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We study the distributed optimization problem over a graphon with a continuum of nodes, which is regarded as the limit of the distributed networked optimization as the number of nodes goes to infinity. Each node has a private local cost function. The global cost function, which all nodes cooperatively minimize, is the integral of the local cost functions on the node set. We propose stochastic gradient descent and gradient tracking algorithms over the graphon. We establish a general lemma for the upper bound estimation related to a class of time-varying differential inequalities with negative linear terms, based upon which, we prove that for both kinds of algorithms, the second moments of the nodes' states are uniformly bounded. Especially, for the stochastic gradient tracking algorithm, we transform the convergence analysis into the asymptotic property of coupled nonlinear differential inequalities with time-varying coefficients and develop a decoupling method. For both kinds of algorithms, we show that by choosing the time-varying algorithm gains properly, all nodes' states achieve $\mathcal{L}^{\infty}$-consensus for a connected graphon. Furthermore, if the local cost functions are strongly convex, then all nodes' states converge to the minimizer of the global cost function and the auxiliary states in the stochastic gradient tracking algorithm converge to the gradient value of the global cost function at the minimizer uniformly in mean square.

Despite extensive exploration of acoustic vortices carrying orbital angular momentum (OAM), the generation of acoustic vortices with OAM orientations beyond the conventional longitudinal direction remains largely unexplored. Spatiotemporal (ST) vortices, featuring spiral phase twisting in the ST domain and carrying transverse OAM, have recently attracted considerable interest in optics and acoustics. Here, we report the generation of three-dimensional (3D) ST acoustic vortices with arbitrarily oriented OAM, thereby opening up a new dimension in acoustic OAM control. By utilizing a two-dimensional (2D) acoustic phased array, we introduce two approaches to manipulate the orientation of OAM: through the direct rotation of vortices in 3D space and the intersection of vortices carrying distinct types of OAM. These methods enable unprecedented control over the orientation of acoustic OAM, providing a new degree of freedom in the manipulation of acoustic waves. The arbitrarily oriented OAM holds promise for enhancing acoustic communication by broadening capacity and enabling more complex particle manipulation techniques. Our work establishes a foundation for future explorations into the complex dynamics of novel structured acoustic fields in the ST domain.

We use the quark potential model to calculate the mass spectrum of the S-wave fully heavy tetraquark systems with different flavors, including the $ bc\bar b\bar c, bb\bar c\bar c, cc\bar c\bar b $ and $ bb\bar b\bar c $ systems. We employ the Gaussian expansion method to solve the four-body Schr\"odinger equation, and the complex scaling method to identify resonant states. The $ bc\bar b\bar c, bb\bar c\bar c, cc\bar c\bar b $ and $ bb\bar b\bar c $ resonant states are obtained in the mass regions of $ (13.2,13.5) $, $ (13.3,13.6) $, $ (10.0,10.3) $, $ (16.5,16.7) $ GeV, respectively. Among these states, the $ bc\bar b\bar c $ tetraquark states are the most promising ones to be discovered in the near future. We recommend the experimental exploration of the $ 1^{++} $ and $ 2^{++} $ $ bc\bar b\bar c $ states with masses near $ 13.3 $ GeV in the $ J/\psi\Upsilon $ channel. From the root-mean-square radii, we find that all the resonant states we have identified are compact tetraquark states., Comment: 10 pages,7 figures,8 tables

Panoptic occupancy poses a novel challenge by aiming to integrate instance occupancy and semantic occupancy within a unified framework. However, there is still a lack of efficient solutions for panoptic occupancy. In this paper, we propose Panoptic-FlashOcc, a straightforward yet robust 2D feature framework that enables realtime panoptic occupancy. Building upon the lightweight design of FlashOcc, our approach simultaneously learns semantic occupancy and class-aware instance clustering in a single network, these outputs are jointly incorporated through panoptic occupancy procession for panoptic occupancy. This approach effectively addresses the drawbacks of high memory and computation requirements associated with three-dimensional voxel-level representations. With its straightforward and efficient design that facilitates easy deployment, Panoptic-FlashOcc demonstrates remarkable achievements in panoptic occupancy prediction. On the Occ3D-nuScenes benchmark, it achieves exceptional performance, with 38.5 RayIoU and 29.1 mIoU for semantic occupancy, operating at a rapid speed of 43.9 FPS. Furthermore, it attains a notable score of 16.0 RayPQ for panoptic occupancy, accompanied by a fast inference speed of 30.2 FPS. These results surpass the performance of existing methodologies in terms of both speed and accuracy. The source code and trained models can be found at the following github repository: https://github.com/Yzichen/FlashOCC.

This work proposes a double-layer thin-film lithium niobate (LiNbO3) longitudinally excited shear wave resonator with a theoretical electromechanical coupling coefficient exceeding 60%, RaR close to 28%, and no spurious modes. This ultra-large electromechanical coupling coefficient, which is close to the upper limit of LiNbO3, is much larger than all microwave acoustic resonators reported so far. Based on X-cut thin-film LiNbO3, when the film thickness is in the order of hundreds of nanometers, the frequency of the fundamental mode of the resonator can cover 1GHz to10GHz. The resonator design is convenient and flexible. The resonant frequency can be modulated monotonically by changing either the electrode or the thickness of the thin-film LiNbO3 without introducing additional spurious modes. This ideal resonator architecture is also applicable to LiTaO3. With the development of the new generation of mobile communications, this resonator is expected to become a key solution for future high-performance, ultra-wide-bandwidth acoustic filters., Comment: 15 pages,9 figures

Kernel methods are extensively employed for nonlinear data clustering, yet their effectiveness heavily relies on selecting suitable kernels and associated parameters, posing challenges in advance determination. In response, Multiple Kernel Clustering (MKC) has emerged as a solution, allowing the fusion of information from multiple base kernels for clustering. However, both early fusion and late fusion methods for large-scale MKC encounter challenges in memory and time constraints, necessitating simultaneous optimization of both aspects. To address this issue, we propose Efficient Multiple Kernel Concept Factorization (EMKCF), which constructs a new sparse kernel matrix inspired by local regression to achieve memory efficiency. EMKCF learns consensus and individual representations by extending orthogonal concept factorization to handle multiple kernels for time efficiency. Experimental results demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of EMKCF on benchmark datasets compared to state-of-the-art methods. The proposed method offers a straightforward, scalable, and effective solution for large-scale MKC tasks.

We study a class of graphon particle systems with time-varying random coefficients. In a graphon particle system, the interactions among particles are characterized by the coupled mean field terms through an underlying graphon and the randomness of the coefficients comes from the stochastic processes associated with the particle labels. By constructing two-level approximated sequences converging in 2-Wasserstein distance, we prove the existence and uniqueness of the solution to the system. Besides, by constructing two-level approximated functions converging to the graphon mean field terms, we establish the law of large numbers, which reveals that if the number of particles tends to infinity and the discretization step tends to zero, then the discrete-time interacting particle system over a large-scale network converges to the graphon particle system. As a byproduct, we discover that the graphon particle system can describe the limiting dynamics of the distributed stochastic gradient descent algorithm over the large-scale network and prove that if the gradients of the local cost functions are Lipschitz continuous, then the graphon particle system can be regarded as the spatio-temporal approximation of the discrete-time distributed stochastic gradient descent algorithm as the number of network nodes tends to infinity and the algorithm step size tends to zero.

Aiming at the limitations of traditional medical decision system in processing large-scale heterogeneous medical data and realizing highly personalized recommendation, this paper introduces a personalized medical decision algorithm utilizing graph neural network (GNN). This research innovatively integrates graph neural network technology into the medical and health field, aiming to build a high-precision representation model of patient health status by mining the complex association between patients' clinical characteristics, genetic information, living habits. In this study, medical data is preprocessed to transform it into a graph structure, where nodes represent different data entities (such as patients, diseases, genes, etc.) and edges represent interactions or relationships between entities. The core of the algorithm is to design a novel multi-scale fusion mechanism, combining the historical medical records, physiological indicators and genetic characteristics of patients, to dynamically adjust the attention allocation strategy of the graph neural network, so as to achieve highly customized analysis of individual cases. In the experimental part, this study selected several publicly available medical data sets for validation, and the results showed that compared with traditional machine learning methods and a single graph neural network model, the proposed personalized medical decision algorithm showed significantly superior performance in terms of disease prediction accuracy, treatment effect evaluation and patient risk stratification.

We present Hunyuan-DiT, a text-to-image diffusion transformer with fine-grained understanding of both English and Chinese. To construct Hunyuan-DiT, we carefully design the transformer structure, text encoder, and positional encoding. We also build from scratch a whole data pipeline to update and evaluate data for iterative model optimization. For fine-grained language understanding, we train a Multimodal Large Language Model to refine the captions of the images. Finally, Hunyuan-DiT can perform multi-turn multimodal dialogue with users, generating and refining images according to the context. Through our holistic human evaluation protocol with more than 50 professional human evaluators, Hunyuan-DiT sets a new state-of-the-art in Chinese-to-image generation compared with other open-source models. Code and pretrained models are publicly available at github.com/Tencent/HunyuanDiT, Comment: Project Page: https://dit.hunyuan.tencent.com/

The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) facilitates in-home electronic healthcare, transforming traditional hospital-based medical examination approaches. This paper proposes a novel transmit scheme for fog computing-enabled IoMT that leverages uplink and downlink rate splitting (RS). Fog computing allows offloading partial computation tasks to the edge server and processing the remainder of the tasks locally. The uplink RS and downlink RS utilize their flexible interference management capabilities to suppress offloading and feedback delay. Our overarching goal is to minimize the total time cost for task offloading, data processing, and result feedback. The resulting problem requires the joint design of task offloading, computing resource allocation, uplink beamforming, downlink beamforming, and common rate allocation. To solve the formulated non-convex problem, we introduce several auxiliary variables and then construct accurate surrogates to smooth the achievable rate. Moreover, we derive the optimal computation resource allocation per user with closed-form expressions. On this basis, we recast the computing resource allocation and energy consumption at the base station to a convex constraint set. We finally develop an alternating optimization algorithm to update the auxiliary variable and inherent variable alternately. Simulation results show that our transmit scheme and algorithm exhibit considerable performance enhancements over several benchmarks., Comment: submitted to IEEE Transactions on Cognitive Communications and Networking

Chirality-induced spin selectivity is a spin-splitting phenomenon from a helical structure with a considerably effective spin-orbit coupling. This unexpectedly large spin-splitting phenomenon has been experimentally observed in chiral organic molecules, which typically show a weak spin-orbit coupling. To understand this, we use the renormalized mean-field theory and Landauer-B\"{u}ttiker formulas to study the transport properties of single-stranded DNA in the presence of strong electron correlation. It shows a significant spin polarization of 46.5% near the Coulomb repulsion limit, which explains the extremely high spin polarization observed in experiments. Compared to systems without electron correlation, the averaged spin polarization in this case is 2 to 4 times greater across various system sizes. Furthermore, the parameter dependence of the spin polarization and the underlying Metal-Insulator transition are studied.

Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) attacks have caused significant damage worldwide. Various Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) systems are deployed by enterprises to fight against potential threats. However, EDR suffers from high false positives. In order not to affect normal operations, analysts need to investigate and filter detection results before taking countermeasures, in which heavy manual labor and alarm fatigue cause analysts miss optimal response time, thereby leading to information leakage and destruction. Therefore, we propose Endpoint Forecasting and Interpreting (EFI), a real-time attack forecast and interpretation system, which can automatically predict next move during post-exploitation and explain it in technique-level, then dispatch strategies to EDR for advance reinforcement. First, we use Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) reports to extract the attack scene graph (ASG) that can be mapped to low-level system logs to strengthen attack samples. Second, we build a serialized graph forecast model, which is combined with the attack provenance graph (APG) provided by EDR to generate an attack forecast graph (AFG) to predict the next move. Finally, we utilize the attack template graph (ATG) and graph alignment plus algorithm for technique-level interpretation to automatically dispatch strategies for EDR to reinforce system in advance. EFI can avoid the impact of existing EDR false positives, and can reduce the attack surface of system without affecting the normal operations. We collect a total of 3,484 CTI reports, generate 1,429 ASGs, label 8,000 sentences, tag 10,451 entities, and construct 256 ATGs. Experimental results on both DARPA Engagement and large scale CTI dataset show that the alignment score between the AFG predicted by EFI and the real attack graph is able to exceed 0.8, the forecast and interpretation precision of EFI can reach 91.8%.

Based on the integral field unit (IFU) data from Mapping Nearby Galaxies at Apache Point Observatory (MaNGA) survey, we develop a new method to select galaxies with biconical ionized structures, building a sample of 142 edge-on biconical ionized galaxies. We classify these 142 galaxies into 81 star-forming galaxies, 31 composite galaxies, and 30 AGNs (consisting of 23 Seyferts and 7 LI(N)ERs) according to the {\nii}-BPT diagram. The star-forming bicones have bar-like structures while AGN bicones display hourglass structures, and composite bicones exhibit transitional morphologies between them due to both black hole and star-formation activities. Star-forming bicones have intense star-formation activities in their central regions, and the primary driver of biconical structures is the central star formation rate surface density. The lack of difference in the strength of central black hole activities (traced by dust attenuation corrected {\oiii}$\lambda$5007 luminosity and Eddington ratio) between Seyfert bicones and their control samples can be naturally explained as that the accretion disk and the galactic disk are not necessarily coplanar. Additionally, the biconical galaxies with central LI(N)ER-like line ratios are edge-on disk galaxies that show strong central dust attenuation. The radial gradients of {\ha} surface brightness follow the $r^{-2.35}$ relation, roughly consistent with $r^{-2}$ profile, which is expected in the case of photoionization by a central point-like source. These observations indicate obscured AGNs or AGN echoes as the primary drivers of biconical structures in LI(N)ERs., Comment: 12 pages, 9 figures, 1 table, Accepted for publication in MNRAS

As the complexity and destructiveness of Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) increase, there is a growing tendency to identify a series of actions undertaken to achieve the attacker's target, called attack investigation. Currently, analysts construct the provenance graph to perform causality analysis on Point-Of-Interest (POI) event for capturing critical events (related to the attack). However, due to the vast size of the provenance graph and the rarity of critical events, existing attack investigation methods suffer from problems of high false positives, high overhead, and high latency. To this end, we propose SPARSE, an efficient and real-time system for constructing critical component graphs (i.e., consisting of critical events) from streaming logs. Our key observation is 1) Critical events exist in a suspicious semantic graph (SSG) composed of interaction flows between suspicious entities, and 2) Information flows that accomplish attacker's goal exist in the form of paths. Therefore, SPARSE uses a two-stage framework to implement attack investigation (i.e., constructing the SSG and performing path-level contextual analysis). First, SPARSE operates in a state-based mode where events are consumed as streams, allowing easy access to the SSG related to the POI event through semantic transfer rule and storage strategy. Then, SPARSE identifies all suspicious flow paths (SFPs) related to the POI event from the SSG, quantifies the influence of each path to filter irrelevant events. Our evaluation on a real large-scale attack dataset shows that SPARSE can generate a critical component graph (~ 113 edges) in 1.6 seconds, which is 2014 X smaller than the backtracking graph (~ 227,589 edges). SPARSE is 25 X more effective than other state-of-the-art techniques in filtering irrelevant edges.

Recent advancements have showcased the potential of handheld millimeter-wave (mmWave) imaging, which applies synthetic aperture radar (SAR) principles in portable settings. However, existing studies addressing handheld motion errors either rely on costly tracking devices or employ simplified imaging models, leading to impractical deployment or limited performance. In this paper, we present IFNet, a novel deep unfolding network that combines the strengths of signal processing models and deep neural networks to achieve robust imaging and focusing for handheld mmWave systems. We first formulate the handheld imaging model by integrating multiple priors about mmWave images and handheld phase errors. Furthermore, we transform the optimization processes into an iterative network structure for improved and efficient imaging performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that IFNet effectively compensates for handheld phase errors and recovers high-fidelity images from severely distorted signals. In comparison with existing methods, IFNet can achieve at least 11.89 dB improvement in average peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and 64.91% improvement in average structural similarity index measure (SSIM) on a real-world dataset.

The $X(3872)$, as the first and the most crucial member in the exotic charmoniumlike $XYZ$ family, has been studied for a long time. However, its dynamical origin, whether stemming from a $D\bar{D}^*$ hadronic molecule or the first excited $P$-wave charmonium $\chi_{c1}(2P)$, remains controversial. In this Letter, we demonstrate that the $X(3872)$ definitely does not result from the mass shift of the higher bare $\chi_{c1}(2P)$ resonance pole in the coupled-channel dynamics involving a short-distance $c\bar{c}$ core and the long-distance $D\bar{D}^*$ channels. Instead, it originates from either the $D\bar{D}^*$ molecular pole or the shadow pole associated with the $P$-wave charmonium, which depends on the concrete coupling mode between the $c\bar{c}$ and $D\bar{D}^*$. In order to further exploit the nature of $X(3872)$, we carefully investigate potential mechanisms that contribute to its pole width, which suggests that the coupled-channel dynamics plays a critical role in causing a noticeable discrepancy between the pole widths of $X(3872)$ and $T_{cc}^+$. Interestingly, we bridge the quantitative connection among the dynamics origin of $X(3872)$, its pole width and the properties of the predicted new resonance. The precise measurement of the pole width of $X(3872)$ and the search for the new charmoniumlike resonance become highly significant and can be anticipated in future LHCb, BESIII and Belle II experiments., Comment: 11 pages, 5 figures

Embedded systems development is a complex task that often requires team collaboration. Given the growing market of freelancers and the global shift to remote work, remote collaboration has become a necessity for many developers and clients. While existing communication and coordination tools help users share, discuss, and edit code collaboratively, these tools were specifically designed for software rather than hardware development. In this work, our goal is to explore the design space of remote support tools for embedded systems development. To do this, we interviewed 12 seasoned embedded systems developers regarding their current remote work practices, issues, and needs. We then conducted a user enactment study with a bespoke remote manipulation agent, Handy, as a hypothetical assistant to elicit the types of support developers desire from a collaborator. Our findings describe the scenarios and strategies in which remote work takes place; the support needs and information, coordination, and implementation challenges expressed by developers; and the privacy, control, and trust concerns that developers have when working on their projects with remote physical manipulation tools. This research contributes to the literature by bringing embedded systems development in line with remote, on-demand collaboration and help-seeking in software environments. The empirical basis of this work provides a rich foundation of documented needs, preferences, and desires that can ground future work on remote manipulation agents and enhance collaboration support in the domain of embedded systems development.

As cyber-attacks become increasingly sophisticated and stealthy, it becomes more imperative and challenging to detect intrusion from normal behaviors. Through fine-grained causality analysis, provenance-based intrusion detection systems (PIDS) demonstrated a promising capacity to distinguish benign and malicious behaviors, attracting widespread attention from both industry and academia. Among diverse approaches, rule-based PIDS stands out due to its lightweight overhead, real-time capabilities, and explainability. However, existing rule-based systems suffer low detection accuracy, especially the high false alarms, due to the lack of fine-grained rules and environment-specific configurations. In this paper, we propose CAPTAIN, a rule-based PIDS capable of automatically adapting to diverse environments. Specifically, we propose three adaptive parameters to adjust the detection configuration with respect to nodes, edges, and alarm generation thresholds. We build a differentiable tag propagation framework and utilize the gradient descent algorithm to optimize these adaptive parameters based on the training data. We evaluate our system based on data from DARPA Engagement and simulated environments. The evaluation results demonstrate that CAPTAIN offers better detection accuracy, less detection latency, lower runtime overhead, and more interpretable detection alarms and knowledge compared to the SOTA PIDS.

The high demand for computer science education has led to high enrollments, with thousands of students in many introductory courses. In such large courses, it can be overwhelmingly difficult for instructors to understand class-wide problem-solving patterns or issues, which is crucial for improving instruction and addressing important pedagogical challenges. In this paper, we propose a technique and system, CFlow, for creating understandable and navigable representations of code at scale. CFlow is able to represent thousands of code samples in a visualization that resembles a single code sample. CFlow creates scalable code representations by (1) clustering individual statements with similar semantic purposes, (2) presenting clustered statements in a way that maintains semantic relationships between statements, (3) representing the correctness of different variations as a histogram, and (4) allowing users to navigate through solutions interactively using semantic filters. With a multi-level view design, users can navigate high-level patterns, and low-level implementations. This is in contrast to prior tools that either limit their focus on isolated statements (and thus discard the surrounding context of those statements) or cluster entire code samples (which can lead to large numbers of clusters -- for example, if there are n code features and m implementations of each, there can be m^n clusters). We evaluated the effectiveness of CFlow with a comparison study, found participants using CFlow spent only half the time identifying mistakes and recalled twice as many desired patterns from over 6,000 submissions., Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures, conditionally accepted by L@S 24

Programming instructors often conduct collaborative learning activities, like Peer Instruction, to foster a deeper understanding in students and enhance their engagement with learning. These activities, however, may not always yield productive outcomes due to the diversity of student mental models and their ineffective collaboration. In this work, we introduce VizGroup, an AI-assisted system that enables programming instructors to easily oversee students' real-time collaborative learning behaviors during large programming courses. VizGroup leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to recommend event specifications for instructors so that they can simultaneously track and receive alerts about key correlation patterns between various collaboration metrics and ongoing coding tasks. We evaluated VizGroup with 12 instructors using a dataset collected from a Peer Instruction activity that was conducted in a large programming lecture. The results showed that compared to a version of VizGroup without the suggested units, VizGroup with suggested units helped instructors create additional monitoring units on previously undetected patterns on their own, covered a more diverse range of metrics, and influenced the participants' following notification creation strategies.

We explore numerically the intricate interplay between Berry phases in both real and momentum spaces within itinerant magnets. This interplay manifests as an emergent spin-orbit coupling, where charge carriers occupying a Berry-curved band generate an orbital magnetization, inducing a pseudo-magnetic field originating in chiral spin textures. Using density-matrix-renormalization-group techniques, we demonstrate that switching on a band Berry curvature in a metallic ferromagnetic phase results in chiral magnetic textures. Furthermore, employing a two-leg strip geometry, we establish a connection between charge and spin chirality, further supporting this emergent spin-orbit interaction.

While large-scale pre-trained text-to-image models can synthesize diverse and high-quality human-centered images, novel challenges arise with a nuanced task of "identity fine editing": precisely modifying specific features of a subject while maintaining its inherent identity and context. Existing personalization methods either require time-consuming optimization or learning additional encoders, adept in "identity re-contextualization". However, they often struggle with detailed and sensitive tasks like human face editing. To address these challenges, we introduce DreamSalon, a noise-guided, staged-editing framework, uniquely focusing on detailed image manipulations and identity-context preservation. By discerning editing and boosting stages via the frequency and gradient of predicted noises, DreamSalon first performs detailed manipulations on specific features in the editing stage, guided by high-frequency information, and then employs stochastic denoising in the boosting stage to improve image quality. For more precise editing, DreamSalon semantically mixes source and target textual prompts, guided by differences in their embedding covariances, to direct the model's focus on specific manipulation areas. Our experiments demonstrate DreamSalon's ability to efficiently and faithfully edit fine details on human faces, outperforming existing methods both qualitatively and quantitatively.

Galaxies' stellar masses, gas-phase oxygen abundances (metallicity), and star formation rates (SFRs) obey a series of empirical correlations, most notably the mass-metallicity relation (MZR) and fundamental metallicity relation (FZR), which relates oxygen abundance to a combination of stellar mass and SFR. However, due to the difficulty of measuring oxygen abundances and SFRs in galaxies that host powerful active galactic nuclei (AGN), to date it is unknown to what extent AGN-host galaxies also follow these correlations. In this work, we apply Bayesian methods to the MaNGA integral field spectrographic (IFS) survey that allow us to measure oxygen abundances and SFRs in AGN hosts, and use these measurements to explore how the MZR and FZR differ between galaxies that do and do not host AGN. We find similar MZRs at stellar masses above $10^{10.5} \mathrm{M}_\odot$, but that at lower stellar masses AGN hosts show up to $\sim 0.2$ dex higher oxygen abundances. The offset in the FZR is significantly smaller, suggesting that the larger deviation in the MZR is a result of AGN-host galaxies having systematically lower SFRs at fixed stellar mass. However, within the AGN-host sample there is little correlation between SFR and oxygen abundance. These findings support a scenario in which an AGN can halt efficient gas accretion, which drives non-AGN host galaxies to both higher SFR and lower oxygen abundance, resulting in the galaxy evolving off the star-forming main sequence (SFMS). As a consequence, as the SFR declines for an individual system its metallicity remains mostly unchanged., Comment: 18 pages, 14 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS

Recent research in both academia and industry has validated the effectiveness of provenance graph-based detection for advanced cyber attack detection and investigation. However, analyzing large-scale provenance graphs often results in substantial overhead. To improve performance, existing detection systems implement various optimization strategies. Yet, as several recent studies suggest, these strategies could lose necessary context information and be vulnerable to evasions. Designing a detection system that is efficient and robust against adversarial attacks is an open problem. We introduce Marlin, which approaches cyber attack detection through real-time provenance graph alignment.By leveraging query graphs embedded with attack knowledge, Marlin can efficiently identify entities and events within provenance graphs, embedding targeted analysis and significantly narrowing the search space. Moreover, we incorporate our graph alignment algorithm into a tag propagation-based schema to eliminate the need for storing and reprocessing raw logs. This design significantly reduces in-memory storage requirements and minimizes data processing overhead. As a result, it enables real-time graph alignment while preserving essential context information, thereby enhancing the robustness of cyber attack detection. Moreover, Marlin allows analysts to customize attack query graphs flexibly to detect extended attacks and provide interpretable detection results. We conduct experimental evaluations on two large-scale public datasets containing 257.42 GB of logs and 12 query graphs of varying sizes, covering multiple attack techniques and scenarios. The results show that Marlin can process 137K events per second while accurately identifying 120 subgraphs with 31 confirmed attacks, along with only 1 false positive, demonstrating its efficiency and accuracy in handling massive data.

We identify a fading AGN SDSS J220141.64+115124.3 from the internal Product Launch-11 (MPL-11) in Mapping Nearby Galaxies at Apache Point Observatory (MaNGA) survey. The central region with a projected radius of $\sim$2.4 kpc is characterized as LINER-like line ratios while the outskirts extended to $\sim$15 kpc show Seyfert-like line ratios. The [OIII]$\lambda$5007 luminosity of the Seyfert regions is a factor of 37 (2) higher than the LINER regions without (with) dust attenuation correction, suggesting that the AGN activity decreases at least $\sim$8 $\times$ 10$^3$ yrs ($\sim$2.4 kpc/light-speed) ago. We model the emission line spectra in the central region with double Gaussian components (a narrow core and a broad wing) and analyze the properties of each component. The narrow core component mostly co-rotates with the stellar disc, whereas the broad wing component with a median of the velocity dispersion $\sim$300 km s$^{-1}$ is related to a wind outflow. The kinematic position angle (PA) of the ionized gas shows a $\sim$20{\deg} twist from the galaxy center to 1.5 effective radius. The median of the PA difference between the gas and stellar components is as large as $\sim$50{\deg} within 0.4 effective radius. The tidal feature in DESI image and star-gas misalignment suggest this galaxy is a merger remnant. Combining all these observational results as well as public available X-ray and MIR luminosities, we confirm this is a fading AGN, the merger process kick-started the central engine to quasar phase which ionized gas composed of tidal debris, and now the activity of the central black hole decreases. The discontinuity in [OIII]$\lambda$5007 flux and EQW maps is due to multiple AGN outbursts triggered by merger remnant gas inflows., Comment: Accepted for publication in MNRAS. 12 pages, 10 figures, 1 table

Spin and orbital angular momenta are fundamental physical characteristics described by polarization and spatial degrees of freedom, respectively. Polarization is a feature of vector fields while spatial phase gradient determines the orbital angular momentum ubiquitous to any scalar field. Common wisdom treats these two degrees of freedom as distinct and independent principles to manipulate wave propagations. Here, we demonstrate their synergy. This is achieved by introducing two orthogonal $p$-orbitals as eigenbases, whose spatial modal features are exploited to generate orbital angular momenta and the associated orbital orientations provide means to simultaneously manipulate polarizations. Through periodic modulation and directional coupling, we realize a full cyclic evolution of the synchronized and synergized spin-orbital angular momenta. Remarkably, this evolution acquires a nontrivial geometric phase, leading to its representation on a M\"obius strip. Experimentally, an acoustic cavity array is designed, whose dipole resonances precisely mimic the $p$-orbitals. The acoustic waves, uniquely, see the pressure (scalar) field as a spatial feature and carry an intrinsic polarization defined by the velocity (vector) field, serving as an ideal platform to observe the synergy of spin and orbital angular momenta. Based on such a property, we further showcase a spin-orbital-Hall effect, highlighting the intricate locking of handedness, directionality, spin density and spatial mode profile. Our study unveils a fundamental connection between spin and orbital angular momenta, promising avenues for novel applications in information coding and high-capacity communications.

Deployable polyhedrons can transform between Platonic and Archimedean polyhedrons to meet the demands of various engineering applications. However, the existing design solutions are often with multiple degrees of freedom and complicated mechanism links and joints, which greatly limited their potential in practice. Combining the fundamentals of solid geometry and mechanism kinematics, this paper proposes a family of kirigami Archimedean polyhedrons based on the N-fold-symmetric loops of spatial 7R linkage, which perform one-DOF radial transformation following tetrahedral, octahedral, or icosahedral symmetry. Moreover, in each symmetric polyhedral group, three different transforming paths can be achieved from one identical deployed configuration. We also demonstrated that such design strategy can be readily applied to polyhedral tessellation. This work provides a family of rich solutions for deployable polyhedrons to facilitate their applications in aerospace exploration, architecture, metamaterials and so on.

Based upon two overlapped, body-unfitted meshes, a type of unified-field monolithic fictitious domain-finite element method (UFMFD-FEM) is developed in this paper for moving interface problems of dynamic fluid-structure interactions (FSI) accompanying with high-contrast physical coefficients across the interface and contacting collisions between the structure and fluidic channel wall when the structure is immersed in the fluid. In particular, the proposed novel numerical method consists of a monolithic, stabilized mixed finite element method within the frame of fictitious domain/immersed boundary method (IBM) for generic fluid-structure-contact interaction (FSCI) problems in the Eulerian-updated Lagrangian description, while involving the no-slip type of interface conditions on the fluid-structure interface, and the repulsive contact force on the structural surface when the immersed structure contacts the fluidic channel wall. The developed UFMFD-FEM for FSI or FSCI problems can deal with the structural motion with large rotational and translational displacements and/or large deformation in an accurate and efficient fashion, which are first validated by two benchmark FSI problems and one FSCI model problem, then by experimental results of a realistic FSCI scenario -- the microfluidic deterministic lateral displacement (DLD) problem that is applied to isolate circulating tumor cells (CTCs) from blood cells in the blood fluid through a cascaded filter DLD microchip in practice, where a particulate fluid with the pillar obstacles effect in the fluidic channel, i.e., the effects of fluid-structure interaction and structure collision, play significant roles to sort particles (cells) of different sizes with tilted pillar arrays., Comment: 32 pages, 42 figures, 5 tables, 66 references

We find a novel chiral superfluid (CSF) phase in a chain of Bose-Fermi mixture, which has been validated using two unbiased numerical methods, density matrix renormalization group and Grassmann multi-scale entanglement renormalization ansatz. The system hosts the interplay between two types of fermions: bare spinless fermions and composite fermions, the latter consisting of a fermion and a boson. In the CSF phase, bosons condensate at non-zero momentum $\pm 2\pi /L$ with chain length $L$. In essence, the local superfluid order parameter continuously rotates along the chain, indicating that the CSF phase spontaneously breaks time-reversal symmetry. This symmetry breaking gives rise to an emergent flux in the background, effectively optimizing the kinetic energy of the composite fermions within the system. We provide a physical understanding at the mean-field level. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the 1D CSF phase can emerge in a more widely applicable extended Hubbard model. The potential realization of this phase in cold-atom experiments has also been explored., Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures

Critical comments on the entropic lattice Boltzmann equation (ELBE), by Li-Shi Luo, Wei Liao, Xingwang Chen, Yan Peng and Wei Zhang, Physical Review E 83, 056710 (2011), are based on simulations which make use of a model that, despite being called ELBE by the authors, is in fact fully equivalent to the standard lattice Bhatnagar-Gross-Krook equation. As a result, the conclusion of Luo et al on ELBE is circular, hence devoid of scientific bearing., Comment: Comment submitted to Phys. Rev. E

Endpoint detection and response (EDR) systems have emerged as a critical component of enterprise security solutions, effectively combating endpoint threats like APT attacks with extended lifecycles. In light of the growing significance of endpoint detection and response (EDR) systems, many cybersecurity providers have developed their own proprietary EDR solutions. It's crucial for users to assess the capabilities of these detection engines to make informed decisions about which products to choose. This is especially urgent given the market's size, which is expected to reach around 3.7 billion dollars by 2023 and is still expanding. MITRE is a leading organization in cyber threat analysis. In 2018, MITRE started to conduct annual APT emulations that cover major EDR vendors worldwide. Indicators include telemetry, detection and blocking capability, etc. Nevertheless, the evaluation results published by MITRE don't contain any further interpretations or suggestions. In this paper, we thoroughly analyzed MITRE evaluation results to gain further insights into real-world EDR systems under test. Specifically, we designed a whole-graph analysis method, which utilizes additional control flow and data flow information to measure the performance of EDR systems. Besides, we analyze MITRE evaluation's results over multiple years from various aspects, including detection coverage, detection confidence, detection modifier, data source, compatibility, etc. Through the above studies, we have compiled a thorough summary of our findings and gained valuable insights from the evaluation results. We believe these summaries and insights can assist researchers, practitioners, and vendors in better understanding the strengths and limitations of mainstream EDR products., Comment: 16 pages, 7 figures, to appear in AsiaCCS 2024

We calculate the mass spectrum of the S-wave fully heavy tetraquark systems $ QQ\bar Q\bar Q~(Q=c,b) $ with both normal $ (J^{PC}=0^{++},1^{+-},2^{++}) $ and exotic $ (J^{PC}=0^{+-},1^{++},2^{+-}) $ C-parities using three different quark potential models (AL1, AP1, BGS). The exotic C-parity systems refer to the ones that cannot be composed of two S-wave ground heavy quarkonia. We incorporate the molecular dimeson and compact diquark-antidiquark spatial correlations simultaneously, thereby discerning the actual configurations of the states. We employ the Gaussian expansion method to solve the four-body Schr\"odinger equation, and the complex scaling method to identify the resonant states. The mass spectra in three different models qualitatively agree with each other. We obtain several resonant states with $ J^{PC} = 0^{++}, 1^{+-}, 2^{++}, 1^{++} $ in the mass region $(6.92,7.30)\, \mathrm{GeV}$, some of which are good candidates of the experimentally observed $X(6900)$ and $X(7200)$. We also obtain several exotic C-parity zero-width states with $ J^{PC}=0^{+-} $ and $ 2^{+-} $. These zero-width states have no corresponding S-wave diquarkonium threshold and can only decay strongly to final states with P-wave quarkonia. With the notation $T_{4Q,J(C)}(M)$, we deduce from the root mean square radii that the $ X(7200) $ candidates $ T_{4c,0(+)}(7173), T_{4c,2(+)}(7214) $ and the state $ T_{4c,1(-)}(7191) $ look like molecular states although most of the resonant and zero-width states are compact states., Comment: 16 pages, 6 figures, 10 tables. Version accepted by PRD

In this paper, we propose an information geometry approach (IGA) for signal detection (SD) in ultra-massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. We formulate the signal detection as obtaining the marginals of the a posteriori probability distribution of the transmitted symbol vector. Then, a maximization of the a posteriori marginals (MPM) for signal detection can be performed. With the information geometry theory, we calculate the approximations of the a posteriori marginals. It is formulated as an iterative m-projection process between submanifolds with different constraints. We then apply the central-limit-theorem (CLT) to simplify the calculation of the m-projection since the direct calculation of the m-projection is of exponential-complexity. With the CLT, we obtain an approximate solution of the m-projection, which is asymptotically accurate. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed IGA-SD emerges as a promising and efficient method to implement the signal detector in ultra-massive MIMO systems.

In Part II of this two-part paper, we prove the convergence of the simplified information geometry approach (SIGA) proposed in Part I. For a general Bayesian inference problem, we first show that the iteration of the common second-order natural parameter (SONP) is separated from that of the common first-order natural parameter (FONP). Hence, the convergence of the common SONP can be checked independently. We show that with the initialization satisfying a specific but large range, the common SONP is convergent regardless of the value of the damping factor. For the common FONP, we establish a sufficient condition of its convergence and prove that the convergence of the common FONP relies on the spectral radius of a particular matrix related to the damping factor. We give the range of the damping factor that guarantees the convergence in the worst case. Further, we determine the range of the damping factor for massive MIMO-OFDM channel estimation by using the specific properties of the measurement matrices. Simulation results are provided to confirm the theoretical results., Comment: I'm merging the two parts of this paper (arXiv:arXiv:2401.02035 and arXiv:2401.02037). The combined paper will appear as v2 of arXiv:2401.02035. So I need to withdraw this paper

We investigate the channel estimation for massive multiple-input multiple-output orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (MIMO-OFDM) systems. We revisit the information geometry approach (IGA) for massive MIMO-OFDM channel estimation. By using the constant magnitude property of the entries of the measurement matrix, we find that the second-order natural parameters of the distributions on all the auxiliary manifolds are equivalent to each other, and the first-order natural parameters are asymptotically equivalent to each other at the fixed point. Motivated by these results, we simplify the process of IGA and propose an efficient IGA (EIGA) for massive MIMO-OFDM channel estimation, which allows efficient implementation with fast Fourier transformation (FFT). We then establish a sufficient condition of its convergence and accordingly find a range of the damping factor for the convergence. We show that this range of damping factor is sufficiently wide by using the specific properties of the measurement matrices. Further, we prove that at the fixed point, the a posteriori mean obtained by EIGA is asymptotically optimal. Simulations confirm that EIGA can achieve the optimal performance with low complexity in a limited number of iterations.

We report the quantum transport properties of the $\alpha$-Sn films grown on CdTe (001) substrates by molecular beam epitaxy. The $\alpha$-Sn films are doped with phosphorus to tune the Fermi level and access the bulk state. Clear Shubnikov-de Haas oscillations can be observed below 30 K and a nontrivial Berry phase has been confirmed. A nearly spherical Fermi surface has been demonstrated by angle-dependent oscillation frequencies. In addition, the sign of negative magnetoresistance which is attributed to the chiral anomaly has also been observed. These results provide strong evidence of the three-dimensional Dirac semimetal phase in $\alpha$-Sn.

Generalized Category Discovery is a crucial real-world task. Despite the improved performance on known categories, current methods perform poorly on novel categories. We attribute the poor performance to two reasons: biased knowledge transfer between labeled and unlabeled data and noisy representation learning on the unlabeled data. To mitigate these two issues, we propose a Transfer and Alignment Network (TAN), which incorporates two knowledge transfer mechanisms to calibrate the biased knowledge and two feature alignment mechanisms to learn discriminative features. Specifically, we model different categories with prototypes and transfer the prototypes in labeled data to correct model bias towards known categories. On the one hand, we pull instances with known categories in unlabeled data closer to these prototypes to form more compact clusters and avoid boundary overlap between known and novel categories. On the other hand, we use these prototypes to calibrate noisy prototypes estimated from unlabeled data based on category similarities, which allows for more accurate estimation of prototypes for novel categories that can be used as reliable learning targets later. After knowledge transfer, we further propose two feature alignment mechanisms to acquire both instance- and category-level knowledge from unlabeled data by aligning instance features with both augmented features and the calibrated prototypes, which can boost model performance on both known and novel categories with less noise. Experiments on three benchmark datasets show that our model outperforms SOTA methods, especially on novel categories. Theoretical analysis is provided for an in-depth understanding of our model in general. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/Lackel/TAN., Comment: Accepted by AAAI 2024

Passive non-line-of-sight (NLOS) imaging has witnessed rapid development in recent years, due to its ability to image objects that are out of sight. The light transport condition plays an important role in this task since changing the conditions will lead to different imaging models. Existing learning-based NLOS methods usually train independent models for different light transport conditions, which is computationally inefficient and impairs the practicality of the models. In this work, we propose NLOS-LTM, a novel passive NLOS imaging method that effectively handles multiple light transport conditions with a single network. We achieve this by inferring a latent light transport representation from the projection image and using this representation to modulate the network that reconstructs the hidden image from the projection image. We train a light transport encoder together with a vector quantizer to obtain the light transport representation. To further regulate this representation, we jointly learn both the reconstruction network and the reprojection network during training. A set of light transport modulation blocks is used to modulate the two jointly trained networks in a multi-scale way. Extensive experiments on a large-scale passive NLOS dataset demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method. The code is available at https://github.com/JerryOctopus/NLOS-LTM.

Nature is often used to inspire solutions for complex engineering problems, but achieving its full potential is challenging due to difficulties in discovering relevant analogies and synthesizing from them. Here, we present an end-to-end system, BioSpark, that generates biological-analogical mechanisms and provides an interactive interface to comprehend and synthesize from them. BioSpark pipeline starts with a small seed set of mechanisms and expands it using an iteratively constructed taxonomic hierarchies, overcoming data sparsity in manual expert curation and limited conceptual diversity in automated analogy generation via LLMs. The interface helps designers with recognizing and understanding relevant analogs to design problems using four main interaction features. We evaluate the biological-analogical mechanism generation pipeline and showcase the value of BioSpark through case studies. We end with discussion and implications for future work in this area., Comment: NeurIPS 2023 Workshop on Machine Learning for Creativity and Design

Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) is a crucial task that aims to recognize both known and novel categories from a set of unlabeled data by utilizing a few labeled data with only known categories. Due to the lack of supervision and category information, current methods usually perform poorly on novel categories and struggle to reveal semantic meanings of the discovered clusters, which limits their applications in the real world. To mitigate the above issues, we propose Loop, an end-to-end active-learning framework that introduces Large Language Models (LLMs) into the training loop, which can boost model performance and generate category names without relying on any human efforts. Specifically, we first propose Local Inconsistent Sampling (LIS) to select samples that have a higher probability of falling to wrong clusters, based on neighborhood prediction consistency and entropy of cluster assignment probabilities. Then we propose a Scalable Query strategy to allow LLMs to choose true neighbors of the selected samples from multiple candidate samples. Based on the feedback from LLMs, we perform Refined Neighborhood Contrastive Learning (RNCL) to pull samples and their neighbors closer to learn clustering-friendly representations. Finally, we select representative samples from clusters corresponding to novel categories to allow LLMs to generate category names for them. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets show that Loop outperforms SOTA models by a large margin and generates accurate category names for the discovered clusters. Code and data are available at https://github.com/Lackel/LOOP., Comment: Accepted by ACL 2024 Findings, code and data are available at https://github.com/Lackel/LOOP