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Marine debris is a problem both for the health of marine environments and for the human health since tiny pieces of plastic called "microplastics" resulting from the debris decomposition over the time are entering the food chain at any levels. For marine debris detection and removal, autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) are a potential solution. In this letter, we focus on the efficiency of AUV vision for real-time and low-light object detection. First, we improved the efficiency of a class of state-of-the-art object detectors, namely EfficientDets, by 1.5% AP on D0, 2.6% AP on D1, 1.2% AP on D2 and 1.3% AP on D3 without increasing the GPU latency. Subsequently, we created and made publicly available a dataset for the detection of in-water plastic bags and bottles and trained our improved EfficientDets on this and another dataset for marine debris detection. Finally, we investigated how the detector performance is affected by low-light conditions and compared two low-light underwater image enhancement strategies both in terms of accuracy and latency. Source code and dataset are publicly available., Comment: To be submitted to IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters

In the context of Earth observation, the detection of changes is performed from multitemporal images acquired by sensors with possibly different spatial and/or spectral resolutions or even different modalities (e.g. optical, radar). Even limiting to the optical modality, this task has proved to be challenging as soon as the sensors have different spatial and/or spectral resolutions. This paper proposes a novel unsupervised change detection method dedicated to images acquired with such so-called heterogeneous optical sensors. This method capitalizes on recent advances which frame the change detection problem into a robust fusion framework. More precisely, we show that a deep adversarial network designed and trained beforehand to fuse a pair of multiband optical images can be easily complemented by a network with the same architecture to perform change detection. The resulting overall architecture itself follows an adversarial strategy where the fusion network and the additional network are interpreted as essential building blocks of a generator. A comparison with state-of-the-art change detection methods demonstrates the versatility and the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

The tapped ions can be cooled close to their motional ground state, which is imperative in implementing quantum computation and quantum simulation. Here we demonstrate the capability of light-mediated chiral couplings between ions, which enables a superior cooling scheme exceeding the single-ion limit of sideband cooling. We present the chiral-coupling-assisted refrigeration in the target ion at the price of heating the others under asymmetric drivings, where its steady-state phonon occupation outperforms the lower bound set by a single ion. We further locate the optimal operation condition of the refrigeration and identify the parameter region where a faster rate of cooling emerges. Under an additional nonguided decay channel, the heating effect in the reciprocal coupling regime becomes suppressed and turns into cooling instead. Our results present a resource of collective chiral couplings which help surpass the bottleneck of cooling procedure in applications of trapped-ion-based quantum computer and simulator., Comment: 7 figures in the main text

The explorations of non-Hermiticity have been devoted to investigate the disorder-induced many-body localization (MBL). However, the sensitivity of the spatial boundary conditions and the interplay of the non-Hermitian skin effect with many-body phenomena are not yet clear. For a MBL system in the presence of non-reciprocal tunnelings and random disorder potential, we identify two different complex-real spectral transitions, one is present for both open and periodic boundaries while the other is present only for open boundaries of a coupled non-Hermitian chains. The later is driven due to the inter-chain coupling at weak disorder where the level statistics of the real eigenenergy phase follows Gaussian orthogonal ensemble. We further characterize wavefunctions through the (biorthogonal) inverse participation ratio and fractal dimension, which reveal the suppression of skin effect in the non-Hermitian MBL phase. Finally, we demonstrate that the quench dynamics of the local particle density, spin imbalance, and entanglement entropy also signify the hallmark of the boundary effects and non-ergodic character of many-body localization., Comment: 11 pages, 10 figures; version accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. B

Quantum dimer models are known to host topological quantum spin liquid phases, and it has recently become possible to simulate such models with Rydberg atoms trapped in arrays of optical tweezers. Here, we present large-scale quantum Monte Carlo simulation results on an extension of the triangular lattice quantum dimer model with terms in the Hamiltonian annihilating and creating single dimers. We find distinct odd and even $\mathbb{Z}_2$ spin liquids, along with several phases with no topological order: a staggered crystal, a nematic phase, and a trivial symmetric phase with no obvious broken symmetry. We also present dynamic spectra of the phases, and note implications for experiments on Rydberg atoms.

Several recent studies have shown that the anisotropy in the magnetic structure of \ECA\ plays a significant role in stabilizing the Weyl nodes. To investigate the relationship between magnetic anisotropy and Weyl physics, we present a comparative study between EuZn$_2$As$_2$ and EuCd$_2$As$_2$ that are isostructural but with different magnetic anisotropy. We performed structural analysis, electronic transport, and magnetization experiments on millimeter-sized single crystals of EuZn$_2$As$_2$, and compared the results to those of EuCd$_2$As$_2$. By combining the first principle calculations and neutron diffraction experiment, we identify the magnetic ground state of EuZn$_2$As$_2$ as A-type antiferromagnetic order with a transition temperature ($T_\mathrm{N}$ = 19.6 K) twice that of EuCd$_2$As$_2$. Like EuCd$_2$As$_2$, the negative magnetoresistance of EuZn$_2$As$_2$ is observed after suppressing the resistivity peak at $T_\mathrm{N}$ with increasing fields. However, the anisotropy in both transport and magnetization are much reduced in EuZn$_2$As$_2$. The difference could be ascribed to the weaker spin-orbit coupling, more localized $d$-orbitals, and a larger contribution from the Eu $s$-orbitals in the zinc compound, as suggested by the electronic band calculations. The same band structure effect could be also responsible for the observation of a smaller non-linear anomalous Hall effect in EuZn$_2$As$_2$ compared to EuCd$_2$As$_2$.

Context. The intrinsic TeV emission of some BL Lacs are characterized by a hard spectrum (the hard-TeV spectrum) after correcting for the extragalactic background light. The hard-TeV spectra pose a challenge to conventional one-zone models, including the leptonic model, the photohadronic model, the proton synchrotron model, etc. Aims. In this work, we study if the one-zone hadronuclear (pp) model can be used to interpret the hard-TeV spectra of BL Lacs without introducing extreme parameters. Methods. We give analytical calculations to study if there is a parameter space and the charge neutrality condition of jet can be satisfied when interpreting the hard-TeV spectra of BL Lacs without introducing a super-Eddington jet power. Results. We find that in a sample of hard-TeV BL Lacs collected by Xue et al. (2019a), only the hard-TeV spectrum of 1ES 0229+200 could be explained by gamma-ray from pi-0 decay produced in the pp interactions, but at the cost of setting a small radius of the radiation region that comparable to the Schwarzschild radius of the central black hole. Combining with previous studies of other one-zone models, we suggest that the hard-TeV spectra of BL Lacs cannot be explained by any one-zone models without introducing extreme parameters, and should originate from the multiple radiation regions., Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure. Accepted for Publication in A&A

We develop a nonequilibrium increment method in quantum Monte Carlo simulations to obtain the R\'enyi entanglement entropy of various quantum many-body systems with high efficiency and precision. To demonstrate its power, we show the results on a few important yet difficult $(2+1)d$ quantum lattice models, ranging from the Heisenberg quantum antiferromagnet with spontaneous symmetry breaking, the quantum critical point with O(3) conformal field theory (CFT) to the toric code $\Z_2$ topological ordered state and the Kagome $\Z_2$ quantum spin liquid model with frustration and multi-spin interactions. In all these cases, our method either reveals the precise CFT data from the logarithmic correction or extracts the quantum dimension in topological order, from the dominant area law in finite-size scaling, with very large system sizes, controlled errorbars and minimal computational costs. Our method therefore establishes a controlled and practical computation paradigm to obtain the difficult yet important universal properties in highly entangled quantum matter.

Entity type prediction is an important problem in knowledge graph (KG) research. A new KG entity type prediction method, named CORE (COmplex space Regression and Embedding), is proposed in this work. The proposed CORE method leverages the expressive power of two complex space embedding models; namely, RotatE and ComplEx models. It embeds entities and types in two different complex spaces using either RotatE or ComplEx. Then, we derive a complex regression model to link these two spaces. Finally, a mechanism to optimize embedding and regression parameters jointly is introduced. Experiments show that CORE outperforms benchmarking methods on representative KG entity type inference datasets. Strengths and weaknesses of various entity type prediction methods are analyzed.

Knowledge base completion is formulated as a binary classification problem in this work, where an XGBoost binary classifier is trained for each relation using relevant links in knowledge graphs (KGs). The new method, named KGBoost, adopts a modularized design and attempts to find hard negative samples so as to train a powerful classifier for missing link prediction. We conduct experiments on multiple benchmark datasets, and demonstrate that KGBoost outperforms state-of-the-art methods across most datasets. Furthermore, as compared with models trained by end-to-end optimization, KGBoost works well under the low-dimensional setting so as to allow a smaller model size.

We review the Seyfert 1.5 Galaxy ESO 362-G18 for exploring the origin of the soft X-ray excess. The Warm Corona and Relativistic Reflection models are two main scenarios to interpret the soft X-ray excess in AGNs at present. We use the simultaneous X-ray observation data of XMM-Newton and NuSTAR on Sep. 24th, 2016 to perform spectral analysis in two steps. First, we analyze the time-average spectra by using Warm Corona and Relativistic Reflection models. Moreover, we also explore the Hybrid model, Double Reflection model and Double Warm Corona model. We find that both of Warm Corona and Relativistic Reflection models can interpret the time-average spectra well but cannot be distinguished easily based on the time-averaged spectra fit statistics. Second, we add the RMS and covariance spectra to perform the spectral analysis with time-average spectra. The result shows that the warm corona could reproduce all of these spectra well. The the hot, optical thin corona and neutral distant reflection will increase their contribution with the temporal frequency, meaning that the corona responsible for X-ray continuum comes from the inner compact X-ray region and the neutral distant reflection is made of some moderate scale neutral clumps.

Phonons are known to generate a thermal Hall effect in certain insulators, including oxides with rare-earth impurities, quantum paraelectrics, multiferroic materials and cuprate Mott insulators. In each case, a special feature of the material is presumed relevant for the underlying mechanism that confers chirality to phonons in a magnetic field. The question is whether a phonon Hall effect is an unusual occurrence - linked to special characteristics such as skew scattering off rare-earth impurities, structural domains, ferroelectricity, ferromagnetism - or a much more common property of insulators than hitherto believed. To help answer this question, we have turned to a simple insulator, with none of the previously encountered special features: the cubic antiferromagnet Cu$_3$TeO$_6$. We find that it has the largest thermal Hall conductivity $\kappa_{\rm{xy}}$ of any insulator so far. We show that this record-high $\kappa_{\rm{xy}}$ signal is due to phonons and it does not require the presence of magnetic order, as it persists above the ordering temperature. We conclude that the phonon Hall effect is likely to be a fairly common property of solids., Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures

Explorations of symmetry and topology have led to important breakthroughs in quantum optics, but much richer behaviors arise from the non-Hermitian nature of light-matter interactions. A high-reflectivity, non-Hermitian optical mirror can be realized by a two-dimensional subwavelength array of neutral atoms near the cooperative resonance associated with the collective dipole modes. Here we show that exceptional points develop from a nondefective degeneracy by lowering the crystal symmetry of a square atomic lattice, and dispersive bulk Fermi arcs that originate from exceptional points are truncated by the light cone. We also find, although the dipole-dipole interaction is reciprocal, the geometry-dependent non-Hermitian skin effect emerges. Furthermore, skin modes localized at a boundary show a scale-free behavior that stems from the long-range interaction and whose mechanism goes beyond the framework of non-Bloch band theory. Our work opens the door to the study of the interplay among non-Hermiticity, topology, and long-range interaction., Comment: 8 + 20 pages, 4 + 7 figures