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3D pre-training is crucial to 3D perception tasks. However, limited by the difficulties in collecting clean 3D data, 3D pre-training consistently faced data scaling challenges. Inspired by semi-supervised learning leveraging limited labeled data and a large amount of unlabeled data, in this work, we propose a novel self-supervised pre-training framework utilizing the real 3D data and the pseudo-3D data lifted from images by a large depth estimation model. Another challenge lies in the efficiency. Previous methods such as Point-BERT and Point-MAE, employ k nearest neighbors to embed 3D tokens, requiring quadratic time complexity. To efficiently pre-train on such a large amount of data, we propose a linear-time-complexity token embedding strategy and a training-efficient 2D reconstruction target. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in 3D classification and few-shot learning while maintaining high pre-training and downstream fine-tuning efficiency., Comment: Under review. Pre-print

Manipulating quantum states is at the heart of quantum information processing and quantum metrology. Landau-Zener Rabi oscillation (LZRO), which arises from a quantum two-level system swept repeatedly across the avoided crossing point in the time domain, has been suggested for widespread use in manipulating quantum states. Cold atom is one of the most prominent platforms for quantum computing and precision measurement. However, LZRO has never been observed in cold atoms due to its stringent requirements. By compensating for the linear drift of the clock laser and optimizing experimental parameters, we successfully measured LZRO on the strontium atomic optical clock platform under both fast and slow passage limits within $4$ to $6$ driving periods. Compared to previous results on other platforms, the duration of the plateau is $10^4$ times longer in the optical lattice clock. The experimental data also suggest that destructive Landau-Zener interference can effectively suppress dephasing effects in the optical lattice clock, paving the way for manipulating quantum states against various environmental effects in cold atomic systems.

Image segmentation plays an important role in vision understanding. Recently, the emerging vision foundation models continuously achieved superior performance on various tasks. Following such success, in this paper, we prove that the Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2) can be a strong encoder for U-shaped segmentation models. We propose a simple but effective framework, termed SAM2-UNet, for versatile image segmentation. Specifically, SAM2-UNet adopts the Hiera backbone of SAM2 as the encoder, while the decoder uses the classic U-shaped design. Additionally, adapters are inserted into the encoder to allow parameter-efficient fine-tuning. Preliminary experiments on various downstream tasks, such as camouflaged object detection, salient object detection, marine animal segmentation, mirror detection, and polyp segmentation, demonstrate that our SAM2-UNet can simply beat existing specialized state-of-the-art methods without bells and whistles. Project page: \url{https://github.com/WZH0120/SAM2-UNet}., Comment: Technical Report

We present the determination of the charm quark mass, the masses and decay constants of charmed mesons using thirteen 2+1 flavor full-QCD gauge ensembles at five different lattice spacings $a\in[0.05,0.11]$ fm, 8 pion masses $m_{\pi}\in(130,360)$ MeV, and several values of the strange quark mass, which facilitate us to do the chiral and continuum extrapolation. These ensembles are generated through the stout smeared clover fermion action and Symanzik gauge actions with the tadpole improvement. Using QED-subtracted $D_s$ meson mass and non-perturbative renormalization, we predict the charm quark mass in the continuum with physical light and strange quark masses to be {$m_c(m_c)=1.289(17)$} GeV in $\overline{\textrm{MS}}$ scheme, with the systematic uncertainties from lattice spacing determination, renormalization constant, {and fit ansatz} included. Predictions of the open and close charm mesons using this charm quark mass agree with the experimental value at 0.3\% level uncertainty. We obtained {$D_{(s)}$ decay constants and also by far the most precise $D_{(s)}^*$ decay constants $f_{D^*}=0.2321(43)$ GeV and $f_{D^*_s}=0.2743(34)$ GeV}, with the charm quark improved vector current normalization., Comment: 14 pages, 14 figures

The shifted frequency-based electromagnetic transient (SFEMT) simulation has greatly improved the computational efficiency of traditional electromagnetic transient (EMT) simulation for the ac grid. This letter proposes a novel interface for the co-simulation of the SFEMT model and the traditional EMT model. The general form of SFEMT modeling and the principle of analytical signal construction are first derived. Then, an interface for the co-simulation of EMT and SFEMT simulation is proposed based on rotational invariance techniques. Theoretical analyses and test results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Femtosecond laser ablation is a process that bears both fundamental physics interest and has wide industrial applications. For decades, the lack of probes on the relevant time and length scales has prevented access to the highly nonequilibrium phase decomposition processes triggered by laser excitation. Enabled by the unprecedented intense femtosecond X-ray pulses delivered by an X-ray free electron laser, we report here results of time-resolved small angle scattering measurements on the dynamics of nanoscale phase decomposition in thin gold films upon femtosecond laser-induced ablation. By analyzing the features imprinted onto the small angle diffraction patterns, the transient heterogeneous density distributions within the ablation plume as obtained from molecular dynamics simulations get direct experimental confirmation., Comment: Main manuscript with 32 pages incl. 9 figures + supplementary materials with 16 pages incl. 5 figures

A self-consistent gravitational quantum field theory, with gravitational force treated on the same footing as the other three fundamental interactions, was established recently. The gravidynamics predicted by such a theory could lead to important implications, and the comparisons with experimental results may provide us opportunities to test such new approach of gravity based on the framework of the quantum field theory of gauge interactions. In this work, we start with the effective field equation of the gravitational quantum field theory, and then solve the perturbative gravigauge field order by order up to the 1st post-Newtonian level under the assumption of a simplified energy-momentum tensor of perfect fluids. Having the constraints on the related post-Newtonian parameters from the most up-to-date observational data, the new bound on the combined coupling in the gravitational quantum field theory $|\gamma_G(\alpha_G-\alpha_W/2)| \leq (2.4\pm30)\times10^{-6}$ is obtained. Under such bound, we found that the new gravitational quantum field theory successfully passed and found no conflict with the contemporary keynote Solar system experiments of gravity., Comment: 7 pages

Decay constants of pseudoscalar mesons $D$, $D_s$, $\eta_c$ and vector mesons $D^*$, $D_s^*$, $J/\psi$ are determined from $N_f=2+1$ lattice QCD at a lattice spacing $a\sim0.08$ fm. For vector mesons, the decay constants defined by tensor currents are given in the $\overline{\rm MS}$ scheme at $2$ GeV. The calculation is performed on domain wall fermion configurations generated by the RBC-UKQCD Collaborations and the overlap fermion action is used for the valence quarks. Comparing the current results with our previous ones at a coarser lattice spacing $a\sim0.11$ fm gives us a better understanding of the discretization error. We obtain $f_{D_s^*}^T(\overline{\rm MS},\text{2 GeV})/f_{D_s^*}=0.907(20)$ with a better precision than our previous result. Combining our $f_{D_s^*}=277(11)$ MeV with the total width of $D_s^*$ determined in a recent work gives a branching fraction $4.26(52)\times10^{-5}$ for $D_s^*$ leptonic decay., Comment: 18 pages, 7 figures, 12 tables

We present near-infrared spectroscopy of ten weak emission-line quasars (WLQs) at redshifts of $z\sim2$, obtained with the Palomar 200-inch Hale Telescope. WLQs are an exceptional population of type 1 quasars that exhibit weak or no broad emission lines in the ultraviolet (e.g., the C IV $\lambda 1549$ line), and they display remarkable X-ray properties. We derive H$\beta$-based single-epoch virial black-hole masses (median value $\rm 1.7 \times 10^{9} M_{\odot}$) and Eddington ratios (median value $0.5)$ for our sources. We confirm the previous finding that WLQ H$\beta$ lines, as a major low-ionization line, are not significantly weak compared to typical quasars. The most prominent feature of the WLQ optical spectra is the universally weak/absent [O III] $\lambda 5007$ emission. They also display stronger optical Fe II emission than typical quasars. Our results favor the super-Eddington accretion scenario for WLQs, where the weak lines are a result of a soft ionizing continuum; the geometrically thick inner accretion disk and/or its associated outflow is responsible for obscuring the nuclear high-energy radiation and producing the soft ionizing continuum. We also report candidate extreme [O III] outflows (blueshifts of $\approx 500$ and $\rm 4900 km s^{-1}$) in one object., Comment: 19 pages, 8 figures, accepted for publication in ApJ

Multi-task dense scene understanding, which learns a model for multiple dense prediction tasks, has a wide range of application scenarios. Modeling long-range dependency and enhancing cross-task interactions are crucial to multi-task dense prediction. In this paper, we propose MTMamba, a novel Mamba-based architecture for multi-task scene understanding. It contains two types of core blocks: self-task Mamba (STM) block and cross-task Mamba (CTM) block. STM handles long-range dependency by leveraging Mamba, while CTM explicitly models task interactions to facilitate information exchange across tasks. Experiments on NYUDv2 and PASCAL-Context datasets demonstrate the superior performance of MTMamba over Transformer-based and CNN-based methods. Notably, on the PASCAL-Context dataset, MTMamba achieves improvements of +2.08, +5.01, and +4.90 over the previous best methods in the tasks of semantic segmentation, human parsing, and object boundary detection, respectively. The code is available at https://github.com/EnVision-Research/MTMamba., Comment: ECCV 2024

In the rise of climate change, land cover mapping has become such an urgent need in environmental monitoring. The accuracy of land cover classification has gotten increasingly based on the improvement of remote sensing data. Land cover classification using satellite imageries has been explored and become more prevalent in recent years, but the methodologies remain some drawbacks of subjective and time-consuming. Some deep learning techniques have been utilized to overcome these limitations. However, most studies implemented just one image type to evaluate algorithms for land cover mapping. Therefore, our study conducted deep learning semantic segmentation in multispectral, hyperspectral, and high spatial aerial image datasets for landcover mapping. This research implemented a semantic segmentation method such as Unet, Linknet, FPN, and PSPnet for categorizing vegetation, water, and others (i.e., soil and impervious surface). The LinkNet model obtained high accuracy in IoU (Intersection Over Union) at 0.92 in all datasets, which is comparable with other mentioned techniques. In evaluation with different image types, the multispectral images showed higher performance with the IoU, and F1-score are 0.993 and 0.997, respectively. Our outcome highlighted the efficiency and broad applicability of LinkNet and multispectral image on land cover classification. This research contributes to establishing an approach on landcover segmentation via open source for long-term future application., Comment: conference, This preprint is based on the following published conference article: Panuntun, I. A., Chen, Y.-N., Jamaluddin, I., & Tran, T. L. C., 2023. Evaluation of Deep Learning Semantic Segmentation for Land Cover Mapping on Multispectral, Hyperspectral and High Spatial Aerial Imagery. 44th Asian Conference on Remote Sensing, ACRS 2023. Code 198676

Foundation models have become prominent in computer vision, achieving notable success in various tasks. However, their effectiveness largely depends on pre-training with extensive datasets. Applying foundation models directly to small datasets of capsule endoscopy images from scratch is challenging. Pre-training on broad, general vision datasets is crucial for successfully fine-tuning our model for specific tasks. In this work, we introduce a simplified approach called Adapt foundation models with a low-rank adaptation (LoRA) technique for easier customization. Our method, inspired by the DINOv2 foundation model, applies low-rank adaptation learning to tailor foundation models for capsule endoscopy diagnosis effectively. Unlike traditional fine-tuning methods, our strategy includes LoRA layers designed to absorb specific surgical domain knowledge. During the training process, we keep the main model (the backbone encoder) fixed and focus on optimizing the LoRA layers and the disease classification component. We tested our method on two publicly available datasets for capsule endoscopy disease classification. The results were impressive, with our model achieving 97.75% accuracy on the Kvasir-Capsule dataset and 98.81% on the Kvasirv2 dataset. Our solution demonstrates that foundation models can be adeptly adapted for capsule endoscopy diagnosis, highlighting that mere reliance on straightforward fine-tuning or pre-trained models from general computer vision tasks is inadequate for such specific applications., Comment: To appear in ICBIR 2024

As generative AI continues to evolve, educators face the challenge of preparing students for a future where AI-assisted work is integral to professional success. This paper introduces ChatISA, an in-house, multi-model chatbot designed to support students in an Information Systems and Analytics department. ChatISA comprises four primary modules-Coding Companion, Project Coach, Exam Ally, and Interview Mentor-each tailored to enhance different aspects of the educational experience. Through iterative development, student feedback, and leveraging open-source frameworks, we created a robust tool that addresses coding inquiries, project management, exam preparation, and interview readiness. The implementation of ChatISA revealed significant insights and challenges, including the necessity of ethical guidelines and balancing AI usage with maintaining student agency. Our findings underscore the importance of adaptive pedagogy and proactive engagement with AI tools to maximize their educational benefits. To support broader adoption and innovation, all code for ChatISA is made publicly available on GitHub, enabling other institutions to customize and integrate similar AI-driven educational tools within their curricula., Comment: 18 pages

surveygenmod2 builds on the macro written by da Silva (2017) for generalized linear models under complex survey designs. The updated macro fixed several minor bugs we encountered while updating the macro for use in SAS\textregistered. We added additional features for conducting basic Wald-type tests on groups of parameters based on the estimated regression coefficients and parameter variance-covariance matrix.

For studying the local topology of maps, one uses deformations which split the singularities into simpler ones while preserving the general fibres. We give conditions under which such conservation holds., Comment: slight changes of terminology, and an application added

Visual grounding is an essential tool that links user-provided text queries with query-specific regions within an image. Despite advancements in visual grounding models, their ability to comprehend complex queries remains limited. To overcome this limitation, we introduce LLM-Optic, an innovative method that utilizes Large Language Models (LLMs) as an optical lens to enhance existing visual grounding models in comprehending complex text queries involving intricate text structures, multiple objects, or object spatial relationships, situations that current models struggle with. LLM-Optic first employs an LLM as a Text Grounder to interpret complex text queries and accurately identify objects the user intends to locate. Then a pre-trained visual grounding model is used to generate candidate bounding boxes given the refined query by the Text Grounder. After that, LLM-Optic annotates the candidate bounding boxes with numerical marks to establish a connection between text and specific image regions, thereby linking two distinct modalities. Finally, it employs a Large Multimodal Model (LMM) as a Visual Grounder to select the marked candidate objects that best correspond to the original text query. Through LLM-Optic, we have achieved universal visual grounding, which allows for the detection of arbitrary objects specified by arbitrary human language input. Importantly, our method achieves this enhancement without requiring additional training or fine-tuning. Extensive experiments across various challenging benchmarks demonstrate that LLM-Optic achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot visual grounding capabilities. Project Page: https://haoyu-zhao.github.io/LLM-Optic.github.io/., Comment: Project Page: https://haoyu-zhao.github.io/LLM-Optic.github.io/

Video Anomaly Detection (VAD) systems can autonomously monitor and identify disturbances, reducing the need for manual labor and associated costs. However, current VAD systems are often limited by their superficial semantic understanding of scenes and minimal user interaction. Additionally, the prevalent data scarcity in existing datasets restricts their applicability in open-world scenarios. In this paper, we introduce Hawk, a novel framework that leverages interactive large Visual Language Models (VLM) to interpret video anomalies precisely. Recognizing the difference in motion information between abnormal and normal videos, Hawk explicitly integrates motion modality to enhance anomaly identification. To reinforce motion attention, we construct an auxiliary consistency loss within the motion and video space, guiding the video branch to focus on the motion modality. Moreover, to improve the interpretation of motion-to-language, we establish a clear supervisory relationship between motion and its linguistic representation. Furthermore, we have annotated over 8,000 anomaly videos with language descriptions, enabling effective training across diverse open-world scenarios, and also created 8,000 question-answering pairs for users' open-world questions. The final results demonstrate that Hawk achieves SOTA performance, surpassing existing baselines in both video description generation and question-answering. Our codes/dataset/demo will be released at https://github.com/jqtangust/hawk.

Recent advancements in text-to-image generation have been propelled by the development of diffusion models and multi-modality learning. However, since text is typically represented sequentially in these models, it often falls short in providing accurate contextualization and structural control. So the generated images do not consistently align with human expectations, especially in complex scenarios involving multiple objects and relationships. In this paper, we introduce the Scene Graph Adapter(SG-Adapter), leveraging the structured representation of scene graphs to rectify inaccuracies in the original text embeddings. The SG-Adapter's explicit and non-fully connected graph representation greatly improves the fully connected, transformer-based text representations. This enhancement is particularly notable in maintaining precise correspondence in scenarios involving multiple relationships. To address the challenges posed by low-quality annotated datasets like Visual Genome, we have manually curated a highly clean, multi-relational scene graph-image paired dataset MultiRels. Furthermore, we design three metrics derived from GPT-4V to effectively and thoroughly measure the correspondence between images and scene graphs. Both qualitative and quantitative results validate the efficacy of our approach in controlling the correspondence in multiple relationships.

In the realm of autonomous driving, robust perception under out-of-distribution conditions is paramount for the safe deployment of vehicles. Challenges such as adverse weather, sensor malfunctions, and environmental unpredictability can severely impact the performance of autonomous systems. The 2024 RoboDrive Challenge was crafted to propel the development of driving perception technologies that can withstand and adapt to these real-world variabilities. Focusing on four pivotal tasks -- BEV detection, map segmentation, semantic occupancy prediction, and multi-view depth estimation -- the competition laid down a gauntlet to innovate and enhance system resilience against typical and atypical disturbances. This year's challenge consisted of five distinct tracks and attracted 140 registered teams from 93 institutes across 11 countries, resulting in nearly one thousand submissions evaluated through our servers. The competition culminated in 15 top-performing solutions, which introduced a range of innovative approaches including advanced data augmentation, multi-sensor fusion, self-supervised learning for error correction, and new algorithmic strategies to enhance sensor robustness. These contributions significantly advanced the state of the art, particularly in handling sensor inconsistencies and environmental variability. Participants, through collaborative efforts, pushed the boundaries of current technologies, showcasing their potential in real-world scenarios. Extensive evaluations and analyses provided insights into the effectiveness of these solutions, highlighting key trends and successful strategies for improving the resilience of driving perception systems. This challenge has set a new benchmark in the field, providing a rich repository of techniques expected to guide future research in this field., Comment: ICRA 2024; 32 pages, 24 figures, 5 tables; Code at https://robodrive-24.github.io/

In this paper, we introduce a new quantum circuit synthesis (QCS) framework, Qsyn, for developers to research, develop, test, experiment, and then contribute their QCS algorithms and tools to the framework. Our framework is more developer-friendly than other modern QCS frameworks in three aspects: (1) We design a rich command-line interface so that developers can easily design various testing scenarios and flexibly conduct experiments on their algorithms. (2) We offer detailed access to many data representations on different abstract levels of quantum circuits so that developers can optimize their algorithms to the extreme. (3) We define a rigid developing flow and environment so that developers can ensure their development qualities with the best modern software engineering practices. We illustrate the friendliness of our framework with a showcase of developing a T-Count Optimization algorithm and demonstrate our performance superiority with fair comparisons to other modern QCS frameworks.

Proto-form reconstruction has been a painstaking process for linguists. Recently, computational models such as RNN and Transformers have been proposed to automate this process. We take three different approaches to improve upon previous methods, including data augmentation to recover missing reflexes, adding a VAE structure to the Transformer model for proto-to-language prediction, and using a neural machine translation model for the reconstruction task. We find that with the additional VAE structure, the Transformer model has a better performance on the WikiHan dataset, and the data augmentation step stabilizes the training.

Bismuth produces different types of ordered superstructures on the InAs(100) surface, depending on the growth procedure and coverage. The (2x1) phase forms at completion of a Bi monolayer and consists of a uniformly oriented array of parallel lines of Bi dimers. Scanning tunneling and core level spectroscopies demonstrate its metallic character, in contrast with the semiconducting properties expected on the basis of the electron counting principle. The weak electronic coupling among neighboring lines gives rise to quasi one-dimensional Bi-derived bands with open contours at the Fermi level. Spin- and angle-resolved photoelectron spectroscopy reveals a giant Rashba splitting of these bands, in good agreement with ab-initio electronic structure calculations. The very high density of the dimer lines, the metallic and quasi one-dimensional band dispersion and the Rashba-like spin texture make the Bi/InAs(100)-(2x1) phase an intriguing system, where novel transport regimes can be studied., Comment: 4 figures, includes supplemental material file

We performed 23Na NMR and magnetization measurements on an S = 1, quasi-2D honeycomb lattice antiferromagnet Na3Ni2BiO6. A large positive Curie-Weiss constant of 22.9 K is observed. The NMR spectra at low fields are consistent with a "zigzag" magnetic order, indicating a large easy-axis anisotropy. With field applied along the c* axis, the NMR spectra confirm the existence of a 1/3-magnetization plateau phase between 5.1 T and 7.1 T. The transition from the zigzag order to the 1/3-magnetization plateau phase is also found to be a first-order type. A monotonic decrease of the spin gap is revealed in the 1/3-magnetization plateau phase, which reaches zero at a quantum critical field Hc = 8.35 T before entering the fully polarized phase. These data suggest the existence of exchange frustration in the system along with strong ferromagnetic interactions, hosting the possibility for Kitaev physics. Besides, well below the ordered phase, the 1/T1 at high fields shows either a level off or an enhancement upon cooling below 3 K, which suggests the existence of low-energy fluctuations., Comment: 7 pages, 7 figures

Multi-modal learning that combines pathological images with genomic data has significantly enhanced the accuracy of survival prediction. Nevertheless, existing methods have not fully utilized the inherent hierarchical structure within both whole slide images (WSIs) and transcriptomic data, from which better intra-modal representations and inter-modal integration could be derived. Moreover, many existing studies attempt to improve multi-modal representations through attention mechanisms, which inevitably lead to high complexity when processing high-dimensional WSIs and transcriptomic data. Recently, a structured state space model named Mamba emerged as a promising approach for its superior performance in modeling long sequences with low complexity. In this study, we propose Mamba with multi-grained multi-modal interaction (SurvMamba) for survival prediction. SurvMamba is implemented with a Hierarchical Interaction Mamba (HIM) module that facilitates efficient intra-modal interactions at different granularities, thereby capturing more detailed local features as well as rich global representations. In addition, an Interaction Fusion Mamba (IFM) module is used for cascaded inter-modal interactive fusion, yielding more comprehensive features for survival prediction. Comprehensive evaluations on five TCGA datasets demonstrate that SurvMamba outperforms other existing methods in terms of performance and computational cost.

Remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) technology has become increasingly popular due to its non-invasive monitoring of various physiological indicators, making it widely applicable in multimedia interaction, healthcare, and emotion analysis. Existing rPPG methods utilize multiple datasets for training to enhance the generalizability of models. However, they often overlook the underlying conflict issues across different datasets, such as (1) label conflict resulting from different phase delays between physiological signal labels and face videos at the instance level, and (2) attribute conflict stemming from distribution shifts caused by head movements, illumination changes, skin types, etc. To address this, we introduce the DOmain-HArmonious framework (DOHA). Specifically, we first propose a harmonious phase strategy to eliminate uncertain phase delays and preserve the temporal variation of physiological signals. Next, we design a harmonious hyperplane optimization that reduces irrelevant attribute shifts and encourages the model's optimization towards a global solution that fits more valid scenarios. Our experiments demonstrate that DOHA significantly improves the performance of existing methods under multiple protocols. Our code is available at https://github.com/SWY666/rPPG-DOHA., Comment: Accepted by ACM MM 2023

Monocular depth estimation from a single image is an ill-posed problem for computer vision due to insufficient reliable cues as the prior knowledge. Besides the inter-frame supervision, namely stereo and adjacent frames, extensive prior information is available in the same frame. Reflections from specular surfaces, informative intra-frame priors, enable us to reformulate the ill-posed depth estimation task as a multi-view synthesis. This paper proposes the first self-supervision for deep-learning depth estimation on water scenes via intra-frame priors, known as reflection supervision and geometrical constraints. In the first stage, a water segmentation network is performed to separate the reflection components from the entire image. Next, we construct a self-supervised framework to predict the target appearance from reflections, perceived as other perspectives. The photometric re-projection error, incorporating SmoothL1 and a novel photometric adaptive SSIM, is formulated to optimize pose and depth estimation by aligning the transformed virtual depths and source ones. As a supplement, the water surface is determined from real and virtual camera positions, which complement the depth of the water area. Furthermore, to alleviate these laborious ground truth annotations, we introduce a large-scale water reflection scene (WRS) dataset rendered from Unreal Engine 4. Extensive experiments on the WRS dataset prove the feasibility of the proposed method compared to state-of-the-art depth estimation techniques., Comment: 16 pages, 8 figures

Due to potential pitch reduction, the semiconductor industry is adopting High-NA EUVL technology. However, its low depth of focus presents challenges for High Volume Manufacturing. To address this, suppliers are exploring thinner photoresists and new underlayers/hardmasks. These may suffer from poor SNR, complicating defect detection. Vision-based ML algorithms offer a promising solution for semiconductor defect inspection. However, developing a robust ML model across various image resolutions without explicit training remains a challenge for nano-scale defect inspection. This research's goal is to propose a scale-invariant ADCD framework capable to upscale images, addressing this issue. We propose an improvised ADCD framework as SEMI-SuperYOLO-NAS, which builds upon the baseline YOLO-NAS architecture. This framework integrates a SR assisted branch to aid in learning HR features by the defect detection backbone, particularly for detecting nano-scale defect instances from LR images. Additionally, the SR-assisted branch can recursively generate upscaled images from their corresponding downscaled counterparts, enabling defect detection inference across various image resolutions without requiring explicit training. Moreover, we investigate improved data augmentation strategy aimed at generating diverse and realistic training datasets to enhance model performance. We have evaluated our proposed approach using two original FAB datasets obtained from two distinct processes and captured using two different imaging tools. Finally, we demonstrate zero-shot inference for our model on a new, originating from a process condition distinct from the training dataset and possessing different Pitch characteristics. Experimental validation demonstrates that our proposed ADCD framework aids in increasing the throughput of imaging tools for defect inspection by reducing the required image pixel resolutions.

Chiral crystals and molecules were recently predicted to form an intriguing platform for unconventional orbital physics. Here, we report the observation of chirality-driven orbital textures in the bulk electronic structure of CoSi, a prototype member of the cubic B20 family of chiral crystals. Using circular dichroism in soft X-ray angle-resolved photoemission, we demonstrate the formation of a bulk orbital-angular-momentum texture and monopole-like orbital-momentum locking that depends on crystal handedness. We introduce the intrinsic chiral circular dichroism, icCD, as a differential photoemission observable and a natural probe of chiral electron states. Our findings render chiral crystals promising for spin-orbitronics applications., Comment: To be published in Physical Review Letters

We perform the first lattice QCD study on the radiative decay of the scalar glueball to the vector meson $\phi$ in the quenched approximation. The calculations are carried out on three gauge ensembles with different lattice spacings, which enable us to do the continuum extrapolation. We first revisit the radiative $J/\psi$ decay into the scalar glueball $G$ and obtain the partial decay width $\Gamma(J/\psi \to \gamma G)=0.578(86)~\text{keV}$ and the branching fraction $\text{Br}(J/\psi \to \gamma G) = 6.2(9)\times 10^{-3}$. We then extend the similar calculation to the process $G\to \gamma \phi$ and get the partial decay width $\Gamma(G \to \gamma \phi)= 0.074(47)~\text{keV}$, which implies that the combined branching fraction of $J/\psi\to\gamma G\to \gamma\gamma\phi$ is as small as $\mathcal{O}(10^{-9})$ such that this process is hardly detected by the BESIII experiment even with the large $J/\psi$ sample of $\mathcal{O}(10^{10})$. With the vector meson dominance model, the two-photon decay width of the scalar glueball is estimated to be $\Gamma(G\to\gamma\gamma)=0.53(46)~\text{eV}$, which results in a large stickiness $S(G)\sim \mathcal{O}(10^4)$ of the scalar glueball by assuming the stickiness of $f_2(1270)$ to be one., Comment: 13 pages,11 figures. This version includes updated numerical results and corrections to previous calculations

A large fraction of total healthcare expenditure occurs due to end-of-life (EOL) care, which means it is important to study the problem of more carefully incentivizing necessary versus unnecessary EOL care because this has the potential to reduce overall healthcare spending. This paper introduces a principal-agent model that integrates a mixed payment system of fee-for-service and pay-for-performance in order to analyze whether it is possible to better align healthcare provider incentives with patient outcomes and cost-efficiency in EOL care. The primary contributions are to derive optimal contracts for EOL care payments using a principal-agent framework under three separate models for the healthcare provider, where each model considers a different level of risk tolerance for the provider. We derive these optimal contracts by converting the underlying principal-agent models from a bilevel optimization problem into a single-level optimization problem that can be analytically solved. Our results are demonstrated using a simulation where an optimal contract is used to price intracranial pressure monitoring for traumatic brain injuries.

Contemporary makeup approaches primarily hinge on unpaired learning paradigms, yet they grapple with the challenges of inaccurate supervision (e.g., face misalignment) and sophisticated facial prompts (including face parsing, and landmark detection). These challenges prohibit low-cost deployment of facial makeup models, especially on mobile devices. To solve above problems, we propose a brand-new learning paradigm, termed "Data Amplify Learning (DAL)," alongside a compact makeup model named "TinyBeauty." The core idea of DAL lies in employing a Diffusion-based Data Amplifier (DDA) to "amplify" limited images for the model training, thereby enabling accurate pixel-to-pixel supervision with merely a handful of annotations. Two pivotal innovations in DDA facilitate the above training approach: (1) A Residual Diffusion Model (RDM) is designed to generate high-fidelity detail and circumvent the detail vanishing problem in the vanilla diffusion models; (2) A Fine-Grained Makeup Module (FGMM) is proposed to achieve precise makeup control and combination while retaining face identity. Coupled with DAL, TinyBeauty necessitates merely 80K parameters to achieve a state-of-the-art performance without intricate face prompts. Meanwhile, TinyBeauty achieves a remarkable inference speed of up to 460 fps on the iPhone 13. Extensive experiments show that DAL can produce highly competitive makeup models using only 5 image pairs.

Although mainstream unsupervised anomaly detection (AD) algorithms perform well in academic datasets, their performance is limited in practical application due to the ideal experimental setting of clean training data. Training with noisy data is an inevitable problem in real-world anomaly detection but is seldom discussed. This paper considers label-level noise in image sensory anomaly detection for the first time. To solve this problem, we proposed a memory-based unsupervised AD method, SoftPatch, which efficiently denoises the data at the patch level. Noise discriminators are utilized to generate outlier scores for patch-level noise elimination before coreset construction. The scores are then stored in the memory bank to soften the anomaly detection boundary. Compared with existing methods, SoftPatch maintains a strong modeling ability of normal data and alleviates the overconfidence problem in coreset. Comprehensive experiments in various noise scenes demonstrate that SoftPatch outperforms the state-of-the-art AD methods on the MVTecAD and BTAD benchmarks and is comparable to those methods under the setting without noise., Comment: 36th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems

In the context of high usability in single-class anomaly detection models, recent academic research has become concerned about the more complex multi-class anomaly detection. Although several papers have designed unified models for this task, they often overlook the utility of class labels, a potent tool for mitigating inter-class interference. To address this issue, we introduce a Multi-class Implicit Neural representation Transformer for unified Anomaly Detection (MINT-AD), which leverages the fine-grained category information in the training stage. By learning the multi-class distributions, the model generates class-aware query embeddings for the transformer decoder, mitigating inter-class interference within the reconstruction model. Utilizing such an implicit neural representation network, MINT-AD can project category and position information into a feature embedding space, further supervised by classification and prior probability loss functions. Experimental results on multiple datasets demonstrate that MINT-AD outperforms existing unified training models.

The past decades have witnessed the development of new X-ray beam sources with brightness growing at a rate surpassing Moore's law. Current and upcoming diffraction limited and fully coherent X-ray beam sources, including multi-bend achromat based synchrotron sources and high repetition rate X-ray free electron lasers, puts increasingly stringent requirements on stability and accuracy of X-ray optics systems. Parasitic motion errors at sub-micro radian scale in beam transport and beam conditioning optics can lead to significant loss of coherence and brightness delivered from source to experiment. To address this challenge, we incorporated optical metrology based on interferometry and differential wavefront sensing as part of the X-ray optics motion control system. A prototype X-ray optics system was constructed following the optical layout of a tunable X-ray cavity. On-line interferometric metrology enabled dynamical feedback to a motion control system to track and compensate for motion errors. The system achieved sub-microradian scale performance, as multiple optical elements are synchronously and continuously adjusted. This first proof of principle measurement demonstrated both the potential and necessity of incorporating optical metrology as part of the motion control architecture for large scale X-ray optical systems such as monochromators, delay lines, and in particular, X-ray cavity systems to enable the next generation cavity-based X-ray free electron lasers.

Despite significant advancements in image customization with diffusion models, current methods still have several limitations: 1) unintended changes in non-target areas when regenerating the entire image; 2) guidance solely by a reference image or text descriptions; and 3) time-consuming fine-tuning, which limits their practical application. In response, we introduce a tuning-free framework for simultaneous text-image-guided image customization, enabling precise editing of specific image regions within seconds. Our approach preserves the semantic features of the reference image subject while allowing modification of detailed attributes based on text descriptions. To achieve this, we propose an innovative attention blending strategy that blends self-attention features in the UNet decoder during the denoising process. To our knowledge, this is the first tuning-free method that concurrently utilizes text and image guidance for image customization in specific regions. Our approach outperforms previous methods in both human and quantitative evaluations, providing an efficient solution for various practical applications, such as image synthesis, design, and creative photography., Comment: 17 pages, 8 figures

Deep learning-based image matching methods play a crucial role in computer vision, yet they often suffer from substantial computational demands. To tackle this challenge, we present HCPM, an efficient and detector-free local feature-matching method that employs hierarchical pruning to optimize the matching pipeline. In contrast to recent detector-free methods that depend on an exhaustive set of coarse-level candidates for matching, HCPM selectively concentrates on a concise subset of informative candidates, resulting in fewer computational candidates and enhanced matching efficiency. The method comprises a self-pruning stage for selecting reliable candidates and an interactive-pruning stage that identifies correlated patches at the coarse level. Our results reveal that HCPM significantly surpasses existing methods in terms of speed while maintaining high accuracy. The source code will be made available upon publication.

We calculate the form factor $M(q^2)$ for the Dalitz decay $J/\psi\to \gamma^*(q^2)\eta_{(N_f=1)}$ with $\eta_{(N_f)}$ being the SU($N_f$) flavor singlet pseudoscalar meson. The difference among the partial widths $\Gamma(J/\psi\to \gamma \eta_{(N_f)})$ at different $N_f$ can be attributed in part to the $\mathbf{U}_A(1)$ anomaly that induces a $N_f$ scaling. $M(q^2)$'s in $N_f=1,2$ are both well described by the single pole model $M(q^2)=M(0)/(1-q^2/\Lambda^2)$. Combined with the known experimental results of the Dalitz decays $J/\psi\to Pe^+e^-$, the pseudoscalar mass $m_P$ dependence of the pole parameter $\Lambda$ is approximated by $\Lambda(m_P^2)=\Lambda_1(1-m_P^2/\Lambda_2^2)$ with $\Lambda_1=2.64(4)~\mathrm{GeV}$ and $\Lambda_2=2.97(33)~\mathrm{GeV}$. These results provide inputs for future theoretical and experimental studies on the Dalitz decays $J/\psi\to Pe^+e^-$., Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures

Matrix sensing problems exhibit pervasive non-convexity, plaguing optimization with a proliferation of suboptimal spurious solutions. Avoiding convergence to these critical points poses a major challenge. This work provides new theoretical insights that help demystify the intricacies of the non-convex landscape. In this work, we prove that under certain conditions, critical points sufficiently distant from the ground truth matrix exhibit favorable geometry by being strict saddle points rather than troublesome local minima. Moreover, we introduce the notion of higher-order losses for the matrix sensing problem and show that the incorporation of such losses into the objective function amplifies the negative curvature around those distant critical points. This implies that increasing the complexity of the objective function via high-order losses accelerates the escape from such critical points and acts as a desirable alternative to increasing the complexity of the optimization problem via over-parametrization. By elucidating key characteristics of the non-convex optimization landscape, this work makes progress towards a comprehensive framework for tackling broader machine learning objectives plagued by non-convexity., Comment: Accepted by AISTATS 2024

In this paper, we study a new problem, Film Removal (FR), which attempts to remove the interference of wrinkled transparent films and reconstruct the original information under films for industrial recognition systems. We first physically model the imaging of industrial materials covered by the film. Considering the specular highlight from the film can be effectively recorded by the polarized camera, we build a practical dataset with polarization information containing paired data with and without transparent film. We aim to remove interference from the film (specular highlights and other degradations) with an end-to-end framework. To locate the specular highlight, we use an angle estimation network to optimize the polarization angle with the minimized specular highlight. The image with minimized specular highlight is set as a prior for supporting the reconstruction network. Based on the prior and the polarized images, the reconstruction network can decouple all degradations from the film. Extensive experiments show that our framework achieves SOTA performance in both image reconstruction and industrial downstream tasks. Our code will be released at \url{https://github.com/jqtangust/FilmRemoval}., Comment: Accepted by CVPR2024

We have performed electrochemical treatment of the van der Waals antiferromagnetic materials FePS$_3$ and NiPS$_3$ with the ionic liquid EMIM-BF$_4$, achieving significant molecular intercalation. Mass analysis of the intercalated compounds, EMIM$_x$-FePS$_3$ and EMIM$_x$-NiPS$_3$, indicated respective intercalation levels, $x$, of approximately 27\% and 37\%, and X-ray diffraction measurements demonstrated a massive (over 50\%) enhancement of the $c$-axis lattice parameters. To investigate the consequences of these changes for the magnetic properties, we performed magnetic susceptibility and $^{31}$P nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) studies of both systems. For EMIM$_x$-FePS$_3$, intercalation reduces the magnetic ordering temperature from $T_N = 120$~K to 78~K, and we find a spin gap in the antiferromagnetic phase that drops from 45~K to 30~K. For EMIM$_x$-NiPS$_3$, the ordering temperature is almost unaffected (changing from 148~K to 145~K), but a change towards nearly isotropic spin fluctuations suggests an alteration of the magnetic Hamiltonian. Such relatively modest changes, given that the huge extension of the $c$ axes is expected to cause a very strong suppression any interlayer interactions, point unequivocally to the conclusion that the magnetic properties of both parent compounds are determined solely by two-dimensional (2D), intralayer physics. The changes in transition temperatures and low-temperature spin dynamics in both compounds therefore indicate that intercalation also results in a significant modulation of the intralayer magnetic interactions, which we propose is due to charge doping and localization on the P sites. Our study offers chemical intercalation with ionic liquids as an effective method to control not only the interlayer but also the intralayer interactions in quasi-2D magnetic materials.

Within the United States, the majority of the populace receives their news online. U.S mainstream media outlets both generate and influence the news consumed by U.S citizens. Many of these citizens have their personal beliefs about these outlets and question the fairness of their reporting. We offer an interactive visualization system for the public to assess their perception of the mainstream media's coverage of a topic against the data. Our system combines belief elicitation techniques and narrative structure designs, emphasizing transparency and user-friendliness to facilitate users' self-assessment on personal beliefs. We gathered $\sim${25k} articles from the span of 2020-2022 from six mainstream media outlets as a testbed. To evaluate our system, we present usage scenarios alongside a user study with a qualitative analysis of user exploration strategies for personal belief assessment. We report our observations from this study and discuss future work and challenges of developing tools for the public to assess media outlet coverage and belief updating on provocative topics.

Whole Slide Image (WSI) classification is often formulated as a Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) problem. Recently, Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in WSI classification. However, existing methods leverage coarse-grained pathogenetic descriptions for visual representation supervision, which are insufficient to capture the complex visual appearance of pathogenetic images, hindering the generalizability of models on diverse downstream tasks. Additionally, processing high-resolution WSIs can be computationally expensive. In this paper, we propose a novel "Fine-grained Visual-Semantic Interaction" (FiVE) framework for WSI classification. It is designed to enhance the model's generalizability by leveraging the interaction between localized visual patterns and fine-grained pathological semantics. Specifically, with meticulously designed queries, we start by utilizing a large language model to extract fine-grained pathological descriptions from various non-standardized raw reports. The output descriptions are then reconstructed into fine-grained labels used for training. By introducing a Task-specific Fine-grained Semantics (TFS) module, we enable prompts to capture crucial visual information in WSIs, which enhances representation learning and augments generalization capabilities significantly. Furthermore, given that pathological visual patterns are redundantly distributed across tissue slices, we sample a subset of visual instances during training. Our method demonstrates robust generalizability and strong transferability, dominantly outperforming the counterparts on the TCGA Lung Cancer dataset with at least 9.19% higher accuracy in few-shot experiments. The code is available at: https://github.com/ls1rius/WSI_FiVE., Comment: Accepted by CVPR 2024

Existing quality enhancement methods for compressed images focus on aligning the enhancement domain with the raw domain to yield realistic images. However, these methods exhibit a pervasive enhancement bias towards the compression domain, inadvertently regarding it as more realistic than the raw domain. This bias makes enhanced images closely resemble their compressed counterparts, thus degrading their perceptual quality. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective method to mitigate this bias and enhance the quality of compressed images. Our method employs a conditional discriminator with the compressed image as a key condition, and then incorporates a domain-divergence regularization to actively distance the enhancement domain from the compression domain. Through this dual strategy, our method enables the discrimination against the compression domain, and brings the enhancement domain closer to the raw domain. Comprehensive quality evaluations confirm the superiority of our method over other state-of-the-art methods without incurring inference overheads., Comment: Accepted to CVPR 2024

Robust metallic surface states (MSS) of topological insulator (TI) against imperfections and perturbations are important in broad applications such as chemical catalysis and quantum computing. Unfortunately, they are suffered from the narrow band gap that can be accessed. Searching for MSS with large bulk band gap beyond conventional TIs becomes a quest. In this work, inspired by the adiabatic connection principle in real space, we identify that all electrides, a new class of emerging materials, must host robust and universal MSS that resists any disturbances, in spite of the fact that some of them could be classified as trivial in standard topology theory. This counterintuitive property is traced to the specific charge localization-delocalization change intrinsic to electride when approaching the crystalline surface or interface, which is a kind of interstice-centered to atom-centered transition in the real-space topology of the charge density distribution, and is sharply different from the band inversion in the standard topology theory. The new mechanism circumvents the obstacle that limits the band gap of TI. Robust and universal MSS in an electride that conventionally-determined as trivial but with a colossal band gap beyond 6.13 eV are demonstrated. This gap size is about 6-fold larger than the highest record of known "wide-gap" TIs, thus opens up new avenues to universal MSS with gigantic bulk gap., Comment: 32 pages, 7 figures, with supporting information

U-based binary alloys have been widely adopted in fast nuclear reactors, but their stability under extreme conditions of high-pressure is almost unknown, mounting up to latent risk in applications. Here, possible ordered phases in U-Zr system up to 200 GPa are comprehensively investigated by unbiased first-principles structure prediction. Stable U2Zr, metastable U3Zr and U4Zr phases are discovered for the first time, which exhibit strong stability under compression. They all are metallic, with 5f electrons of uranium dominating the electronic density of states near the Fermi level. Prominent ionic interactions between U and Zr atoms, as well as covalent interactions between adjacent uranium atoms, are found. The same strategy is applied to explore the stability of ordered phases in other U-based binary transition metal alloys, U-X (X= Sc, Ti, V, Cr, Y, Nb, Mo, Hf, Ta, W). Stable and metastable ordered phases similar to U-Zr alloy are unveiled, all with similar electronic structures. For these alloys, we find that the structure of U2X (X=Zr, Ti, Hf) hosts a unique hybrid phase transition similar to U2Nb, which is a superposition of a first-order transition and a second-order transition. The prediction of these novel phases not only refutes the stability of the long-believed ordered phase I4/mmm-U2Mo, but also rewrites the phase diagrams of U-X (X= Zr, Sc, Ti, V, Cr, Nb, Mo, Hf, Ta) alloys under high pressure. All of these findings promote our understanding of the high-pressure behavior of the broad category of U-based binary alloys with transition metals., Comment: 27 pages, 12 figures, with supplementary material

We study the $S$-wave $D\bar{D}^*(I=0)$ scattering at four different pion masses $m_\pi$ ranging from 250 MeV to 417 MeV from $N_f=2$ lattice QCD. A bound state near the $D\bar{D}^*$ threshold likely exists even after considering the possible left-hand cut effect due to the one pion exchange interaction. At $m_\pi\approx 417$ MeV where the effective range expansion is valid, the compositeness of the bound state is $X\approx 1$ and indicates a predominant $D\bar{D}^*$ component. This state may correspond to $X(3872)$. On the other hand, our results of the finite volume energies also hint at the existence of a $1^{++}$ resonance below 4.0 GeV with a width around 60 MeV., Comment: 17 pages, 11 figures

We performed nuclear magnetic resonance studies on a kagome antiferromagnet YCu$_3$(OH)$_6$Br$_2$[Br$_{1-x}$(OH)$_{x}$]. No significant NMR spectral broadening is found in the Br center peak from 1 K down to 0.05 K, indicating absence of static antiferromagnetic ordering. In contrast to signatures of dominant 2D kagome antiferromagnetic fluctuations at temperature above 30 K, both the Knight shift $K_{\rm{n}}$ and the spin-lattice relaxation rate $1/T_{1}$ increase when the sample is cooled from 30 K to 8 K, which can be attributed to the scattering of spin excitations by strong non-magnetic impurities. Unusually, a hump is observed in $K_{\rm{n}}$ and $1/T_{2}$ close to 2 K (far below the exchange energy), which indicates the existence of excitations with a large density of states close to zero energy. These phenomena are reproduced by a mean-field simulation of Heisenberg model with bond-dependent exchange interactions, where the sign fluctuations in the spinon kinetic terms caused by impurities result in localization of spinons and an almost flat band close to the Fermi energy., Comment: 9 pages, 7 figures. The supplementary materials can be obtained upon request

We performed 23Na NMR measurements on a single-domain crystal of the Kitaev material Na3Co2SbO6, with magnetic field applied along the crystalline a axis. A positive Curie-Weiss constant is obtained from the NMR Knight shift, which suggests the existence of ferromagnetic exchange couplings. The antiferromagnetic ordering is found to be suppressed at a field of 1.9 T. Inside the ordered phase, our data reveal two additional phase transitions. At 1.9 T, the spin-lattice relaxation rate 1/23T1 establishes a quantum critical behavior at high temperatures. However, at low temperatures, a gapped behavior is observed at the critical field, which suggests a weakly first-order transition instead and a possible field-induced quantum spin liquid. Our results reveal complex microscopic interactions in the system, which may help to search for possible quantum spin liquids., Comment: 9 pages, 9 figures