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Electronic structure calculations of molecular systems are among the most promising applications for fault-tolerant quantum computing (FTQC) in quantum chemistry and drug design. However, while recent algorithmic advancements such as qubitization and Tensor Hypercontraction (THC) have significantly reduced the complexity of such calculations, they do not yet achieve computational runtimes short enough to be practical for industrially relevant use cases. In this work, we introduce several advances to electronic structure calculation for molecular systems, resulting in a two-orders-of-magnitude speedup of estimated runtimes over prior-art algorithms run on comparable quantum devices. One of these advances is a novel framework for block-invariant symmetry-shifted Tensor Hypercontraction (BLISS-THC), with which we achieve the tightest Hamiltonian factorizations reported to date. We compile our algorithm for an Active Volume (AV) architecture, a technical layout that has recently been proposed for fusion-based photonic quantum hardware. AV compilation contributes towards a lower runtime of our computation by eliminating overheads stemming from connectivity issues in the underlying surface code. We present a detailed benchmark of our approach, focusing primarily on the computationally challenging benchmark molecule P450. Leveraging a number of hardware tradeoffs in interleaving-based photonic FTQC, we estimate runtimes for the electronic structure calculation of P450 as a function of the device footprint.

Despite being the most common types of stars in the Galaxy, the physical properties of late M dwarfs are often poorly constrained. A trend of radius inflation compared to evolutionary models has been observed for earlier type M dwarfs in eclipsing binaries, possibly caused by magnetic activity. It is currently unclear whether this trend also extends to later type M dwarfs below the convective boundary. This makes the discovery of lower-mass, fully convective, M dwarfs in eclipsing binaries valuable for testing evolutionary models especially in longer-period binaries where tidal interaction between the primary and secondary is negligible. With this context, we present the discovery of the NGTS-EB-7 AB system, an eclipsing binary containing a late M dwarf secondary and an evolved G-type primary star. The secondary star has a radius of $0.125 \pm 0.006 R_\odot$ , a mass of $0.096 \pm 0.004 M_\odot$ and follows a highly eccentric $(e=0.71436 \pm 0.00085)$ orbit every $193.35875 \pm 0.00034$ days. This makes NGTS-EB-7 AB the third longest-period eclipsing binary system with a secondary smaller than $200 M_J$ with the mass and radius constrained to better than $5 \%$. In addition, NGTS-EB-7 is situated near the centre of the proposed LOPS2 southern field of the upcoming PLATO mission, allowing for detection of the secondary eclipse and measurement of the companion`s temperature. With its long-period and well-constrained physical properties - NGTS-EB-7 B will make a valuable addition to the sample of M dwarfs in eclipsing binaries and help in determining accurate empirical mass/radius relations for later M dwarf stars., Comment: Main body: 14 pages, 6 figures, 5 tables. Appendices: 7 pages, 5 figures, 5 tables

Synthesizing natural human motion that adapts to complex environments while allowing creative control remains a fundamental challenge in motion synthesis. Existing models often fall short, either by assuming flat terrain or lacking the ability to control motion semantics through text. To address these limitations, we introduce SCENIC, a diffusion model designed to generate human motion that adapts to dynamic terrains within virtual scenes while enabling semantic control through natural language. The key technical challenge lies in simultaneously reasoning about complex scene geometry while maintaining text control. This requires understanding both high-level navigation goals and fine-grained environmental constraints. The model must ensure physical plausibility and precise navigation across varied terrain, while also preserving user-specified text control, such as ``carefully stepping over obstacles" or ``walking upstairs like a zombie." Our solution introduces a hierarchical scene reasoning approach. At its core is a novel scene-dependent, goal-centric canonicalization that handles high-level goal constraint, and is complemented by an ego-centric distance field that captures local geometric details. This dual representation enables our model to generate physically plausible motion across diverse 3D scenes. By implementing frame-wise text alignment, our system achieves seamless transitions between different motion styles while maintaining scene constraints. Experiments demonstrate our novel diffusion model generates arbitrarily long human motions that both adapt to complex scenes with varying terrain surfaces and respond to textual prompts. Additionally, we show SCENIC can generalize to four real-scene datasets. Our code, dataset, and models will be released at \url{https://virtualhumans.mpi-inf.mpg.de/scenic/}.

Given that visual foundation models (VFMs) are trained on extensive datasets but often limited to 2D images, a natural question arises: how well do they understand the 3D world? With the differences in architecture and training protocols (i.e., objectives, proxy tasks), a unified framework to fairly and comprehensively probe their 3D awareness is urgently needed. Existing works on 3D probing suggest single-view 2.5D estimation (e.g., depth and normal) or two-view sparse 2D correspondence (e.g., matching and tracking). Unfortunately, these tasks ignore texture awareness, and require 3D data as ground-truth, which limits the scale and diversity of their evaluation set. To address these issues, we introduce Feat2GS, which readout 3D Gaussians attributes from VFM features extracted from unposed images. This allows us to probe 3D awareness for geometry and texture via novel view synthesis, without requiring 3D data. Additionally, the disentanglement of 3DGS parameters - geometry ($\boldsymbol{x}, \alpha, \Sigma$) and texture ($\boldsymbol{c}$) - enables separate analysis of texture and geometry awareness. Under Feat2GS, we conduct extensive experiments to probe the 3D awareness of several VFMs, and investigate the ingredients that lead to a 3D aware VFM. Building on these findings, we develop several variants that achieve state-of-the-art across diverse datasets. This makes Feat2GS useful for probing VFMs, and as a simple-yet-effective baseline for novel-view synthesis. Code and data will be made available at https://fanegg.github.io/Feat2GS/., Comment: Project Page: https://fanegg.github.io/Feat2GS/

Device simulation plays a crucial role in complementing experimental device characterisation by enabling deeper understanding of internal physical processes. However, for simulations to be trusted, experimental validation is essential to confirm the accuracy of the conclusions drawn.In the framework of semiconductor detector characterisation, one powerful tool for such validation is the Two Photon Absorption - Transient Current Technique (TPA-TCT), which allows for highly precise, three-dimensional spatially-resolved characterisation of semiconductor detectors. In this work, the TCAD framework Synopsys Sentaurus is used to simulate depth-resolved TPA-TCT data for both p-type pad detectors (PINs) and Low Gain Avalanche Detectors (LGADs). The simulated data are compared against experimentally measured TPA-TCT results. Through this comparison, it is demonstrated that TCAD simulations can reproduce the TPA-TCT measurements, providing valuable insights into the TPA-TCT itself. Another significant outcome of this study is the successful simulation of the gain reduction mechanism, which can be observed in LGADs with increasing densities of excess charge carriers. This effect is demonstrated in an p-type LGAD with a thickness of approximately 286 um. The results confirm the ability of TCAD to model the complex interaction between carrier dynamics and device gain., Comment: 12 pages, 9 figures

Aims: We aim to observe the transits and occultations of WASP-33b, which orbits a rapidly-rotating $\delta$ Scuti pulsator, with the goal of measuring the orbital obliquity via the gravity-darkening effect, and constraining the geometric albedo via the occultation depth. Methods: We observed four transits and four occultations with CHEOPS, and employ a variety of techniques to remove the effects of the stellar pulsations from the light curves, as well as the usual CHEOPS systematic effects. We also performed a comprehensive analysis of low-resolution spectral and Gaia data to re-determine the stellar properties of WASP-33. Results: We measure an orbital obliquity 111.3 +0.2 -0.7 degrees, which is consistent with previous measurements made via Doppler tomography. We also measure the planetary impact parameter, and confirm that this parameter is undergoing rapid secular evolution as a result of nodal precession of the planetary orbit. This precession allows us to determine the second-order fluid Love number of the star, which we find agrees well with the predictions of theoretical stellar models. We are unable to robustly measure a unique value of the occultation depth, and emphasise the need for long-baseline observations to better measure the pulsation periods., Comment: 18 pages, 12 figures. Accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysics

This paper presents the development and implementation of a versatile ad-hoc metropolitan-range Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) network. The approach presented integrates various types of physical channels and QKD protocols, and a mix of trusted and untrusted nodes. Unlike conventional QKD networks that predominantly depend on either fiber-based or free-space optical (FSO) links, the testbed presented amalgamates FSO and fiber-based links, thereby overcoming some inherent limitations. Various network deployment strategies have been considered, including permanent infrastructure and provisional ad-hoc links to eradicate coverage gaps. Furthermore, the ability to rapidly establish a network using portable FSO terminals and to investigate diverse link topologies is demonstrated. The study also showcases the successful establishment of a quantum-secured link to a cloud server.

Creating realistic 3D objects and clothed avatars from a single RGB image is an attractive yet challenging problem. Due to its ill-posed nature, recent works leverage powerful prior from 2D diffusion models pretrained on large datasets. Although 2D diffusion models demonstrate strong generalization capability, they cannot guarantee the generated multi-view images are 3D consistent. In this paper, we propose Gen-3Diffusion: Realistic Image-to-3D Generation via 2D & 3D Diffusion Synergy. We leverage a pre-trained 2D diffusion model and a 3D diffusion model via our elegantly designed process that synchronizes two diffusion models at both training and sampling time. The synergy between the 2D and 3D diffusion models brings two major advantages: 1) 2D helps 3D in generalization: the pretrained 2D model has strong generalization ability to unseen images, providing strong shape priors for the 3D diffusion model; 2) 3D helps 2D in multi-view consistency: the 3D diffusion model enhances the 3D consistency of 2D multi-view sampling process, resulting in more accurate multi-view generation. We validate our idea through extensive experiments in image-based objects and clothed avatar generation tasks. Results show that our method generates realistic 3D objects and avatars with high-fidelity geometry and texture. Extensive ablations also validate our design choices and demonstrate the strong generalization ability to diverse clothing and compositional shapes. Our code and pretrained models will be publicly released on https://yuxuan-xue.com/gen-3diffusion., Comment: Project Page: https://yuxuan-xue.com/gen-3diffusion

Modeling 3D human-object interaction (HOI) is a problem of great interest for computer vision and a key enabler for virtual and mixed-reality applications. Existing methods work in a one-way direction: some recover plausible human interactions conditioned on a 3D object; others recover the object pose conditioned on a human pose. Instead, we provide the first unified model - TriDi which works in any direction. Concretely, we generate Human, Object, and Interaction modalities simultaneously with a new three-way diffusion process, allowing to model seven distributions with one network. We implement TriDi as a transformer attending to the various modalities' tokens, thereby discovering conditional relations between them. The user can control the interaction either as a text description of HOI or a contact map. We embed these two representations into a shared latent space, combining the practicality of text descriptions with the expressiveness of contact maps. Using a single network, TriDi unifies all the special cases of prior work and extends to new ones, modeling a family of seven distributions. Remarkably, despite using a single model, TriDi generated samples surpass one-way specialized baselines on GRAB and BEHAVE in terms of both qualitative and quantitative metrics, and demonstrating better diversity. We show the applicability of TriDi to scene population, generating objects for human-contact datasets, and generalization to unseen object geometry. The project page is available at: https://virtualhumans.mpi-inf.mpg.de/tridi.

The EAGLE-1 mission aims to develop Europe's first sovereign, end-to-end space-based quantum key distribution (QKD) system. The mission is led by the European Space Agency (ESA) and SES in collaboration with several European National Space Agencies and private partners. The state-of-the-art QKD system will consist of a payload on board the EAGLE-1 low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite, optical ground stations, quantum operational networks, and key management system. The EAGLE-1 mission represents a major step for next-generation quantum communication infrastructures, delivering valuable technical results and mission data. The Institute of Communications and Navigation (IKN) of the German Aerospace Center (DLR) is a key partner in the EAGLE-1 mission and is involved in the research and development of elements in both space and ground segments. Here we report on the development of the QKD transmitter, a vital part of the QKD payload, and the customization of the Optical Ground Station Oberpfaffenhofen (OGS-OP) to conduct the IOT phase of EAGLE-1. For the space segment, DLR-IKN is in charge of the design of the QKD transmitter, including the development of the software and firmware. This transmitter generates quantum states which are used to implement a QKD protocol based on an optical signal, that will be transmitted to ground. For the ground segment, The OGS-OP will serve as the in-orbit testing ground station for EAGLE-1. Building upon the expertise with a range of satellites for quantum communication, as well as new implementations, OGS-OP will validate the performance of the payload, optical link and QKD system for the first time. We present the main developments of OGS-OP for the mission, which includes the implementation of an upgraded adaptive optics system to correct for atmospheric distortions and optimize the coupling of the incoming light into a single mode optical fiber., Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures. Manuscript presented at the 75th International Astronautical Congress (IAC), Milan, Italy, 14-18 October 2024

We present the detection and characterization of TOI-4994b (TIC 277128619b), a warm Saturn-sized planet discovered by the NASA Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). TOI-4994b transits a G-type star (V = 12.6 mag) with a mass, radius, and effective temperature of $M_{\star} =1.005^{+0.064}_{-0.061} M_{\odot}$, $R_{\star} = 1.055^{+0.040}_{-0.037} R_{\odot}$, and $T_{\rm eff} = 5640 \pm 110$ K. We obtained follow-up ground-based photometry from the Las Cumbres Observatory (LCO) and the Antarctic Search for Transiting ExoPlanets (ASTEP) telescopes, and we confirmed the planetary nature of TOI-4994b with multiple radial velocity observations from the PFS, CHIRON, HARPS, FEROS, and CORALIE instruments. From a global fit to the photometry and radial velocities, we determine that TOI-4994b is in a 21.5-day, eccentric orbit ($e = 0.32 \pm 0.04$) and has a mass of $M_{P}= 0.280^{+0.037}_{-0.034} M_{J}$, a radius of $R_{P}= 0.762^{+0.030}_{-0.027}R_{J}$, and a Saturn-like bulk density of $\rho_{p} = 0.78^{+0.16}_{-0.14}$ $\rm g/cm^3$. We find that TOI-4994 is a potentially viable candidate for follow-up stellar obliquity measurements. TOI-4994b joins the small sample of warm Saturn analogs and thus sheds light on our understanding of these rare and unique worlds., Comment: 17 pages, 10 figures. Accepted to AJ

We study a generalization of the manifold-valued Rudin-Osher-Fatemi (ROF) model, which involves an initial datum $f$ mapping from a curved compact surface with smooth boundary to a complete, connected and smooth $n$-dimensional Riemannian manifold. We prove the existence and uniqueness of minimizers under curvature restrictions on the target and topological ones on the range of $f$. We obtain a series of regularity results on the associated PDE system of a relaxed functional with Neumann boundary condition. We apply these results to the ROF model to obtain Lipschitz regularity of minimizers without further requirements on the convexity of the boundary. Additionally, we provide variants of the regularity statement of independent interest: for 1-dimensional domains (related to signal denoising), local Lipschitz regularity (meaningful for image processing) and Lipschitz regularity for a version of the Mosolov problem coming from fluid mechanics., Comment: References added, proof of Proposition 6.6 detailed

Classical shadow tomography has become a powerful tool in learning about quantum states prepared on a quantum computer. Recent works have used classical shadows to variationally enforce N-representability conditions on the 2-particle reduced density matrix. In this paper, we build upon previous research by choice of an improved estimator within classical shadow tomography and rephrasing the optimisation constraints, resulting in an overall enhancement in performance under comparable measurement shot budgets. We further explore the specific regimes where these methods outperform the unbiased estimator of the standalone classical shadow protocol and quantify the potential savings in numerical studies.

The CHaracterising ExOPlanet Satellite (CHEOPS) is a partnership between the European Space Agency and Switzerland with important contributions by 10 additional ESA member States. It is the first S-class mission in the ESA Science Programme. CHEOPS has been flying on a Sun-synchronous low Earth orbit since December 2019, collecting millions of short-exposure images in the visible domain to study exoplanet properties. A small yet increasing fraction of CHEOPS images show linear trails caused by resident space objects crossing the instrument field of view. To characterize the population of satellites and orbital debris observed by CHEOPS, all and every science images acquired over the past 3 years have been scanned with a Hough transform algorithm to identify the characteristic linear features that these objects cause on the images. Thousands of trails have been detected. This statistically significant sample shows interesting trends and features such as an increased occurrence rate over the past years as well as the fingerprint of the Starlink constellation. The cross-matching of individual trails with catalogued objects is underway as we aim to measure their distance at the time of observation and deduce the apparent magnitude of the detected objects. As space agencies and private companies are developing new space-based surveillance and tracking activities to catalogue and characterize the distribution of small debris, the CHEOPS experience is timely and relevant. With the first CHEOPS mission extension currently running until the end of 2026, and a possible second extension until the end of 2029, the longer time coverage will make our dataset even more valuable to the community, especially for characterizing objects with recurrent crossings., Comment: 9 pages, 8 figures, Special Issue of the Journal of Space Safety Engineering

The AU Microscopii planetary system is only 24 Myr old, and its geometry may provide clues about the early dynamical history of planetary systems. Here, we present the first measurement of the Rossiter-McLaughlin effect for the warm sub-Neptune AU Mic c, using two transits observed simultaneously with the European Southern Observatory's (ESO's) Very Large Telescope (VLT)/Echelle SPectrograph for Rocky Exoplanets and Stable Spectroscopic Observations (ESPRESSO), CHaracterising ExOPlanet Satellite (CHEOPS), and Next-Generation Transit Survey (NGTS). After correcting for flares and for the magnetic activity of the host star, and accounting for transit-timing variations, we find the sky-projected spin-orbit angle of planet c to be in the range $\lambda_c=67.8_{-49.0}^{+31.7}$\,degrees (1-$\sigma$). We examine the possibility that planet c is misaligned with respect to the orbit of the inner planet b ($\lambda_b=-2.96_{-10.30}^{+10.44}$\,degrees), and the equatorial plane of the host star, and discuss scenarios that could explain both this and the planet's high density, including secular interactions with other bodies in the system or a giant impact. We note that a significantly misaligned orbit for planet c is in some degree of tension with the dynamical stability of the system, and with the fact that we see both planets in transit, though these arguments alone do not preclude such an orbit. Further observations would be highly desirable to constrain the spin-orbit angle of planet c more precisely., Comment: Accepted for publication in MNRAS

This document is comprised of a collection of updated preliminary parameters for the key parts of the muon collider. The updated preliminary parameters follow on from the October 2023 Tentative Parameters Report. Particular attention has been given to regions of the facility that are believed to hold greater technical uncertainty in their design and that have a strong impact on the cost and power consumption of the facility. The data is collected from a collaborative spreadsheet and transferred to overleaf.

We present new observations from CHEOPS and TESS to clarify the architecture of the planetary system hosted by the old Galactic thick disk star TOI-561. Our global analysis, which also includes previously published photometric and radial velocity data, incontrovertibly proves that TOI-561 is hosting at least four transiting planets with periods of 0.44 days (TOI-561 b), 10.8 days (TOI-561 c), 25.7 days (TOI-561 d), and 77.1 days (TOI-561 e) and a fifth non-transiting candidate, TOI-561f with a period of 433 days. The precise characterisation of TOI-561's orbital architecture is interesting since old and metal-poor thick disk stars are less likely to host ultra-short period Super-Earths like TOI-561 b. The new period of planet -e is consistent with the value obtained using radial velocity alone and is now known to be $77.14399\pm0.00025$ days, thanks to the new CHEOPS and TESS transits. The new data allowed us to improve its radius ($R_p = 2.517 \pm 0.045 R_{\oplus}$ from 5$\%$ to 2$\%$ precision) and mass ($M_p = 12.4 \pm 1.4 M_{\oplus}$) estimates, implying a density of $\rho_p = 0.778 \pm 0.097 \rho_{\oplus}$. Thanks to recent TESS observations and the focused CHEOPS visit of the transit of TOI-561 e, a good candidate for exomoon searches, the planet's period is finally constrained, allowing us to predict transit times through 2030 with 20-minute accuracy. We present an updated version of the internal structure of the four transiting planets. We finally performed a detailed stability analysis, which confirmed the long-term stability of the outer planet TOI-561 f., Comment: 13 pages, 10 Figures. Accepted on MNRAS. Updated the author list

With the rapid growth of the volume of research fields like computer vision and computer graphics, researchers require effective and user-friendly rendering tools to visualize results. While advanced tools like Blender offer powerful capabilities, they also require a significant effort to master. This technical report introduces Blendify, a lightweight Python-based framework that seamlessly integrates with Blender, providing a high-level API for scene creation and rendering. Blendify reduces the complexity of working with Blender's native API by automating object creation, handling the colors and material linking, and implementing features such as shadow-catcher objects while maintaining support for high-quality ray-tracing rendering output. With a focus on usability Blendify enables efficient and flexible rendering workflow for rendering in common computer vision and computer graphics use cases. The code is available at https://github.com/ptrvilya/blendify, Comment: Project page: https://virtualhumans.mpi-inf.mpg.de/blendify/

A turn constrained vehicle is initially located inside a polygon region and desires to escape in minimum time. First, the method of characteristics is used to describe the time-optimal strategies for reaching a line of infinite length. Next, the approach is extended to polygons constructed of a series of line segments. Using this construction technique, the min-time path to reach each edge is obtained; the resulting minimum of the set of optimal trajectories is then selected for escaping the polygon., Comment: 7 Pages, 6 Figures, Submitted to IFAC ACC, DISTRIBUTION STATEMENT A. Approved for public release. Distribution is unlimited; AFRL-2024-5262. This work is funded in-part by AFOSR, LRIR 24RQCOR002

Weak momentum dissipation in ultra-clean metals gives rise to novel non-Ohmic current flow, including ballistic and hydrodynamic regimes. Recently, hydrodynamic flow has attracted intense interest because it presents a valuable window into the electronic correlations and the longest lived collective modes of quantum materials. However, diagnosing viscous flow is difficult as the macroscopic observables of ballistic and hydrodynamic transport such as the average current distribution can be deceptively similar, even if their respective microscopics deviate notably. Based on kinetic Boltzmann theory, here we propose to address this issue via the transverse channel voltage at zero magnetic field, which can efficiently detect hydrodynamic flow in a number of materials. To this end, we show that the transverse voltage is sensitive to the interplay between anisotropic fermiology and boundary scattering, resulting in a non-trivial behavior in narrow channels along crystalline low-symmetry directions. We discuss several materials where the channel-size dependent stress of the quantum fluid leads to a characteristic sign change of the transverse voltage as a new hallmark of the cross-over from the ballistic to the hydrodynamic regime.

We introduce Unimotion, the first unified multi-task human motion model capable of both flexible motion control and frame-level motion understanding. While existing works control avatar motion with global text conditioning, or with fine-grained per frame scripts, none can do both at once. In addition, none of the existing works can output frame-level text paired with the generated poses. In contrast, Unimotion allows to control motion with global text, or local frame-level text, or both at once, providing more flexible control for users. Importantly, Unimotion is the first model which by design outputs local text paired with the generated poses, allowing users to know what motion happens and when, which is necessary for a wide range of applications. We show Unimotion opens up new applications: 1.) Hierarchical control, allowing users to specify motion at different levels of detail, 2.) Obtaining motion text descriptions for existing MoCap data or YouTube videos 3.) Allowing for editability, generating motion from text, and editing the motion via text edits. Moreover, Unimotion attains state-of-the-art results for the frame-level text-to-motion task on the established HumanML3D dataset. The pre-trained model and code are available available on our project page at https://coral79.github.io/uni-motion/., Comment: Project Page: https://coral79.github.io/uni-motion/

In the context of AI decision support systems (AI-DSS), we argue that meeting the demands of ethical and explainable AI (XAI) is about developing AI-DSS to provide human decision-makers with three types of human-grounded explanations: reasons, counterfactuals, and confidence, an approach we refer to as the RCC approach. We begin by reviewing current empirical XAI literature that investigates the relationship between various methods for generating model explanations (e.g., LIME, SHAP, Anchors), the perceived trustworthiness of the model, and end-user accuracy. We demonstrate how current theories about what constitutes good human-grounded reasons either do not adequately explain this evidence or do not offer sound ethical advice for development. Thus, we offer a novel theory of human-machine interaction: the theory of epistemic quasi-partnerships (EQP). Finally, we motivate adopting EQP and demonstrate how it explains the empirical evidence, offers sound ethical advice, and entails adopting the RCC approach., Comment: 20 pages

This paper investigates the online generation of realistic full-body human motion using a single head-mounted device with an outward-facing color camera and the ability to perform visual SLAM. Given the inherent ambiguity of this setup, we introduce a novel system, HMD$^2$, designed to balance between motion reconstruction and generation. From a reconstruction standpoint, our system aims to maximally utilize the camera streams to produce both analytical and learned features, including head motion, SLAM point cloud, and image embeddings. On the generative front, HMD$^2$ employs a multi-modal conditional motion Diffusion model, incorporating a time-series backbone to maintain temporal coherence in generated motions, and utilizes autoregressive in-painting to facilitate online motion inference with minimal latency (0.17 seconds). Collectively, we demonstrate that our system offers a highly effective and robust solution capable of scaling to an extensive dataset of over 200 hours collected in a wide range of complex indoor and outdoor environments using publicly available smart glasses.

The estimation of 3D human poses from images has progressed tremendously over the last few years as measured on standard benchmarks. However, performance in the open world remains underexplored, as current benchmarks cannot capture its full extent. Especially in safety-critical systems, it is crucial that 3D pose estimators are audited before deployment, and their sensitivity towards single factors or attributes occurring in the operational domain is thoroughly examined. Nevertheless, we currently lack a benchmark that would enable such fine-grained analysis. We thus present STAGE, a GenAI data toolkit for auditing 3D human pose estimators. We enable a text-to-image model to control the 3D human body pose in the generated image. This allows us to create customized annotated data covering a wide range of open-world attributes. We leverage STAGE and generate a series of benchmarks to audit the sensitivity of popular pose estimators towards attributes such as gender, ethnicity, age, clothing, location, and weather. Our results show that the presence of such naturally occurring attributes can cause severe degradation in the performance of pose estimators and leads us to question if they are ready for open-world deployment.

Tracking human object interaction from videos is important to understand human behavior from the rapidly growing stream of video data. Previous video-based methods require predefined object templates while single-image-based methods are template-free but lack temporal consistency. In this paper, we present a method to track human object interaction without any object shape templates. We decompose the 4D tracking problem into per-frame pose tracking and canonical shape optimization. We first apply a single-view reconstruction method to obtain temporally-inconsistent per-frame interaction reconstructions. Then, for the human, we propose an efficient autoencoder to predict SMPL vertices directly from the per-frame reconstructions, introducing temporally consistent correspondence. For the object, we introduce a pose estimator that leverages temporal information to predict smooth object rotations under occlusions. To train our model, we propose a method to generate synthetic interaction videos and synthesize in total 10 hour videos of 8.5k sequences with full 3D ground truth. Experiments on BEHAVE and InterCap show that our method significantly outperforms previous template-based video tracking and single-frame reconstruction methods. Our proposed synthetic video dataset also allows training video-based methods that generalize to real-world videos. Our code and dataset will be publicly released., Comment: 17 pages, 13 figures and 6 tables. Project page: https://virtualhumans.mpi-inf.mpg.de/InterTrack/

The International Muon Collider Collaboration (IMCC) [1] was established in 2020 following the recommendations of the European Strategy for Particle Physics (ESPP) and the implementation of the European Strategy for Particle Physics-Accelerator R&D Roadmap by the Laboratory Directors Group [2], hereinafter referred to as the the European LDG roadmap. The Muon Collider Study (MuC) covers the accelerator complex, detectors and physics for a future muon collider. In 2023, European Commission support was obtained for a design study of a muon collider (MuCol) [3]. This project started on 1st March 2023, with work-packages aligned with the overall muon collider studies. In preparation of and during the 2021-22 U.S. Snowmass process, the muon collider project parameters, technical studies and physics performance studies were performed and presented in great detail. Recently, the P5 panel [4] in the U.S. recommended a muon collider R&D, proposed to join the IMCC and envisages that the U.S. should prepare to host a muon collider, calling this their "muon shot". In the past, the U.S. Muon Accelerator Programme (MAP) [5] has been instrumental in studies of concepts and technologies for a muon collider., Comment: This document summarises the International Muon Collider Collaboration (IMCC) progress and status of the Muon Collider R&D programme

Chirality is a pervasive form of symmetry that is intimately connected to the physical properties of solids, as well as the chemical and biological activity of molecular systems. However, its control with light is challenging, because inducing chirality in a non-chiral material requires that all mirrors and all roto-inversions be simultaneously broken. Electromagnetic fields exert only oscillatory forces that vanish on average, mostly leading to entropy increase that does not break symmetries, per se. Here, we show that chirality of either handedness can be generated in the non-chiral piezoelectric material BPO$_4$, in which two compensated sub-structures of opposite handedness coexist within the same unit cell. By resonantly driving either one of two orthogonal, doubly degenerate vibrational modes at Terahertz frequency, we rectify the lattice distortion and exert a displacive force onto the crystal. The staggered chirality is in this way uncompensated in either direction, inducing chiral structure with either handedness. The rotary power of the photo-induced phases is comparable to the static value of prototypical chiral alpha-quartz, limited by the strength of the pump laser pulse., Comment: 27 pages, including Supplementary Materials

With the explosive growth of available training data, single-image 3D human modeling is ahead of a transition to a data-centric paradigm. A key to successfully exploiting data scale is to design flexible models that can be supervised from various heterogeneous data sources produced by different researchers or vendors. To this end, we propose a simple yet powerful paradigm for seamlessly unifying different human pose and shape-related tasks and datasets. Our formulation is centered on the ability -- both at training and test time -- to query any arbitrary point of the human volume, and obtain its estimated location in 3D. We achieve this by learning a continuous neural field of body point localizer functions, each of which is a differently parameterized 3D heatmap-based convolutional point localizer (detector). For generating parametric output, we propose an efficient post-processing step for fitting SMPL-family body models to nonparametric joint and vertex predictions. With this approach, we can naturally exploit differently annotated data sources including mesh, 2D/3D skeleton and dense pose, without having to convert between them, and thereby train large-scale 3D human mesh and skeleton estimation models that considerably outperform the state-of-the-art on several public benchmarks including 3DPW, EMDB, EHF, SSP-3D and AGORA., Comment: Accepted at NeurIPS 2024

Hot Jupiters generally do not have nearby planet companions, as they may have cleared out other planets during their inward migration from more distant orbits. This gives evidence that hot Jupiters more often migrate inward via high-eccentricity migration due to dynamical interactions between planets rather than more dynamically cool migration mechanisms through the protoplanetary disk. Here we further refine the unique system of WASP-132 by characterizing the mass of the recently validated 1.0-day period super-Earth WASP-132c (TOI-822.02) interior to the 7.1-day period hot Jupiter WASP-132b. Additionally, we announce the discovery of a giant planet at a 5-year period (2.7 AU). We also detect a long-term trend in the radial velocity data indicative of another outer companion. Using over nine years of CORALIE RVs and over two months of highly-sampled HARPS RVs, we determine the masses of the planets from smallest to largest orbital period to be M$_{\rm{c}}$ = $6.26^{+1.84}_{-1.83}$ $M_{\oplus}$, M$_{\rm{b}}$ = $0.428^{+0.015}_{-0.015}$ $M_{\rm{Jup}}$, and M$_{\rm{d}}\sin{i}$ = $5.16^{+0.52}_{-0.52}$ $M_{\rm{Jup}}$, respectively. Using TESS and CHEOPS photometry data we measure the radii of the two inner transiting planets to be $1.841^{+0.094}_{-0.093}$ $R_{\oplus}$ and $0.901^{+0.038}_{-0.038}$ $R_{\rm{Jup}}$. WASP-132 is a unique multi-planetary system in that both an inner rocky planet and an outer giant planet are in a system with a hot Jupiter. This suggests it migrated via a more rare dynamically cool mechanism and helps to further our understanding of how hot Jupiter systems may form and evolve., Comment: 19 Pages, 15 figures, in review process with Astronomy & Astrophysics

Creating realistic avatars from a single RGB image is an attractive yet challenging problem. Due to its ill-posed nature, recent works leverage powerful prior from 2D diffusion models pretrained on large datasets. Although 2D diffusion models demonstrate strong generalization capability, they cannot provide multi-view shape priors with guaranteed 3D consistency. We propose Human 3Diffusion: Realistic Avatar Creation via Explicit 3D Consistent Diffusion. Our key insight is that 2D multi-view diffusion and 3D reconstruction models provide complementary information for each other, and by coupling them in a tight manner, we can fully leverage the potential of both models. We introduce a novel image-conditioned generative 3D Gaussian Splats reconstruction model that leverages the priors from 2D multi-view diffusion models, and provides an explicit 3D representation, which further guides the 2D reverse sampling process to have better 3D consistency. Experiments show that our proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods and enables the creation of realistic avatars from a single RGB image, achieving high-fidelity in both geometry and appearance. Extensive ablations also validate the efficacy of our design, (1) multi-view 2D priors conditioning in generative 3D reconstruction and (2) consistency refinement of sampling trajectory via the explicit 3D representation. Our code and models will be released on https://yuxuan-xue.com/human-3diffusion., Comment: Accepted to NeurIPS2024. Project Page: https://yuxuan-xue.com/human-3diffusion

PLATO (PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars) is ESA's M3 mission designed to detect and characterise extrasolar planets and perform asteroseismic monitoring of a large number of stars. PLATO will detect small planets (down to <2 R_(Earth)) around bright stars (<11 mag), including terrestrial planets in the habitable zone of solar-like stars. With the complement of radial velocity observations from the ground, planets will be characterised for their radius, mass, and age with high accuracy (5 %, 10 %, 10 % for an Earth-Sun combination respectively). PLATO will provide us with a large-scale catalogue of well-characterised small planets up to intermediate orbital periods, relevant for a meaningful comparison to planet formation theories and to better understand planet evolution. It will make possible comparative exoplanetology to place our Solar System planets in a broader context. In parallel, PLATO will study (host) stars using asteroseismology, allowing us to determine the stellar properties with high accuracy, substantially enhancing our knowledge of stellar structure and evolution. The payload instrument consists of 26 cameras with 12cm aperture each. For at least four years, the mission will perform high-precision photometric measurements. Here we review the science objectives, present PLATO's target samples and fields, provide an overview of expected core science performance as well as a description of the instrument and the mission profile at the beginning of the serial production of the flight cameras. PLATO is scheduled for a launch date end 2026. This overview therefore provides a summary of the mission to the community in preparation of the upcoming operational phases.

The AEFishBIT tri-axial accelerometer was externally attached to the operculum to assess the divergent activity and respiratory patterns of two marine farmed fish, the gilthead sea bream (Sparus aurata) and European sea bass (Dicentrarchus labrax). Analysis of raw data from exercised fish highlighted the large amplitude of operculum aperture and body tail movements in European sea bass, which were overall more stable at low-medium exercise intensity levels. Cosinor analysis in free-swimming fish (on-board data processing) highlighted a pronounced daily rhythmicity of locomotor activity and respiratory frequency in both gilthead sea bream and European sea bass. Acrophases of activity and respiration were coupled in gilthead sea bream, acting feeding time (once daily at 11:00 h) as a main synchronizing factor. By contrast, locomotor activity and respiratory frequency were out of phase in European sea bass with activity acrophase on early morning and respiration acrophase on the afternoon. The daily range of activity and respiration variation was also higher in European sea bass, probably as part of the adaptation of this fish species to act as a fast swimming predator. In any case, lower locomotor activity and enhanced respiration were associated with larger body weight in both fish species. This agrees with the notion that selection for fast growth in farming conditions is accompanied by a lower activity profile, which may favor an efficient feed conversion for growth purposes. Therefore, the use of behavioral monitoring is becoming a reliable and large-scale promising tool for selecting more efficient farmed fish, allowing researchers and farmers to establish stricter criteria of welfare for more sustainable and ethical fish production.

In this radiation tolerance study, Low Gain Avalanche Detectors (LGADs) with a carbon-enriched broad and shallow multiplication layer were examined in comparison to identical non-carbonated LGADs. Manufactured at IMB-CNM, the sensors underwent neutron irradiation at the TRIGA reactor in Ljubljana, reaching a fluence of $1.5e^{15} {n_{eq}} cm^{-2}$. The results revealed a smaller deactivation of boron and improved resistance to radiation in carbonated LGADs. The study demonstrated the potential benefits of carbon enrichment in mitigating radiation damage effects, particularly the acceptor removal mechanism, reducing the acceptor removal constant by more than a factor of two. Additionally, time resolution and collected charge degradation due to irradiation were observed, with carbonated samples exhibiting better radiation tolerance. A noise analysis focused on baseline noise and spurious pulses showed the presence of thermal-generated dark counts attributed to a too narrow distance between the gain layer end and the p-stop implant at the periphery of the pad for the characterized LGAD design; however, without significant impact of operation performance.

HIP 41378 d is a long-period planet that has only been observed to transit twice, three years apart, with K2. According to stability considerations and a partial detection of the Rossiter-McLaughlin effect, $P_\mathrm{d} = 278.36$ d has been determined to be the most likely orbital period. We targeted HIP 41378 d with CHEOPS at the predicted transit timing based on $P_\mathrm{d}= 278.36$ d, but the observations show no transit. We find that large ($>22.4$ hours) transit timing variations (TTVs) could explain this non-detection during the CHEOPS observation window. We also investigated the possibility of an incorrect orbital solution, which would have major implications for our knowledge of this system. If $P_\mathrm{d} \neq 278.36$ d, the periods that minimize the eccentricity would be $101.22$ d and $371.14$ d. The shortest orbital period will be tested by TESS, which will observe HIP 41378 in Sector 88 starting in January 2025. Our study shows the importance of a mission like CHEOPS, which today is the only mission able to make long observations (i.e., from space) to track the ephemeris of long-period planets possibly affected by large TTVs., Comment: Accepted for publication in Astronomy and Astrophysics

Can deception exist in differential games? We provide a case study for a Turret-Attacker differential game, where two Attackers seek to score points by reaching a target region while a Turret tries to minimize the score by aligning itself with the Attackers before they reach the target. In contrast to the original problem solved with complete information, we assume that the Turret only has partial information about the maximum speed of the Attackers. We investigate whether there is any incentive for the Attackers to move slower than their maximum speed in order to ``deceive'' the Turret into taking suboptimal actions. We first describe the existence of a dilemma that the Turret may face. Then we derive a set of initial conditions from which the Attackers can force the Turret into a situation where it must take a guess.

Discovering transiting exoplanets with relatively long orbital periods ($>$10 days) is crucial to facilitate the study of cool exoplanet atmospheres ($T_{\rm eq} < 700 K$) and to understand exoplanet formation and inward migration further out than typical transiting exoplanets. In order to discover these longer period transiting exoplanets, long-term photometric and radial velocity campaigns are required. We report the discovery of TOI-2447 b ($=$ NGTS-29b), a Saturn-mass transiting exoplanet orbiting a bright (T=10.0) Solar-type star (T$_{\rm eff}$=5730 K). TOI-2447 b was identified as a transiting exoplanet candidate from a single transit event of 1.3% depth and 7.29 h duration in $TESS$ Sector 31 and a prior transit event from 2017 in NGTS data. Four further transit events were observed with NGTS photometry which revealed an orbital period of P=69.34 days. The transit events establish a radius for TOI-2447 b of $0.865 \pm 0.010\rm R_{\rm J}$, while radial velocity measurements give a mass of $0.386 \pm 0.025 \rm M_{\rm J}$. The equilibrium temperature of the planet is $414$ K, making it much cooler than the majority of $TESS$ planet discoveries. We also detect a transit signal in NGTS data not caused by TOI-2447 b, along with transit timing variations and evidence for a $\sim$150 day signal in radial velocity measurements. It is likely that the system hosts additional planets, but further photometry and radial velocity campaigns will be needed to determine their parameters with confidence. TOI-2447 b/NGTS-29b joins a small but growing population of cool giants that will provide crucial insights into giant planet composition and formation mechanisms., Comment: 16 pages, 12 figures. Accepted for publication in MNRAS

A turn-constrained evader strives to escape a circular region in minimum time., Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, submitted to the 2024 IEEE NAECON