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Visual anomaly detection targets to detect images that notably differ from normal pattern, and it has found extensive application in identifying defective parts within the manufacturing industry. These anomaly detection paradigms predominantly focus on training detection models using only clean, unlabeled normal samples, assuming an absence of contamination; a condition often unmet in real-world scenarios. The performance of these methods significantly depends on the quality of the data and usually decreases when exposed to noise. We introduce a systematic adaptive method that employs deviation learning to compute anomaly scores end-to-end while addressing data contamination by assigning relative importance to the weights of individual instances. In this approach, the anomaly scores for normal instances are designed to approximate scalar scores obtained from the known prior distribution. Meanwhile, anomaly scores for anomaly examples are adjusted to exhibit statistically significant deviations from these reference scores. Our approach incorporates a constrained optimization problem within the deviation learning framework to update instance weights, resolving this problem for each mini-batch. Comprehensive experiments on the MVTec and VisA benchmark datasets indicate that our proposed method surpasses competing techniques and exhibits both stability and robustness in the presence of data contamination., Comment: Accepted to IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV 2025)

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have advanced relational data analysis but lack invariance learning techniques common in image classification. In node classification with GNNs, it is actually the ego-graph of the center node that is classified. This research extends the scale invariance concept to node classification by drawing an analogy to image processing: just as scale invariance being used in image classification to capture multi-scale features, we propose the concept of ``scaled ego-graphs''. Scaled ego-graphs generalize traditional ego-graphs by replacing undirected single-edges with ``scaled-edges'', which are ordered sequences of multiple directed edges. We empirically assess the performance of the proposed scale invariance in graphs on seven benchmark datasets, across both homophilic and heterophilic structures. Our scale-invariance-based graph learning outperforms inception models derived from random walks by being simpler, faster, and more accurate. The scale invariance explains inception models' success on homophilic graphs and limitations on heterophilic graphs. To ensure applicability of inception model to heterophilic graphs as well, we further present ScaleNet, an architecture that leverages multi-scaled features. ScaleNet achieves state-of-the-art results on five out of seven datasets (four homophilic and one heterophilic) and matches top performance on the remaining two, demonstrating its excellent applicability. This represents a significant advance in graph learning, offering a unified framework that enhances node classification across various graph types. Our code is available at https://github.com/Qin87/ScaleNet/tree/July25., Comment: Scale invariance in node classification is demonstrated and applied in graph transformation to develop ScaleNet, which achieves state-of-the-art performance on both homophilic and heterophilic directed graphs

Broken symmetry plays a pivotal role in determining the macroscopic electrical, optical, magnetic, and topological properties of materials. Circular dichroism (CD) has been widely employed to probe broken symmetry in various systems, from small molecules to bulk crystals, but designing CD responses on demand remains a challenge, especially for antiferromagnetic materials. Here, we develop a cavity-enhanced CD technique to sensitively probe the magnetic order and broken symmetry in the van der Waals antiferromagnet FePS3. By introducing interfacial inversion asymmetry in cavity-coupled FePS3 crystals, we demonstrate that the induced CD is strongly coupled with the zig-zag antiferromagnetic order of FePS3 and can be tuned both spectrally and in magnitude by varying the cavity length and FePS3 thickness. Our findings open new avenues for using cavity-modulated CD as a sensitive diagnostic probe to detect weak broken symmetries, particularly at hidden interfaces, and in systems exhibiting hidden spin polarization or strong correlations.

In comparative studies of progressive diseases, such as randomized controlled trials (RCTs), the mean Change From Baseline (CFB) of a continuous outcome at a pre-specified follow-up time across subjects in the target population is a standard estimand used to summarize the overall disease progression. Despite its simplicity in interpretation, the mean CFB may not efficiently capture important features of the trajectory of the mean outcome relevant to the evaluation of the treatment effect of an intervention. Additionally, the estimation of the mean CFB does not use all longitudinal data points. To address these limitations, we propose a class of estimands called Principal Progression Rate (PPR). The PPR is a weighted average of local or instantaneous slope of the trajectory of the population mean during the follow-up. The flexibility of the weight function allows the PPR to cover a broad class of intuitive estimands, including the mean CFB, the slope of ordinary least-square fit to the trajectory, and the area under the curve. We showed that properly chosen PPRs can enhance statistical power over the mean CFB by amplifying the signal of treatment effect and/or improving estimation precision. We evaluated different versions of PPRs and the performance of their estimators through numerical studies. A real dataset was analyzed to demonstrate the advantage of using alternative PPR over the mean CFB.

In optimal control problem, policy iteration (PI) is a powerful reinforcement learning (RL) tool used for designing optimal controller for the linear systems. However, the need for an initial stabilizing control policy significantly limits its applicability. To address this constraint, this paper proposes a novel scaling technique, which progressively brings a sequence of stable scaled systems closer to the original system, enabling the acquisition of stable control gain. Based on the designed scaling update law, we develop model-based and model-free scaling policy iteration (SPI) algorithms for solving the optimal control problem for discrete-time linear systems, in both known and completely unknown system dynamics scenarios. Unlike existing works on PI based RL, the SPI algorithms do not necessitate an initial stabilizing gain to initialize the algorithms, they can achieve the optimal control under any initial control gain. Finally, the numerical results validate the theoretical findings and confirm the effectiveness of the algorithms.

Vision Language Models (VLMs), pre-trained on large-scale image-text datasets, enable zero-shot predictions for unseen data but may underperform on specific unseen tasks. Continual learning (CL) can help VLMs effectively adapt to new data distributions without joint training, but faces challenges of catastrophic forgetting and generalization forgetting. Although significant progress has been achieved by distillation-based methods, they exhibit two severe limitations. One is the popularly adopted single-teacher paradigm fails to impart comprehensive knowledge, The other is the existing methods inadequately leverage the multimodal information in the original training dataset, instead they rely on additional data for distillation, which increases computational and storage overhead. To mitigate both limitations, by drawing on Knowledge Integration Theory (KIT), we propose a Multi-Stage Knowledge Integration network (MulKI) to emulate the human learning process in distillation methods. MulKI achieves this through four stages, including Eliciting Ideas, Adding New Ideas, Distinguishing Ideas, and Making Connections. During the four stages, we first leverage prototypes to align across modalities, eliciting cross-modal knowledge, then adding new knowledge by constructing fine-grained intra- and inter-modality relationships with prototypes. After that, knowledge from two teacher models is adaptively distinguished and re-weighted. Finally, we connect between models from intra- and inter-task, integrating preceding and new knowledge. Our method demonstrates significant improvements in maintaining zero-shot capabilities while supporting continual learning across diverse downstream tasks, showcasing its potential in adapting VLMs to evolving data distributions.

In this paper we study the partition function of the mass deformed ABJM theory on a squashed three sphere. In particular, we focus on the case with the Chern-Simons levels being $\pm 1$ and apply a duality between this theory and the $\mathcal{N}=4$ $\mathrm{U}\left(N\right)$ super Yang-Mills theory with an adjoint hypermultiplet and a fundamental hypermultiplet. For a special mass parameter depending on the squashing parameter, we find that the partition function can be written as that of an ideal Fermi gas with a non-trivial density matrix. By studying this density matrix, we analytically derive the all order perturbative expansion of the partition function in $1/N$, which turns out to take the form of the Airy function. Our results not only align with previous findings and conjectures but also lead to a new formula for the overall constant factor of the partition function. We also study the exact values of the partition function for small but finite values of $N$., Comment: 36 pages, 4 figures

Designing planners and controllers for contact-rich manipulation is extremely challenging as contact violates the smoothness conditions that many gradient-based controller synthesis tools assume. Contact smoothing approximates a non-smooth system with a smooth one, allowing one to use these synthesis tools more effectively. However, applying classical control synthesis methods to smoothed contact dynamics remains relatively under-explored. This paper analyzes the efficacy of linear controller synthesis using differential simulators based on contact smoothing. We introduce natural baselines for leveraging contact smoothing to compute (a) open-loop plans robust to uncertain conditions and/or dynamics, and (b) feedback gains to stabilize around open-loop plans. Using robotic bimanual whole-body manipulation as a testbed, we perform extensive empirical experiments on over 300 trajectories and analyze why LQR seems insufficient for stabilizing contact-rich plans. The video summarizing this paper and hardware experiments is found here: https://youtu.be/HLaKi6qbwQg?si=_zCAmBBD6rGSitm9., Comment: Under review for ICRA2025

World models play a crucial role in decision-making within embodied environments, enabling cost-free explorations that would otherwise be expensive in the real world. To facilitate effective decision-making, world models must be equipped with strong generalizability to support faithful imagination in out-of-distribution (OOD) regions and provide reliable uncertainty estimation to assess the credibility of the simulated experiences, both of which present significant challenges for prior scalable approaches. This paper introduces WHALE, a framework for learning generalizable world models, consisting of two key techniques: behavior-conditioning and retracing-rollout. Behavior-conditioning addresses the policy distribution shift, one of the primary sources of the world model generalization error, while retracing-rollout enables efficient uncertainty estimation without the necessity of model ensembles. These techniques are universal and can be combined with any neural network architecture for world model learning. Incorporating these two techniques, we present Whale-ST, a scalable spatial-temporal transformer-based world model with enhanced generalizability. We demonstrate the superiority of Whale-ST in simulation tasks by evaluating both value estimation accuracy and video generation fidelity. Additionally, we examine the effectiveness of our uncertainty estimation technique, which enhances model-based policy optimization in fully offline scenarios. Furthermore, we propose Whale-X, a 414M parameter world model trained on 970K trajectories from Open X-Embodiment datasets. We show that Whale-X exhibits promising scalability and strong generalizability in real-world manipulation scenarios using minimal demonstrations.

Recent research suggests that the failures of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) at visual reasoning often stem from erroneous agreements -- when semantically distinct images are ambiguously encoded by the CLIP image encoder into embeddings with high cosine similarity. In this paper, we show that erroneous agreements are not always the main culprit, as Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) can still extract distinct information from them. For instance, when distinguishing objects on the left vs right in the What'sUp benchmark, the CLIP image embeddings of the left/right pairs have an average cosine similarity $>0.99$, and CLIP performs at random chance; but LLaVA-1.5-7B, which uses the same CLIP image encoder, achieves nearly $100\%$ accuracy. We find that the extractable information in CLIP image embeddings is likely obscured by CLIP's inadequate vision-language alignment: Its matching score learned by the contrastive objective might not capture all diverse image-text correspondences. We also study the MMVP benchmark, on which prior work has shown that LLaVA-1.5 cannot distinguish image pairs with high cosine similarity. We observe a performance gain brought by attending more to visual input through an alternative decoding algorithm. Further, the accuracy significantly increases if the model can take both images as input to emphasize their nuanced differences. Both findings indicate that LLaVA-1.5 did not utilize extracted visual information sufficiently. In conclusion, our findings suggest that while improving image encoders could benefit VLMs, there is still room to enhance models with a fixed image encoder by applying better strategies for extracting and utilizing visual information., Comment: 18 pages, 4 figures

Multi-Image Super-Resolution (MISR) is a crucial yet challenging research task in the remote sensing community. In this paper, we address the challenging task of Multi-Image Super-Resolution in Remote Sensing (MISR-RS), aiming to generate a High-Resolution (HR) image from multiple Low-Resolution (LR) images obtained by satellites. Recently, the weak temporal correlations among LR images have attracted increasing attention in the MISR-RS task. However, existing MISR methods treat the LR images as sequences with strong temporal correlations, overlooking spatial correlations and imposing temporal dependencies. To address this problem, we propose a novel end-to-end framework named Enhancing Spatial Correlations in MISR (ESC-MISR), which fully exploits the spatial-temporal relations of multiple images for HR image reconstruction. Specifically, we first introduce a novel fusion module named Multi-Image Spatial Transformer (MIST), which emphasizes parts with clearer global spatial features and enhances the spatial correlations between LR images. Besides, we perform a random shuffle strategy for the sequential inputs of LR images to attenuate temporal dependencies and capture weak temporal correlations in the training stage. Compared with the state-of-the-art methods, our ESC-MISR achieves 0.70dB and 0.76dB cPSNR improvements on the two bands of the PROBA-V dataset respectively, demonstrating the superiority of our method.

In our urban life, long distance coaches supply a convenient yet economic approach to the transportation of the public. One notable problem is to discover the abnormal stop of the coaches due to the important reason, i.e., illegal pick up on the way which possibly endangers the safety of passengers. It has become a pressing issue to detect the coach abnormal stop with low-quality GPS. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised method that helps transportation managers to efficiently discover the Abnormal Stop Detection (ASD) for long distance coaches. Concretely, our method converts the ASD problem into an unsupervised clustering framework in which both the normal stop and the abnormal one are decomposed. Firstly, we propose a stop duration model for the low frequency GPS based on the assumption that a coach changes speed approximately in a linear approach. Secondly, we strip the abnormal stops from the normal stop points by the low rank assumption. The proposed method is conceptually simple yet efficient, by leveraging low rank assumption to handle normal stop points, our approach enables domain experts to discover the ASD for coaches, from a case study motivated by traffic managers. Datset and code are publicly available at: https://github.com/pangjunbiao/IPPs.

Self-alignment, whereby models learn to improve themselves without human annotation, is a rapidly growing research area. However, existing techniques often fail to improve complex reasoning tasks due to the difficulty of assigning correct rewards. An orthogonal approach that is known to improve correctness is self-consistency, a method applied at inference time based on multiple sampling in order to find the most consistent answer. In this work, we extend the self-consistency concept to help train models. We thus introduce self-consistency preference optimization (ScPO), which iteratively trains consistent answers to be preferred over inconsistent ones on unsupervised new problems. We show ScPO leads to large improvements over conventional reward model training on reasoning tasks such as GSM8K and MATH, closing the gap with supervised training with gold answers or preferences, and that combining ScPO with standard supervised learning improves results even further. On ZebraLogic, ScPO finetunes Llama-3 8B to be superior to Llama-3 70B, Gemma-2 27B, and Claude-3 Haiku., Comment: 16 pages, 3 figures

The BESIII Collaboration recently reported the observation of two new resonances, $X(1910)$ and $X(2300)$, which have sparked our interest in studying the light hadron family with $J^{PC}=1^{+-}$ . In this work, we investigate the mass spectra and OZI-allowed two-body strong decays of $b_1$, $h_1$, and $h_1^\prime$ using the MGI model and QPC model with newly fitted parameters. We also explore the possibility of identifying $X(1910)$ and $X(2300)$ as $h_1$ or $h_1^\prime$ states. Our numerical results suggest that $X(1910)$ could be a promising candidate for the $h_1^\prime(2^1P_1)$ state with quark content $s\bar{s}$, while the structure of $X(2300)$ remains uncertain.

Texturing is a crucial step in the 3D asset production workflow, which enhances the visual appeal and diversity of 3D assets. Despite recent advancements in Text-to-Texture (T2T) generation, existing methods often yield subpar results, primarily due to local discontinuities, inconsistencies across multiple views, and their heavy dependence on UV unwrapping outcomes. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel generation-refinement 3D texturing framework called MVPaint, which can generate high-resolution, seamless textures while emphasizing multi-view consistency. MVPaint mainly consists of three key modules. 1) Synchronized Multi-view Generation (SMG). Given a 3D mesh model, MVPaint first simultaneously generates multi-view images by employing an SMG model, which leads to coarse texturing results with unpainted parts due to missing observations. 2) Spatial-aware 3D Inpainting (S3I). To ensure complete 3D texturing, we introduce the S3I method, specifically designed to effectively texture previously unobserved areas. 3) UV Refinement (UVR). Furthermore, MVPaint employs a UVR module to improve the texture quality in the UV space, which first performs a UV-space Super-Resolution, followed by a Spatial-aware Seam-Smoothing algorithm for revising spatial texturing discontinuities caused by UV unwrapping. Moreover, we establish two T2T evaluation benchmarks: the Objaverse T2T benchmark and the GSO T2T benchmark, based on selected high-quality 3D meshes from the Objaverse dataset and the entire GSO dataset, respectively. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that MVPaint surpasses existing state-of-the-art methods. Notably, MVPaint could generate high-fidelity textures with minimal Janus issues and highly enhanced cross-view consistency., Comment: Project Page: https://mvpaint.github.io

In this study, the novel hybrid machine learning approach is proposed in carbon price fluctuation prediction. Specifically, a research framework integrating DILATED Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) neural network algorithm is proposed. The advantage of the combined framework is that it can make feature extraction more efficient. Then, based on the DILATED CNN-LSTM framework, the L1 and L2 parameter norm penalty as regularization method is adopted to predict. Referring to the characteristics of high correlation between energy indicator price and blockchain information in previous literature, and we primarily includes indicators related to blockchain information through regularization process. Based on the above methods, this paper uses a dataset containing an amount of data to carry out the carbon price prediction. The experimental results show that the DILATED CNN-LSTM framework is superior to the traditional CNN-LSTM architecture. Blockchain information can effectively predict the price. Since parameter norm penalty as regularization, Ridge Regression (RR) as L2 regularization is better than Smoothly Clipped Absolute Deviation Penalty (SCAD) as L1 regularization in price forecasting. Thus, the proposed RR-DILATED CNN-LSTM approach can effectively and accurately predict the fluctuation trend of the carbon price. Therefore, the new forecasting methods and theoretical ecology proposed in this study provide a new basis for trend prediction and evaluating digital assets policy represented by the carbon price for both the academia and practitioners., Comment: 26 pages, 2 figures

Recent advances in high-definition (HD) map construction from surround-view images have highlighted their cost-effectiveness in deployment. However, prevailing techniques often fall short in accurately extracting and utilizing road features, as well as in the implementation of view transformation. In response, we introduce HeightMapNet, a novel framework that establishes a dynamic relationship between image features and road surface height distributions. By integrating height priors, our approach refines the accuracy of Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) features beyond conventional methods. HeightMapNet also introduces a foreground-background separation network that sharply distinguishes between critical road elements and extraneous background components, enabling precise focus on detailed road micro-features. Additionally, our method leverages multi-scale features within the BEV space, optimally utilizing spatial geometric information to boost model performance. HeightMapNet has shown exceptional results on the challenging nuScenes and Argoverse 2 datasets, outperforming several widely recognized approaches. The code will be available at \url{https://github.com/adasfag/HeightMapNet/}., Comment: This paper has been accepted to WACV 2025

The Water Cherenkov Detector Array (WCDA) is one of the components of Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO) and can monitor any sources over two-thirds of the sky for up to 7 hours per day with >98\% duty cycle. In this work, we report the detection of two outbursts of the Fanaroff-Riley I radio galaxy NGC 1275 that were detected by LHAASO-WCDA between November 2022 and January 2023 with statistical significance of 5.2~$\sigma$ and 8.3~$\sigma$. The observed spectral energy distribution in the range from 500 GeV to 3 TeV is fitted by a power-law with a best-fit spectral index of $\alpha=-3.37\pm0.52$ and $-3.35\pm0.29$, respectively. The outburst flux above 0.5~TeV was ($4.55\pm 4.21)\times~10^{-11}~\rm cm^{-2}~s^{-1}$ and ($3.45\pm 1.78)\times~10^{-11}~\rm cm^{-2}~s^{-1}$, corresponding to 60\%, 45\% of Crab Nebula flux. Variation analysis reveals the variability time-scale of days at the TeV energy band. A simple test by one-zone synchrotron self-Compton model reproduces the data in the gamma-ray band well., Comment: 11 pages, 8 figures, 3 tables

Query generation is a critical task for web search engines (e.g. Google, Bing) and recommendation systems. Recently, state-of-the-art query generation methods leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) for their strong capabilities in context understanding and text generation. However, they still face challenges in generating high-quality queries in terms of inferring user intent based on their web search interaction history. In this paper, we propose Token-level Proximal Policy Optimization (TPPO), a noval approach designed to empower LLMs perform better in query generation through fine-tuning. TPPO is based on the Reinforcement Learning from AI Feedback (RLAIF) paradigm, consisting of a token-level reward model and a token-level proximal policy optimization module to address the sparse reward challenge in traditional RLAIF frameworks. To evaluate the effectiveness and robustness of TPPO, we conducted experiments on both open-source dataset and an industrial dataset that was collected from a globally-used search engine. The experimental results demonstrate that TPPO significantly improves the performance of query generation for LLMs and outperforms its existing competitors., Comment: 10 pages

This paper introduces Stereo-Talker, a novel one-shot audio-driven human video synthesis system that generates 3D talking videos with precise lip synchronization, expressive body gestures, temporally consistent photo-realistic quality, and continuous viewpoint control. The process follows a two-stage approach. In the first stage, the system maps audio input to high-fidelity motion sequences, encompassing upper-body gestures and facial expressions. To enrich motion diversity and authenticity, large language model (LLM) priors are integrated with text-aligned semantic audio features, leveraging LLMs' cross-modal generalization power to enhance motion quality. In the second stage, we improve diffusion-based video generation models by incorporating a prior-guided Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) mechanism: a view-guided MoE focuses on view-specific attributes, while a mask-guided MoE enhances region-based rendering stability. Additionally, a mask prediction module is devised to derive human masks from motion data, enhancing the stability and accuracy of masks and enabling mask guiding during inference. We also introduce a comprehensive human video dataset with 2,203 identities, covering diverse body gestures and detailed annotations, facilitating broad generalization. The code, data, and pre-trained models will be released for research purposes.

Anderson localization transitions are a universal quantum phenomenon sensitive to the disorder and dimensionality of electronic systems. Over the past decades, this intriguing topic has inspired overwhelmingly more theoretical studies than experimental verifications due to the difficulty of controlling a material's disorder or dimensionality without modifying its fundamental electronic properties. Organic crystals with their rich disorders would be terrific playgrounds to investigate such disorder-driven phase transitions except for their low conductivities which usually prohibit low-temperature measurements. Here, we conduct systematic transport experiments in mesoscopic devices made with copper benzenehexathiol thin films across a wide range of thicknesses. We find metal-insulator transitions both among three-dimensional samples with different disorder strengths and between three-dimensional and quasi-two-dimensional samples. Temperature-dependence analysis of the conductivities corroborates the dimensionality crossover. Moreover, our theoretical modeling provides a basis for understanding both types of metal-insulator transitions within the framework of Anderson localization transitions. Our findings establish for the first time that organic crystals such as conductive metal-organic frameworks can exhibit such quantum interference effects. With organic materials' versatile chemical designs and crystalline structures, our work opens new avenues to search for novel quantum phenomena in organic material platforms.

This paper explores the application of deep reinforcement learning (RL) techniques in the domain of autonomous self-driving car racing. Motivated by the rise of AI-driven mobility and autonomous racing events, the project aims to develop an AI agent that efficiently drives a simulated car in the OpenAI Gymnasium CarRacing environment. We investigate various RL algorithms, including Deep Q-Network (DQN), Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), and novel adaptations that incorporate transfer learning and recurrent neural networks (RNNs) for enhanced performance. The project demonstrates that while DQN provides a strong baseline for policy learning, integrating ResNet and LSTM models significantly improves the agent's ability to capture complex spatial and temporal dynamics. PPO, particularly in continuous action spaces, shows promising results for fine control, although challenges such as policy collapse remain. We compare the performance of these approaches and outline future research directions focused on improving computational efficiency and addressing model stability. Our findings contribute to the ongoing development of AI systems in autonomous driving and related control tasks.

Magnetic excitations in the noncentrosymmetric magnet Sr$_2$MnSi$_2$O$_7$ were investigated through inelastic neutron scattering measurements. Major magnetic excitations are limited up to the energy transfer of 0.5 meV, and two magnon branches under zero magnetic field were well explained in the framework of linear spin-wave theory. The magnitudes of the square-lattice in-plane and inter-plane nearest-neighbor interactions, spin anisotropy term, and the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction are respectively estimated to be $J_1=45.54(5)$ $\mu$eV, $J_2=0.52(1)$ $\mu$eV, $\Lambda=4.98(11)$ $\mu$eV, $D_{xy}=0.02(9)$ $\mu$eV, and $D_z=4.10(1)$ $\mu$eV, and calculations using these parameters reproduce experimental data quite well. Sr$_2$MnSi$_2$O$_7$ appears to have the smallest energy scale among the melilite-type compounds, and the small $J_2/J_1=0.0114(2)$ indicates the sufficient two-dimensionality., Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures

Kilonovae, possible electromagnetic counterparts to neutron star mergers, provide important information about high-energy transient phenomena and, in principle, also allow us to obtain information about the source properties responsible for powering the kilonova. Unfortunately, numerous uncertainties exist in kilonova modeling that, at the current stage, hinder accurate predictions. Hence, one has to account for possible systematic modeling uncertainties when interpreting the observed transients. In this work, we provide a data-driven approach to account for time-dependent and frequency-dependent uncertainties in kilonova models. Through a suite of tests, we find that the most reliable recovery of the source parameters and description of the observational data can be obtained through a combination of kilonova models with time- and frequency-dependent systematic uncertainties. We apply our new method to analyze AT2017gfo. While recovering a total ejecta mass consistent with previous studies, our approach gives insights into the temporal and spectral evolution of the systematic uncertainties of this kilonova. We consistently find a systematic error below $1$ mag between $1$ to $5$ days after the merger. Our work addresses the need for early follow-up of kilonovae at earlier times, and improved modeling of the kilonova at later times, to reduce the uncertainties outside of this time window.

Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) aims to classify both base and novel images using labeled base data. However, current approaches inadequately address the intrinsic optimization of the co-occurrence matrix $\bar{A}$ based on cosine similarity, failing to achieve zero base-novel regions and adequate sparsity in base and novel domains. To address these deficiencies, we propose a Non-Negative Generalized Category Discovery (NN-GCD) framework. It employs Symmetric Non-negative Matrix Factorization (SNMF) as a mathematical medium to prove the equivalence of optimal K-means with optimal SNMF, and the equivalence of SNMF solver with non-negative contrastive learning (NCL) optimization. Utilizing these theoretical equivalences, it reframes the optimization of $\bar{A}$ and K-means clustering as an NCL optimization problem. Moreover, to satisfy the non-negative constraints and make a GCD model converge to a near-optimal region, we propose a GELU activation function and an NMF NCE loss. To transition $\bar{A}$ from a suboptimal state to the desired $\bar{A}^*$, we introduce a hybrid sparse regularization approach to impose sparsity constraints. Experimental results show NN-GCD outperforms state-of-the-art methods on GCD benchmarks, achieving an average accuracy of 66.1\% on the Semantic Shift Benchmark, surpassing prior counterparts by 4.7\%., Comment: 13 pages, 8 figures

Graph clustering is an essential aspect of network analysis that involves grouping nodes into separate clusters. Recent developments in deep learning have resulted in advanced deep graph clustering techniques, which have proven effective in many applications. Nonetheless, these methods often encounter difficulties when dealing with the complexities of real-world graphs, particularly in the presence of noisy edges. Additionally, many denoising graph clustering strategies tend to suffer from lower performance compared to their non-denoised counterparts, training instability, and challenges in scaling to large datasets. To tackle these issues, we introduce a new framework called the Dual Adaptive Assignment Approach for Robust Graph-Based Clustering (RDSA). RDSA consists of three key components: (i) a node embedding module that effectively integrates the graph's topological features and node attributes; (ii) a structure-based soft assignment module that improves graph modularity by utilizing an affinity matrix for node assignments; and (iii) a node-based soft assignment module that identifies community landmarks and refines node assignments to enhance the model's robustness. We assess RDSA on various real-world datasets, demonstrating its superior performance relative to existing state-of-the-art methods. Our findings indicate that RDSA provides robust clustering across different graph types, excelling in clustering effectiveness and robustness, including adaptability to noise, stability, and scalability.

Persistent phosphor has emerged as a promising candidate for information storage due to the rapid accessibility and low-energy requirements. However, the low storage capacity has limited its practical application. Herein, we skillfully designed and developed NaGdGeO4:Pb2+,Tb3+ stimulated phosphor by trace doped Sm3+. As expected, this phosphor demonstrates the larger carrier capacity than traditional commercial SrAl2O4:Eu2+,Dy3+ phosphors and super-strong thermo-stimulated luminescence (TSL) that is three times greater than its photoluminescence (PL) intensity (PL efficiency: 17.3%). A mechanism of the enhanced and controllable TSL is proposed based on electron-hole defect pair structure. We further present a high-throughput optical data recording in five dimensions in a single fluorescent film recording layer. The findings described here provides not only a universal approach for construction TSL materials, but also a new paradigm for future generation optical storage technology.

We develop a generic policy gradient method with the global optimality guarantee for robust Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). While policy gradient methods are widely used for solving dynamic decision problems due to their scalable and efficient nature, adapting these methods to account for model ambiguity has been challenging, often making it impractical to learn robust policies. This paper introduces a novel policy gradient method, Double-Loop Robust Policy Mirror Descent (DRPMD), for solving robust MDPs. DRPMD employs a general mirror descent update rule for the policy optimization with adaptive tolerance per iteration, guaranteeing convergence to a globally optimal policy. We provide a comprehensive analysis of DRPMD, including new convergence results under both direct and softmax parameterizations, and provide novel insights into the inner problem solution through Transition Mirror Ascent (TMA). Additionally, we propose innovative parametric transition kernels for both discrete and continuous state-action spaces, broadening the applicability of our approach. Empirical results validate the robustness and global convergence of DRPMD across various challenging robust MDP settings.

One key challenge in Out-of-Distribution (OOD) detection is the absence of ground-truth OOD samples during training. One principled approach to address this issue is to use samples from external datasets as outliers (i.e., pseudo OOD samples) to train OOD detectors. However, we find empirically that the outlier samples often present a distribution shift compared to the true OOD samples, especially in Long-Tailed Recognition (LTR) scenarios, where ID classes are heavily imbalanced, \ie, the true OOD samples exhibit very different probability distribution to the head and tailed ID classes from the outliers. In this work, we propose a novel approach, namely normalized outlier distribution adaptation (AdaptOD), to tackle this distribution shift problem. One of its key components is dynamic outlier distribution adaptation that effectively adapts a vanilla outlier distribution based on the outlier samples to the true OOD distribution by utilizing the OOD knowledge in the predicted OOD samples during inference. Further, to obtain a more reliable set of predicted OOD samples on long-tailed ID data, a novel dual-normalized energy loss is introduced in AdaptOD, which leverages class- and sample-wise normalized energy to enforce a more balanced prediction energy on imbalanced ID samples. This helps avoid bias toward the head samples and learn a substantially better vanilla outlier distribution than existing energy losses during training. It also eliminates the need of manually tuning the sensitive margin hyperparameters in energy losses. Empirical results on three popular benchmarks for OOD detection in LTR show the superior performance of AdaptOD over state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/mala-lab/AdaptOD}., Comment: NIPS2024

We present the results of the "Fast Calorimeter Simulation Challenge 2022" - the CaloChallenge. We study state-of-the-art generative models on four calorimeter shower datasets of increasing dimensionality, ranging from a few hundred voxels to a few tens of thousand voxels. The 31 individual submissions span a wide range of current popular generative architectures, including Variational AutoEncoders (VAEs), Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), Normalizing Flows, Diffusion models, and models based on Conditional Flow Matching. We compare all submissions in terms of quality of generated calorimeter showers, as well as shower generation time and model size. To assess the quality we use a broad range of different metrics including differences in 1-dimensional histograms of observables, KPD/FPD scores, AUCs of binary classifiers, and the log-posterior of a multiclass classifier. The results of the CaloChallenge provide the most complete and comprehensive survey of cutting-edge approaches to calorimeter fast simulation to date. In addition, our work provides a uniquely detailed perspective on the important problem of how to evaluate generative models. As such, the results presented here should be applicable for other domains that use generative AI and require fast and faithful generation of samples in a large phase space., Comment: 204 pages, 100+ figures, 30+ tables

Non-Gaussian Component Analysis (NGCA) is the statistical task of finding a non-Gaussian direction in a high-dimensional dataset. Specifically, given i.i.d.\ samples from a distribution $P^A_{v}$ on $\mathbb{R}^n$ that behaves like a known distribution $A$ in a hidden direction $v$ and like a standard Gaussian in the orthogonal complement, the goal is to approximate the hidden direction. The standard formulation posits that the first $k-1$ moments of $A$ match those of the standard Gaussian and the $k$-th moment differs. Under mild assumptions, this problem has sample complexity $O(n)$. On the other hand, all known efficient algorithms require $\Omega(n^{k/2})$ samples. Prior work developed sharp Statistical Query and low-degree testing lower bounds suggesting an information-computation tradeoff for this problem. Here we study the complexity of NGCA in the Sum-of-Squares (SoS) framework. Our main contribution is the first super-constant degree SoS lower bound for NGCA. Specifically, we show that if the non-Gaussian distribution $A$ matches the first $(k-1)$ moments of $\mathcal{N}(0, 1)$ and satisfies other mild conditions, then with fewer than $n^{(1 - \varepsilon)k/2}$ many samples from the normal distribution, with high probability, degree $(\log n)^{{1\over 2}-o_n(1)}$ SoS fails to refute the existence of such a direction $v$. Our result significantly strengthens prior work by establishing a super-polynomial information-computation tradeoff against a broader family of algorithms. As corollaries, we obtain SoS lower bounds for several problems in robust statistics and the learning of mixture models. Our SoS lower bound proof introduces a novel technique, that we believe may be of broader interest, and a number of refinements over existing methods.

We present an accelerated pipeline, based on high-performance computing techniques and normalizing flows, for joint Bayesian parameter estimation and model selection and demonstrate its efficiency in gravitational wave astrophysics. We integrate the Jim inference toolkit, a normalizing flow-enhanced Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampler, with the learned harmonic mean estimator. Our Bayesian evidence estimates run on $1$ GPU are consistent with traditional nested sampling techniques run on $16$ CPU cores, while reducing the computation time by factors of $5\times$ and $15\times$ for $4$-dimensional and $11$-dimensional gravitational wave inference problems, respectively. Our code is available in well-tested and thoroughly documented open-source packages, ensuring accessibility and reproducibility for the wider research community., Comment: accepted to NeurIPS 2024 workshop on Machine Learning and the Physical Sciences

Self-trapped excitons (STEs), renowned for their unique radiative properties, have been harnessed in diverse photonic devices. Yet, a full comprehension and manipulation of STEs remain elusive. In this study, we present novel experimental and theoretical evidence of the hybrid nature and optical tuning of the STEs state in Cs2Ag0.4Na0.6InCl6. The detection of Fano resonance in the laser energy-dependent Raman and photoluminescence spectra indicates the emergence of an exciton-phonon hybrid state, a result of the robust quantum interference between the discrete phonon and continuous exciton states. Moreover, we showcase the ability to continuously adjust this hybrid state with the energy and intensity of the laser field. These significant findings lay the foundation for a comprehensive understanding of the nature of STE and its potential for state control.

Reinforcement Learning (RL) empowers agents to acquire various skills by learning from reward signals. Unfortunately, designing high-quality instance-level rewards often demands significant effort. An emerging alternative, RL with delayed reward, focuses on learning from rewards presented periodically, which can be obtained from human evaluators assessing the agent's performance over sequences of behaviors. However, traditional methods in this domain assume the existence of underlying Markovian rewards and that the observed delayed reward is simply the sum of instance-level rewards, both of which often do not align well with real-world scenarios. In this paper, we introduce the problem of RL from Composite Delayed Reward (RLCoDe), which generalizes traditional RL from delayed rewards by eliminating the strong assumption. We suggest that the delayed reward may arise from a more complex structure reflecting the overall contribution of the sequence. To address this problem, we present a framework for modeling composite delayed rewards, using a weighted sum of non-Markovian components to capture the different contributions of individual steps. Building on this framework, we propose Composite Delayed Reward Transformer (CoDeTr), which incorporates a specialized in-sequence attention mechanism to effectively model these contributions. We conduct experiments on challenging locomotion tasks where the agent receives delayed rewards computed from composite functions of observable step rewards. The experimental results indicate that CoDeTr consistently outperforms baseline methods across evaluated metrics. Additionally, we demonstrate that it effectively identifies the most significant time steps within the sequence and accurately predicts rewards that closely reflect the environment feedback.

Masked diffusion models (MDMs) have shown promise in language modeling, yet their scalability and effectiveness in core language tasks, such as text generation and language understanding, remain underexplored. This paper establishes the first scaling law for MDMs, demonstrating a scaling rate comparable to autoregressive models (ARMs) and a relatively small compute gap. Motivated by their scalability, we train a family of MDMs with up to 1.1 billion (B) parameters to systematically evaluate their performance against ARMs of comparable or larger sizes. Fully leveraging the probabilistic formulation of MDMs, we propose a simple yet effective \emph{unsupervised classifier-free guidance} that effectively exploits large-scale unpaired data, boosting performance for conditional inference. In language understanding, a 1.1B MDM shows competitive results, outperforming the larger 1.5B GPT-2 model on four out of eight zero-shot benchmarks. In text generation, MDMs provide a flexible trade-off compared to ARMs utilizing KV-cache: MDMs match the performance of ARMs while being 1.4 times faster, or achieve higher quality than ARMs at a higher computational cost. Moreover, MDMs address challenging tasks for ARMs by effectively handling bidirectional reasoning and adapting to temporal shifts in data. Notably, a 1.1B MDM breaks the \emph{reverse curse} encountered by much larger ARMs with significantly more data and computation, such as Llama-2 (13B) and GPT-3 (175B). Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/ML-GSAI/SMDM}.

This paper develops a dynamic model to analyze the general equilibrium of the insurance market, focusing on the interaction between insurers' underwriting and investment strategies. Three possible equilibrium outcomes are identified: a positive insurance market, a zero insurance market, and market failure. Our findings reveal why insurers may rationally accept underwriting losses by setting a negative safety loading while relying on investment profits, particularly when there is a negative correlation between insurance gains and financial returns. Additionally, we explore the impact of regulatory frictions, showing that while imposing a cost on investment can enhance social welfare under certain conditions, it may not always be necessary. Therefore, we emphasize the importance of tailoring regulatory interventions to specific market conditions.

We investigate the electronic shot noise produced by nanowires of beta-Ta, an archetypal ``bad" metal with resistivity near the Ioffe-Regel localization limit. The Fano factor characterizing the shot noise exhibits a strong dependence on temperature and is suppressed compared to the expectations for quasiparticle diffusion, but hopping transport is ruled out by the analysis of scaling with the nanowire length. These anomalous behaviors closely resemble those of strange metal nanowires, suggesting that beta-Ta may host a correlated electron liquid. This material provides an accessible platform for exploring exotic electronic states of matter., Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures; comments are welcome

Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) approaches encompass traditional methods that optimize fixed pipelines for model selection and ensembling, as well as newer LLM-based frameworks that autonomously build pipelines. While LLM-based agents have shown promise in automating machine learning tasks, they often generate low-diversity and suboptimal code, even after multiple iterations. To overcome these limitations, we introduce Tree-Search Enhanced LLM Agents (SELA), an innovative agent-based system that leverages Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to optimize the AutoML process. By representing pipeline configurations as trees, our framework enables agents to conduct experiments intelligently and iteratively refine their strategies, facilitating a more effective exploration of the machine learning solution space. This novel approach allows SELA to discover optimal pathways based on experimental feedback, improving the overall quality of the solutions. In an extensive evaluation across 20 machine learning datasets, we compare the performance of traditional and agent-based AutoML methods, demonstrating that SELA achieves a win rate of 65% to 80% against each baseline across all datasets. These results underscore the significant potential of agent-based strategies in AutoML, offering a fresh perspective on tackling complex machine learning challenges., Comment: The code is available at https://github.com/geekan/MetaGPT

We study the optimal scheduling problem for a Markovian multiclass queueing network with abandonment in the Halfin--Whitt regime, under the long run average (ergodic) risk sensitive cost criterion. The objective is to prove asymptotic optimality for the optimal control arising from the corresponding ergodic risk sensitive control (ERSC) problem for the limiting diffusion. In particular, we show that the optimal ERSC value associated with the diffusion-scaled queueing process converges to that of the limiting diffusion in the asymptotic regime. The challenge that ERSC poses is that one cannot express the ERSC cost as an expectation over the mean empirical measure associated with the queueing process, unlike in the usual case of a long run average (ergodic) cost. We develop a novel approach by exploiting the variational representations of the limiting diffusion and the Poisson-driven queueing dynamics, which both involve certain auxiliary controls. The ERSC costs for both the diffusion-scaled queueing process and the limiting diffusion can be represented as the integrals of an extended running cost over a mean empirical measure associated with the corresponding extended processes using these auxiliary controls. For the lower bound proof, we exploit the connections of the ERSC problem for the limiting diffusion with a two-person zero-sum stochastic differential game. We also make use of the mean empirical measures associated with the extended limiting diffusion and diffusion-scaled processes with the auxiliary controls. One major technical challenge in both lower and upper bound proofs, is to establish the tightness of the aforementioned mean empirical measures for the extended processes. We identify nearly optimal controls appropriately in both cases so that the existing ergodicity properties of the limiting diffusion and diffusion-scaled queueing processes can be used.

We study the stochastic SIR epidemic model with infection-age dependent infectivity for which a measure-valued process is used to describe the ages of infection for each individual. We establish a functional law large numbers (FLLN) and a functional central limit theorem (FCLT) for the properly scaled measure-valued processes together with the other epidemic processes to describe the evolution dynamics. In the FLLN, assuming that the hazard rate function of the infection periods is bounded and the ages at time 0 of the infections of the initially infected individuals are bounded, we obtain a PDE limit for the LLN-scaled measure-valued process, for which we characterize its solution explicitly. The PDE is linear with a boundary condition given by the unique solution to a set of Volterra-type nonlinear integral equations. In the FCLT, we obtain an SPDE for the CLT-scaled measure-valued process, driven by two independent white noises coming from the infection and recovery processes. The SPDE is also linear and coupled with the solution to a system of stochastic Volterra-type linear integral equations driven by three independent Gaussian noises, one from the random infection functions in addition to the two white noises mentioned above. The solution to the SPDE can be also explicitly characterized, given this auxiliary process. The uniqueness of the SPDE solution is established under stronger assumptions (density and its derivative being locally bounded) on the distribution function of an infectious duration.

Recovering dense and uniformly distributed point clouds from sparse or noisy data remains a significant challenge. Recently, great progress has been made on these tasks, but usually at the cost of increasingly intricate modules or complicated network architectures, leading to long inference time and huge resource consumption. Instead, we embrace simplicity and present a simple yet efficient method for jointly upsampling and cleaning point clouds. Our method leverages an off-the-shelf octree-based 3D U-Net (OUNet) with minor modifications, enabling the upsampling and cleaning tasks within a single network. Our network directly processes each input point cloud as a whole instead of processing each point cloud patch as in previous works, which significantly eases the implementation and brings at least 47 times faster inference. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performances under huge efficiency advantages on a series of benchmarks. We expect our method to serve simple baselines and inspire researchers to rethink the method design on point cloud upsampling and cleaning., Comment: Accepted by Computational Visual Media

We present the results of a search for gravitational-wave transients associated with core-collapse supernova SN 2023ixf, which was observed in the galaxy Messier 101 via optical emission on 2023 May 19th, during the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA 15th Engineering Run. We define a five-day on-source window during which an accompanying gravitational-wave signal may have occurred. No gravitational waves have been identified in data when at least two gravitational-wave observatories were operating, which covered $\sim 14\%$ of this five-day window. We report the search detection efficiency for various possible gravitational-wave emission models. Considering the distance to M101 (6.7 Mpc), we derive constraints on the gravitational-wave emission mechanism of core-collapse supernovae across a broad frequency spectrum, ranging from 50 Hz to 2 kHz where we assume the GW emission occurred when coincident data are available in the on-source window. Considering an ellipsoid model for a rotating proto-neutron star, our search is sensitive to gravitational-wave energy $1 \times 10^{-5} M_{\odot} c^2$ and luminosity $4 \times 10^{-5} M_{\odot} c^2/\text{s}$ for a source emitting at 50 Hz. These constraints are around an order of magnitude more stringent than those obtained so far with gravitational-wave data. The constraint on the ellipticity of the proto-neutron star that is formed is as low as $1.04$, at frequencies above $1200$ Hz, surpassing results from SN 2019ejj., Comment: Main paper: 6 pages, 4 figures and 1 table. Total with appendices: 20 pages, 4 figures, and 1 table

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning in vision language models (VLMs) is crucial for improving interpretability and trustworthiness. However, current training recipes lack robust CoT reasoning data, relying on datasets dominated by short annotations with minimal rationales. In this work, we show that training VLM on short answers does not generalize well to reasoning tasks that require more detailed responses. To address this, we propose a two-fold approach. First, we distill rationales from GPT-4o model to enrich the training data and fine-tune VLMs, boosting their CoT performance. Second, we apply reinforcement learning to further calibrate reasoning quality. Specifically, we construct positive (correct) and negative (incorrect) pairs of model-generated reasoning chains, by comparing their predictions with annotated short answers. Using this pairwise data, we apply the Direct Preference Optimization algorithm to refine the model's reasoning abilities. Our experiments demonstrate significant improvements in CoT reasoning on benchmark datasets and better generalization to direct answer prediction as well. This work emphasizes the importance of incorporating detailed rationales in training and leveraging reinforcement learning to strengthen the reasoning capabilities of VLMs., Comment: 10 pages + appendix

With the advancement of global climate change and sustainable development goals, urban building energy consumption optimization and carbon emission reduction have become the focus of research. Traditional energy consumption prediction methods often lack accuracy and adaptability due to their inability to fully consider complex energy consumption patterns, especially in dealing with seasonal fluctuations and dynamic changes. This study proposes a hybrid deep learning model that combines TRIZ innovation theory with GWO, SARIMA and LSTM to improve the accuracy of building energy consumption prediction. TRIZ plays a key role in model design, providing innovative solutions to achieve an effective balance between energy efficiency, cost and comfort by systematically analyzing the contradictions in energy consumption optimization. GWO is used to optimize the parameters of the model to ensure that the model maintains high accuracy under different conditions. The SARIMA model focuses on capturing seasonal trends in the data, while the LSTM model handles short-term and long-term dependencies in the data, further improving the accuracy of the prediction. The main contribution of this research is the development of a robust model that leverages the strengths of TRIZ and advanced deep learning techniques, improving the accuracy of energy consumption predictions. Our experiments demonstrate a significant 15% reduction in prediction error compared to existing models. This innovative approach not only enhances urban energy management but also provides a new framework for optimizing energy use and reducing carbon emissions, contributing to sustainable development., Comment: 29 pages

We wish to discuss positive integer solutions to the Diophantine equation $$\prod_{k=1}^n(k^2+1)=b^2$$ and state some possible extensions of the problem. Some methods in analytic number theory will be used to tackle this problem.

Mesh smoothing methods can enhance mesh quality by eliminating distorted elements, leading to improved convergence in simulations. To balance the efficiency and robustness of traditional mesh smoothing process, previous approaches have employed supervised learning and reinforcement learning to train intelligent smoothing models. However, these methods heavily rely on labeled dataset or prior knowledge to guide the models' learning. Furthermore, their limited capacity to enhance mesh connectivity often restricts the effectiveness of smoothing. In this paper, we first systematically analyze the learning mechanisms of recent intelligent smoothing methods and propose a prior-free reinforcement learning model for intelligent mesh smoothing. Our proposed model integrates graph neural networks with reinforcement learning to implement an intelligent node smoothing agent and introduces, for the first time, a mesh connectivity improvement agent. We formalize mesh optimization as a Markov Decision Process and successfully train both agents using Twin Delayed Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient and Double Dueling Deep Q-Network in the absence of any prior data or knowledge. We verified the proposed model on both 2D and 3D meshes. Experimental results demonstrate that our model achieves feature-preserving smoothing on complex 3D surface meshes. It also achieves state-of-the-art results among intelligent smoothing methods on 2D meshes and is 7.16 times faster than traditional optimization-based smoothing methods. Moreover, the connectivity improvement agent can effectively enhance the quality distribution of the mesh.

Aluminum alloys, the most widely utilized lightweight structural materials, predominantly depend on coherent complex-structured nano-plates to enhance their mechanical properties. Despite several decades of research, the atomic-scale nucleation and growth pathways for these complex-structured nano-plates remain elusive, as probing and simulating atomic events like solid nucleation is prohibitively challenging. Here, using theoretical calculations and focus on three representative complex-structured nano-plates in commercial Al alloys, we explicitly demonstrate their associated structural transitions follow an inter-layer-sliding+shuffling mode. Specifically, partial dislocations complete the inter-layer-sliding stage, while atomic shuffling occurs upon forming the unstable basic structural transformation unit of the nano-plates. By identifying these basic structural transformation units, we propose structural evolution pathways for these nano-plates within the Al matrix, which align well with experimental observations and enable the evaluation of critical nuclei. These findings provide long-sought mechanistic details into how coherent nano-plates nucleate and grow, facilitating the rational design of higher-performance Al alloys and other structural materials.

Graph anomaly detection (GAD), which aims to identify nodes in a graph that significantly deviate from normal patterns, plays a crucial role in broad application domains. Existing GAD methods, whether supervised or unsupervised, are one-model-for-one-dataset approaches, i.e., training a separate model for each graph dataset. This limits their applicability in real-world scenarios where training on the target graph data is not possible due to issues like data privacy. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel zero-shot generalist GAD approach UNPrompt that trains a one-for-all detection model, requiring the training of one GAD model on a single graph dataset and then effectively generalizing to detect anomalies in other graph datasets without any retraining or fine-tuning. The key insight in UNPrompt is that i) the predictability of latent node attributes can serve as a generalized anomaly measure and ii) highly generalized normal and abnormal graph patterns can be learned via latent node attribute prediction in a properly normalized node attribute space. UNPrompt achieves generalist GAD through two main modules: one module aligns the dimensionality and semantics of node attributes across different graphs via coordinate-wise normalization in a projected space, while another module learns generalized neighborhood prompts that support the use of latent node attribute predictability as an anomaly score across different datasets. Extensive experiments on real-world GAD datasets show that UNPrompt significantly outperforms diverse competing methods under the generalist GAD setting, and it also has strong superiority under the one-model-for-one-dataset setting., Comment: 19 pages