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The Quantum Focusing Conjecture (QFC) lies at the foundation of holo\-graphy and semiclassical gravity. The QFC implies the Bousso bound and the Quantum Null Energy Condition (QNEC). The QFC also ensures the consistency of the quantum extremal surface prescription and bulk reconstruction in AdS/CFT. However, the central object in the QFC -- the expansion of lightrays -- is not defined at points where geodesics enter or leave a null congruence. Moreover, the expansion admits three inequivalent quantum extensions in terms of the conditional max, min, and von Neumann entropies. Here we formulate a discrete notion of nonexpansion that can be evaluated even at non-smooth points. Moreover, we show that a single conjecture, the discrete \emph{max}-QFC, suffices for deriving the QNEC, the Bousso bound, and key properties of both max and min entanglement wedges. Continuous numerical values need not be assigned, nor are the von Neumann or min-versions of the quantum expansion needed. Both our new notion of nonexpansion, and also the properties of conditional max entropies, are inherently asymmetric and outward directed from the input wedge. Thus the framework we develop here reduces and clarifies the axiomatic structure of semiclassical gravity, eliminating redundancies and fixing ambiguities. We also derive a new result: the strong subadditivity of the generalized smooth conditional max and min entropies of entanglement wedges., Comment: 35 pages

The notion of defects in crystalline phases of matter has been extremely powerful for understanding crystal growth, deformation and melting. These discontinuities in the periodic order of crystals are mathematically described by the Burgers vector, derived from the particle displacements, which encapsulates the direction and magnitude of slip relative to the undeformed state. Since the reference structure of the crystal is known a priori, the Burgers vector can be determined experimentally using both imaging and diffraction methods to measure the lattice distortion, and thus infer the particle displacements. Glasses have structures that lack the periodicity of crystals, and thus a well-defined reference state. Yet, measurable structural parameters can still be obtained from diffraction from a glass. Here we examine the usefulness of these parameters to probe deformation in glasses. We find that coordinated transformations in the centrosymmetry of local particle arrangements are a strong marker of plastic events. Moreover, we investigate two geometric indicators that can be derived from distortions in local diffraction patterns, namely the continuous Burgers vector and the quadrupolar strain. We find that the Burgers vector again emerges as a robust and sensitive metric for understanding local structural transformations due to mechanical deformation, even in structural glasses., Comment: 13 pages 5 figures

Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) have recently gained attention as a powerful approach for continuously representing signals such as images, videos, and 3D shapes using multilayer perceptrons (MLPs). However, MLPs are known to exhibit a low-frequency bias, limiting their ability to capture high-frequency details accurately. This limitation is typically addressed by incorporating high-frequency input embeddings or specialized activation layers. In this work, we demonstrate that these embeddings and activations are often configured with hyperparameters that perform well on average but are suboptimal for specific input signals under consideration, necessitating a costly grid search to identify optimal settings. Our key observation is that the initial frequency spectrum of an untrained model's output correlates strongly with the model's eventual performance on a given target signal. Leveraging this insight, we propose frequency shifting (or FreSh), a method that selects embedding hyperparameters to align the frequency spectrum of the model's initial output with that of the target signal. We show that this simple initialization technique improves performance across various neural representation methods and tasks, achieving results comparable to extensive hyperparameter sweeps but with only marginal computational overhead compared to training a single model with default hyperparameters., Comment: Code at https://github.com/gmum/FreSh/

In various scenarios motivated by real life, such as medical data analysis, autonomous driving, and adversarial training, we are interested in robust deep networks. A network is robust when a relatively small perturbation of the input cannot lead to drastic changes in output (like change of class, etc.). This falls under the broader scope field of Neural Network Certification (NNC). Two crucial problems in NNC are of profound interest to the scientific community: how to calculate the robustness of a given pre-trained network and how to construct robust networks. The common approach to constructing robust networks is Interval Bound Propagation (IBP). This paper demonstrates that IBP is sub-optimal in the first case due to its susceptibility to the wrapping effect. Even for linear activation, IBP gives strongly sub-optimal bounds. Consequently, one should use strategies immune to the wrapping effect to obtain bounds close to optimal ones. We adapt two classical approaches dedicated to strict computations -- Dubleton Arithmetic and Affine Arithmetic -- to mitigate the wrapping effect in neural networks. These techniques yield precise results for networks with linear activation functions, thus resisting the wrapping effect. As a result, we achieve bounds significantly closer to the optimal level than IBPs.

This study presents a demonstration of the surface morphology behavior of gallium antimonide (GaSb) layers deposited on gallium arsenide (GaAs) (100) substrates using three different methods: metamorphic, interfacial misfit (IMF) matrix, and a method based on a Polish patent application number P.443805. The first two methods are commonly used, while the third differs in the sequence of successive steps and the presence of Be doping at the initial growth stage. By comparing GaSb layers made by these methods for the same growth parameters, the most favorable procedure for forming a GaSb buffer layer is selected. Using GaAs substrates with a GaSb buffer layer is a cheaper alternative to using GaSb substrates in infrared detector structures based on II-type superlattices T2SL, such as InAs/GaSb. The quality of the GaSb buffer layer determines the quality of the subsequent layers that form the entire T2SL and affects factors such as dark current in terms of application, Comment: 8 pages, 11 figures

Effective patient-provider communication is crucial in clinical care, directly impacting patient outcomes and quality of life. Traditional evaluation methods, such as human ratings, patient feedback, and provider self-assessments, are often limited by high costs and scalability issues. Although existing natural language processing (NLP) techniques show promise, they struggle with the nuances of clinical communication and require sensitive clinical data for training, reducing their effectiveness in real-world applications. Emerging large language models (LLMs) offer a new approach to assessing complex communication metrics, with the potential to advance the field through integration into passive sensing and just-in-time intervention systems. This study explores LLMs as evaluators of palliative care communication quality, leveraging their linguistic, in-context learning, and reasoning capabilities. Specifically, using simulated scripts crafted and labeled by healthcare professionals, we test proprietary models (e.g., GPT-4) and fine-tune open-source LLMs (e.g., LLaMA2) with a synthetic dataset generated by GPT-4 to evaluate clinical conversations, to identify key metrics such as `understanding' and `empathy'. Our findings demonstrated LLMs' superior performance in evaluating clinical communication, providing actionable feedback with reasoning, and demonstrating the feasibility and practical viability of developing in-house LLMs. This research highlights LLMs' potential to enhance patient-provider interactions and lays the groundwork for downstream steps in developing LLM-empowered clinical health systems., Comment: Accepted by ACM Transactions on Computing for Healthcare, Special Issue on Large Language Models, Conversational Systems, and Generative AI in Health, pending minor revisions

Understanding the decisions made by image classification networks is a critical area of research in deep learning. This task is traditionally divided into two distinct approaches: post-hoc methods and intrinsic methods. Post-hoc methods, such as GradCam, aim to interpret the decisions of pre-trained models by identifying regions of the image where the network focuses its attention. However, these methods provide only a high-level overview, making it difficult to fully understand the network's decision-making process. Conversely, intrinsic methods, like prototypical parts models, offer a more detailed understanding of network predictions but are constrained by specific architectures, training methods, and datasets. In this paper, we introduce InfoDisent, a hybrid model that combines the advantages of both approaches. By utilizing an information bottleneck, InfoDisent disentangles the information in the final layer of a pre-trained deep network, enabling the breakdown of classification decisions into basic, understandable atomic components. Unlike standard prototypical parts approaches, InfoDisent can interpret the decisions of pre-trained classification networks and be used for making classification decisions, similar to intrinsic models. We validate the effectiveness of InfoDisent on benchmark datasets such as ImageNet, CUB-200-2011, Stanford Cars, and Stanford Dogs for both convolutional and transformer backbones.

With advancements in computer vision and deep learning, video-based human action recognition (HAR) has become practical. However, due to the complexity of the computation pipeline, running HAR on live video streams incurs excessive delays on embedded platforms. This work tackles the real-time performance challenges of HAR with four contributions: 1) an experimental study identifying a standard Optical Flow (OF) extraction technique as the latency bottleneck in a state-of-the-art HAR pipeline, 2) an exploration of the latency-accuracy tradeoff between the standard and deep learning approaches to OF extraction, which highlights the need for a novel, efficient motion feature extractor, 3) the design of Integrated Motion Feature Extractor (IMFE), a novel single-shot neural network architecture for motion feature extraction with drastic improvement in latency, 4) the development of RT-HARE, a real-time HAR system tailored for embedded platforms. Experimental results on an Nvidia Jetson Xavier NX platform demonstrated that RT-HARE realizes real-time HAR at a video frame rate of 30 frames per second while delivering high levels of recognition accuracy.

Diffusion models are among the most effective methods for image generation. This is in particular because, unlike GANs, they can be easily conditioned during training to produce elements with desired class or properties. However, guiding a pre-trained diffusion model to generate elements from previously unlabeled data is significantly more challenging. One of the possible solutions was given by the ADM-G guiding approach. Although ADM-G successfully generates elements from the given class, there is a significant quality gap compared to a model originally conditioned on this class. In particular, the FID score obtained by the ADM-G-guided diffusion model is nearly three times lower than the class-conditioned guidance. We demonstrate that this issue is partly due to ADM-G providing minimal guidance during the final stage of the denoising process. To address this problem, we propose GeoGuide, a guidance model based on tracing the distance of the diffusion model's trajectory from the data manifold. The main idea of GeoGuide is to produce normalized adjustments during the backward denoising process. As shown in the experiments, GeoGuide surpasses the probabilistic approach ADM-G with respect to both the FID scores and the quality of the generated images.

Quality patient-provider communication is critical to improve clinical care and patient outcomes. While progress has been made with communication skills training for clinicians, significant gaps exist in how to best monitor, measure, and evaluate the implementation of communication skills in the actual clinical setting. Advancements in ubiquitous technology and natural language processing make it possible to realize more objective, real-time assessment of clinical interactions and in turn provide more timely feedback to clinicians about their communication effectiveness. In this paper, we propose CommSense, a computational sensing framework that combines smartwatch audio and transcripts with natural language processing methods to measure selected ``best-practice'' communication metrics captured by wearable devices in the context of palliative care interactions, including understanding, empathy, presence, emotion, and clarity. We conducted a pilot study involving N=40 clinician participants, to test the technical feasibility and acceptability of CommSense in a simulated clinical setting. Our findings demonstrate that CommSense effectively captures most communication metrics and is well-received by both practicing clinicians and student trainees. Our study also highlights the potential for digital technology to enhance communication skills training for healthcare providers and students, ultimately resulting in more equitable delivery of healthcare and accessible, lower cost tools for training with the potential to improve patient outcomes., Comment: 30 pages, accepted by ACM CSCW 2024, to appear in PACM HCI

Single-step Coulomb excitation of $^{46,48,49,50}$Ti is presented. A complete set of $E2$ matrix elements for the quintuplet of states in $^{49}$Ti, centered on the $2^+$ core excitation, was measured for the first time. A total of nine $E2$ matrix elements are reported, four of which were previously unknown. $^{49}_{22}$Ti$_{27}$ shows a $20\%$ quenching in electric quadrupole transition strength as compared to its semi-magic $^{50}_{22}$Ti$_{28}$ neighbour. This $20\%$ quenching, while empirically unprecedented, can be explained with a remarkably simple two-state mixing model, which is also consistent with other ground-state properties such as the magnetic dipole moment and electric quadrupole moment. A connection to nucleon transfer data and the quenching of single-particle strength is also demonstrated. The simplicity of the $^{49}$Ti-$^{50}$Ti pair (i.e., approximate single-$j$ $0f_{7/2}$ valence space and isolation of yrast states from non-yrast states) provides a unique opportunity to disentangle otherwise competing effects in the ground-state properties of atomic nuclei, the emergence of collectivity, and the role of proton-neutron interactions., Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, accepted in Physics Letters B

Single-step retrosynthesis aims to predict a set of reactions that lead to the creation of a target molecule, which is a crucial task in molecular discovery. Although a target molecule can often be synthesized with multiple different reactions, it is not clear how to verify the feasibility of a reaction, because the available datasets cover only a tiny fraction of the possible solutions. Consequently, the existing models are not encouraged to explore the space of possible reactions sufficiently. In this paper, we propose a novel single-step retrosynthesis model, RetroGFN, that can explore outside the limited dataset and return a diverse set of feasible reactions by leveraging a feasibility proxy model during the training. We show that RetroGFN achieves competitive results on standard top-k accuracy while outperforming existing methods on round-trip accuracy. Moreover, we provide empirical arguments in favor of using round-trip accuracy which expands the notion of feasibility with respect to the standard top-k accuracy metric.

Video processing is generally divided into two main categories: processing of the entire video, which typically yields optimal classification outcomes, and real-time processing, where the objective is to make a decision as promptly as possible. The latter is often driven by the need to identify rapidly potential critical or dangerous situations. These could include machine failure, traffic accidents, heart problems, or dangerous behavior. Although the models dedicated to the processing of entire videos are typically well-defined and clearly presented in the literature, this is not the case for online processing, where a plethora of hand-devised methods exist. To address this, we present \our{}, a novel, unified, and theoretically-based adaptation framework for dealing with the online classification problem for video data. The initial phase of our study is to establish a robust mathematical foundation for the theory of classification of sequential data, with the potential to make a decision at an early stage. This allows us to construct a natural function that encourages the model to return an outcome much faster. The subsequent phase is to demonstrate a straightforward and readily implementable method for adapting offline models to online and recurrent operations. Finally, by comparing the proposed approach to the non-online state-of-the-art baseline, it is demonstrated that the use of \our{} encourages the network to make earlier classification decisions without compromising accuracy.

Static sparse training aims to train sparse models from scratch, achieving remarkable results in recent years. A key design choice is given by the sparse initialization, which determines the trainable sub-network through a binary mask. Existing methods mainly select such mask based on a predefined dense initialization. Such an approach may not efficiently leverage the mask's potential impact on the optimization. An alternative direction, inspired by research into dynamical isometry, is to introduce orthogonality in the sparse subnetwork, which helps in stabilizing the gradient signal. In this work, we propose Exact Orthogonal Initialization (EOI), a novel sparse orthogonal initialization scheme based on composing random Givens rotations. Contrary to other existing approaches, our method provides exact (not approximated) orthogonality and enables the creation of layers with arbitrary densities. We demonstrate the superior effectiveness and efficiency of EOI through experiments, consistently outperforming common sparse initialization techniques. Our method enables training highly sparse 1000-layer MLP and CNN networks without residual connections or normalization techniques, emphasizing the crucial role of weight initialization in static sparse training alongside sparse mask selection. The code is available at https://github.com/woocash2/sparser-better-deeper-stronger, Comment: ICML 2024

One of the key advantages of 3D rendering is its ability to simulate intricate scenes accurately. One of the most widely used methods for this purpose is Gaussian Splatting, a novel approach that is known for its rapid training and inference capabilities. In essence, Gaussian Splatting involves incorporating data about the 3D objects of interest into a series of Gaussian distributions, each of which can then be depicted in 3D in a manner analogous to traditional meshes. It is regrettable that the use of Gaussians in Gaussian Splatting is currently somewhat restrictive due to their perceived linear nature. In practice, 3D objects are often composed of complex curves and highly nonlinear structures. This issue can to some extent be alleviated by employing a multitude of Gaussian components to reflect the complex, nonlinear structures accurately. However, this approach results in a considerable increase in time complexity. This paper introduces the concept of negative Gaussians, which are interpreted as items with negative colors. The rationale behind this approach is based on the density distribution created by dividing the probability density functions (PDFs) of two Gaussians, which we refer to as Diff-Gaussian. Such a distribution can be used to approximate structures such as donut and moon-shaped datasets. Experimental findings indicate that the application of these techniques enhances the modeling of high-frequency elements with rapid color transitions. Additionally, it improves the representation of shadows. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper to extend the simple elipsoid shapes of Gaussian Splatting to more complex nonlinear structures.

The rapid expansion of large language models (LLMs) has underscored the need for parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods, with LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation) emerging as a popular solution. Although LoRA reduces the number of trainable parameters, serving multiple (task or user-specific) LoRA modules on top of a base model still creates significant storage challenges. To address this, using theoretical derivation, we introduce LoRA-XS (Low-Rank Adaptation with eXtremely Small number of parameters), a novel low-rank adaptation method that considerably reduces the trainable parameters while showing superior or competitive performance. LoRA-XS achieves this by inserting a small, trainable r x r weight matrix between frozen low-rank matrices, which are constructed by Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) of the original weight matrix. This lightweight matrix enables fine-tuning with drastically reduced storage requirements, making it feasible to deploy millions of personalized models while minimizing memory overhead. For instance, LoRA-XS achieves a remarkable reduction of trainable parameters by over 100x in 7B models compared to LoRA. Our evaluations across various benchmarks (including GLUE, GSM8K, MATH, and eight commonsense reasoning datasets) demonstrate that LoRA-XS performs competitively or better than LoRA and other recent methods like VeRA while being significantly more parameter efficient. We also provide an extensive ablation study on the importance of singular vectors in transformer weights, shedding light on the underlying mechanisms driving LoRA-XS's enhanced efficiency. These findings suggest that LoRA-XS is not only a storage-efficient alternative, but also a powerful tool for scaling and personalizing LLMs at unprecedented scales.

Prototypical parts networks combine the power of deep learning with the explainability of case-based reasoning to make accurate, interpretable decisions. They follow the this looks like that reasoning, representing each prototypical part with patches from training images. However, a single image patch comprises multiple visual features, such as color, shape, and texture, making it difficult for users to identify which feature is important to the model. To reduce this ambiguity, we introduce the Lucid Prototypical Parts Network (LucidPPN), a novel prototypical parts network that separates color prototypes from other visual features. Our method employs two reasoning branches: one for non-color visual features, processing grayscale images, and another focusing solely on color information. This separation allows us to clarify whether the model's decisions are based on color, shape, or texture. Additionally, LucidPPN identifies prototypical parts corresponding to semantic parts of classified objects, making comparisons between data classes more intuitive, e.g., when two bird species might differ primarily in belly color. Our experiments demonstrate that the two branches are complementary and together achieve results comparable to baseline methods. More importantly, LucidPPN generates less ambiguous prototypical parts, enhancing user understanding., Comment: Work in the review process. The code will be available upon acceptance

We show how to encode the radiative degrees of freedom in $4$-dimensional asymptotically AdS spacetimes, using the boundary Cotton and stress tensors. Background radiation leads to a reduction of the asymptotic symmetry group, in contrast to asymptotically flat spacetimes, where a non-vanishing news tensor does not restrict the asymptotic symmetries. Null gauges, such as $\Lambda$-BMS, provide a framework for AdS spacetimes that include radiation in the flat limit. We use this to check that the flat limit of the radiative data matches the expected definition in intrinsically asymptotically flat spacetimes. We further dimensionally reduce our construction to the celestial sphere, and show how the $2$-dimensional celestial currents can be extracted from the $3$-dimensional boundary data., Comment: v2, appendix and references added

Partial Multi-label Learning (PML) is a type of weakly supervised learning where each training instance corresponds to a set of candidate labels, among which only some are true. In this paper, we introduce \our{}, a novel probabilistic approach to this problem that extends the binary cross entropy to the PML setup. In contrast to existing methods, it does not require suboptimal disambiguation and, as such, can be applied to any deep architecture. Furthermore, experiments conducted on artificial and real-world datasets indicate that \our{} outperforms existing approaches, especially for high noise in a candidate set., Comment: Accepted to the International Conference on Data Science and Advanced Analytics (DSAA 2023)

Numerous emerging deep-learning techniques have had a substantial impact on computer graphics. Among the most promising breakthroughs are the recent rise of Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) and Gaussian Splatting (GS). NeRFs encode the object's shape and color in neural network weights using a handful of images with known camera positions to generate novel views. In contrast, GS provides accelerated training and inference without a decrease in rendering quality by encoding the object's characteristics in a collection of Gaussian distributions. These two techniques have found many use cases in spatial computing and other domains. On the other hand, the emergence of deepfake methods has sparked considerable controversy. Such techniques can have a form of artificial intelligence-generated videos that closely mimic authentic footage. Using generative models, they can modify facial features, enabling the creation of altered identities or facial expressions that exhibit a remarkably realistic appearance to a real person. Despite these controversies, deepfake can offer a next-generation solution for avatar creation and gaming when of desirable quality. To that end, we show how to combine all these emerging technologies to obtain a more plausible outcome. Our ImplicitDeepfake1 uses the classical deepfake algorithm to modify all training images separately and then train NeRF and GS on modified faces. Such relatively simple strategies can produce plausible 3D deepfake-based avatars.

Recently, a range of neural network-based methods for image rendering have been introduced. One such widely-researched neural radiance field (NeRF) relies on a neural network to represent 3D scenes, allowing for realistic view synthesis from a small number of 2D images. However, most NeRF models are constrained by long training and inference times. In comparison, Gaussian Splatting (GS) is a novel, state-of-the-art technique for rendering points in a 3D scene by approximating their contribution to image pixels through Gaussian distributions, warranting fast training and swift, real-time rendering. A drawback of GS is the absence of a well-defined approach for its conditioning due to the necessity to condition several hundred thousand Gaussian components. To solve this, we introduce the Gaussian Mesh Splatting (GaMeS) model, which allows modification of Gaussian components in a similar way as meshes. We parameterize each Gaussian component by the vertices of the mesh face. Furthermore, our model needs mesh initialization on input or estimated mesh during training. We also define Gaussian splats solely based on their location on the mesh, allowing for automatic adjustments in position, scale, and rotation during animation. As a result, we obtain a real-time rendering of editable GS.

Robots are experiencing a revolution as they permeate many aspects of our daily lives, from performing house maintenance to infrastructure inspection, from efficiently warehousing goods to autonomous vehicles, and more. This technical progress and its impact are astounding. This revolution, however, is outstripping the capabilities of existing software development processes, techniques, and tools, which largely have remained unchanged for decades. These capabilities are ill-suited to handling the challenges unique to robotics software such as dealing with a wide diversity of domains, heterogeneous hardware, programmed and learned components, complex physical environments captured and modeled with uncertainty, emergent behaviors that include human interactions, and scalability demands that span across multiple dimensions. Looking ahead to the need to develop software for robots that are ever more ubiquitous, autonomous, and reliant on complex adaptive components, hardware, and data, motivated an NSF-sponsored community workshop on the subject of Software Engineering for Robotics, held in Detroit, Michigan in October 2023. The goal of the workshop was to bring together thought leaders across robotics and software engineering to coalesce a community, and identify key problems in the area of SE for robotics that that community should aim to solve over the next 5 years. This report serves to summarize the motivation, activities, and findings of that workshop, in particular by articulating the challenges unique to robot software, and identifying a vision for fruitful near-term research directions to tackle them., Comment: 16 pages

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities in various applications, yet LLMs face challenges such as limited context windows and difficulties in generalization. In this paper, we introduce a metacognition module for generative agents, enabling them to observe their own thought processes and actions. This metacognitive approach, designed to emulate System 1 and System 2 cognitive processes, allows agents to significantly enhance their performance by modifying their strategy. We tested the metacognition module on a variety of scenarios, including a situation where generative agents must survive a zombie apocalypse, and observe that our system outperform others, while agents adapt and improve their strategies to complete tasks over time., Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures

The cross-shell excited states of $^{34}$Si have been investigated via $\beta$-decays of the $4^-$ ground state and the $1^+$ isomeric state of $^{34}$Al. Since the valence protons and valence neutrons occupy different major shells in the ground state as well as the intruder $1^+$ isomeric state of $^{34}$Al, intruder levels of $^{34}$Si are populated via allowed $\beta$ decays. Spin assignments to such intruder levels of $^{34}$Si were established through $\gamma$-$\gamma$ angular correlation analysis for the negative parity states with dominant configurations $(\nu d_{3/2})^{-1} \otimes (\nu f_{7/2})^{1}$ as well as the positive parity states with dominant configurations $(\nu sd)^{-2} \otimes (\nu f_{7/2}p_{3/2})^2$. The configurations of such intruder states play crucial roles in our understanding of the $N=20$ shell gap evolution. A configuration interaction model derived from the FSU Hamiltonian was utilized in order to interpret the intruder states in $^{34}$Si. Shell model interaction derived from a more fundamental theory with the Valence Space In Medium Similarity Renormalization Group (VS-IMSRG) method was also employed to interpret the structure of $^{34}$Si.

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) have demonstrated the remarkable potential of neural networks to capture the intricacies of 3D objects. By encoding the shape and color information within neural network weights, NeRFs excel at producing strikingly sharp novel views of 3D objects. Recently, numerous generalizations of NeRFs utilizing generative models have emerged, expanding its versatility. In contrast, Gaussian Splatting (GS) offers a similar render quality with faster training and inference as it does not need neural networks to work. It encodes information about the 3D objects in the set of Gaussian distributions that can be rendered in 3D similarly to classical meshes. Unfortunately, GS are difficult to condition since they usually require circa hundred thousand Gaussian components. To mitigate the caveats of both models, we propose a hybrid model Viewing Direction Gaussian Splatting (VDGS) that uses GS representation of the 3D object's shape and NeRF-based encoding of color and opacity. Our model uses Gaussian distributions with trainable positions (i.e. means of Gaussian), shape (i.e. covariance of Gaussian), color and opacity, and a neural network that takes Gaussian parameters and viewing direction to produce changes in the said color and opacity. As a result, our model better describes shadows, light reflections, and the transparency of 3D objects without adding additional texture and light components.

{\beta} decay of neutron-rich isotopes 43,45 S,studied at the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory is reported here. {\beta} delayed {\gamma} transitions were detected by an array of 16 clover detectors surrounding the Beta Counting Station which consists of a 40x40 Double Sided Silicon Strip Detector followed by a Single Sided Silicon Strip Detector. {\beta} decay half-lives have been extracted for 43,45 S by correlating implants and decays in the pixelated implant detector with further coincidence with {\gamma} transitions in the daughter nucleus. The level structure of 43,45 Cl is expanded by the addition of 20 new {\gamma} transitions in 43Cl and 8 in 45 Cl with the observation of core excited negative-parity states for the first time. For 45 S decay, a large fraction of the {\beta} decay strength goes to delayed neutron emission populating states in 44 Cl which are also presented. Comparison of experimental observations is made to detailed shell-model calculations using the SDPFSDG-MU interaction to highlight the role of the diminished N = 28 neutron shell gap and the near degeneracy of the proton s 1/2 and d 3/2 orbitals on the structure of the neutron-rich Cl isotopes. The current work also provides further support to a ground state spin-parity assignment of 3/2 + in 45 Cl.

Video generation is important, especially in medicine, as much data is given in this form. However, video generation of high-resolution data is a very demanding task for generative models, due to the large need for memory. In this paper, we propose Memory Efficient Video GAN (MeVGAN) - a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) which uses plugin-type architecture. We use a pre-trained 2D-image GAN and only add a simple neural network to construct respective trajectories in the noise space, so that the trajectory forwarded through the GAN model constructs a real-life video. We apply MeVGAN in the task of generating colonoscopy videos. Colonoscopy is an important medical procedure, especially beneficial in screening and managing colorectal cancer. However, because colonoscopy is difficult and time-consuming to learn, colonoscopy simulators are widely used in educating young colonoscopists. We show that MeVGAN can produce good quality synthetic colonoscopy videos, which can be potentially used in virtual simulators.

Conditional GANs are frequently used for manipulating the attributes of face images, such as expression, hairstyle, pose, or age. Even though the state-of-the-art models successfully modify the requested attributes, they simultaneously modify other important characteristics of the image, such as a person's identity. In this paper, we focus on solving this problem by introducing PluGeN4Faces, a plugin to StyleGAN, which explicitly disentangles face attributes from a person's identity. Our key idea is to perform training on images retrieved from movie frames, where a given person appears in various poses and with different attributes. By applying a type of contrastive loss, we encourage the model to group images of the same person in similar regions of latent space. Our experiments demonstrate that the modifications of face attributes performed by PluGeN4Faces are significantly less invasive on the remaining characteristics of the image than in the existing state-of-the-art models.

Gliomas with CDKN2A mutations are known to have worse prognosis but imaging features of these gliomas are unknown. Our goal is to identify CDKN2A specific qualitative imaging biomarkers in glioblastomas using a new informatics workflow that enables rapid analysis of qualitative imaging features with Visually AcceSAble Rembrandtr Images (VASARI) for large datasets in PACS. Sixty nine patients undergoing GBM resection with CDKN2A status determined by whole-exome sequencing were included. GBMs on magnetic resonance images were automatically 3D segmented using deep learning algorithms incorporated within PACS. VASARI features were assessed using FHIR forms integrated within PACS. GBMs without CDKN2A alterations were significantly larger (64% vs. 30%, p=0.007) compared to tumors with homozygous deletion (HOMDEL) and heterozygous loss (HETLOSS). Lesions larger than 8 cm were four times more likely to have no CDKN2A alteration (OR: 4.3; 95% CI:1.5-12.1; p<0.001). We developed a novel integrated PACS informatics platform for the assessment of GBM molecular subtypes and show that tumors with HOMDEL are more likely to have radiographic evidence of pial invasion and less likely to have deep white matter invasion or subependymal invasion. These imaging features may allow noninvasive identification of CDKN2A allele status., Comment: 23 pages, 5 figures

Prototypical parts-based networks are becoming increasingly popular due to their faithful self-explanations. However, their similarity maps are calculated in the penultimate network layer. Therefore, the receptive field of the prototype activation region often depends on parts of the image outside this region, which can lead to misleading interpretations. We name this undesired behavior a spatial explanation misalignment and introduce an interpretability benchmark with a set of dedicated metrics for quantifying this phenomenon. In addition, we propose a method for misalignment compensation and apply it to existing state-of-the-art models. We show the expressiveness of our benchmark and the effectiveness of the proposed compensation methodology through extensive empirical studies., Comment: Under review. Code will be release upon acceptance

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) play a fundamental role in many deep learning problems, in particular in cheminformatics. However, typical GNNs cannot capture the concept of chirality, which means they do not distinguish between the 3D graph of a chemical compound and its mirror image (enantiomer). The ability to distinguish between enantiomers is important especially in drug discovery because enantiomers can have very distinct biochemical properties. In this paper, we propose a theoretically justified message-passing scheme, which makes GNNs sensitive to the order of node neighbors. We apply that general concept in the context of molecular chirality to construct Chiral Edge Neural Network (ChiENN) layer which can be appended to any GNN model to enable chirality-awareness. Our experiments show that adding ChiENN layers to a GNN outperforms current state-of-the-art methods in chiral-sensitive molecular property prediction tasks.

We have developed a deep generative model that can produce accurate optical emission spectra and colour images of an ICP plasma using only the applied coil power, electrode power, pressure and gas flows as inputs -- essentially an empirical surrogate collisional radiative model. An autoencoder was trained on a dataset of 812,500 image/spectra pairs in argon, oxygen, Ar/O\textsubscript{2}, CF\textsubscript{4}/O\textsubscript{2} and SF\textsubscript{6}/O\textsubscript{2} plasmas in an industrial plasma etch tool, taken across the entire operating space of the tool. The autoencoder learns to encode the input data into a compressed latent representation and then decode it back to a reconstruction of the data. We learn to map the plasma tool's inputs to the latent space and use the decoder to create a generative model. The model is very fast, taking just over 10 s to generate 10,000 measurements on a single GPU. This type of model can become a building block for a wide range of experiments and simulations. To aid this, we have released the underlying dataset of 812,500 image/spectra pairs used to train the model, the trained models and the model code for the community to accelerate the development and use of this exciting area of deep learning. Anyone can try the model, for free, on Google Colab., Comment: 14 pages, 10 figures, 5 tables

High spin states in $^{59}$Co ($Z=27$), $^{59}$Ni ($Z=28$) and $^{61}$Co have been populated by the fusion evaporation reactions, $^{48}$Ti($^{14}$C, p2n)$^{59}$Co, $^{48}$Ti($^{14}$C, 3n)$^{59}$Ni, and $^{50}$Ti($^{14}$C, p2n)$^{61}$Co. The 9 MV tandem accelerator at the John D Fox Laboratory, Florida State University (FSU) was used to accelerate the $^{14}$C beam and the de-exciting $\gamma$ rays were detected by the FSU detector array consisting of six High Purity Germanium (HPGe) clover detectors, and three single crystals. Directional correlation of the $\gamma$ rays de-exciting oriented states (DCO ratios) and polarization asymmetry measurements helped to establish spin and parities of the excited states whenever possible. The level scheme of $^{59}$Co has been expanded with the inclusion of positive parity states up to 31/2$^+$ at around 11 MeV. The $^{59}$Ni positive parity states known from previous study were verified with modifications to some of the spins and parities. On the other hand, the negative parity states were extended to 31/2 at an excitation energy of 12 MeV. No new transition was observed for $^{61}$Co, but one of the major bands has been reassigned as consisting of positive parity states by reason of this study which is a candidate for magnetic rotation band. Cross shell excitations were observed in the three nuclei studied and the prominent role of excitation to g$_{9/2}$ orbital crossing the $N=40$ shell gap was established in relation to collective excitation in these nuclei by comparison with large-scale shell model calculations.

In order to characterize and benchmark computational hardware, software, and algorithms, it is essential to have many problem instances on-hand. This is no less true for quantum computation, where a large collection of real-world problem instances would allow for benchmarking studies that in turn help to improve both algorithms and hardware designs. To this end, here we present a large dataset of qubit-based quantum Hamiltonians. The dataset, called HamLib (for Hamiltonian Library), is freely available online and contains problem sizes ranging from 2 to 1000 qubits. HamLib includes problem instances of the Heisenberg model, Fermi-Hubbard model, Bose-Hubbard model, molecular electronic structure, molecular vibrational structure, MaxCut, Max-$k$-SAT, Max-$k$-Cut, QMaxCut, and the traveling salesperson problem. The goals of this effort are (a) to save researchers time by eliminating the need to prepare problem instances and map them to qubit representations, (b) to allow for more thorough tests of new algorithms and hardware, and (c) to allow for reproducibility and standardization across research studies., Comment: 33 pages; small changes in v1.1 of dataset