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Identifying infall motions is crucial for our understanding of accretion processes in regions of star formation. The NH3 (1,1) hyperfine intensity anomaly (HIA) has been proposed to be a readily usable tracer for such infall motions in star-forming regions harboring young stellar objects at very early evolutionary stages. In this paper, we seek to study the HIA toward fifteen infall candidate regions to assess its reliability as an infall tracer. By using deep observations of the NH3 (1,1) transition with the Effelsberg 100 m telescope, HIAs have been identified toward all the targets. Fourteen out of fifteen sources exhibit anomalous intensities either in the inner or outer satellite lines. All the derived HIAs conform to the framework of the existing two models, namely, hyperfine selective trapping (HST) and systematic contraction or expansion motion (CE) models. In our sample of infall candidates, a majority of the HIAs remain consistent with the HST model. Only in three targets, the HIAs are consistent with infall motions under the CE model. Thus HIAs could be used as an infall tracer but seem not highly sensitive to infall motions in our single-dish data. Nevertheless, the emission could be blended with emission from outflow activities. HIAs consistent with the HST model show stronger anomalies with increasing kinetic temperatures (Tk), which is expected by the HST model. On the other hand, HIAs consistent with infall motions show little dependence on Tk. Therefore, HIAs may preferably trace infall of cold gas., Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, accepted for publication in A&A

Current state-of-the-art flow methods are mostly based on dense all-pairs cost volumes. However, as image resolution increases, the computational and spatial complexity of constructing these cost volumes grows at a quartic rate, making these methods impractical for high-resolution images. In this paper, we propose a novel Hybrid Cost Volume for memory-efficient optical flow, named HCV. To construct HCV, we first propose a Top-k strategy to separate the 4D cost volume into two global 3D cost volumes. These volumes significantly reduce memory usage while retaining a substantial amount of matching information. We further introduce a local 4D cost volume with a local search space to supplement the local information for HCV. Based on HCV, we design a memory-efficient optical flow network, named HCVFlow. Compared to the recurrent flow methods based the all-pairs cost volumes, our HCVFlow significantly reduces memory consumption while ensuring high accuracy. We validate the effectiveness and efficiency of our method on the Sintel and KITTI datasets and real-world 4K (2160*3840) resolution images. Extensive experiments show that our HCVFlow has very low memory usage and outperforms other memory-efficient methods in terms of accuracy. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/gangweiX/HCVFlow., Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures

Frequency tunable qubit plays a significant role for scalable superconducting quantum processors. The state-of-the-art room-temperature electronics for tuning qubit frequency suffers from unscalable limit, such as heating problem, linear growth of control cables, etc. Here we propose a scalable scheme to tune the qubit frequency by using in situ superconducting circuit, which is based on radio frequency superconducting quantum interference device (rf-SQUID). We demonstrate both theoretically and experimentally that the qubit frequency could be modulated by inputting several single pulses into rf-SQUID. Compared with the traditional scheme, our scheme not only solves the heating problem, but also provides the potential to exponentially reduce the number of cables inside the dilute refrigerator and the room-temperature electronics resource for tuning qubit frequency, which is achieved by a time-division-multiplex (TDM) scheme combining rf-SQUID with switch arrays. With such TDM scheme, the number of cables could be reduced from the usual $\sim 3n$ to $\sim \log_2{(3n)} + 1$ for two-dimensional quantum processors comprising $n$ qubits and $\sim 2n$ couplers. Our work paves the way for large-scale control of superconducting quantum processor., Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures

W49A is a prominent giant molecular cloud (GMC) that exhibits strong star formation activities, yet its structural and kinematic properties remain uncertain. Our study aims to investigate the large-scale structure and kinematics of W49A, and elucidate the role of filaments and hub-filament systems (HFSs) in its star formation activity. We utilized continuum data from Herschel and the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) as well as the molecular lines 12CO (3-2), 13CO (3-2), and C18O (3-2) to identify filaments and HFS structures within W49A. Further analysis focused on the physical properties, kinematics, and mass transport within these structures. Additionally, recombination line emission from the H I/OH/Recombination (THOR) line survey was employed to trace the central H II region and ionized gas. Our findings reveal that W49A comprises one blue-shifted (B-S) HFS and one red-shifted (R-S) HFS, each with multiple filaments and dense hubs. Notably, significant velocity gradients were detected along these filaments, indicative of material transport toward the hubs. High mass accretion rates along the filaments facilitate the formation of massive stars in the HFSs. Furthermore, the presence of V-shaped structures around clumps in position-velocity diagrams suggests ongoing gravitational collapse and local star formation within the filaments. Our results indicate that W49A consists of one R-S HFS and one B-S HFS, and that the material transport from filaments to the hub promotes the formation of massive stars in the hub. These findings underscore the significance of HFSs in shaping the star formation history of W49A., Comment: 19 pages, 22 figures. Accepted to A&A

In order to mitigate the distance reduction attack in Ultra-Wide Band (UWB) ranging, this paper proposes a secure ranging scheme based on a random time-hopping mechanism without redundant signaling overhead. Additionally, a secure ranging strategy is designed for backward compatibility with existing standards such as IEEE 802.15.4a/z, combined with an attack detection scheme. The effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed strategy are demonstrated through both simulation and experimental results in the case of the Ghost Peak attack, as demonstrated by Patrick Leu et al. The random time-hopping mechanism is verified to be capable of reducing the success rate of distance reduction attacks to less than 0.01%, thereby significantly enhancing the security of UWB ranging.

A variety of ranging threats represented by Ghost Peak attack have raised concerns regarding the security performance of Ultra-Wide Band (UWB) systems with the finalization of the IEEE 802.15.4z standard. Based on channel reciprocity, this paper proposes a low complexity attack detection scheme that compares Channel Impulse Response (CIR) features of both ranging sides utilizing an autoencoder with the capability of data compression and feature extraction. Taking Ghost Peak attack as an example, this paper demonstrates the effectiveness, feasibility and generalizability of the proposed attack detection scheme through simulation and experimental validation. The proposed scheme achieves an attack detection success rate of over 99% and can be implemented in current systems at low cost.

The increasing size of large language models (LLMs) traditionally requires low-precision integer formats to meet strict latency and power demands. Yet recently, alternative formats such as Normal Float (NF4) have increased model accuracy at the cost of increased chip area. In this work, we first conduct a large-scale analysis of LLM weights and activations across 30 networks and conclude that most distributions follow a Student's t-distribution. We then derive a new theoretically optimal format, Student Float (SF4), that improves over NF4 across modern LLMs, for example increasing the average accuracy on LLaMA2-7B by 0.76% across tasks. Using this format as a high-accuracy reference, we then propose augmenting E2M1 with two variants of supernormal support for higher model accuracy. Finally, we explore the quality and efficiency frontier across 11 datatypes by evaluating their model accuracy and hardware complexity. We discover a Pareto curve composed of INT4, E2M1, and E2M1 with supernormal support, which offers a continuous tradeoff between model accuracy and chip area. For example, E2M1 with supernormal support increases the accuracy of Phi-2 by up to 2.19% with 1.22% area overhead, enabling more LLM-based applications to be run at four bits. The supporting code is hosted at https://github.com/cornell-zhang/llm-datatypes., Comment: Accepted to ICML 2024

Semantic communication technology is regarded as a method surpassing the Shannon limit of bit transmission, capable of effectively enhancing transmission efficiency. However, current approaches that directly map content to transmission symbols are challenging to deploy in practice, imposing significant limitations on the development of semantic communication. To address this challenge, we propose a hybrid bit and semantic communication system, named HybridBSC, in which encoded semantic information is inserted into bit information for transmission via conventional digital communication systems utilizing same spectrum resources. The system can be easily deployed using existing communication architecture to achieve bit and semantic information transmission. Particularly, we design a semantic insertion and extraction scheme to implement this strategy. Furthermore, we conduct experimental validation based on the pluto-based software defined radio (SDR) platform in a real wireless channel, demonstrating that the proposed strategy can simultaneously transmit semantic and bit information.

This paper discusses the results of the third edition of the Monocular Depth Estimation Challenge (MDEC). The challenge focuses on zero-shot generalization to the challenging SYNS-Patches dataset, featuring complex scenes in natural and indoor settings. As with the previous edition, methods can use any form of supervision, i.e. supervised or self-supervised. The challenge received a total of 19 submissions outperforming the baseline on the test set: 10 among them submitted a report describing their approach, highlighting a diffused use of foundational models such as Depth Anything at the core of their method. The challenge winners drastically improved 3D F-Score performance, from 17.51% to 23.72%., Comment: To appear in CVPRW2024

Recent advances in self-supervised learning, predominantly studied in high-level visual tasks, have been explored in low-level image processing. This paper introduces a novel self-supervised constraint for single image super-resolution, termed SSC-SR. SSC-SR uniquely addresses the divergence in image complexity by employing a dual asymmetric paradigm and a target model updated via exponential moving average to enhance stability. The proposed SSC-SR framework works as a plug-and-play paradigm and can be easily applied to existing SR models. Empirical evaluations reveal that our SSC-SR framework delivers substantial enhancements on a variety of benchmark datasets, achieving an average increase of 0.1 dB over EDSR and 0.06 dB over SwinIR. In addition, extensive ablation studies corroborate the effectiveness of each constituent in our SSC-SR framework. Codes are available at https://github.com/Aitical/SSCSR., Comment: ICME 2024

Recent progress in single-image super-resolution (SISR) has achieved remarkable performance, yet the computational costs of these methods remain a challenge for deployment on resource-constrained devices. Especially for transformer-based methods, the self-attention mechanism in such models brings great breakthroughs while incurring substantial computational costs. To tackle this issue, we introduce the Convolutional Transformer layer (ConvFormer) and the ConvFormer-based Super-Resolution network (CFSR), which offer an effective and efficient solution for lightweight image super-resolution tasks. In detail, CFSR leverages the large kernel convolution as the feature mixer to replace the self-attention module, efficiently modeling long-range dependencies and extensive receptive fields with a slight computational cost. Furthermore, we propose an edge-preserving feed-forward network, simplified as EFN, to obtain local feature aggregation and simultaneously preserve more high-frequency information. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CFSR can achieve an advanced trade-off between computational cost and performance when compared to existing lightweight SR methods. Compared to state-of-the-art methods, e.g. ShuffleMixer, the proposed CFSR achieves 0.39 dB gains on Urban100 dataset for x2 SR task while containing 26% and 31% fewer parameters and FLOPs, respectively. Code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/Aitical/CFSR., Comment: submitting to TIP

Single-pointing observations of NH$_3$ (1,1) and (2,2) were conducted towards 672 Planck Early Release Cold Cores (ECCs) using the Nanshan 26-m radio telescope. Out of these sources, a detection rate of 37% (249 cores) was achieved, with NH$_3$(1,1) hyperfine structure detected in 187 and NH$_3$(2,2) emission lines detected in 76 cores. The detection rate of NH3 is positively correlated with the continuum emission fluxes at a frequency of 857 GHz. Among the observed 672 cores, ~22% have associated stellar and IR objects within the beam size (~2$\arcmin$). This suggests that most of the cores in our sample may be starless. The kinetic temperatures of the cores range from 8.9 to 20.7 K, with an average of 12.3 K, indicating a coupling between gas and dust temperatures. The ammonia column densities range from 0.36 to 6.07$\times10^{15}$ cm$^{-2}$, with a median value of 2.04$\times10^{15}$ cm$^{-2}$. The fractional abundances of ammonia range from 0.3 to 9.7$\times10^{-7}$, with an average of 2.7 $\times10^{-7}$, which is one order of magnitude larger than that of Massive Star-Forming (MSF) regions and Infrared Dark Clouds (IRDCs). The correlation between thermal and non-thermal velocity dispersion of the NH$_3$(1,1) inversion transition indicates the dominance of supersonic non-thermal motions in the dense gas traced by NH$_3$, and the relationship between these two parameters in Planck cold cores is weaker, with lower values observed for both parameters relative to other samples under our examination. The cumulative distribution shapes of line widths in the Planck cold cores closely resemble those of the dense cores found in regions of Cepheus, and Orion L1630 and L1641, with higher values compared to Ophiuchus. A comparison of NH3 line-center velocities with those of $^{13}$CO and C$^{18}$O shows small differences (0.13 and 0.12 km s$^{-1}$ ), suggesting quiescence on small scales., Comment: 29 pages, 13 figures

Recent advancements in language-model-based video understanding have been progressing at a remarkable pace, spurred by the introduction of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, the focus of prior research has been predominantly on devising a projection layer that maps video features to tokens, an approach that is both rudimentary and inefficient. In our study, we introduce a cutting-edge framework, VaQuitA, designed to refine the synergy between video and textual information. At the data level, instead of sampling frames uniformly, we implement a sampling method guided by CLIP-score rankings, which enables a more aligned selection of frames with the given question. At the feature level, we integrate a trainable Video Perceiver alongside a Visual-Query Transformer (abbreviated as VQ-Former), which bolsters the interplay between the input question and the video features. We also discover that incorporating a simple prompt, "Please be critical", into the LLM input can substantially enhance its video comprehension capabilities. Our experimental results indicate that VaQuitA consistently sets a new benchmark for zero-shot video question-answering tasks and is adept at producing high-quality, multi-turn video dialogues with users.

In recent years, Large Language Models (LLM) have emerged as pivotal tools in various applications. However, these models are susceptible to adversarial prompt attacks, where attackers can carefully curate input strings that mislead LLMs into generating incorrect or undesired outputs. Previous work has revealed that with relatively simple yet effective attacks based on discrete optimization, it is possible to generate adversarial prompts that bypass moderation and alignment of the models. This vulnerability to adversarial prompts underscores a significant concern regarding the robustness and reliability of LLMs. Our work aims to address this concern by introducing a novel approach to detecting adversarial prompts at a token level, leveraging the LLM's capability to predict the next token's probability. We measure the degree of the model's perplexity, where tokens predicted with high probability are considered normal, and those exhibiting high perplexity are flagged as adversarial. Additionaly, our method also integrates context understanding by incorporating neighboring token information to encourage the detection of contiguous adversarial prompt sequences. To this end, we design two algorithms for adversarial prompt detection: one based on optimization techniques and another on Probabilistic Graphical Models (PGM). Both methods are equipped with efficient solving methods, ensuring efficient adversarial prompt detection. Our token-level detection result can be visualized as heatmap overlays on the text sequence, allowing for a clearer and more intuitive representation of which part of the text may contain adversarial prompts.

Safety alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) can be compromised with manual jailbreak attacks and (automatic) adversarial attacks. Recent studies suggest that defending against these attacks is possible: adversarial attacks generate unlimited but unreadable gibberish prompts, detectable by perplexity-based filters; manual jailbreak attacks craft readable prompts, but their limited number due to the necessity of human creativity allows for easy blocking. In this paper, we show that these solutions may be too optimistic. We introduce AutoDAN, an interpretable, gradient-based adversarial attack that merges the strengths of both attack types. Guided by the dual goals of jailbreak and readability, AutoDAN optimizes and generates tokens one by one from left to right, resulting in readable prompts that bypass perplexity filters while maintaining high attack success rates. Notably, these prompts, generated from scratch using gradients, are interpretable and diverse, with emerging strategies commonly seen in manual jailbreak attacks. They also generalize to unforeseen harmful behaviors and transfer to black-box LLMs better than their unreadable counterparts when using limited training data or a single proxy model. Furthermore, we show the versatility of AutoDAN by automatically leaking system prompts using a customized objective. Our work offers a new way to red-team LLMs and understand jailbreak mechanisms via interpretability., Comment: Version 2 updates: Added comparison of three more evaluation methods and their reliability check using human labeling. Added results for jailbreaking Llama2 (individual behavior) and included complexity and hyperparameter analysis. Revised objectives for prompt leaking. Other minor changes made

A greedy randomized augmented Kaczmarz (GRAK) method was proposed in [Z.-Z. Bai and W.-T. WU, SIAM J. Sci. Comput., 43 (2021), pp. A3892-A3911] for large and sparse inconsistent linear systems. However, one has to construct two new index sets via computing residual vector with respect to the augmented linear system in each iteration. Thus, the computational overhead of this method is large for extremely large-scale problems. Moreover, there is no reliable stopping criterion for this method. In this work, we are interested in solving large-scale sparse or dense inconsistent linear systems, and try to enhance the numerical performance of the GRAK method. First, we propose an accelerated greedy randomized augmented Kaczmarz method. Theoretical analysis indicates that it converges faster than the GRAK method under very weak assumptions. Second, in order to further release the overhead, we propose a semi-randomized augmented Kaczmarz method with simple random sampling. Third, to the best of our knowledge, there are no practical stopping criteria for all the randomized Kaczmarz-type methods till now. To fill-in this gap, we introduce a practical stopping criterion for Kaczmarz-type methods, and show its rationality from a theoretical point of view. Numerical experiments are performed on both real-world and synthetic data sets, which demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed methods and the effectiveness of our stopping criterion.

This study presents a general outline of the Qitai radio telescope (QTT) project. Qitai, the site of the telescope, is a county of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region of China, located in the east Tianshan Mountains at an elevation of about 1800 m. The QTT is a fully steerable, Gregorian type telescope with a standard parabolic main reflector of 110 m diameter. The QTT has adopted an um-brella support, homology-symmetric lightweight design. The main reflector is active so that the deformation caused by gravity can be corrected. The structural design aims to ultimately allow high-sensitivity observations from 150 MHz up to 115 GHz. To satisfy the requirements for early scientific goals, the QTT will be equipped with ultra-wideband receivers and large field-of-view mul-ti-beam receivers. A multi-function signal-processing system based on RFSoC and GPU processor chips will be developed. These will enable the QTT to operate in pulsar, spectral line, continuum and Very Long Baseline Interferometer (VLBI) observing modes. Electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) and radio frequency interference (RFI) control techniques are adopted throughout the system design. The QTT will form a world-class observational platform for the detection of low-frequency (nanoHertz) gravitational waves through pulsar timing array (PTA) techniques, pulsar surveys, the discovery of binary black-hole systems, and exploring dark matter and the origin of life in the universe., Comment: 12 pages, 11 figures, accepted for publication in Science China Physics, Mechanics & Astronomy