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Product images (e.g., a phone) can be used to elicit a diverse set of consumer-reported features expressed through language, including surface-level perceptual attributes (e.g., "white") and more complex ones, like perceived utility (e.g., "battery"). The cognitive complexity of elicited language reveals the nature of cognitive processes and the context required to understand them; cognitive complexity also predicts consumers' subsequent choices. This work offers an approach for measuring and validating the cognitive complexity of human language elicited by product images, providing a tool for understanding the cognitive processes of human as well as virtual respondents simulated by Large Language Models (LLMs). We also introduce a large dataset that includes diverse descriptive labels for product images, including human-rated complexity. We demonstrate that human-rated cognitive complexity can be approximated using a set of natural language models that, combined, roughly capture the complexity construct. Moreover, this approach is minimally supervised and scalable, even in use cases with limited human assessment of complexity.

Realization of quantum computing requires the development of high-fidelity quantum gates that are resilient to decoherence, control errors, and environmental noise. While non-adiabatic holonomic quantum computation (NHQC) offers a promising approach, it often necessitates system-specific adjustments. This work presents a versatile scheme for implementing NHQC gates across multiple qubit systems by optimizing multiple degrees of freedom using a genetic algorithm. The scheme is applied to three qubit systems: ensemble rare-earth ion (REI) qubits, single REI qubits, and superconducting transmon qubits. Numerical simulations demonstrate that the optimized gate operations are robust against frequency detuning and induce low off-resonant excitations, making the scheme effective for advancing fault-tolerant quantum computation across various platforms., Comment: 20 pages, 11 figures, Journal of the Optical Society of America B

Treatment heterogeneity is ubiquitous in many areas, motivating practitioners to search for the optimal policy that maximizes the expected outcome based on individualized characteristics. However, most existing policy learning methods rely on weighting-based approaches, which may suffer from high instability in observational studies. To enhance the robustness of the estimated policy, we propose a matching-based estimator of the policy improvement upon a randomized baseline. After correcting the conditional bias, we learn the optimal policy by maximizing the estimate over a policy class. We derive a non-asymptotic high probability bound for the regret of the learned policy and show that the convergence rate is almost $1/\sqrt{n}$. The competitive finite sample performance of the proposed method is demonstrated in extensive simulation studies and a real data application.

In recent years, there is a growing body of causal inference literature focusing on covariate balancing methods. These methods eliminate observed confounding by equalizing covariate moments between the treated and control groups. The validity of covariate balancing relies on an implicit assumption that all covariates are accurately measured, which is frequently violated in observational studies. Nevertheless, the impact of measurement error on covariate balancing is unclear, and there is no existing work on balancing mismeasured covariates adequately. In this article, we show that naively ignoring measurement error reversely increases the magnitude of covariate imbalance and induces bias to treatment effect estimation. We then propose a class of measurement error correction strategies for the existing covariate balancing methods. Theoretically, we show that these strategies successfully recover balance for all covariates, and eliminate bias of treatment effect estimation. We assess the proposed correction methods in simulation studies and real data analysis.

Vocoders reconstruct speech waveforms from acoustic features and play a pivotal role in modern TTS systems. Frequent-domain GAN vocoders like Vocos and APNet2 have recently seen rapid advancements, outperforming time-domain models in inference speed while achieving comparable audio quality. However, these frequency-domain vocoders suffer from large parameter sizes, thus introducing extra memory burden. Inspired by PriorGrad and SpecGrad, we employ pseudo-inverse to estimate the amplitude spectrum as the initialization roughly. This simple initialization significantly mitigates the parameter demand for vocoder. Based on APNet2 and our streamlined Amplitude prediction branch, we propose our FreeV, compared with its counterpart APNet2, our FreeV achieves 1.8 times inference speed improvement with nearly half parameters. Meanwhile, our FreeV outperforms APNet2 in resynthesis quality, marking a step forward in pursuing real-time, high-fidelity speech synthesis. Code and checkpoints is available at: https://github.com/BakerBunker/FreeV, Comment: Accepted by InterSpeech 2024; 5 pages, 5 figures

There have been apparently conflicting claims over the syntax-semantics relationship in child acquisition. However, few of them have assessed the child's path toward the acquisition of recursive relative clauses (RRCs). The authors of the current paper did experiments to investigate 3- to 11-year-olds' most-structured elicited production of eight Mandarin RRCs in a 4 (syntactic types)*2 (semantic conditions) design. The four syntactic types were RRCs with a subject-gapped RC embedded in an object-gapped RC (SORRCs), RRCs with an object-gapped RC embedded in another object-gapped RC (OORRCs), RRCs with an object-gapped RC embedded in a subject-gapped RC (OSRRCs), and RRCs with a subject-gapped RC embedded in another subject-gapped RC (SSRRCs). Each syntactic type was put in two conditions differing in internal semantics: irreversible internal semantics (IIS) and reversible internal semantics (RIS). For example, "the balloon that [the girl that _ eats the banana] holds _" is SORRCs in the IIS condition; "the monkey that [the dog that _ bites the pig] hits_" is SORRCs in the RIS condition. For each target, the participants were provided with a speech-visual stimulus constructing a condition of irreversible external semantics (IES). The results showed that SSRRCs, OSRRCs and SORRCs in the IIS-IES condition were produced two years earlier than their counterparts in the RIS-IES condition. Thus, a 2-stage development path is proposed: the language acquisition device starts with the interface between (irreversible) syntax and IIS, and ends with the interface between syntax and IES, both abiding by the syntax-semantic interface principle.

Classical data with graph structure always exists when dealing with many real-world problems. In parallel, quantum data with graph structure also need to be investigated since they are always produced by common quantum data sources.In this paper, we build a hybrid quantum-classical neural network with deep residual learning (Res-HQCNN) with graph-structured quantum data. Specifically, based on this special graph-structured quantum data, we first find suitable cost functions for Res-HQCNN model to learn semisupervised quantum data with graphs. Then, we present the training algorithm of Res-HQCNN for graph-structured training data in detail. Next, in order to show the learning ability of Res-HQCNN,we perform extensive experiments to show that the using of information about graph structures in quantum data can lead to better learning efficiency compared with the state-of-the-art model. At the same time, we also design comparable experiments to explain that the using of residual block structure can help deeper quantum neural networks learn graph-structured quantum data faster and better., Comment: 30 pages,9 figures

Nature is often used to inspire solutions for complex engineering problems, but achieving its full potential is challenging due to difficulties in discovering relevant analogies and synthesizing from them. Here, we present an end-to-end system, BioSpark, that generates biological-analogical mechanisms and provides an interactive interface to comprehend and synthesize from them. BioSpark pipeline starts with a small seed set of mechanisms and expands it using an iteratively constructed taxonomic hierarchies, overcoming data sparsity in manual expert curation and limited conceptual diversity in automated analogy generation via LLMs. The interface helps designers with recognizing and understanding relevant analogs to design problems using four main interaction features. We evaluate the biological-analogical mechanism generation pipeline and showcase the value of BioSpark through case studies. We end with discussion and implications for future work in this area., Comment: NeurIPS 2023 Workshop on Machine Learning for Creativity and Design

Generative AI (GenAI) models excel in their ability to recognize patterns in existing data and generate new and unexpected content. Recent advances have motivated applications of GenAI tools (e.g., Stable Diffusion, ChatGPT) to professional practice across industries, including product design. While these generative capabilities may seem enticing on the surface, certain barriers limit their practical application for real-world use in industry settings. In this position paper, we articulate and situate these barriers within two phases of the product design process, namely "getting the right design" and "getting the design right," and propose a research agenda to stimulate discussions around opportunities for realizing the full potential of GenAI tools in product design.

One primary goal of precision medicine is to estimate the individualized treatment rules (ITRs) that optimize patients' health outcomes based on individual characteristics. Health studies with multiple treatments are commonly seen in practice. However, most existing ITR estimation methods were developed for the studies with binary treatments. Many require that the outcomes are fully observed. In this paper, we propose a matching-based machine learning method to estimate the optimal ITRs in observational studies with multiple treatments when the outcomes are fully observed or right-censored. We establish theoretical property for the proposed method. It is compared with the existing inverse probability weighting-based ITR estimation methods in simulation studies and a hepatocellular carcinoma study.

We demonstrate a closed-loop light-pulse atom interferometer inertial sensor that can realize continuous decoupled measurements of acceleration and rotation rate. The sensor operates with double-loop atom interferometers, which share the same Raman light pulses in a spatially separated Mach-Zehnder configuration and use continuous cold atomic beams propagating in opposite directions from two 2D$^+$ magneto-optical trappings. Acceleration and the rotation rate are decoupled and simultaneously measured by the sum and difference of dual atom-interferometer signals, respectively. The sensitivities of inertial measurements are also increased to be approximately 1.86 times higher than that of a single atom interferometer. The acceleration phase shift is compensated in real time by phase-locking these interferometers via the Raman laser phases from the sum interferometer signal, and the gyroscope perfomance is improved. We achieve long-term stabilities of $6.1 \ \mu g$ and 840 nrad/s for the acceleration and the rotation rate, respectively, using a short interrogation time of 0.87ms (interference area $A=0.097$ mm$^2$). This work provides a building block for an atomic interferometer based inertial measurement unit for use in field applications that require a high data-rate and high stability., Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures

The thermodynamics of the BTZ black holes are revisited with variable Newton constant. A new pair of conjugated variables, the central charge $C$ and the chemical potential $\mu$, is introduced as thermodynamic variables. The first law of thermodynamics and the Euler relation, instead of the Smarr relation in the extended phase space formalism, are matched perfectly in this formalism. Compatible with standard extensive thermodynamics, the black hole mass is verified to be a first order homogeneous function of the related extensive variables, and restores the role of internal energy. In addition, the heat capacity has also resulted in a first order homogeneous function in this formalism as we expected, and an asymptotic behavior in high temperature limit is shown intriguingly. The non-negatively of heat capacity indicates that the rotating and charged BTZ black holes are thermodynamically stable., Comment: 16 pages, no figure

Software-defined radio dongles are small and inexpensive receivers well known to amateur radio enthusiasts. When connected to an antenna, they enable monitoring of a wide range of the radio spectrum by conditioning the input signal and transferring a downconverted version of it to a personal computer for software processing. Here, we employ a composite of two such dongles, interfaced with codes written in MATLAB and GNU Radio, as a measuring instrument to study the flexural vibrations of a few-layer graphene nanomechanical resonator. Instead of an antenna, we connect the dongles to the split output of a photodetector used to detect vibrations optically. We first perform a quantitative analysis of the dynamics of the first vibrational mode. We then measure the response of the first two vibrational modes in parallel. To illustrate our technique, we detect changes in the vibrational amplitude of both modes induced by periodic strain modulation with a delay of $\approx1$ ms between measurements. Last, we show that our software-based instrument can be employed to demodulate human voice encoded in the vibrations of our resonator. For parallel measurements of several frequency channels, and provided that the input signal is not too weak, our composite system may offer an alternative to the use of multiple lock-in amplifiers or multiple spectrum analyzers, with the distinct advantage of being cost-effective per frequency channel., Comment: 16 pages, 11 figures