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Visual features, whose description often relies on the local intensity and gradient direction, have found wide applications in robot navigation and localization in recent years. However, the extraction of visual features is usually disturbed by the variation of illumination conditions, making it challenging for real-world applications. Previous works have addressed this issue by establishing datasets with variations in illumination conditions, but can be costly and time-consuming. This paper proposes a design procedure for an illumination-robust feature extractor, where the recently developed relightable 3D reconstruction techniques are adopted for rapid and direct data generation with varying illumination conditions. A self-supervised framework is proposed for extracting features with advantages in repeatability for key points and similarity for descriptors across good and bad illumination conditions. Experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method for robust feature extraction. Ablation studies also indicate the effectiveness of the self-supervised framework design.

Continuous electroencephalography (EEG) signals are widely used in affective brain-computer interface (aBCI) applications. However, not all continuously collected EEG signals are relevant or meaningful to the task at hand (e.g., wondering thoughts). On the other hand, manually labeling the relevant parts is nearly impossible due to varying engagement patterns across different tasks and individuals. Therefore, effectively and efficiently identifying the important parts from continuous EEG recordings is crucial for downstream BCI tasks, as it directly impacts the accuracy and reliability of the results. In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised deep reinforcement learning framework, called Emotion-Agent, to automatically identify relevant and informative emotional moments from continuous EEG signals. Specifically, Emotion-Agent involves unsupervised deep reinforcement learning combined with a heuristic algorithm. We first use the heuristic algorithm to perform an initial global search and form prototype representations of the EEG signals, which facilitates the efficient exploration of the signal space and identify potential regions of interest. Then, we design distribution-prototype reward functions to estimate the interactions between samples and prototypes, ensuring that the identified parts are both relevant and representative of the underlying emotional states. Emotion-Agent is trained using Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) to achieve stable and efficient convergence. Our experiments compare the performance with and without Emotion-Agent. The results demonstrate that selecting relevant and informative emotional parts before inputting them into downstream tasks enhances the accuracy and reliability of aBCI applications., Comment: 11 pages, 4 figures, 4 tables, submitted to AAAI 2025

Wide field of view and light weight optics are critical for advanced eyewear, with applications in augmented/virtual reality and night vision. Conventional refractive lenses are often stacked to correct aberrations at wide field of view, leading to limited performance and increased size and weight. In particular, simultaneously achieving wide field of view and large aperture for light collection is desirable but challenging to realize in a compact form-factor. Here, we demonstrate a wide field of view (greater than 60$^\circ$) meta-optic doublet eyepiece with an entrance aperture of 2.1 cm. At the design wavelength of 633 nm, the meta-optic doublet achieves comparable performance to a refractive lens-based eyepiece system. This meta-doublet eyepiece illustrates the potential for meta-optics to play an important role in the development of high-quality monochrome near-eye display and night vision systems.

The integration of human emotions into multimedia applications shows great potential for enriching user experiences and enhancing engagement across various digital platforms. Unlike traditional methods such as questionnaires, facial expressions, and voice analysis, brain signals offer a more direct and objective understanding of emotional states. However, in the field of electroencephalography (EEG)-based emotion recognition, previous studies have primarily concentrated on training and testing EEG models within a single dataset, overlooking the variability across different datasets. This oversight leads to significant performance degradation when applying EEG models to cross-corpus scenarios. In this study, we propose a novel Joint Contrastive learning framework with Feature Alignment (JCFA) to address cross-corpus EEG-based emotion recognition. The JCFA model operates in two main stages. In the pre-training stage, a joint domain contrastive learning strategy is introduced to characterize generalizable time-frequency representations of EEG signals, without the use of labeled data. It extracts robust time-based and frequency-based embeddings for each EEG sample, and then aligns them within a shared latent time-frequency space. In the fine-tuning stage, JCFA is refined in conjunction with downstream tasks, where the structural connections among brain electrodes are considered. The model capability could be further enhanced for the application in emotion detection and interpretation. Extensive experimental results on two well-recognized emotional datasets show that the proposed JCFA model achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance, outperforming the second-best method by an average accuracy increase of 4.09% in cross-corpus EEG-based emotion recognition tasks.

Renewable energy is important for achieving carbon neutrality goal. With the great success of Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT in automatic content generation, LLMs are playing an increasingly important role. However, there has not been a specially designed LLM for renewable energy. Meanwhile, there has not been any dataset of renewable energy for training LLMs. Therefore, this paper published the first open-source Renewable Energy Academic Paper (REAP) dataset for non-commercial LLM research of renewable energy. REAP dataset is collected through searching the title and abstract of 1,168,970 academic literatures from Web of Science. Based on REAP dataset, HouYi model, the first LLM for renewable energy, is developed through finetuning general LLMs. HouYi demonstrated powerful academic paper paragraph generation ability in renewable energy field. Experiments show that its ability to generate academic papers on renewable energy is comparable to ChatGPT, slightly outperforms Claude, ERNIE Bot and SparkDesk, and significantly outperforms open-source LLaMA-13B model.

A broad range of imaging and sensing technologies in the infrared require large Field-of-View (FoV) operation. To achieve this, traditional refractive systems often employ multiple elements to compensate for aberrations, which leads to excess size, weight, and cost. For many applications, including night vision eye-wear, air-borne surveillance, and autonomous navigation for unmanned aerial vehicles, size and weight are highly constrained. Sub-wavelength diffractive optics, also known as meta-optics, can dramatically reduce the size, weight, and cost of these imaging systems, as meta-optics are significantly thinner and lighter than traditional refractive lenses. Here, we demonstrate 80$^\circ$ FoV thermal imaging in the long-wavelength infrared regime (8-12 $\mu$m) using an all-silicon meta-optic with an entrance aperture and lens focal length of 1 cm., Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures

The scalability of optical addressing is one of the key challenges for the large-scale trapped-ion quantum computing (QC). Metasurfaces is a promising solution due to excellent optical performance, integration, and miniaturization. Here, we propose and numerically demonstrate a design of integrated scalable metalens array (ISMA) working in the UV 350nm range for optical addressing. These ISMAs can focus the collimated individual addressing beams array into diffraction-limited spots array, featuring crosstalk below 0.82%, focusing efficiency as high as 36.90%. For various applications, the x-polarized, polarization-insensitive and right-handed circularly polarized ISMA are designed. The design proposed in this paper can also find applications in optical trapping., Comment: 7 pages,3 figures