Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Adaptive Integrate-and-Fire Time Encoding Machine

An integrate-and-fire time-encoding machine (IF-TEM) is an effective asynchronous sampler that translates amplitude information into non-uniform time sequences. In this work, we propose a novel Adaptive IF-TEM (AIF-TEM) approach. This design dynamically adjusts the TEM's sensitivity to changes in the input signal's amplitude and frequency in real-time. We provide a comprehensive analysis of AIF-TEM's oversampling and distortion properties. By the adaptive adjustments, AIF-TEM as we show can achieve significant performance improvements in practical finite regime, in terms of sampling rate-distortion. We demonstrate empirically that in the scenarios tested AIF-TEM outperforms classical IF-TEM and traditional Nyquist (i.e., periodic) sampling methods for band-limited signals. In terms of Mean Square Error (MSE), the reduction reaches at least 12dB (fixing the oversampling rate).
Recent Advances, Applications, and Open Challenges in Machine Learning for Health: Reflections from Research Roundtables at ML4H 2023 Symposium

The third ML4H symposium was held in person on December 10, 2023, in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA. The symposium included research roundtable sessions to foster discussions between participants and senior researchers on timely and relevant topics for the \ac{ML4H} community. Encouraged by the successful virtual roundtables in the previous year, we organized eleven in-person roundtables and four virtual roundtables at ML4H 2022. The organization of the research roundtables at the conference involved 17 Senior Chairs and 19 Junior Chairs across 11 tables. Each roundtable session included invited senior chairs (with substantial experience in the field), junior chairs (responsible for facilitating the discussion), and attendees from diverse backgrounds with interest in the session's topic. Herein we detail the organization process and compile takeaways from these roundtable discussions, including recent advances, applications, and open challenges for each topic. We conclude with a summary and lessons learned across all roundtables. This document serves as a comprehensive review paper, summarizing the recent advancements in machine learning for healthcare as contributed by foremost researchers in the field.
What do we learn from inverting CLIP models?

We employ an inversion-based approach to examine CLIP models. Our examination reveals that inverting CLIP models results in the generation of images that exhibit semantic alignment with the specified target prompts. We leverage these inverted images to gain insights into various aspects of CLIP models, such as their ability to blend concepts and inclusion of gender biases. We notably observe instances of NSFW (Not Safe For Work) images during model inversion. This phenomenon occurs even for semantically innocuous prompts, like"a beautiful landscape,"as well as for prompts involving the names of celebrities.
Quantum Computation by Cooling

Adiabatic quantum computation is a paradigmatic model aiming to solve a computational problem by finding the many-body ground state encapsulating the solution. However, its use of an adiabatic evolution depending on the spectral gap of an intricate many-body Hamiltonian makes its analysis daunting. While it is plausible to directly cool the final gapped system of the adiabatic evolution instead, the analysis of such a scheme on a general ground is missing. Here, we propose a specific Hamiltonian model for this purpose. The scheme is inspired by cavity cooling, involving the emulation of a zero-temperature reservoir. Repeated discarding of ancilla reservoir qubits extracts the entropy of the system, driving the system toward its ground state. At the same time, the measurement of the discarded qubits hints at the energy level structure of the system as a return. We show that quantum computation based on this cooling procedure is equivalent in its computational power to the one based on quantum circuits. We then exemplify the scheme with a few illustrative use cases for combinatorial optimization problems. In the first example, the cooling is free from any local energy minima, reducing the scheme to Grover's search algorithm with a few improvements. In the second example, the cooling suffers from abundant local energy minima. To circumvent this, we implant a mechanism in the Hamiltonian so that the population trapped in the local minima can tunnel out by high-order transitions. We support this idea with a numerical simulation for a particular combinatorial optimization problem. We also discuss its application to preparing quantum many-body ground states, arguing that the spectral gap is a crucial factor in determining the time scale of the cooling.
STUDY OF THE EVOLUTION OF CLAY MINERALS IN PADDY (Pa) AND NON-PADDY (NPa) SOILS ON A TOPOSEQUENCE IN GHAEMSHAHR CITY, MAZANDARAN PROVINCE

This research was carried out to investigate the effect of rice cultivation and topography on the development of soil clay minerals in Ghaemshahr City in Mazandaran province. A total of 10 profiles were selected on a toposequence– five profiles with rice fields and five with rangeland land uses. The soils studied were classified as Inceptisols and Mollisols. The results of clay mineralogy show that the amount of smectite is higher in paddy (Pa) soils, while the amount of vermiculite is higher in non-paddy (NPa) soils. The higher presence of smectite in rice fields is probably due to the neoformation process. Also, smectite was found to be higher in lower regions with shallow groundwater. The cation exchange capacity, clay content, and bulk density are higher in the Pa soils. Rice cultivation increases the amount of iron extracted in oxalate (Feo) form and decreases the amount of iron extracted in dithionate (Fed) form. Also, during the toposequence from lower areas to areas with higher altitudes, the amount of Fe dithionate increased while Fe oxalate decreased respectively. The amount of pedogenic iron (Fed) has a direct correlation with the degree of evolution of the soil; this amount increased during the toposequence from low to higher regions.
Tsallis Entropy Regularization for Linearly Solvable MDP and Linear Quadratic Regulator

Shannon entropy regularization is widely adopted in optimal control due to its ability to promote exploration and enhance robustness, e.g., maximum entropy reinforcement learning known as Soft Actor-Critic. In this paper, Tsallis entropy, which is a one-parameter extension of Shannon entropy, is used for the regularization of linearly solvable MDP and linear quadratic regulators. We derive the solution for these problems and demonstrate its usefulness in balancing between exploration and sparsity of the obtained control law.
Search Intenion Network for Personalized Query Auto-Completion in E-Commerce

Query Auto-Completion(QAC), as an important part of the modern search engine, plays a key role in complementing user queries and helping them refine their search intentions.Today's QAC systems in real-world scenarios face two major challenges:1)intention equivocality(IE): during the user's typing process,the prefix often contains a combination of characters and subwords, which makes the current intention ambiguous and difficult to model.2)intention transfer (IT):previous works make personalized recommendations based on users' historical sequences, but ignore the search intention transfer.However, the current intention extracted from prefix may be contrary to the historical preferences.
Mesoscale simulations of diffusion and sedimentation in shape-anisotropic nanoparticle suspensions

We determine the long-time self-diffusion coefficient and sedimentation coefficient for suspensions of nanoparticles with anisotropic shapes (octahedra, cubes, tetrahedra, and spherocylinders) as a function of nanoparticle concentration using mesoscale simulations. We use a discrete particle model for the nanoparticles, and we account for solvent-mediated hydrodynamic interactions between nanoparticles using the multiparticle collision dynamics method. Our simulations are compared to theoretical predictions and experimental data from existing literature, demonstrating good agreement in the majority of cases. Further, we find that the self-diffusion coefficient of the regular polyhedral shapes can be estimated from that of a sphere whose diameter is average of their inscribed and circumscribed sphere diameters.
Low-rank matrix estimation via nonconvex spectral regularized methods in errors-in-variables matrix regression

High-dimensional matrix regression has been studied in various aspects, such as statistical properties, computational efficiency and application to specific instances including multivariate regression, system identification and matrix compressed sensing. Current studies mainly consider the idealized case that the covariate matrix is obtained without noise, while the more realistic scenario that the covariates may always be corrupted with noise or missing data has received little attention. We consider the general errors-in-variables matrix regression model and proposed a unified framework for low-rank estimation based on nonconvex spectral regularization. Then in the statistical aspect, recovery bounds for any stationary points are provided to achieve statistical consistency. In the computational aspect, the proximal gradient method is applied to solve the nonconvex optimization problem and is proved to converge in polynomial time. Consequences for specific matrix compressed sensing models with additive noise and missing data are obtained via verifying corresponding regularity conditions. Finally, the performance of the proposed nonconvex estimation method is illustrated by numerical experiments.
A Robust Audio Deepfake Detection System via Multi-View Feature

With the advancement of generative modeling techniques, synthetic human speech becomes increasingly indistinguishable from real, and tricky challenges are elicited for the audio deepfake detection (ADD) system. In this paper, we exploit audio features to improve the generalizability of ADD systems. Investigation of the ADD task performance is conducted over a broad range of audio features, including various handcrafted features and learning-based features. Experiments show that learning-based audio features pretrained on a large amount of data generalize better than hand-crafted features on out-of-domain scenarios. Subsequently, we further improve the generalizability of the ADD system using proposed multi-feature approaches to incorporate complimentary information from features of different views. The model trained on ASV2019 data achieves an equal error rate of 24.27\% on the In-the-Wild dataset.
SARD: A Human-AI Collaborative Story Generation

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has ushered in a new era for storytellers, providing a powerful tool to ignite creativity and explore uncharted narrative territories. As technology continues to advance, the synergy between human creativity and AI-generated content holds the potential to redefine the landscape of storytelling. In this work, we propose SARD, a drag-and-drop visual interface for generating a multi-chapter story using large language models. Our evaluation of the usability of SARD and its creativity support shows that while node-based visualization of the narrative may help writers build a mental model, it exerts unnecessary mental overhead to the writer and becomes a source of distraction as the story becomes more elaborated. We also found that AI generates stories that are less lexically diverse, irrespective of the complexity of the story. We identified some patterns and limitations of our tool that can guide the development of future human-AI co-writing tools.
Emotion Granularity from Text: An Aggregate-Level Indicator of Mental Health

We are united in how emotions are central to shaping our experiences; and yet, individuals differ greatly in how we each identify, categorize, and express emotions. In psychology, variation in the ability of individuals to differentiate between emotion concepts is called emotion granularity (determined through self-reports of one's emotions). High emotion granularity has been linked with better mental and physical health; whereas low emotion granularity has been linked with maladaptive emotion regulation strategies and poor health outcomes. In this work, we propose computational measures of emotion granularity derived from temporally-ordered speaker utterances in social media (in lieu of self-reports that suffer from various biases). We then investigate the effectiveness of such text-derived measures of emotion granularity in functioning as markers of various mental health conditions (MHCs). We establish baseline measures of emotion granularity derived from textual utterances, and show that, at an aggregate level, emotion granularities are significantly lower for people self-reporting as having an MHC than for the control population. This paves the way towards a better understanding of the MHCs, and specifically the role emotions play in our well-being.
PI-AstroDeconv: A Physics-Informed Unsupervised Learning Method for Astronomical Image Deconvolution

In the imaging process of an astronomical telescope, the deconvolution of its beam or Point Spread Function (PSF) is a crucial task. However, deconvolution presents a classical and challenging inverse computation problem. In scenarios where the beam or PSF is complex or inaccurately measured, such as in interferometric arrays and certain radio telescopes, the resultant blurry images are often challenging to interpret visually or analyze using traditional physical detection methods. We argue that traditional methods frequently lack specific prior knowledge, thereby leading to suboptimal performance. To address this issue and achieve image deconvolution and reconstruction, we propose an unsupervised network architecture that incorporates prior physical information. The network adopts an encoder-decoder structure while leveraging the telescope's PSF as prior knowledge. During network training, we introduced accelerated Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) convolution to enable efficient processing of high-resolution input images and PSFs. We explored various classic regression networks, including autoencoder (AE) and U-Net, and conducted a comprehensive performance evaluation through comparative analysis.
Numerical studies of triangulated vesicles with anisotropic membrane inclusions

In this study, we implement the deviatoric curvature model to examine dynamically triangulated surfaces with anisotropic membrane inclusions. The Monte-Carlo numerical scheme is devised to not only minimize the total bending energy of the membrane but also the in-plane nematic order of the inclusions by considering the mismatch between the curvature of the membrane and the intrinsic curvature of the inclusion. Neighboring inclusions can either attract with nearest-neighbor interaction or with a nematic interaction derived from liquid crystal theory. Orientational order determines whether vesicles fully covered with inclusions result in bulbs connected by necks or long tubes. Remarkably, when inclusions on vesicles with no vacancies interact non-nematically, a spontaneous local order can lead to a bulb transition which may have implications in cell or organelle division. Furthermore we find that average nematic order is inversely proportional to the number of thin necks formed in the vesicles. Our method shows good convergence and is suitable for further upgrades, for example to vesicles constrained by volume.
Unleashing Graph Partitioning for Large-Scale Nearest Neighbor Search

We consider the fundamental problem of decomposing a large-scale approximate nearest neighbor search (ANNS) problem into smaller sub-problems. The goal is to partition the input points into neighborhood-preserving shards, so that the nearest neighbors of any point are contained in only a few shards. When a query arrives, a routing algorithm is used to identify the shards which should be searched for its nearest neighbors. This approach forms the backbone of distributed ANNS, where the dataset is so large that it must be split across multiple machines. In this paper, we design simple and highly efficient routing methods, and prove strong theoretical guarantees on their performance. A crucial characteristic of our routing algorithms is that they are inherently modular, and can be used with any partitioning method. This addresses a key drawback of prior approaches, where the routing algorithms are inextricably linked to their associated partitioning method. In particular, our new routing methods enable the use of balanced graph partitioning, which is a high-quality partitioning method without a naturally associated routing algorithm. Thus, we provide the first methods for routing using balanced graph partitioning that are extremely fast to train, admit low latency, and achieve high recall. We provide a comprehensive evaluation of our full partitioning and routing pipeline on billion-scale datasets, where it outperforms existing scalable partitioning methods by significant margins, achieving up to 2.14x higher QPS at 90% recall$@10$ than the best competitor.
Efficient sparse probability measures recovery via Bregman gradient

This paper presents an algorithm tailored for the efficient recovery of sparse probability measures incorporating $\ell_0$-sparse regularization within the probability simplex constraint. Employing the Bregman proximal gradient method, our algorithm achieves sparsity by explicitly solving underlying subproblems. We rigorously establish the convergence properties of the algorithm, showcasing its capacity to converge to a local minimum with a convergence rate of $O(1/k)$ under mild assumptions. To substantiate the efficacy of our algorithm, we conduct numerical experiments, offering a compelling demonstration of its efficiency in recovering sparse probability measures.
UniDoorManip: Learning Universal Door Manipulation Policy Over Large-scale and Diverse Door Manipulation Environments

Learning a universal manipulation policy encompassing doors with diverse categories, geometries and mechanisms, is crucial for future embodied agents to effectively work in complex and broad real-world scenarios. Due to the limited datasets and unrealistic simulation environments, previous works fail to achieve good performance across various doors. In this work, we build a novel door manipulation environment reflecting different realistic door manipulation mechanisms, and further equip this environment with a large-scale door dataset covering 6 door categories with hundreds of door bodies and handles, making up thousands of different door instances. Additionally, to better emulate real-world scenarios, we introduce a mobile robot as the agent and use the partial and occluded point cloud as the observation, which are not considered in previous works while possessing significance for real-world implementations. To learn a universal policy over diverse doors, we propose a novel framework disentangling the whole manipulation process into three stages, and integrating them by training in the reversed order of inference. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our designs and demonstrate our framework's strong performance. Code, data and videos are avaible on https://unidoormanip.github. io/.
Machine Learning Assisted Adjustment Boosts Inferential Efficiency of Randomized Controlled Trials

In this work, we proposed a novel inferential procedure assisted by machine learning based adjustment for randomized control trials. The method was developed under the Rosenbaum's framework of exact tests in randomized experiments with covariate adjustments. Through extensive simulation experiments, we showed the proposed method can robustly control the type I error and can boost the inference efficiency for a randomized controlled trial (RCT). This advantage was further demonstrated in a real world example. The simplicity and robustness of the proposed method makes it a competitive candidate as a routine inference procedure for RCTs, especially when the number of baseline covariates is large, and when nonlinear association or interaction among covariates is expected. Its application may remarkably reduce the required sample size and cost of RCTs, such as phase III clinical trials.
Time reversal invariant topological 1D and 2D superconductors: doubling the Sau-Luchtin-Tewari-Sarma and Oreg-Refael-von Oppen proposals

In this work we present a doubled version of the Sau-Luchtin-Tewari-Sarma and Oreg-Refael-von Open proposals thereby obtaining time reversal invariant p-wave superconductivity in both 1D and 2D. This construction is much like the Kane-Mele spin Hall model which is a time reversal invariant doubling of the Haldane model. We show that the low energy effective action for these doubled versions of the Sau-Luchtin-Tewari-Sarma and Oreg-Refael-von Open models corresponds to a single band p-wave time reversal invariant superconductors with pseudo spin degree of freedom instead of spin degree of freedom. There are Majorana fermions at the ends of wires or in vortex cores of these superconductors. Furthermore these are shown to be stable to small perturbations. In the supplement we present physical realization of the system with cold atoms and show a related"no-go"theorem given in Haim et. al. (2019) has too restrictive assumptions to apply to this proposal.
Spectroscopic and Photometric Behaviour of LP Ori

We performed spectroscopic and photometric analyses on the early B-type LP Ori young stellar object located in the Orion Nebula. The high-resolution spectra of LP Ori was obtained at the Ankara University Kreiken Observatory in 2023, while all spectra recorded over the past 19 years were extracted from the ESO and ESPaDOnS archives. In these spectra of LP Ori, there is typically an emission observed in the core of the Balmer profile. This structure is accompanied by a $\sim$14-year interval inverse P-Cygni repetition superimposed on the Balmer profile. Additionally, an emission in the $\lambda$5875 He~I line is visible in the spectra in the year 2023. When this emission is considered together with the inverse P-Cygni structures, these observations suggest that LP Ori is a Herbig Ae/Be star. The abundance pattern of LP Ori is close to solar with the exception of a slightly rich helium and slightly poor Al abundance. Additionally, the spectral energy distribution of LP Ori was constructed to confirm the infrared excess caused by its circumstellar disk. Furthermore, the photometric analysis performed on the TESS observations of LP Ori shows significant photometric variability and the frequency analysis reveals a $\beta$~Cephei star in its forthcoming evolution.
A Frequency-Domain Approach for Enhanced Performance and Task Flexibility in Finite-Time ILC

Iterative learning control (ILC) is capable of improving the tracking performance of repetitive control systems by utilizing data from past iterations. The aim of this paper is to achieve both task flexibility, which is often achieved by ILC with basis functions, and the performance of frequency-domain ILC, with an intuitive design procedure. The cost function of norm-optimal ILC is determined that recovers frequency-domain ILC, and consequently, the feedforward signal is parameterized in terms of basis functions and frequency-domain ILC. The resulting method has the performance and design procedure of frequency-domain ILC and the task flexibility of basis functions ILC, and are complimentary to each other. Validation on a benchmark example confirms the capabilities of the framework.