Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Deployable polyhedrons with one-DOF radial transformation

Deployable polyhedrons can transform between Platonic and Archimedean polyhedrons to meet the demands of various engineering applications. However, the existing design solutions are often with multiple degrees of freedom and complicated mechanism links and joints, which greatly limited their potential in practice. Combining the fundamentals of solid geometry and mechanism kinematics, this paper proposes a family of kirigami Archimedean polyhedrons based on the N-fold-symmetric loops of spatial 7R linkage, which perform one-DOF radial transformation following tetrahedral, octahedral, or icosahedral symmetry. Moreover, in each symmetric polyhedral group, three different transforming paths can be achieved from one identical deployed configuration. We also demonstrated that such design strategy can be readily applied to polyhedral tessellation. This work provides a family of rich solutions for deployable polyhedrons to facilitate their applications in aerospace exploration, architecture, metamaterials and so on.
Interactive Continual Learning Architecture for Long-Term Personalization of Home Service Robots

For robots to perform assistive tasks in unstructured home environments, they must learn and reason on the semantic knowledge of the environments. Despite a resurgence in the development of semantic reasoning architectures, these methods assume that all the training data is available a priori. However, each user's environment is unique and can continue to change over time, which makes these methods unsuitable for personalized home service robots. Although research in continual learning develops methods that can learn and adapt over time, most of these methods are tested in the narrow context of object classification on static image datasets. In this paper, we combine ideas from continual learning, semantic reasoning, and interactive machine learning literature and develop a novel interactive continual learning architecture for continual learning of semantic knowledge in a home environment through human-robot interaction. The architecture builds on core cognitive principles of learning and memory for efficient and real-time learning of new knowledge from humans. We integrate our architecture with a physical mobile manipulator robot and perform extensive system evaluations in a laboratory environment over two months. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of our architecture to allow a physical robot to continually adapt to the changes in the environment from limited data provided by the users (experimenters), and use the learned knowledge to perform object fetching tasks.
A Privacy-Preserving Framework with Multi-Modal Data for Cross-Domain Recommendation

Cross-domain recommendation (CDR) aims to enhance recommendation accuracy in a target domain with sparse data by leveraging rich information in a source domain, thereby addressing the data-sparsity problem. Some existing CDR methods highlight the advantages of extracting domain-common and domain-specific features to learn comprehensive user and item representations. However, these methods can't effectively disentangle these components as they often rely on simple user-item historical interaction information (such as ratings, clicks, and browsing), neglecting the rich multi-modal features. Additionally, they don't protect user-sensitive data from potential leakage during knowledge transfer between domains. To address these challenges, we propose a Privacy-Preserving Framework with Multi-Modal Data for Cross-Domain Recommendation, called P2M2-CDR. Specifically, we first design a multi-modal disentangled encoder that utilizes multi-modal information to disentangle more informative domain-common and domain-specific embeddings. Furthermore, we introduce a privacy-preserving decoder to mitigate user privacy leakage during knowledge transfer. Local differential privacy (LDP) is utilized to obfuscate the disentangled embeddings before inter-domain exchange, thereby enhancing privacy protection. To ensure both consistency and differentiation among these obfuscated disentangled embeddings, we incorporate contrastive learning-based domain-inter and domain-intra losses. Extensive Experiments conducted on four real-world datasets demonstrate that P2M2-CDR outperforms other state-of-the-art single-domain and cross-domain baselines.
CrossNet: Leveraging Global, Cross-Band, Narrow-Band, and Positional Encoding for Single- and Multi-Channel Speaker Separation

We introduce CrossNet, a complex spectral mapping approach to speaker separation and enhancement in reverberant and noisy conditions. The proposed architecture comprises an encoder layer, a global multi-head self-attention module, a cross-band module, a narrow-band module, and an output layer. CrossNet captures global, cross-band, and narrow-band correlations in the time-frequency domain. To address performance degradation in long utterances, we introduce a random chunk positional encoding. Experimental results on multiple datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of CrossNet, achieving state-of-the-art performance in tasks including reverberant and noisy-reverberant speaker separation. Furthermore, CrossNet exhibits faster and more stable training in comparison to recent baselines. Additionally, CrossNet's high performance extends to multi-microphone conditions, demonstrating its versatility in various acoustic scenarios.
Extend Your Own Correspondences: Unsupervised Distant Point Cloud Registration by Progressive Distance Extension

Registration of point clouds collected from a pair of distant vehicles provides a comprehensive and accurate 3D view of the driving scenario, which is vital for driving safety related applications, yet existing literature suffers from the expensive pose label acquisition and the deficiency to generalize to new data distributions. In this paper, we propose EYOC, an unsupervised distant point cloud registration method that adapts to new point cloud distributions on the fly, requiring no global pose labels. The core idea of EYOC is to train a feature extractor in a progressive fashion, where in each round, the feature extractor, trained with near point cloud pairs, can label slightly farther point cloud pairs, enabling self-supervision on such far point cloud pairs. This process continues until the derived extractor can be used to register distant point clouds. Particularly, to enable high-fidelity correspondence label generation, we devise an effective spatial filtering scheme to select the most representative correspondences to register a point cloud pair, and then utilize the aligned point clouds to discover more correct correspondences. Experiments show that EYOC can achieve comparable performance with state-of-the-art supervised methods at a lower training cost. Moreover, it outwits supervised methods regarding generalization performance on new data distributions.
Fine-Grained Privacy Guarantees for Coverage Problems

We introduce a new notion of neighboring databases for coverage problems such as Max Cover and Set Cover under differential privacy. In contrast to the standard privacy notion for these problems, which is analogous to node-privacy in graphs, our new definition gives a more fine-grained privacy guarantee, which is analogous to edge-privacy. We illustrate several scenarios of Set Cover and Max Cover where our privacy notion is desired one for the application. Our main result is an $\epsilon$-edge differentially private algorithm for Max Cover which obtains an $(1-1/e-\eta,\tilde{O}(k/\epsilon))$-approximation with high probability. Furthermore, we show that this result is nearly tight: we give a lower bound show that an additive error of $\Omega(k/\epsilon)$ is necessary under edge-differential privacy. Via group privacy properties, this implies a new algorithm for $\epsilon$-node differentially private Max Cover which obtains an $(1-1/e-\eta,\tilde{O}(fk/\epsilon))$-approximation, where $f$ is the maximum degree of an element in the set system. When $f\ll k$, this improves over the best known algorithm for Max Cover under pure (node) differential privacy, which obtains an $(1-1/e,\tilde{O}(k^2/\epsilon))$-approximation.
Slot Abstractors: Toward Scalable Abstract Visual Reasoning

Abstract visual reasoning is a characteristically human ability, allowing the identification of relational patterns that are abstracted away from object features, and the systematic generalization of those patterns to unseen problems. Recent work has demonstrated strong systematic generalization in visual reasoning tasks involving multi-object inputs, through the integration of slot-based methods used for extracting object-centric representations coupled with strong inductive biases for relational abstraction. However, this approach was limited to problems containing a single rule, and was not scalable to visual reasoning problems containing a large number of objects. Other recent work proposed Abstractors, an extension of Transformers that incorporates strong relational inductive biases, thereby inheriting the Transformer's scalability and multi-head architecture, but it has yet to be demonstrated how this approach might be applied to multi-object visual inputs. Here we combine the strengths of the above approaches and propose Slot Abstractors, an approach to abstract visual reasoning that can be scaled to problems involving a large number of objects and multiple relations among them. The approach displays state-of-the-art performance across four abstract visual reasoning tasks.
PPTC-R benchmark: Towards Evaluating the Robustness of Large Language Models for PowerPoint Task Completion

The growing dependence on Large Language Models (LLMs) for finishing user instructions necessitates a comprehensive understanding of their robustness to complex task completion in real-world situations. To address this critical need, we propose the PowerPoint Task Completion Robustness benchmark (PPTC-R) to measure LLMs' robustness to the user PPT task instruction and software version. Specifically, we construct adversarial user instructions by attacking user instructions at sentence, semantic, and multi-language levels. To assess the robustness of Language Models to software versions, we vary the number of provided APIs to simulate both the newest version and earlier version settings. Subsequently, we test 3 closed-source and 4 open-source LLMs using a benchmark that incorporates these robustness settings, aiming to evaluate how deviations impact LLMs' API calls for task completion. We find that GPT-4 exhibits the highest performance and strong robustness in our benchmark, particularly in the version update and the multilingual settings. However, we find that all LLMs lose their robustness when confronted with multiple challenges (e.g., multi-turn) simultaneously, leading to significant performance drops. We further analyze the robustness behavior and error reasons of LLMs in our benchmark, which provide valuable insights for researchers to understand the LLM's robustness in task completion and develop more robust LLMs and agents. We release the code and data at \url{https://github.com/ZekaiGalaxy/PPTCR}.
Self-Attention Empowered Graph Convolutional Network for Structure Learning and Node Embedding

In representation learning on graph-structured data, many popular graph neural networks (GNNs) fail to capture long-range dependencies, leading to performance degradation. Furthermore, this weakness is magnified when the concerned graph is characterized by heterophily (low homophily). To solve this issue, this paper proposes a novel graph learning framework called the graph convolutional network with self-attention (GCN-SA). The proposed scheme exhibits an exceptional generalization capability in node-level representation learning. The proposed GCN-SA contains two enhancements corresponding to edges and node features. For edges, we utilize a self-attention mechanism to design a stable and effective graph-structure-learning module that can capture the internal correlation between any pair of nodes. This graph-structure-learning module can identify reliable neighbors for each node from the entire graph. Regarding the node features, we modify the transformer block to make it more applicable to enable GCN to fuse valuable information from the entire graph. These two enhancements work in distinct ways to help our GCN-SA capture long-range dependencies, enabling it to perform representation learning on graphs with varying levels of homophily. The experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed GCN-SA. Compared to other outstanding GNN counterparts, the proposed GCN-SA is competitive.
How these characterized higher charmonia shape the puzzling data of the $e^+e^-\to \eta J/\psi$ cross section

Recently, the BESIII Collaboration performed a precise measurement of the $e^+e^-\to \eta J/\psi$ cross section. It is puzzling that the resonance parameters of the reported $Y(4230)$ show a substantial divergence from the previously measured results in both the open-charmed and hidden-charmed decay channels, and the line shape asymmetry of the data approaching 4.2 GeV also suggests that it might be difficult to characterize the details of the structure around 4.2 GeV by a single resonance. This has motivated our great curiosity about how the charmonium states are distributed in the measured energy range and how they shape the puzzling data of the $e^+e^-\to \eta J/\psi$ cross section. In this work, we use five theoretically constructed charmonia in the range of $4.0\sim4.5$ $\text{GeV}$, i.e. $\psi(4040)$, $\psi(4160)$, $\psi(4220)$, $\psi(4380)$, and $\psi(4415)$, to apply a combined fit to the data, in which their calculated decay ratios into $\eta J/\psi$ via hadronic loop mechanism are taken as input. The fit results can reproduce the measured cross section data well, especially for the subtle line shape around 4.2 GeV, showing that the structure around 4.2 GeV is possible from the contribution of both $\psi(4160)$ and $\psi(4220)$.
Assortment Optimization For Conference Goodies With Indifferent Attendees

Conferences such as FUN with Algorithms routinely buy goodies (e.g., t-shirts, coffee mugs, etc) for their attendees. Often, said goodies come in different types, varying by color or design, and organizers need to decide how many goodies of each type to buy. We study the problem of buying optimal amounts of each type under a simple model of preferences by the attendees: they are indifferent to the types but want to be able to choose between more than one type of goodies at the time of their arrival. The indifference of attendees suggests that the optimal policy is to buy roughly equal amounts for every goodie type. Despite how intuitive this conjecture sounds, we show that this simple model of assortment optimization is quite rich, and even though we make progress towards proving the conjecture (e.g., we succeed when the number of goodie types is 2 or 3), the general case with K types remains open. We also present asymptotic results and computer simulations, and finally, to motivate further progress, we offer a reward of $100usd for a full proof.
MeaCap: Memory-Augmented Zero-shot Image Captioning

Zero-shot image captioning (IC) without well-paired image-text data can be divided into two categories, training-free and text-only-training. Generally, these two types of methods realize zero-shot IC by integrating pretrained vision-language models like CLIP for image-text similarity evaluation and a pre-trained language model (LM) for caption generation. The main difference between them is whether using a textual corpus to train the LM. Though achieving attractive performance w.r. t. some metrics, existing methods often exhibit some common drawbacks. Training-free methods tend to produce hallucinations, while text-only-training often lose generalization capability. To move forward, in this paper, we propose a novel Memory-Augmented zero-shot image Captioning framework (MeaCap). Specifically, equipped with a textual memory, we introduce a retrieve-then-filter module to get key concepts that are highly related to the image. By deploying our proposed memory-augmented visual-related fusion score in a keywords-to-sentence LM, MeaCap can generate concept-centered captions that keep high consistency with the image with fewer hallucinations and more world-knowledge. The framework of MeaCap achieves the state-of-the-art performance on a series of zero-shot IC settings. Our code is available at https://github.com/joeyz0z/MeaCap.
On the vacuum energy in the Einstein Universe and the conformal anomaly

An oldish question is resurrected concerning the significance of the ambiguous `b-type' terms encountered in calculations of the vacuum, Casimir energy on the Einstein Universe for conformally coupled scalar fields. Some remarks in the literature are hopefully clarified and the relevance of much earlier evaluations is pointed out. A consistency principle is suggested.
CLongEval: A Chinese Benchmark for Evaluating Long-Context Large Language Models

Developing Large Language Models (LLMs) with robust long-context capabilities has been the recent research focus, resulting in the emergence of long-context LLMs proficient in Chinese. However, the evaluation of these models remains underdeveloped due to a lack of benchmarks. To address this gap, we present CLongEval, a comprehensive Chinese benchmark for evaluating long-context LLMs. CLongEval is characterized by three key features: (1) Sufficient data volume, comprising 7 distinct tasks and 7,267 examples; (2) Broad applicability, accommodating to models with context windows size from 1K to 100K; (3) High quality, with over 2,000 manually annotated question-answer pairs in addition to the automatically constructed labels. With CLongEval, we undertake a comprehensive assessment of 6 open-source long-context LLMs and 2 leading commercial counterparts that feature both long-context abilities and proficiency in Chinese. We also provide in-depth analysis based on the empirical results, trying to shed light on the critical capabilities that present challenges in long-context settings. The dataset, evaluation scripts, and model outputs will be released.
Case studies on time-dependent Ginzburg-Landau simulations for superconducting applications

The macroscopic electromagnetic properties of type II superconductors are primarily influenced by the behavior of microscopic superconducting flux quantum units. Time-dependent Ginzburg-Landau (TDGL) equations provide an elegant and powerful tool for describing and examining both the statics and dynamics of these superconducting entities. They have been instrumental in replicating and elucidating numerous experimental results over the past decades.This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the progress in TDGL simulations, focusing on three key aspects of superconductor applications. The initial section delves into vortex rectification in superconductors described within the TDGL framework. We specifically highlight the superconducting diode effect achieved through asymmetric pinning landscapes and the reversible manipulation of vortex ratchets with dynamic pinning landscapes. The subsequent section reviews the achievements of TDGL simulations concerning the critical current density of superconductors, emphasizing the optimization of pinning sites, particularly vortex pinning and dynamics in polycrystalline Nb$_3$Sn with grain boundaries. The third part concentrates on numerical modeling of vortex penetration and dynamics in superconducting radio frequency (SRF) cavities, including a discussion of superconductor insulator superconductor multilayer structures. In the last section, we present key findings, insights, and perspectives derived from the discussed simulations.
LEAD: Learning Decomposition for Source-free Universal Domain Adaptation

Universal Domain Adaptation (UniDA) targets knowledge transfer in the presence of both covariate and label shifts. Recently, Source-free Universal Domain Adaptation (SF-UniDA) has emerged to achieve UniDA without access to source data, which tends to be more practical due to data protection policies. The main challenge lies in determining whether covariate-shifted samples belong to target-private unknown categories. Existing methods tackle this either through hand-crafted thresholding or by developing time-consuming iterative clustering strategies. In this paper, we propose a new idea of LEArning Decomposition (LEAD), which decouples features into source-known and -unknown components to identify target-private data. Technically, LEAD initially leverages the orthogonal decomposition analysis for feature decomposition. Then, LEAD builds instance-level decision boundaries to adaptively identify target-private data. Extensive experiments across various UniDA scenarios have demonstrated the effectiveness and superiority of LEAD. Notably, in the OPDA scenario on VisDA dataset, LEAD outperforms GLC by 3.5% overall H-score and reduces 75% time to derive pseudo-labeling decision boundaries. Besides, LEAD is also appealing in that it is complementary to most existing methods. The code is available at https://github.com/ispc-lab/LEAD.
Junctiond: Extending FaaS Runtimes with Kernel-Bypass

This report explores the use of kernel-bypass networking in FaaS runtimes and demonstrates how using Junction, a novel kernel-bypass system, as the backend for executing components in faasd can enhance performance and isolation. Junction achieves this by reducing network and compute overheads and minimizing interactions with the host operating system. Junctiond, the integration of Junction with faasd, reduces median and P99 latency by 37.33% and 63.42%, respectively, and can handle 10 times more throughput while decreasing latency by 2x at the median and 3.5 times at the tail.
F$^3$Loc: Fusion and Filtering for Floorplan Localization

In this paper we propose an efficient data-driven solution to self-localization within a floorplan. Floorplan data is readily available, long-term persistent and inherently robust to changes in the visual appearance. Our method does not require retraining per map and location or demand a large database of images of the area of interest. We propose a novel probabilistic model consisting of an observation and a novel temporal filtering module. Operating internally with an efficient ray-based representation, the observation module consists of a single and a multiview module to predict horizontal depth from images and fuses their results to benefit from advantages offered by either methodology. Our method operates on conventional consumer hardware and overcomes a common limitation of competing methods that often demand upright images. Our full system meets real-time requirements, while outperforming the state-of-the-art by a significant margin.