pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Enhancing System-Level Safety in Mixed-Autonomy Platoon via Safe Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Jingyuan Zhou, Longhao Yan, Kaidi Yang
Date: 2024-01-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Collision Avoidance, Deep Reinforcement Learning, Safe Reinforcement Learning

Connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) have recently gained prominence in traffic research due to advances in communication technology and autonomous driving. Various longitudinal control strategies for CAVs have been developed to enhance traffic efficiency, stability, and safety in mixed-autonomy scenarios. Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) is one promising strategy for mixed-autonomy platoon control, thanks to its capability of managing complex scenarios in real time after sufficient offline training. However, there are three research gaps for DRL-based mixed-autonomy platoon control: (i) the lack of theoretical collision-free guarantees, (ii) the widely adopted but impractical assumption of skilled and rational drivers who will not collide with preceding vehicles, and (iii) the strong assumption of a known human driver model. To address these research gaps, we propose a safe DRL-based controller that can provide a system-level safety guarantee for mixed-autonomy platoon control. First, we combine control barrier function (CBF)-based safety constraints and DRL via a quadratic programming (QP)-based differentiable neural network layer to provide theoretical safety guarantees. Second, we incorporate system-level safety constraints into our proposed method to account for the safety of both CAVs and the following HDVs to address the potential collisions due to irrational human driving behavior. Third, we devise a learning-based system identification approach to estimate the unknown human car-following behavior in the real system. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed method effectively ensures CAV safety and improves HDV safety in mixed platoon environments while simultaneously enhancing traffic capacity and string stability.
Chance-Constrained, Drift-Safe Guidance for Spacecraft Rendezvous
Authors: Andrew W. Berning Jr., Ethan R. Burnett, Stefan Bieniawski
Date: 2024-01-20 00:00:00

A robust drift-safe rendezvous trajectory optimization tool is developed in this work, with applications to orbital rendezvous and proximity operations. The method is based on direct collocation and utilizes a sequential convex programming framework, and is extended from previous work to include passive safety constraints. The tool is then paired with a dispersion analysis framework to allow trajectories to be optimized subject to plant, navigation, and actuator uncertainties. The timing, direction, and magnitude of orbital maneuvers are optimized subject to the expected propellant usage, for a given navigation system performance. Representative trajectories are presented for the LEO flight regime, but the approach can also be applied to GEO and NRHO with minimal modification.
Nonlinear Observer Design in Discrete-time Systems: Incorporating LMI Relaxation Strategies
Authors: Shivaraj Mohite
Date: 2024-01-19 00:00:00

This manuscript focuses on the $\mathcal{H}_\infty$ observer design for a class of nonlinear discrete systems under the presence of measurement noise or external disturbances. Two new Linear Matrix Inequality (LMI) conditions are developed in this method through the utilization of the reformulated Lipschitz property, a new variant of Young inequality and the well-known Linear Parameter Varying (LPV) approach. One of the key components of the proposed LMIs is the generalized matrix multipliers. The judicious use of these multipliers enables us to introduce more numbers of decision variables inside LMIs than the one illustrated in the literature. It aids in adding some extra degrees of freedom from a feasibility point of view, thus enhancing the LMI conditions. Thus, the established LMIs are less conservative than existing ones. Later on, the effectiveness of the developed LMIs and observer is highlighted through a numerical example and the application of state of charge (SoC) estimation in the Li-ion battery model.
Machine learning classification of power converter control mode
Authors: Rabah Ouali, Jean-Yves Dieulot, Pascal Yim, Xavier Guillaud, Frédéric Colas, Yang Wu, Heng Wu
Date: 2024-01-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification

To ensure the proper functioning of the current and future electrical grid, it is necessary for Transmission System Operators (TSOs) to verify that energy providers comply with the grid code and specifications provided by TSOs. A lot of energy production are conntected to the grid through a power electronic inverter. Grid Forming (GFM) and Grid Following (GFL) are the two types of operating modes used to control power electronic converters. The choice of control mode by TSOs to avoid impacting the stability of the grid is crucial, as is the commitment to these choices by energy suppliers. This article proposes a comparison between commonplace machine learning algorithms for converter control mode classification: GFL or GFM. The classification is based on frequency-domain admittance obtained by external measurement methods. Most algorithms are able to classify accurately when the control structure belongs to the training data, but they fail to classify modified control structures with the exception of the random forest algorithm.
Automatic dimensionality reduction of Twin-in-the-Loop Observers
Authors: Giacomo Delcaro, Federico Dettù, Simone Formentin, Sergio Matteo Savaresi
Date: 2024-01-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Optimization, Dimensionality Reduction

State-of-the-art vehicle dynamics estimation techniques usually share one common drawback: each variable to estimate is computed with an independent, simplified filtering module. These modules run in parallel and need to be calibrated separately. To solve this issue, a unified Twin-in-the-Loop (TiL) Observer architecture has recently been proposed: the classical simplified control-oriented vehicle model in the estimators is replaced by a full-fledged vehicle simulator, or digital twin (DT). The states of the DT are corrected in real time with a linear time invariant output error law. Since the simulator is a black-box, no explicit analytical formulation is available, hence classical filter tuning techniques cannot be used. Due to this reason, Bayesian Optimization will be used to solve a data-driven optimization problem to tune the filter. Due to the complexity of the DT, the optimization problem is high-dimensional. This paper aims to find a procedure to tune the high-complexity observer by lowering its dimensionality. In particular, in this work we will analyze both a supervised and an unsupervised learning approach. The strategies have been validated for speed and yaw-rate estimation on real-world data.
Smart Drug-Delivery Systems for Cancer Nanotherapy
Authors: Paola Sanchez-Moreno, Juan Luis Ortega-Vinuesa, Jose Manuel Peula-Garcia, Juan Antonio Marchal, Houria Boulaiz
Date: 2024-01-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Specificity

Despite all the advances achieved in the field of tumor-biology research, in most cases conventional therapies including chemotherapy are still the leading choices. The main disadvantage of these treatments, in addition to the low solubility of many antitumor drugs, is their lack of specificity, which explains the frequent occurrence of serious side effects due to nonspecific drug uptake by healthy cells. Progress in nanotechnology and its application in medicine have provided new opportunities and different smart systems. Such systems can improve the intracellular delivery of the drugs due to their multifunctionality and targeting potential. The purpose of this manuscript is to review and analyze the recent progress made in nanotherapy applied to cancer treatment. First, we provide a global overview of cancer and different smart nanoparticles currently used in oncology. Then, we analyze in detail the development of drug-delivery strategies in cancer therapy, focusing mainly on the intravenously administered smart nanoparticles with protein corona to avoid immune-system clearance. Finally, we discuss the challenges, clinical trials, and future directions of the nanoparticle-based therapy in cancer.
Multi-View Neural 3D Reconstruction of Micro-/Nanostructures with Atomic Force Microscopy
Authors: Shuo Chen, Mao Peng, Yijin Li, Bing-Feng Ju, Hujun Bao, Yuan-Liu Chen, Guofeng Zhang
Date: 2024-01-21 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction, Surface Reconstruction

Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) is a widely employed tool for micro-/nanoscale topographic imaging. However, conventional AFM scanning struggles to reconstruct complex 3D micro-/nanostructures precisely due to limitations such as incomplete sample topography capturing and tip-sample convolution artifacts. Here, we propose a multi-view neural-network-based framework with AFM (MVN-AFM), which accurately reconstructs surface models of intricate micro-/nanostructures. Unlike previous works, MVN-AFM does not depend on any specially shaped probes or costly modifications to the AFM system. To achieve this, MVN-AFM uniquely employs an iterative method to align multi-view data and eliminate AFM artifacts simultaneously. Furthermore, we pioneer the application of neural implicit surface reconstruction in nanotechnology and achieve markedly improved results. Extensive experiments show that MVN-AFM effectively eliminates artifacts present in raw AFM images and reconstructs various micro-/nanostructures including complex geometrical microstructures printed via Two-photon Lithography and nanoparticles such as PMMA nanospheres and ZIF-67 nanocrystals. This work presents a cost-effective tool for micro-/nanoscale 3D analysis.
Learning Dynamics from Multicellular Graphs with Deep Neural Networks
Authors: Haiqian Yang, Florian Meyer, Shaoxun Huang, Liu Yang, Cristiana Lungu, Monilola A. Olayioye, Markus J. Buehler, Ming Guo
Date: 2024-01-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Neural Network

Multicellular self-assembly into functional structures is a dynamic process that is critical in the development and diseases, including embryo development, organ formation, tumor invasion, and others. Being able to infer collective cell migratory dynamics from their static configuration is valuable for both understanding and predicting these complex processes. However, the identification of structural features that can indicate multicellular motion has been difficult, and existing metrics largely rely on physical instincts. Here we show that using a graph neural network (GNN), the motion of multicellular collectives can be inferred from a static snapshot of cell positions, in both experimental and synthetic datasets.
A Chaotic Associative Memory
Authors: Nurani Rajagopal Rohan, Sayan Gupta, V. Srinivasa Chakravarthy
Date: 2024-01-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval

We propose a novel Chaotic Associative Memory model using a network of chaotic Rossler systems and investigate the storage capacity and retrieval capabilities of this model as a function of increasing periodicity and chaos. In early models of associate memory networks, memories were modeled as fixed points, which may be mathematically convenient but has poor neurobiological plausibility. Since brain dynamics is inherently oscillatory, attempts have been made to construct associative memories using nonlinear oscillatory networks. However, oscillatory associative memories are plagued by the problem of poor storage capacity, though efforts have been made to improve capacity by adding higher order oscillatory modes. The chaotic associative memory proposed here exploits the continuous spectrum of chaotic elements and has higher storage capacity than previously described oscillatory associate memories.
Homogenisation of nonlinear blood flow in periodic networks: the limit of small haematocrit heterogeneity
Authors: Y. Ben-Ami, B. D. Wood, J. M. Pitt-Francis, P. K. Maini, H. M. Byrne
Date: 2024-01-16 00:00:00

In this work we develop a homogenisation methodology to upscale mathematical descriptions of microcirculatory blood flow from the microscale (where individual vessels are resolved) to the macroscopic (or tissue) scale. Due to the assumed two-phase nature of blood and specific features of red blood cells (RBCs), mathematical models for blood flow in the microcirculation are highly nonlinear, coupling the flow and RBC concentrations (haematocrit). In contrast to previous works which accomplished blood-flow homogenisation by assuming that the haematocrit level remains constant, here we allow for spatial heterogeneity in the haematocrit concentration and thus begin with a nonlinear microscale model. We simplify the analysis by considering the limit of small haematocrit heterogeneity which prevails when variations in haematocrit concentration between neighbouring vessels are small. Homogenisation results in a system of coupled, nonlinear partial differential equations describing the flow and haematocrit transport at the macroscale, in which a nonlinear Darcy-type model relates the flow and pressure gradient via a haematocrit-dependent permeability tensor. During the analysis we obtain further that haematocrit transport at the macroscale is governed by a purely advective equation. Applying the theory to particular examples of two- and three-dimensional geometries of periodic networks, we calculate the effective permeability tensor associated with blood flow in these vascular networks. We demonstrate how the statistical distribution of vessel lengths and diameters, together with the average haematocrit level, affect the statistical properties of the macroscopic permeability tensor. These data can be used to simulate blood flow and haematocrit transport at the macroscale.
Equivariant Multiscale Learned Invertible Reconstruction for Cone Beam CT
Authors: Nikita Moriakov, Jan-Jakob Sonke, Jonas Teuwen
Date: 2024-01-20 00:00:00

Cone Beam CT (CBCT) is an essential imaging modality nowadays, but the image quality of CBCT still lags behind the high quality standards established by the conventional Computed Tomography. We propose LIRE+, a learned iterative scheme for fast and memory-efficient CBCT reconstruction, which is a substantially faster and more parameter-efficient alternative to the recently proposed LIRE method. LIRE+ is a rotationally-equivariant multiscale learned invertible primal-dual iterative scheme for CBCT reconstruction. Memory usage is optimized by relying on simple reversible residual networks in primal/dual cells and patch-wise computations inside the cells during forward and backward passes, while increased inference speed is achieved by making the primal-dual scheme multiscale so that the reconstruction process starts at low resolution and with low resolution primal/dual latent vectors. A LIRE+ model was trained and validated on a set of 260 + 22 thorax CT scans and tested using a set of 142 thorax CT scans with additional evaluation with and without finetuning on an out-of-distribution set of 79 Head and Neck (HN) CT scans. Our method surpasses classical and deep learning baselines, including LIRE, on the thorax test set. For a similar inference time and with only 37 % of the parameter budget, LIRE+ achieves a +0.2 dB PSNR improvement over LIRE, while being able to match the performance of LIRE in 45 % less inference time and with 28 % of the parameter budget. Rotational equivariance ensures robustness of LIRE+ to patient orientation, while LIRE and other deep learning baselines suffer from substantial performance degradation when patient orientation is unusual. On the HN dataset in the absence of finetuning, LIRE+ is generally comparable to LIRE in performance apart from a few outlier cases, whereas after identical finetuning LIRE+ demonstates a +1.02 dB PSNR improvement over LIRE.
Modern approaches to improving phase contrast electron microscopy
Authors: Jeremy J. Axelrod, Jessie T. Zhang, Petar N. Petrov, Robert M. Glaeser, Holger Mueller
Date: 2024-01-22 00:00:00

Although defocus can be used to generate partial phase contrast in transmission electron microscope images, cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) can be further improved by the development of phase plates which increase contrast by applying a phase shift to the unscattered part of the electron beam. Many approaches have been investigated, including the ponderomotive interaction between light and electrons. We review the recent successes achieved with this method in high-resolution, single-particle cryo-EM. We also review the status of using pulsed or near-field enhanced laser light as alternatives, along with approaches that use scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) with a segmented detector rather than a phase plate.
Temporal Aggregation for the Synthetic Control Method
Authors: Liyang Sun, Eli Ben-Michael, Avi Feller
Date: 2024-01-22 00:00:00

The synthetic control method (SCM) is a popular approach for estimating the impact of a treatment on a single unit with panel data. Two challenges arise with higher frequency data (e.g., monthly versus yearly): (1) achieving excellent pre-treatment fit is typically more challenging; and (2) overfitting to noise is more likely. Aggregating data over time can mitigate these problems but can also destroy important signal. In this paper, we bound the bias for SCM with disaggregated and aggregated outcomes and give conditions under which aggregating tightens the bounds. We then propose finding weights that balance both disaggregated and aggregated series.
A Bracketing Relationship for Long-Term Policy Evaluation with Combined Experimental and Observational Data
Authors: Yechan Park, Yuya Sasaki
Date: 2024-01-22 00:00:00

Combining short-term experimental data with observational data enables credible long-term policy evaluation. The literature offers two key but non-nested assumptions, namely the latent unconfoundedness (LU; Athey et al., 2020) and equi-confounding bias (ECB; Ghassami et al., 2022) conditions, to correct observational selection. Committing to the wrong assumption leads to biased estimation. To mitigate such risks, we provide a novel bracketing relationship (cf. Angrist and Pischke, 2009) repurposed for the setting with data combination: the LU-based estimand and the ECB-based estimand serve as the lower and upper bounds, respectively, with the true causal effect lying in between if either assumption holds. For researchers further seeking point estimates, our Lalonde-style exercise suggests the conservatively more robust LU-based lower bounds align closely with the hold-out experimental estimates for educational policy evaluation. We investigate the economic substantives of these findings through the lens of a nonparametric class of selection mechanisms and sensitivity analysis. We uncover as key the sub-martingale property and sufficient-statistics role (Chetty, 2009) of the potential outcomes of student test scores (Chetty et al., 2011, 2014).
Local Identification in Instrumental Variable Multivariate Quantile Regression Models
Authors: Haruki Kono
Date: 2024-01-21 00:00:00
Tasks: quantile regression, regression

In the instrumental variable quantile regression (IVQR) model of Chernozhukov and Hansen (2005), a one-dimensional unobserved rank variable monotonically determines a single potential outcome. Even when multiple outcomes are simultaneously of interest, it is common to apply the IVQR model to each of them separately. This practice implicitly assumes that the rank variable of each regression model affects only the corresponding outcome and does not affect the other outcomes. In reality, however, it is often the case that all rank variables together determine the outcomes, which leads to a systematic correlation between the outcomes. To deal with this, we propose a nonlinear IV model that allows for multivariate unobserved heterogeneity, each of which is considered as a rank variable for an observed outcome. We show that the structural function of our model is locally identified under the assumption that the IV and the treatment variable are sufficiently positively correlated.
Estimation with Pairwise Observations
Authors: Felix Chan, Laszlo Matyas
Date: 2024-01-20 00:00:00
Tasks: valid

The paper introduces a new estimation method for the standard linear regression model. The procedure is not driven by the optimisation of any objective function rather, it is a simple weighted average of slopes from observation pairs. The paper shows that such estimator is consistent for carefully selected weights. Other properties, such as asymptotic distributions, have also been derived to facilitate valid statistical inference. Unlike traditional methods, such as Least Squares and Maximum Likelihood, among others, the estimated residual of this estimator is not by construction orthogonal to the explanatory variables of the model. This property allows a wide range of practical applications, such as the testing of endogeneity, i.e., the correlation between the explanatory variables and the disturbance terms.
Information Based Inference in Models with Set-Valued Predictions and Misspecification
Authors: Hiroaki Kaido, Francesca Molinari
Date: 2024-01-19 00:00:00
Tasks: valid

This paper proposes an information-based inference method for partially identified parameters in incomplete models that is valid both when the model is correctly specified and when it is misspecified. Key features of the method are: (i) it is based on minimizing a suitably defined Kullback-Leibler information criterion that accounts for incompleteness of the model and delivers a non-empty pseudo-true set; (ii) it is computationally tractable; (iii) its implementation is the same for both correctly and incorrectly specified models; (iv) it exploits all information provided by variation in discrete and continuous covariates; (v) it relies on Rao's score statistic, which is shown to be asymptotically pivotal.
Measures of the Capital Network of the U.S. Economy
Authors: Ben Klemens
Date: 2024-01-22 00:00:00

About two million U.S. corporations and partnerships are linked to each other and human investors by about 15 million owner-subsidiary links. Comparable social networks such as corporate board memberships and socially-built systems such as the network of Internet links are "small worlds," meaning a network with a small diameter and link densities with a power-law distribution, but these properties had not yet been measured for the business entity network. This article shows that both inbound links and outbound links display a power-law distribution with a coefficient of concentration estimable to within a generally narrow confidence interval, overall, for subnetworks including only business entities, only for the great connected component of the network, and in subnetworks with edges associated with certain industries, for all years 2009-2021. In contrast to other networks with power-law distributed link densities, the network is mostly a tree, and has a diameter an order of magnitude larger than a small-world network with the same link distribution. The regularity of the power-law distribution indicates that its coefficient can be used as a new, well-defined macroeconomic metric for the concentration of capital flows in an economy. Economists might use it as a new measure of market concentration which is more comprehensive than measures based only on the few biggest firms. Comparing capital link concentrations across countries would facilitate modeling the relationship between business network characteristics and other macroeconomic indicators.