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Chen Zhou

Publications and source records attributed to Chen Zhou.

At least 91 records · Page 5Linked to original sources

TrajPRed: Trajectory Prediction with Region-based Relation Learning

Forecasting human trajectories in traffic scenes is critical for safety within mixed or fully autonomous systems. Human future trajectories are driven by two major stimuli, social interactions, and stochastic goals. Thus, reliable forecasting needs to capture these two stimuli. Edge-based relation modeling represents social interactions using pairwise correlations from precise individual states. Nevertheless, edge-based relations can be vulnerable under perturbations. To alleviate these issues, we propose a region-based relation learning paradigm that models social interactions via region-wise dynamics of joint states, i.e., the changes in the density of crowds. In particular, region-wise agent joint information is encoded within convolutional feature grids. Social relations are modeled by relating the temporal changes of local joint information from a global perspective. We show that region-based relations are less susceptible to perturbations. In order to account for the stochastic individual goals, we exploit a conditional variational autoencoder to realize multi-goal estimation and diverse future prediction. Specifically, we perform variational inference via the latent distribution, which is conditioned on the correlation between input states and associated target goals. Sampling from the latent distribution enables the framework to reliably capture the stochastic behavior in test data. We integrate multi-goal estimation and region-based relation learning to model the two stimuli, social interactions, and stochastic goals, in a prediction framework. We evaluate our framework on the ETH-UCY dataset and Stanford Drone Dataset (SDD). We show that the diverse prediction better fits the ground truth when incorporating the relation module. Our framework outperforms the state-of-the-art models on SDD by $27.61\%$/$18.20\%$ of ADE/FDE metrics.

cs.CV↗

A proposed PKU-Muon experiment for muon tomography and dark matter search

We propose here a set of new methods to directly detect light mass dark matter through its scattering with abundant atmospheric muons or accelerator beams. Firstly, we plan to use the free cosmic-ray muons interacting with dark matter in a volume surrounded by tracking detectors, to trace possible interaction between dark matter and muons. Secondly, we will interface our device with domestic or international muon beams. Due to much larger muon intensity and focused beam, we anticipate the detector can be made further compact and the resulting sensitivity on dark matter searches will be improved. Furthermore, we will measure precisely directional distributions of cosmic-ray muons, either at mountain or sea level, and the differences may reveal possible information of dark matter distributed near the earth. Specifically, our methods can have advantages over `exotic' dark matters which are either muon-philic or slowed down due to some mechanism, and sensitivity on dark matter and muon scattering cross section can reach as low as microbarn level.

hep-ex↗

Perceptual Quality-based Model Training under Annotator Label Uncertainty

Annotators exhibit disagreement during data labeling, which can be termed as annotator label uncertainty. Annotator label uncertainty manifests in variations of labeling quality. Training with a single low-quality annotation per sample induces model reliability degradations. In this work, we first examine the effects of annotator label uncertainty in terms of the model's generalizability and prediction uncertainty. We observe that the model's generalizability and prediction uncertainty degrade with the presence of low-quality noisy labels. Meanwhile, our evaluation of existing uncertainty estimation algorithms indicates their incapability in response to annotator label uncertainty. To mitigate performance degradation, prior methods show that training models with labels collected from multiple independent annotators can enhance generalizability. However, they require massive annotations. Hence, we introduce a novel perceptual quality-based model training framework to objectively generate multiple labels for model training to enhance reliability, while avoiding massive annotations. Specifically, we first select a subset of samples with low perceptual quality scores ranked by statistical regularities of visual signals. We then assign de-aggregated labels to each sample in this subset to obtain a training set with multiple labels. Our experiments and analysis demonstrate that training with the proposed framework alleviates the degradation of generalizability and prediction uncertainty caused by annotator label uncertainty.

cs.CV↗

Application of Quantum Machine Learning in a Higgs Physics Study at the CEPC

Machine learning has blossomed in recent decades and has become essential in many fields. It significantly solved some problems in particle physics -- particle reconstruction, event classification, etc. However, it is now time to break the limitation of conventional machine learning with quantum computing. A support-vector machine algorithm with a quantum kernel estimator (QSVM-Kernel) leverages high-dimensional quantum state space to identify a signal from backgrounds. In this study, we have pioneered employing this quantum machine learning algorithm to study the $e^{+}e^{-} \rightarrow ZH$ process at the Circular Electron-Positron Collider (CEPC), a proposed Higgs factory to study electroweak symmetry breaking of particle physics. Using 6 qubits on quantum computer simulators, we optimised the QSVM-Kernel algorithm and obtained a classification performance similar to the classical support-vector machine algorithm. Furthermore, we have validated the QSVM-Kernel algorithm using 6-qubits on quantum computer hardware from both IBM and Origin Quantum: the classification performances of both are approaching noiseless quantum computer simulators. In addition, the Origin Quantum hardware results are similar to the IBM Quantum hardware within the uncertainties in our study. Our study shows that state-of-the-art quantum computing technologies could be utilised by particle physics, a branch of fundamental science that relies on big experimental data.

hep-ex↗

Distributed Inference for Tail Risk

For measuring tail risk with scarce extreme events, extreme value analysis is often invoked as the statistical tool to extrapolate to the tail of a distribution. The presence of large datasets benefits tail risk analysis by providing more observations for conducting extreme value analysis. However, large datasets can be stored distributedly preventing the possibility of directly analyzing them. In this paper, we introduce a comprehensive set of tools for examining the asymptotic behavior of tail empirical and quantile processes in the setting where data is distributed across multiple sources, for instance, when data are stored on multiple machines. Utilizing these tools, one can establish the oracle property for most distributed estimators in extreme value statistics in a straightforward way. The main theoretical challenge arises when the number of machines diverges to infinity. The number of machines resembles the role of dimensionality in high dimensional statistics. We provide various examples to demonstrate the practicality and value of our proposed toolkit.

stat.ME↗

Evaluating residual acceleration noise for TianQin gravitational waves observatory with an empirical magnetic field model

TianQin (TQ) project plans to deploy three satellites in space around the Earth to measure the displacement change of test masses caused by gravitational waves via laser interferometry. The requirement of the acceleration noise of the test mass is on the order of $10^{-15}~\,{\rm m}\,{\rm s}^{-2}\,{\rm Hz}^{-1/2}$ in the sensitive frequency range of TQ, %the extremely precise acceleration measurement requirements make it necessary to investigate acceleration noise due to space magnetic fields. which is so stringent that the acceleration noise caused by the interaction of the space magnetic field with the test mass needs to be investigated. In this work, by using the Tsyganenko model, a data-based empirical space magnetic field model, we obtain the magnetic field distribution around TQ's orbit spanning two solar cycles in 23 years from 1998 to 2020. With the obtained space magnetic field, we derive the distribution and amplitude spectral densities (ASDs) of the acceleration noise of TQ in 23 years. Our results reveal that the average values of the ratio of the acceleration noise cauesd by the space magnetic field to the requirements of TQ at 1 mHz ($R_{\rm 1mHz}$) and 6 mHz ($R_{\rm 6mHz}$) are 0.123$\pm$0.052 and 0.027$\pm$0.013, respectively. The occurence probabilities of $R_{\rm 1mHz}>0.2$ and $>0.3$ are only 7.9% and 1.2%, respectively, and $R_{\rm 6mHz}$ never exceeds 0.2.

astro-ph.IM↗

FOCAL: A Cost-Aware Video Dataset for Active Learning

In this paper, we introduce the FOCAL (Ford-OLIVES Collaboration on Active Learning) dataset which enables the study of the impact of annotation-cost within a video active learning setting. Annotation-cost refers to the time it takes an annotator to label and quality-assure a given video sequence. A practical motivation for active learning research is to minimize annotation-cost by selectively labeling informative samples that will maximize performance within a given budget constraint. However, previous work in video active learning lacks real-time annotation labels for accurately assessing cost minimization and instead operates under the assumption that annotation-cost scales linearly with the amount of data to annotate. This assumption does not take into account a variety of real-world confounding factors that contribute to a nonlinear cost such as the effect of an assistive labeling tool and the variety of interactions within a scene such as occluded objects, weather, and motion of objects. FOCAL addresses this discrepancy by providing real annotation-cost labels for 126 video sequences across 69 unique city scenes with a variety of weather, lighting, and seasonal conditions. We also introduce a set of conformal active learning algorithms that take advantage of the sequential structure of video data in order to achieve a better trade-off between annotation-cost and performance while also reducing floating point operations (FLOPS) overhead by at least 77.67%. We show how these approaches better reflect how annotations on videos are done in practice through a sequence selection framework. We further demonstrate the advantage of these approaches by introducing two performance-cost metrics and show that the best conformal active learning method is cheaper than the best traditional active learning method by 113 hours.

cs.CV↗

ParticleNet and its application on CEPC Jet Flavor Tagging

Identification of quark flavor is essential for collider experiments in high-energy physics, relying on the flavor tagging algorithm. In this study, using a full simulation of the Circular Electron Positron Collider (CEPC), we investigated the flavor tagging performance of two different algorithms: ParticleNet, originally developed at CMS, and LCFIPlus, the current flavor tagging algorithm employed at CEPC. Compared to LCFIPlus, ParticleNet significantly enhances flavor tagging performance, resulting in a significant improvement in benchmark measurement accuracy, i.e., a 36% improvement for $ν\barνH\to c\bar{c}$ measurement and a 75% improvement for $|V_{cb}|$ measurement via W boson decay when CEPC operates as a Higgs factory at the center-of-mass energy of 240 GeV and integrated luminosity of 5.6 $ab^{-1}$. We compared the performance of ParticleNet and LCFIPlus at different vertex detector configurations, observing that the inner radius is the most sensitive parameter, followed by material budget and spatial resolution.

hep-ex↗

Probing darK Matter Using free leptONs: PKMUON

We propose a new method to detect sub-GeV dark matter, through their scatterings from free leptons and the resulting kinematic shifts. Specially, such an experiment can detect dark matter interacting solely with muons. The experiment proposed here is to directly probe muon-philic dark matter, in a model-independent way. Its complementarity with the muon on target proposal, is similar to, e.g. XENON/PandaX and ATLAS/CMS on dark matter searches. Moreover, our proposal can work better for relatively heavy dark matter such as in the sub-GeV region. We start with a small device of a size around 0.1 to 1 meter, using atmospheric muons to set up a prototype. Within only one year of operation, the sensitivity on cross section of dark matter scattering with muons can already reach $σ_D\sim 10^{-19 (-20,\,-18)}\rm{cm}^{2}$ for a dark mater $\rm{M_D}=100\, (10,\,1000)$ MeV. We can then interface the device with a high intensity muon beam of $10^{12}$/bunch. Within one year, the sensitivity can reach $σ_D\sim 10^{-27 (-28,\,-26)}\rm{cm}^{2}$ for $\rm{M_D}=100\, (10,\,1000)$ MeV.

hep-ph↗

LESS: Label-efficient Multi-scale Learning for Cytological Whole Slide Image Screening

In computational pathology, multiple instance learning (MIL) is widely used to circumvent the computational impasse in giga-pixel whole slide image (WSI) analysis. It usually consists of two stages: patch-level feature extraction and slide-level aggregation. Recently, pretrained models or self-supervised learning have been used to extract patch features, but they suffer from low effectiveness or inefficiency due to overlooking the task-specific supervision provided by slide labels. Here we propose a weakly-supervised Label-Efficient WSI Screening method, dubbed LESS, for cytological WSI analysis with only slide-level labels, which can be effectively applied to small datasets. First, we suggest using variational positive-unlabeled (VPU) learning to uncover hidden labels of both benign and malignant patches. We provide appropriate supervision by using slide-level labels to improve the learning of patch-level features. Next, we take into account the sparse and random arrangement of cells in cytological WSIs. To address this, we propose a strategy to crop patches at multiple scales and utilize a cross-attention vision transformer (CrossViT) to combine information from different scales for WSI classification. The combination of our two steps achieves task-alignment, improving effectiveness and efficiency. We validate the proposed label-efficient method on a urine cytology WSI dataset encompassing 130 samples (13,000 patches) and FNAC 2019 dataset with 212 samples (21,200 patches). The experiment shows that the proposed LESS reaches 84.79%, 85.43%, 91.79% and 78.30% on a urine cytology WSI dataset, and 96.88%, 96.86%, 98.95%, 97.06% on FNAC 2019 dataset in terms of accuracy, AUC, sensitivity and specificity. It outperforms state-of-the-art MIL methods on pathology WSIs and realizes automatic cytological WSI cancer screening.

eess.IV↗

TableGPT: Towards Unifying Tables, Nature Language and Commands into One GPT

Tables are prevalent in real-world databases, requiring significant time and effort for humans to analyze and manipulate. The advancements in large language models (LLMs) have made it possible to interact with tables using natural language input, bringing this capability closer to reality. In this paper, we present TableGPT, a unified fine-tuned framework that enables LLMs to understand and operate on tables using external functional commands. It introduces the capability to seamlessly interact with tables, enabling a wide range of functionalities such as question answering, data manipulation (e.g., insert, delete, query, and modify operations), data visualization, analysis report generation, and automated prediction. TableGPT aims to provide convenience and accessibility to users by empowering them to effortlessly leverage tabular data. At the core of TableGPT lies the novel concept of global tabular representations, which empowers LLMs to gain a comprehensive understanding of the entire table beyond meta-information. By jointly training LLMs on both table and text modalities, TableGPT achieves a deep understanding of tabular data and the ability to perform complex operations on tables through chain-of-command instructions. Importantly, TableGPT offers the advantage of being a self-contained system rather than relying on external API interfaces. Moreover, it supports efficient data process flow, query rejection (when appropriate) and private deployment, enabling faster domain data fine-tuning and ensuring data privacy, which enhances the framework's adaptability to specific use cases.

cs.AI↗

Valley-dependent topological edge states in plasma photonic crystals

Plasma photonic crystals designed in this paper are composed of gas discharge tubes to control the flow of electromagnetic waves. The band structures calculated by the finite element method are consistent with the experimental results in that two distinct attenuation peaks appear in the ranges of 1 GHz to 2.5 GHz and 5 GHz to 6 GHz. Electromagnetic parameters of the plasma are extracted by the Nicolson-Ross-Weir method and effective medium theory. The measured electron density is between 1e11 cm-3 and 1e12 cm-3, which verifies the correctness of the parameter used in the simulation, and the collision frequency is near 1.5e10 Hz. As the band structures are corroborated by the measured scattering parameters, we introduce the concept of photonic topological insulator based on the quantum Valley Hall effect into the plasma photonic crystal. A valley-dependent plasma photonic crystal with hexagonal lattice is constructed, and the phase transition of the valley K(K') occurs by breaking the spatial inversion symmetry. Valley-spin locked topological edge states are generated and excited by chiral sources. The frequency of the non-bulk state can be dynamically regulated by the electron density. This concept paves the way for novel, tunable topological edge states. More interestingly, the Dirac cone is broken when the electron density increases to 3.1e12 cm-3, which distinguishes from the methods of applying a magnetic field and changing the symmetry of the point group.

physics.plasm-ph↗

Tail inverse regression for dimension reduction with extreme response

We consider the problem of supervised dimension reduction with a particular focus on extreme values of the target $Y\in\mathbb{R}$ to be explained by a covariate vector $X \in \mathbb{R}^p$. The general purpose is to define and estimate a projection on a lower dimensional subspace of the covariate space which is sufficient for predicting exceedances of the target above high thresholds. We propose an original definition of Tail Conditional Independence which matches this purpose. Inspired by Sliced Inverse Regression (SIR) methods, we develop a novel framework (TIREX, Tail Inverse Regression for EXtreme response) in order to estimate an extreme sufficient dimension reduction (SDR) space of potentially smaller dimension than that of a classical SDR space. We prove the weak convergence of tail empirical processes involved in the estimation procedure and we illustrate the relevance of the proposed approach on simulated and real world data.

math.ST↗

Learning Trajectory-Conditioned Relations to Predict Pedestrian Crossing Behavior

In smart transportation, intelligent systems avoid potential collisions by predicting the intent of traffic agents, especially pedestrians. Pedestrian intent, defined as future action, e.g., start crossing, can be dependent on traffic surroundings. In this paper, we develop a framework to incorporate such dependency given observed pedestrian trajectory and scene frames. Our framework first encodes regional joint information between a pedestrian and surroundings over time into feature-map vectors. The global relation representations are then extracted from pairwise feature-map vectors to estimate intent with past trajectory condition. We evaluate our approach on two public datasets and compare against two state-of-the-art approaches. The experimental results demonstrate that our method helps to inform potential risks during crossing events with 0.04 improvement in F1-score on JAAD dataset and 0.01 improvement in recall on PIE dataset. Furthermore, we conduct ablation experiments to confirm the contribution of the relation extraction in our framework.

cs.CV↗

Tail inference using extreme U-statistics

Extreme U-statistics arise when the kernel of a U-statistic has a high degree but depends only on its arguments through a small number of top order statistics. As the kernel degree of the U-statistic grows to infinity with the sample size, estimators built out of such statistics form an intermediate family in between those constructed in the block maxima and peaks-over-threshold frameworks in extreme value analysis. The asymptotic normality of extreme U-statistics based on location-scale invariant kernels is established. Although the asymptotic variance coincides with the one of the Hájek projection, the proof goes beyond considering the first term in Hoeffding's variance decomposition. We propose a kernel depending on the three highest order statistics leading to a location-scale invariant estimator of the extreme value index resembling the Pickands estimator. This extreme Pickands U-estimator is asymptotically normal and its finite-sample performance is competitive with that of the pseudo-maximum likelihood estimator.

math.ST↗

A new proof of Huber's theorem on differential geometry in the large

In this paper we give a new, and shorter, proof of Huber's theorem which affirms that for a connected open Riemann surface endowed with a complete conformal Riemannian metric, if the negative part of its Gaussian curvature has finite mass, then the Riemann surface is homeomorphic to the interior of a compact surface with boundary, and thus it has finite topological type. We will also show that such Riemann surface is parabolic.

math.DG↗

Lefschetz theorem for holomorphic one-forms on weakly 1-complete manifolds

For a holomorphic one-form $\mathbfξ$ on a weakly 1-complete manifold $X$ with certain properties, we discussed the connectivity of the pair $(\hat{X}, F^{-1}(z))$, where $π: \hat{X} \to X$ is a covering map and $dF=π^*\mathbfξ$. We also discussed the criteria about when such a manifold $X$ admits a proper holomorphic mapping onto a Riemann surface.

math.DG↗

On the Ramifications of Human Label Uncertainty

Humans exhibit disagreement during data labeling. We term this disagreement as human label uncertainty. In this work, we study the ramifications of human label uncertainty (HLU). Our evaluation of existing uncertainty estimation algorithms, with the presence of HLU, indicates the limitations of existing uncertainty metrics and algorithms themselves in response to HLU. Meanwhile, we observe undue effects in predictive uncertainty and generalizability. To mitigate the undue effects, we introduce a novel natural scene statistics (NSS) based label dilution training scheme without requiring massive human labels. Specifically, we first select a subset of samples with low perceptual quality ranked by statistical regularities of images. We then assign separate labels to each sample in this subset to obtain a training set with diluted labels. Our experiments and analysis demonstrate that training with NSS-based label dilution alleviates the undue effects caused by HLU.

cs.CV↗