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Han Li

Publications and source records attributed to Han Li.

At least 289 records · Page 16Linked to original sources

Dielectric Screening Inside Carbon Nanotubes

Dielectric screening plays a vital role for the physical properties in the nanoscale and also alters our ability to detect and characterize nanomaterials by optical techniques. We study the dielectric screening inside of carbon nanotubes and how it changes electromagnetic fields and many-body effects for encapsulated nanostructures. First, we show that the local electric field inside a nanotube is altered by one-dimensional screening with dramatic effects on the effective Raman scattering efficiency of the encapsulated species for metallic walls. The scattering intensity of the inner tube is two orders of magnitude weaker than for the tube in air, which is nicely reproduced by local field calculations. Secondly, we find that the optical transition energies of the inner nanotubes shift to lower energies compared to a single-walled carbon nanotubes of the same chirality. The shift is higher if the outer tube is metallic than when it is semiconducting. The magnitude of the shift suggests that the excitons of small diameter inner metallic tubes are thermally dissociated at room temperate if the outer tube is also metallic and in essence we observe band-to-band transitions.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

BEM: Balanced and Entropy-based Mix for Long-Tailed Semi-Supervised Learning

Data mixing methods play a crucial role in semi-supervised learning (SSL), but their application is unexplored in long-tailed semi-supervised learning (LTSSL). The primary reason is that the in-batch mixing manner fails to address class imbalance. Furthermore, existing LTSSL methods mainly focus on re-balancing data quantity but ignore class-wise uncertainty, which is also vital for class balance. For instance, some classes with sufficient samples might still exhibit high uncertainty due to indistinguishable features. To this end, this paper introduces the Balanced and Entropy-based Mix (BEM), a pioneering mixing approach to re-balance the class distribution of both data quantity and uncertainty. Specifically, we first propose a class balanced mix bank to store data of each class for mixing. This bank samples data based on the estimated quantity distribution, thus re-balancing data quantity. Then, we present an entropy-based learning approach to re-balance class-wise uncertainty, including entropy-based sampling strategy, entropy-based selection module, and entropy-based class balanced loss. Our BEM first leverages data mixing for improving LTSSL, and it can also serve as a complement to the existing re-balancing methods. Experimental results show that BEM significantly enhances various LTSSL frameworks and achieves state-of-the-art performances across multiple benchmarks.

cs.CV↗

LoCo: Locally Constrained Training-Free Layout-to-Image Synthesis

Recent text-to-image diffusion models have reached an unprecedented level in generating high-quality images. However, their exclusive reliance on textual prompts often falls short in precise control of image compositions. In this paper, we propose LoCo, a training-free approach for layout-to-image Synthesis that excels in producing high-quality images aligned with both textual prompts and layout instructions. Specifically, we introduce a Localized Attention Constraint (LAC), leveraging semantic affinity between pixels in self-attention maps to create precise representations of desired objects and effectively ensure the accurate placement of objects in designated regions. We further propose a Padding Token Constraint (PTC) to leverage the semantic information embedded in previously neglected padding tokens, improving the consistency between object appearance and layout instructions. LoCo seamlessly integrates into existing text-to-image and layout-to-image models, enhancing their performance in spatial control and addressing semantic failures observed in prior methods. Extensive experiments showcase the superiority of our approach, surpassing existing state-of-the-art training-free layout-to-image methods both qualitatively and quantitatively across multiple benchmarks.

cs.CV↗

On the asymptotic behavior of solutions to the steady Navier-Stokes system in two-dimensional channels

In this paper, we investigate the incompressible steady Navier-Stokes system with no-slip boundary condition in a two-dimensional channel. Given any flux, the existence of solutions is proved as long as the width of cross-section of the channel grows more slowly than the linear growth. Furthermore, if the flux is suitably small, the solution is unique even when the width of the channel is unbounded. Finally, based on the estimate of Dirichlet norm on the truncated domain, one could obtain the pointwise decay rate of the solution for arbitrary flux.

math.AP↗

RadarCam-Depth: Radar-Camera Fusion for Depth Estimation with Learned Metric Scale

We present a novel approach for metric dense depth estimation based on the fusion of a single-view image and a sparse, noisy Radar point cloud. The direct fusion of heterogeneous Radar and image data, or their encodings, tends to yield dense depth maps with significant artifacts, blurred boundaries, and suboptimal accuracy. To circumvent this issue, we learn to augment versatile and robust monocular depth prediction with the dense metric scale induced from sparse and noisy Radar data. We propose a Radar-Camera framework for highly accurate and fine-detailed dense depth estimation with four stages, including monocular depth prediction, global scale alignment of monocular depth with sparse Radar points, quasi-dense scale estimation through learning the association between Radar points and image patches, and local scale refinement of dense depth using a scale map learner. Our proposed method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art Radar-Camera depth estimation methods by reducing the mean absolute error (MAE) of depth estimation by 25.6% and 40.2% on the challenging nuScenes dataset and our self-collected ZJU-4DRadarCam dataset, respectively. Our code and dataset will be released at \url{https://github.com/MMOCKING/RadarCam-Depth}.

cs.CV↗

Knowledge Condensation and Reasoning for Knowledge-based VQA

Knowledge-based visual question answering (KB-VQA) is a challenging task, which requires the model to leverage external knowledge for comprehending and answering questions grounded in visual content. Recent studies retrieve the knowledge passages from external knowledge bases and then use them to answer questions. However, these retrieved knowledge passages often contain irrelevant or noisy information, which limits the performance of the model. To address the challenge, we propose two synergistic models: Knowledge Condensation model and Knowledge Reasoning model. We condense the retrieved knowledge passages from two perspectives. First, we leverage the multimodal perception and reasoning ability of the visual-language models to distill concise knowledge concepts from retrieved lengthy passages, ensuring relevance to both the visual content and the question. Second, we leverage the text comprehension ability of the large language models to summarize and condense the passages into the knowledge essence which helps answer the question. These two types of condensed knowledge are then seamlessly integrated into our Knowledge Reasoning model, which judiciously navigates through the amalgamated information to arrive at the conclusive answer. Extensive experiments validate the superiority of the proposed method. Compared to previous methods, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on knowledge-based VQA datasets (65.1% on OK-VQA and 60.1% on A-OKVQA) without resorting to the knowledge produced by GPT-3 (175B).

cs.CV↗

Skeleton Supervised Airway Segmentation

Fully-supervised airway segmentation has accomplished significant triumphs over the years in aiding pre-operative diagnosis and intra-operative navigation. However, full voxel-level annotation constitutes a labor-intensive and time-consuming task, often plagued by issues such as missing branches, branch annotation discontinuity, or erroneous edge delineation. label-efficient solutions for airway extraction are rarely explored yet primarily demanding in medical practice. To this end, we introduce a novel skeleton-level annotation (SkA) tailored to the airway, which simplifies the annotation workflow while enhancing annotation consistency and accuracy, preserving the complete topology. Furthermore, we propose a skeleton-supervised learning framework to achieve accurate airway segmentation. Firstly, a dual-stream buffer inference is introduced to realize initial label propagation from SkA, avoiding the collapse of direct learning from SkA. Then, we construct a geometry-aware dual-path propagation framework (GDP) to further promote complementary propagation learning, composed of hard geometry-aware propagation learning and soft geometry-aware propagation guidance. Experiments reveal that our proposed framework outperforms the competing methods with SKA, which amounts to only 1.96% airways, and achieves comparable performance with the baseline model that is fully supervised with 100% airways, demonstrating its significant potential in achieving label-efficient segmentation for other tubular structures, such as vessels.

cs.CV↗

Graphics Processing Unit/Artificial Neural Network-accelerated large-eddy simulation of turbulent combustion: Application to swirling premixed flames

Within the scope of reacting flow simulations, the real-time direct integration (DI) of stiff ordinary differential equations (ODE) for the computation of chemical kinetics stands as the primary demand on computational resources. Meanwhile, as the number of transport equations that need to be solved increases, the computational cost grows more substantially, particularly for those combustion models involving direct coupling of chemistry and flow such as the transported probability density function model. In the current study, an integrated Graphics Processing Unit-Artificial Neural Network (GPU-ANN) framework is introduced to comply with heavy computational costs while maintaining high fidelity. Within this framework, a GPU-based solver is employed to solve partial differential equations and compute thermal and transport properties, and an ANN is utilized to replace the calculation of reaction rates. Large eddy simulations of two swirling flames provide a robust validation, affirming and extending the GPU-ANN approach's applicability to challenging scenarios. The simulation results demonstrate a strong correlation in the macro flame structure and statistical characteristics between the GPU-ANN approach and the traditional Central Processing Unit (CPU)-based solver with DI. This comparison indicates that the GPU-ANN approach is capable of attaining the same degree of precision as the conventional CPU-DI solver, even in more complex scenarios. In addition, the overall speed-up factor for the GPU-ANN approach is over two orders of magnitude. This study establishes the potential groundwork for widespread application of the proposed GPU-ANN approach in combustion simulations, addressing various and complex scenarios based on detailed chemistry, while significantly reducing computational costs.

physics.flu-dyn↗

Understanding Public Perceptions of AI Conversational Agents: A Cross-Cultural Analysis

Conversational Agents (CAs) have increasingly been integrated into everyday life, sparking significant discussions on social media. While previous research has examined public perceptions of AI in general, there is a notable lack in research focused on CAs, with fewer investigations into cultural variations in CA perceptions. To address this gap, this study used computational methods to analyze about one million social media discussions surrounding CAs and compared people's discourses and perceptions of CAs in the US and China. We find Chinese participants tended to view CAs hedonically, perceived voice-based and physically embodied CAs as warmer and more competent, and generally expressed positive emotions. In contrast, US participants saw CAs more functionally, with an ambivalent attitude. Warm perception was a key driver of positive emotions toward CAs in both countries. We discussed practical implications for designing contextually sensitive and user-centric CAs to resonate with various users' preferences and needs.

cs.HC↗

Adaptive Neural Ranking Framework: Toward Maximized Business Goal for Cascade Ranking Systems

Cascade ranking is widely used for large-scale top-k selection problems in online advertising and recommendation systems, and learning-to-rank is an important way to optimize the models in cascade ranking. Previous works on learning-to-rank usually focus on letting the model learn the complete order or top-k order, and adopt the corresponding rank metrics (e.g. OPA and NDCG@k) as optimization targets. However, these targets can not adapt to various cascade ranking scenarios with varying data complexities and model capabilities; and the existing metric-driven methods such as the Lambda framework can only optimize a rough upper bound of limited metrics, potentially resulting in sub-optimal and performance misalignment. To address these issues, we propose a novel perspective on optimizing cascade ranking systems by highlighting the adaptability of optimization targets to data complexities and model capabilities. Concretely, we employ multi-task learning to adaptively combine the optimization of relaxed and full targets, which refers to metrics Recall@m@k and OPA respectively. We also introduce permutation matrix to represent the rank metrics and employ differentiable sorting techniques to relax hard permutation matrix with controllable approximate error bound. This enables us to optimize both the relaxed and full targets directly and more appropriately. We named this method as Adaptive Neural Ranking Framework (abbreviated as ARF). Furthermore, we give a specific practice under ARF. We use the NeuralSort to obtain the relaxed permutation matrix and draw on the variant of the uncertainty weight method in multi-task learning to optimize the proposed losses jointly. Experiments on a total of 4 public and industrial benchmarks show the effectiveness and generalization of our method, and online experiment shows that our method has significant application value.

cs.LG↗

Optimal dynamic climate adaptation pathways: a case study of New York City

Assessing climate risk and its potential impacts on our cities and economies is of fundamental importance. Extreme weather events, such as hurricanes, floods, and storm surges can lead to catastrophic damages. We propose a flexible approach based on real options analysis and extreme value theory, which enables the selection of optimal adaptation pathways for a portfolio of climate adaptation projects. We model the severity of extreme sea level events using the block maxima approach from extreme value theory, and then develop a real options framework, factoring in climate change, sea level rise uncertainty, and the growth in asset exposure. We then apply the proposed framework to a real-world problem, considering sea level data as well as different adaptation investment options for New York City. Our research can assist governments and policy makers in taking informed decisions about optimal adaptation pathways and more specifically about reducing flood and storm surge risk in a dynamic settings.

q-fin.RM↗

RIDERS: Radar-Infrared Depth Estimation for Robust Sensing

Dense depth recovery is crucial in autonomous driving, serving as a foundational element for obstacle avoidance, 3D object detection, and local path planning. Adverse weather conditions, including haze, dust, rain, snow, and darkness, introduce significant challenges to accurate dense depth estimation, thereby posing substantial safety risks in autonomous driving. These challenges are particularly pronounced for traditional depth estimation methods that rely on short electromagnetic wave sensors, such as visible spectrum cameras and near-infrared LiDAR, due to their susceptibility to diffraction noise and occlusion in such environments. To fundamentally overcome this issue, we present a novel approach for robust metric depth estimation by fusing a millimeter-wave Radar and a monocular infrared thermal camera, which are capable of penetrating atmospheric particles and unaffected by lighting conditions. Our proposed Radar-Infrared fusion method achieves highly accurate and finely detailed dense depth estimation through three stages, including monocular depth prediction with global scale alignment, quasi-dense Radar augmentation by learning Radar-pixels correspondences, and local scale refinement of dense depth using a scale map learner. Our method achieves exceptional visual quality and accurate metric estimation by addressing the challenges of ambiguity and misalignment that arise from directly fusing multi-modal long-wave features. We evaluate the performance of our approach on the NTU4DRadLM dataset and our self-collected challenging ZJU-Multispectrum dataset. Especially noteworthy is the unprecedented robustness demonstrated by our proposed method in smoky scenarios. Our code will be released at \url{https://github.com/MMOCKING/RIDERS}.

cs.CV↗

Ratiometric fluorescent sensing of pyrophosphate with sp$^{3}$-functionalized single-walled carbon nanotubes

Inorganic pyrophosphate is a key molecule in many biological processes from DNA synthesis to cell metabolism. Here we introduce sp$^{3}$-functionalized (6,5) single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) with red-shifted defect emission as near-infrared luminescent probes for the optical detection and quantification of inorganic pyrophosphate. The sensing scheme is based on the immobilization of Cu$^{2+}$ ions on the SWNT surface promoted by coordination to covalently attached aryl alkyne groups and a triazole complex. The presence of Cu$^{2+}$ ions on the SWNT surface causes fluorescence quenching via photoinduced electron transfer, which is reversed by copper-complexing analytes such as pyrophosphate. The differences in the fluorescence response of sp$^{3}$-defect to pristine nanotube emission enables reproducible ratiometric measurements in a wide concentration window. Biocompatible, phospholipid-polyethylene glycol-coated SWNTs with such sp$^{3}$ defects are employed for the detection of pyrophosphate in cell lysate and for monitoring the progress of DNA synthesis in a polymerase chain reaction. This robust ratiometric and near-infrared luminescent probe for pyrophosphate may serve as a starting point for the rational design of nanotube-based biosensors.

physics.app-ph↗

PepGB: Facilitating peptide drug discovery via graph neural networks

Peptides offer great biomedical potential and serve as promising drug candidates. Currently, the majority of approved peptide drugs are directly derived from well-explored natural human peptides. It is quite necessary to utilize advanced deep learning techniques to identify novel peptide drugs in the vast, unexplored biochemical space. Despite various in silico methods having been developed to accelerate peptide early drug discovery, existing models face challenges of overfitting and lacking generalizability due to the limited size, imbalanced distribution and inconsistent quality of experimental data. In this study, we propose PepGB, a deep learning framework to facilitate peptide early drug discovery by predicting peptide-protein interactions (PepPIs). Employing graph neural networks, PepGB incorporates a fine-grained perturbation module and a dual-view objective with contrastive learning-based peptide pre-trained representation to predict PepPIs. Through rigorous evaluations, we demonstrated that PepGB greatly outperforms baselines and can accurately identify PepPIs for novel targets and peptide hits, thereby contributing to the target identification and hit discovery processes. Next, we derive an extended version, diPepGB, to tackle the bottleneck of modeling highly imbalanced data prevalent in lead generation and optimization processes. Utilizing directed edges to represent relative binding strength between two peptide nodes, diPepGB achieves superior performance in real-world assays. In summary, our proposed frameworks can serve as potent tools to facilitate peptide early drug discovery.

q-bio.BM↗

Towards Efficient and Effective Text-to-Video Retrieval with Coarse-to-Fine Visual Representation Learning

In recent years, text-to-video retrieval methods based on CLIP have experienced rapid development. The primary direction of evolution is to exploit the much wider gamut of visual and textual cues to achieve alignment. Concretely, those methods with impressive performance often design a heavy fusion block for sentence (words)-video (frames) interaction, regardless of the prohibitive computation complexity. Nevertheless, these approaches are not optimal in terms of feature utilization and retrieval efficiency. To address this issue, we adopt multi-granularity visual feature learning, ensuring the model's comprehensiveness in capturing visual content features spanning from abstract to detailed levels during the training phase. To better leverage the multi-granularity features, we devise a two-stage retrieval architecture in the retrieval phase. This solution ingeniously balances the coarse and fine granularity of retrieval content. Moreover, it also strikes a harmonious equilibrium between retrieval effectiveness and efficiency. Specifically, in training phase, we design a parameter-free text-gated interaction block (TIB) for fine-grained video representation learning and embed an extra Pearson Constraint to optimize cross-modal representation learning. In retrieval phase, we use coarse-grained video representations for fast recall of top-k candidates, which are then reranked by fine-grained video representations. Extensive experiments on four benchmarks demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness. Notably, our method achieves comparable performance with the current state-of-the-art methods while being nearly 50 times faster.

cs.CV↗

The Security Analysis of Continuous-Variable Quantum Key Distribution under Limited Eavesdropping with Practical Fiber

Research on optimal eavesdropping models under practical conditions will help to evaluate realistic risk when employing quantum key distribution (QKD) system for secure information transmission. Intuitively, fiber loss will lead to the optical energy leaking to the environment, rather than harvested by the eavesdropper, which also limits the eavesdropping ability while improving the QKD system performance in practical use. However, defining the optimal eavesdropping model in the presence of lossy fiber is difficult because the channel is beyond the control of legitimate partners and the leaked signal is undetectable. Here we investigate how the fiber loss influences the eavesdropping ability based on a teleportation-based collective attack model which requires two distant stations and a shared entanglement source. We find that if the distributed entanglement is limited due to the practical loss, the optimal attack occurs when the two teleportation stations are merged to one and placed close to the transmitter site, which performs similar to the entangling-cloning attack but with a reduced wiretapping ratio. Assuming Eve uses the best available hollow-core fiber, the secret key rate in the practical environment can be 20%~40% higher than that under ideal eavesdropping. While if the entanglement distillation technology is mature enough to provide high quality of distributed entanglement, the two teleportation stations should be distantly separated for better eavesdropping performance, where the eavesdropping can even approach the optimal collective attack. Under the current level of entanglement purification technology, the unavoidable fiber loss can still greatly limit the eavesdropping ability as well as enhance the secret key rate and transmission distance of the realistic system, which promotes the development of QKD systems in practical application scenarios.

quant-ph↗

A comprehensive study on the accuracy and generalization of deep learning-generated chemical ODE integrators

The application of deep neural networks (DNNs) holds considerable promise as a substitute for the direct integration of chemical source terms in combustion simulations. However, challenges persist in ensuring high precision and generalisation across various different fuels and flow conditions. In this study, we propose and validate a consistent DNN approach for chemistry integration in a range of fuels and premixed flame configurations. This approach generates thermochemical base state from a set of low-dimensional laminar flames, followed by an effective perturbation strategy to enhance the coverage of the composition space for higher generalisation ability. A constraint criterion based on heat release rate is then employed to remove the nonphysical perturbed states for improved accuracy.Without specific tuning, three DNNs are consistently trained for three representative fuels, i.e., hydrogen, ethylene and Jet-A. Comprehensive validations are conducted using 1-D laminar flames and two typical turbulent premixed flames. The DNN model predictions on various physical characteristics, including laminar and turbulent flame speeds, dynamic flame structures influenced by turbulence-chemistry interactions, and conditional scalar profiles, all exhibit good agreement with the results obtained from direct integration. This demonstrates the exceptional accuracy and generalisation ability of the proposed DNN approach. Furthermore, when the DNN is used in the simulation, a significant speed-up for the chemistry integration is achieved, approximately 50 for the ethylene/air flame and 90 for the Jet-A/air flame.

physics.flu-dyn↗

D3L: Decomposition of 3D Rotation and Lift from 2D Joint to 3D for Human Mesh Recovery

Existing methods for 3D human mesh recovery always directly estimate SMPL parameters, which involve both joint rotations and shape parameters. However, these methods present rotation semantic ambiguity, rotation error accumulation, and shape estimation overfitting, which also leads to errors in the estimated pose. Additionally, these methods have not efficiently leveraged the advancements in another hot topic, human pose estimation. To address these issues, we propose a novel approach, Decomposition of 3D Rotation and Lift from 2D Joint to 3D mesh (D3L). We disentangle 3D joint rotation into bone direction and bone twist direction so that the human mesh recovery task is broken down into estimation of pose, twist, and shape, which can be handled independently. Then we design a 2D-to-3D lifting network for estimating twist direction and 3D joint position from 2D joint position sequences and introduce a nonlinear optimization method for fitting shape parameters and bone directions. Our approach can leverage human pose estimation methods, and avoid pose errors introduced by shape estimation overfitting. We conduct experiments on the Human3.6M dataset and demonstrate improved performance compared to existing methods by a large margin.

cs.CV↗