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Li Chen

Publications and source records attributed to Li Chen.

At least 271 records · Page 15Linked to original sources

Quantum key distribution based on mid-infrared and telecom band two-color entanglement source

Due to the high noise caused by solar background radiation, the existing satellite-based free-space quantum key distribution (QKD) experiments are mainly carried out at night, hindering the establishment of a practical all-day real-time global-scale quantum network. Given that the 3-5 μm mid-infrared (MIR) band has extremely low solar background radiation and strong scattering resistance, it is one of the ideal bands for free-space quantum communication. Here, firstly, we report on the preparation of a high-quality MIR (3370 nm) and telecom band (1555 nm) two-color polarization-entangled photon source, then we use this source to realize a principle QKD based on free-space and fiber hybrid channels in a laboratory. The theoretical analysis clearly shows that a long-distance QKD over 500 km of free-space and 96 km of fiber hybrid channels can be reached simultaneously. This work represents a significant step toward developing all-day global-scale quantum communication networks.

quant-ph↗

GenAD: Generalized Predictive Model for Autonomous Driving

In this paper, we introduce the first large-scale video prediction model in the autonomous driving discipline. To eliminate the restriction of high-cost data collection and empower the generalization ability of our model, we acquire massive data from the web and pair it with diverse and high-quality text descriptions. The resultant dataset accumulates over 2000 hours of driving videos, spanning areas all over the world with diverse weather conditions and traffic scenarios. Inheriting the merits from recent latent diffusion models, our model, dubbed GenAD, handles the challenging dynamics in driving scenes with novel temporal reasoning blocks. We showcase that it can generalize to various unseen driving datasets in a zero-shot manner, surpassing general or driving-specific video prediction counterparts. Furthermore, GenAD can be adapted into an action-conditioned prediction model or a motion planner, holding great potential for real-world driving applications.

cs.CV↗

Quantum-Enhanced Polarimetric Imaging

Polarimetric imaging, a technique that captures the invisible polarization-related properties of given materials, has broad applications from fundamental physics to advanced fields such as target recognition, stress detection, biomedical diagnosis and remote sensing. The introduction of quantum sources into classical imaging systems has demonstrated distinct advantages, yet few studies have explored their combination with polarimetric imaging. In this study, we present a quantum polarimetric imaging system that integrates polarization-entangled photon pairs into a polarizer-sample-compensator-analyzer (PSRA)-type polarimeter. Our system visualizes the birefringence properties of a periodical-distributed anisotropic material under decreasing illumination levels and diverse disturbing light sources. Compared to the classical system, the quantum approach reveals the superior sensitivity and robustness in low-light conditions, particularly useful in biomedical studies where the low illumination and non-destructive detection are urgently needed. The study also highlights the nonlocality of entangled photons in birefringence measurement, indicating the potential of quantum polarimetric system in the remote sensing domain.

physics.optics↗

Comprehensive characterization of tumor therapeutic response with simultaneous mapping cell size, density, and transcytolemmal water exchange

Early assessment of tumor therapeutic response is an important topic in precision medicine to optimize personalized treatment regimens and reduce unnecessary toxicity, cost, and delay. Although diffusion MRI (dMRI) has shown potential to address this need, its predictive accuracy is limited, likely due to its unspecific sensitivity to overall pathological changes. In this work, we propose a new quantitative dMRI-based method dubbed EXCHANGE (MRI of water Exchange, Confined and Hindered diffusion under Arbitrary Gradient waveform Encodings) for simultaneous mapping of cell size, cell density, and transcytolemmal water exchange. Such rich microstructural information comprehensively evaluates tumor pathologies at the cellular level. Validations using numerical simulations and in vitro cell experiments confirmed that the EXCHANGE method can accurately estimate mean cell size, density, and water exchange rate constants. The results from in vivo animal experiments show the potential of EXCHANGE for monitoring tumor treatment response. Finally, the EXCHANGE method was implemented in breast cancer patients with neoadjuvant chemotherapy, demonstrating its feasibility in assessing tumor therapeutic response in clinics. In summary, a new, quantitative dMRI-based EXCHANGE method was proposed to comprehensively characterize tumor microstructural properties at the cellular level, suggesting a unique means to monitor tumor treatment response in clinical practice.

physics.med-ph↗

Hegselmann--Krause model with environmental noise

We study a continuous-time version of the Hegselmann-Krause model describing the opinion dynamics of interacting agents subject to random perturbations. Mathematically speaking, the opinion of agents is modelled by an interacting particle system with a non-Lipschitz continuous interaction force, perturbed by idiosyncratic and environmental noises. Sending the number of agents to infinity, we derive a McKean-Vlasov stochastic differential equation as the limiting dynamic, by establishing propagation of chaos for regularized versions of the noisy opinion dynamics. To that end, we prove the existence of a unique strong solution to the McKean-Vlasov stochastic differential equation as well as well-posedness of the associated non-local, non-linear stochastic Fokker-Planck equation.

math.PR↗

Evolution of cooperation in the public goods game with Q-learning

Recent paradigm shifts from imitation learning to reinforcement learning (RL) is shown to be productive in understanding human behaviors. In the RL paradigm, individuals search for optimal strategies through interaction with the environment to make decisions. This implies that gathering, processing, and utilizing information from their surroundings are crucial. However, existing studies typically study pairwise games such as the prisoners' dilemma and employ a self-regarding setup, where individuals play against one opponent based solely on their own strategies, neglecting the environmental information. In this work, we investigate the evolution of cooperation with the multiplayer game -- the public goods game using the Q-learning algorithm by leveraging the environmental information. Specifically, the decision-making of players is based upon the cooperation information in their neighborhood. Our results show that cooperation is more likely to emerge compared to the case of imitation learning by using Fermi rule. Of particular interest is the observation of an anomalous non-monotonic dependence which is revealed when voluntary participation is further introduced. The analysis of the Q-table explains the mechanisms behind the cooperation evolution. Our findings indicate the fundamental role of environment information in the RL paradigm to understand the evolution of cooperation, and human behaviors in general.

q-bio.PE↗

Near-field Integrated Sensing and Communication: Opportunities and Challenges

With the extremely large-scale array XL-array deployed in future wireless systems, wireless communication and sensing are expected to operate in the radiative near-field region, which needs to be characterized by the spherical rather than planar wavefronts. Unlike most existing works that considered far-field integrated sensing and communication (ISAC), we study in this article the new near-field ISAC, which integrates both functions of sensing and communication in the near-field region. To this end, we first discuss the appealing advantages of near-field communication and sensing over their far-field counterparts, respectively. Then, we introduce three approaches for near-field ISAC, including joint near-field communication and sensing, sensing-assisted near-field communication, and communication-assisted near-field sensing. We discuss their individual research opportunities, new design issues, as well as propose promising solutions. Finally, several important directions in near-field ISAC are also highlighted to motivate future work.

cs.IT↗

Restriction-induced time-dependent transcytolemmal water exchange: Revisiting the Kärger exchange model

The Kärger model and its derivatives have been widely used to incorporate transcytolemmal water exchange rate, an essential characteristic of living cells, into analyses of diffusion MRI (dMRI) signals from tissues. The Kärger model consists of two homogeneous exchanging components coupled by an exchange rate constant and assumes measurements are made with sufficiently long diffusion time and slow water exchange. Despite successful applications, it remains unclear whether these assumptions are generally valid for practical dMRI sequences and biological tissues. In particular, barrier-induced restrictions to diffusion produce inhomogeneous magnetization distributions in relatively large-sized compartments such as cancer cells, violating the above assumptions. The effects of this inhomogeneity are usually overlooked. We performed computer simulations to quantify how restriction effects, which in images produce edge enhancements at compartment boundaries, influence different variants of the Kärger-model. The results show that the edge enhancement effect will produce larger, time-dependent estimates of exchange rates in e.g., tumors with relatively large cell sizes (>10 μm), resulting in overestimations of water exchange as previously reported. Moreover, stronger diffusion gradients, longer diffusion gradient durations, and larger cell sizes, all cause more pronounced edge enhancement effects. This helps us to better understand the feasibility of the Kärger model in estimating water exchange in different tissue types and provides useful guidance on signal acquisition methods that may mitigate the edge enhancement effect. This work also indicates the need to correct the overestimated transcytolemmal water exchange rates obtained assuming the Kärger-model.

physics.med-ph↗

Fully Sparse 3D Occupancy Prediction

Occupancy prediction plays a pivotal role in autonomous driving. Previous methods typically construct dense 3D volumes, neglecting the inherent sparsity of the scene and suffering from high computational costs. To bridge the gap, we introduce a novel fully sparse occupancy network, termed SparseOcc. SparseOcc initially reconstructs a sparse 3D representation from camera-only inputs and subsequently predicts semantic/instance occupancy from the 3D sparse representation by sparse queries. A mask-guided sparse sampling is designed to enable sparse queries to interact with 2D features in a fully sparse manner, thereby circumventing costly dense features or global attention. Additionally, we design a thoughtful ray-based evaluation metric, namely RayIoU, to solve the inconsistency penalty along the depth axis raised in traditional voxel-level mIoU criteria. SparseOcc demonstrates its effectiveness by achieving a RayIoU of 34.0, while maintaining a real-time inference speed of 17.3 FPS, with 7 history frames inputs. By incorporating more preceding frames to 15, SparseOcc continuously improves its performance to 35.1 RayIoU without bells and whistles.

cs.CV↗

ParamNet: A Dynamic Parameter Network for Fast Multi-to-One Stain Normalization

In practice, digital pathology images are often affected by various factors, resulting in very large differences in color and brightness. Stain normalization can effectively reduce the differences in color and brightness of digital pathology images, thus improving the performance of computer-aided diagnostic systems. Conventional stain normalization methods rely on one or several reference images, but one or several images may not adequately represent the entire dataset. Although learning-based stain normalization methods are a general approach, they use complex deep networks, which not only greatly reduce computational efficiency, but also risk introducing artifacts. Some studies use specialized network structures to enhance computational efficiency and reliability, but these methods are difficult to apply to multi-to-one stain normalization due to insufficient network capacity. In this study, we introduced dynamic-parameter network and proposed a novel method for stain normalization, called ParamNet. ParamNet addresses the challenges of limited network capacity and computational efficiency by introducing dynamic parameters (weights and biases of convolutional layers) into the network design. By effectively leveraging these parameters, ParamNet achieves superior performance in stain normalization while maintaining computational efficiency. Results show ParamNet can normalize one whole slide image (WSI) of 100,000x100,000 within 25s. The code is available at: https://github.com/khtao/ParamNet.

eess.IV↗

Almost-Linear Time Algorithms for Decremental Graphs: Min-Cost Flow and More via Duality

We give the first almost-linear total time algorithm for deciding if a flow of cost at most $F$ still exists in a directed graph, with edge costs and capacities, undergoing decremental updates, i.e., edge deletions, capacity decreases, and cost increases. This implies almost-linear time algorithms for approximating the minimum-cost flow value and $s$-$t$ distance on such decremental graphs. Our framework additionally allows us to maintain decremental strongly connected components in almost-linear time deterministically. These algorithms also improve over the current best known runtimes for statically computing minimum-cost flow, in both the randomized and deterministic settings. We obtain our algorithms by taking the dual perspective, which yields cut-based algorithms. More precisely, our algorithm computes the flow via a sequence of $m^{1+o(1)}$ dynamic min-ratio cut problems, the dual analog of the dynamic min-ratio cycle problem that underlies recent fast algorithms for minimum-cost flow. Our main technical contribution is a new data structure that returns an approximately optimal min-ratio cut in amortized $m^{o(1)}$ time by maintaining a tree-cut sparsifier. This is achieved by devising a new algorithm to maintain the dynamic expander hierarchy of [Goranci-Räcke-Saranurak-Tan, SODA 2021] that also works in capacitated graphs. All our algorithms are deterministc, though they can be sped up further using randomized techniques while still working against an adaptive adversary.

cs.DS↗

FedClust: Tackling Data Heterogeneity in Federated Learning through Weight-Driven Client Clustering

Federated learning (FL) is an emerging distributed machine learning paradigm that enables collaborative training of machine learning models over decentralized devices without exposing their local data. One of the major challenges in FL is the presence of uneven data distributions across client devices, violating the well-known assumption of independent-and-identically-distributed (IID) training samples in conventional machine learning. To address the performance degradation issue incurred by such data heterogeneity, clustered federated learning (CFL) shows its promise by grouping clients into separate learning clusters based on the similarity of their local data distributions. However, state-of-the-art CFL approaches require a large number of communication rounds to learn the distribution similarities during training until the formation of clusters is stabilized. Moreover, some of these algorithms heavily rely on a predefined number of clusters, thus limiting their flexibility and adaptability. In this paper, we propose {\em FedClust}, a novel approach for CFL that leverages the correlation between local model weights and the data distribution of clients. {\em FedClust} groups clients into clusters in a one-shot manner by measuring the similarity degrees among clients based on the strategically selected partial weights of locally trained models. We conduct extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets with different non-IID data settings. Experimental results demonstrate that {\em FedClust} achieves higher model accuracy up to $\sim$45\% as well as faster convergence with a significantly reduced communication cost up to 2.7$\times$ compared to its state-of-the-art counterparts.

cs.DC↗

Vertical-supercooling-controlled interfacial instability for a spreading liquid film

Thermal effect is essential to regulate the interfacial instabilities for diverse technology applications. Here we report the fingering instability at the propagation front for a spreading liquid film subjected to the supercooling at the vertical direction. We find the onset timescale of hydrodynamic instability is strongly correlated with that of the vertical solidification process. This correlation is further validated in a non-uniform geometry, demonstrating the capability of controlling fingering instability by structure design. We attribute the identified interfacial instability to a pronounced thermo-viscous effect, since the rapidly increased viscosity of propagation front undergoing solidification can significantly enhance the mobility contrast locally in the vicinity of the spreading front, consequently producing the instability analogous to viscous fingering. This work offers another valuable dimension by gating the vertical temperature to exploit the interfacial stabilities and steer liquid flow, consequently shedding light on the microfluidic cooling for electronics, and the advanced functional fibers and fabrics.

physics.flu-dyn↗

T-CorresNet: Template Guided 3D Point Cloud Completion with Correspondence Pooling Query Generation Strategy

Point clouds are commonly used in various practical applications such as autonomous driving and the manufacturing industry. However, these point clouds often suffer from incompleteness due to limited perspectives, scanner resolution and occlusion. Therefore the prediction of missing parts performs a crucial task. In this paper, we propose a novel method for point cloud completion. We utilize a spherical template to guide the generation of the coarse complete template and generate the dynamic query tokens through a correspondence pooling (Corres-Pooling) query generator. Specifically, we first generate the coarse complete template by embedding a Gaussian spherical template into the partial input and transforming the template to best match the input. Then we use the Corres-Pooling query generator to refine the coarse template and generate dynamic query tokens which could be used to predict the complete point proxies. Finally, we generate the complete point cloud with a FoldingNet following the coarse-to-fine paradigm, according to the fine template and the predicted point proxies. Experimental results demonstrate that our T-CorresNet outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on several benchmarks. Our Codes are available at https://github.com/df-boy/T-CorresNet.

cs.CV↗

Catalytic evolution of cooperation in a population with behavioural bimodality

The remarkable adaptability of humans in response to complex environments is often demonstrated by the context-dependent adoption of different behavioral modes. However, the existing game-theoretic studies mostly focus on the single-mode assumption, and the impact of this behavioral multimodality on the evolution of cooperation remains largely unknown. Here, we study how cooperation evolves in a population with two behavioral modes. Specifically, we incorporate Q-learning and Tit-for-Tat (TFT) rules into our toy model, where prisoner's dilemma game is played and we investigate the impact of the mode mixture on the evolution of cooperation. While players in Q-learning mode aim to maximize their accumulated payoffs, players within TFT mode repeat what their neighbors have done to them. In a structured mixing implementation where the updating rule is fixed for each individual, we find that the mode mixture greatly promotes the overall cooperation prevalence. The promotion is even more significant in the probabilistic mixing, where players randomly select one of the two rules at each step. Finally, this promotion is robust when players are allowed to adaptively choose the two modes by real-time comparison. In all three scenarios, players within the Q-learning mode act as catalyzer that turns the TFT players to be more cooperative, and as a result drive the whole population to be highly cooperative. The analysis of Q-tables explains the underlying mechanism of cooperation promotion, which captures the ``psychologic evolution" in the players' mind. Our study indicates that the variety of behavioral modes is non-negligible, and could be crucial to clarify the emergence of cooperation in the real world.

q-bio.PE↗

FontStudio: Shape-Adaptive Diffusion Model for Coherent and Consistent Font Effect Generation

Recently, the application of modern diffusion-based text-to-image generation models for creating artistic fonts, traditionally the domain of professional designers, has garnered significant interest. Diverging from the majority of existing studies that concentrate on generating artistic typography, our research aims to tackle a novel and more demanding challenge: the generation of text effects for multilingual fonts. This task essentially requires generating coherent and consistent visual content within the confines of a font-shaped canvas, as opposed to a traditional rectangular canvas. To address this task, we introduce a novel shape-adaptive diffusion model capable of interpreting the given shape and strategically planning pixel distributions within the irregular canvas. To achieve this, we curate a high-quality shape-adaptive image-text dataset and incorporate the segmentation mask as a visual condition to steer the image generation process within the irregular-canvas. This approach enables the traditionally rectangle canvas-based diffusion model to produce the desired concepts in accordance with the provided geometric shapes. Second, to maintain consistency across multiple letters, we also present a training-free, shape-adaptive effect transfer method for transferring textures from a generated reference letter to others. The key insights are building a font effect noise prior and propagating the font effect information in a concatenated latent space. The efficacy of our FontStudio system is confirmed through user preference studies, which show a marked preference (78% win-rates on aesthetics) for our system even when compared to the latest unrivaled commercial product, Adobe Firefly.

cs.CV↗

Smooth solutions to the Christoffel problem in $\mathbb{H}^{n+1}$

The famous Christoffel problem is possibly the oldest problem of prescribed curvatures for convex hypersurfaces in Euclidean space. Recently, this problem has been naturally formulated in the context of uniformly $h$-convex hypersurfaces in hyperbolic space by Espinar-Gálvez-Mira. Surprisingly, Espinar-Gálvez-Mira find that the Christoffel problem in hyperbolic space is essentially equivalent to the Nirenberg-Kazdan-Warner problem on prescribing scalar curvature on $\mathbb{S}^n$. This equivalence opens a new door to study the Nirenberg-Kazdan-Warner problem. In this paper, we establish a existence of solutions to the Christoffel problem in hyperbolic space by proving a full rank theorem. As a corollary, a existence of solutions to the Nirenberg-Kazdan-Warner problem follows.

math.DG↗

Fairness-Aware Meta-Learning via Nash Bargaining

To address issues of group-level fairness in machine learning, it is natural to adjust model parameters based on specific fairness objectives over a sensitive-attributed validation set. Such an adjustment procedure can be cast within a meta-learning framework. However, naive integration of fairness goals via meta-learning can cause hypergradient conflicts for subgroups, resulting in unstable convergence and compromising model performance and fairness. To navigate this issue, we frame the resolution of hypergradient conflicts as a multi-player cooperative bargaining game. We introduce a two-stage meta-learning framework in which the first stage involves the use of a Nash Bargaining Solution (NBS) to resolve hypergradient conflicts and steer the model toward the Pareto front, and the second stage optimizes with respect to specific fairness goals. Our method is supported by theoretical results, notably a proof of the NBS for gradient aggregation free from linear independence assumptions, a proof of Pareto improvement, and a proof of monotonic improvement in validation loss. We also show empirical effects across various fairness objectives in six key fairness datasets and two image classification tasks.

cs.LG↗