Search arXiv⌕ Search

arXiv subjects

Yang Xu

Publications and source records attributed to Yang Xu.

At least 325 records · Page 18Linked to original sources

An asperity-based statistical model for the adhesive friction of elastic nominally flat rough contact interfaces

Contact mechanics-based models for the friction of nominally flat rough surfaces have not been able to adequately capture certain key experimentally observed phenomenona, such as the transition from a static friction peak to a lower level of sliding friction and the shear-induced contact area reduction that has been observed in the pre-sliding regime especially for soft materials. Here, we propose a statistical model based on physically-rooted contact mechanics laws describing the micromechanics of individual junctions. The model considers the quasi-static tangential loading, up to full sliding, of the contact between a smooth rigid flat surface and a nominally flat linear elastic rough surface comprising random independent spherical asperities, and accounts for the coupling between adhesion and friction at the micro-junction level. The model qualitatively reproduces both the macroscopic shear-induced contact area reduction and, remarkably, the static friction peak without the need to explicitly introduce two different friction levels. It also demonstrates how the static friction peak and contact area evolution depend on the normal load and certain key microscale interface properties such as surface energy, mode mixity and frictional shear strength. "Tougher" interfaces (i.e. with larger surface energy and smaller mode mixity parameter) are shown to result in a larger real contact area and a more pronounced static friction peak. Overall, this work provides important insights about how key microscale properties operating at the asperity level can combine with the surface statistics to reproduce important macroscopic responses observed in rough frictionalsoft contact experiments.

cond-mat.soft↗

Reflexivity of Partitions Induced by Weighted Poset Metric and Combinatorial Metric

Let $\mathbf{H}$ be the Cartesian product of a family of finite abelian groups. Via a polynomial approach, we give sufficient conditions for a partition of $\mathbf{H}$ induced by weighted poset metric to be reflexive, which also become necessary for some special cases. Moreover, by examining the roots of the Krawtchouk polynomials, we establish non-reflexive partitions of $\mathbf{H}$ induced by combinatorial metric. When $\mathbf{H}$ is a vector space over a finite field $\mathbb{F}$, we consider the property of admitting MacWilliams identity (PAMI) and the MacWilliams extension property (MEP) for partitions of $\mathbf{H}$. With some invariance assumptions, we show that two partitions of $\mathbf{H}$ admit MacWilliams identity if and only if they are mutually dual and reflexive, and any partition of $\mathbf{H}$ satisfying the MEP is in fact an orbit partition induced by some subgroup of $\Aut_{\mathbb{F}}(\mathbf{H})$, which is necessarily reflexive. As an application of the aforementioned results, we establish partitions of $\mathbf{H}$ induced by combinatorial metric that do not satisfy the MEP, which further enable us to provide counter-examples to a conjecture proposed by Pinheiro, Machado and Firer in \cite{39}.

cs.IT↗

Isometries and MacWilliams Extension Property for Weighted Poset Metric

Let $\mathbf{H}$ be the cartesian product of a family of left modules over a ring $S$, indexed by a finite set $Ω$. We are concerned with the $(\mathbf{P},ω)$-weight on $\mathbf{H}$, where $\mathbf{P}=(Ω,\preccurlyeq_{\mathbf{P}})$ is a poset and $ω:Ω\longrightarrow\mathbb{R}^{+}$ is a weight function. We characterize the group of $(\mathbf{P},ω)$-weight isometries of $\mathbf{H}$, and give a canonical decomposition for semi-simple subcodes of $\mathbf{H}$ when $\mathbf{P}$ is hierarchical. We then study the MacWilliams extension property (MEP) for $(\mathbf{P},ω)$-weight. We show that the MEP implies the unique decomposition property (UDP) of $(\mathbf{P},ω)$, which further implies that $\mathbf{P}$ is hierarchical if $ω$ is identically $1$. For the case that either $\mathbf{P}$ is hierarchical or $ω$ is identically $1$, we show that the MEP for $(\mathbf{P},ω)$-weight can be characterized in terms of the MEP for Hamming weight, and give necessary and sufficient conditions for $\mathbf{H}$ to satisfy the MEP for $(\mathbf{P},ω)$-weight when $S$ is an Artinian simple ring (either finite or infinite). When $S$ is a finite field, in the context of $(\mathbf{P},ω)$-weight, we compare the MEP with other coding theoretic properties including the MacWilliams identity, Fourier-reflexivity of partitions and the UDP, and show that the MEP is strictly stronger than all the rest among them.

cs.IT↗

Optimization of rule-based energy management strategies for hybrid vehicles using dynamic programming

Reducing energy consumption is a key focus for hybrid electric vehicle (HEV) development. The popular vehicle dynamic model used in many energy management optimization studies does not capture the vehicle dynamics that the in-vehicle measurement system does. However, feedback from the measurement system is what the vehicle controller actually uses to manage energy consumption. Therefore, the optimization solely using the model does not represent what the vehicle controller sees in the vehicle. This paper reports the utility factor-weighted energy consumption using a rule-based strategy under a real-world representative drive cycle. In addition, the vehicle test data was used to perform the optimization approach. By comparing results from both rule-based and optimization-based strategies, the areas for further improving rule-based strategy are discussed. Furthermore, recent development of OBD raises a concern about the increase of energy consumption. This paper investigates the energy consumption increase with extensive OBD usage.

eess.SY↗

Crosslinguistic word order variation reflects evolutionary pressures of dependency and information locality

Languages vary considerably in syntactic structure. About 40% of the world's languages have subject-verb-object order, and about 40% have subject-object-verb order. Extensive work has sought to explain this word order variation across languages. However, the existing approaches are not able to explain coherently the frequency distribution and evolution of word order in individual languages. We propose that variation in word order reflects different ways of balancing competing pressures of dependency locality and information locality, whereby languages favor placing elements together when they are syntactically related or contextually informative about each other. Using data from 80 languages in 17 language families and phylogenetic modeling, we demonstrate that languages evolve to balance these pressures, such that word order change is accompanied by change in the frequency distribution of the syntactic structures which speakers communicate to maintain overall efficiency. Variability in word order thus reflects different ways in which languages resolve these evolutionary pressures. We identify relevant characteristics that result from this joint optimization, particularly the frequency with which subjects and objects are expressed together for the same verb. Our findings suggest that syntactic structure and usage across languages co-adapt to support efficient communication under limited cognitive resources.

cs.CL↗

K-Detector: Identifying Duplicate Crash Failures in Large-Scale Software Delivery

After a developer submits code, corresponding test cases arise to ensure the quality of software delivery. Test failures would occur during this period, such as crash, error, and timeout. Since it takes time for developers to resolve them, many duplicate failures will happen during this period. In the delivery practice of SAP HANA, crash triage is considered as the most time-consuming task. If duplicate crash failures can be automatically identified, the degree of automation will be significantly enhanced. To find such duplicates, we propose a training-based mathematical model that utilizes component information of SAP HANA to achieve better crash similarity comparison. We implement our approach in a tool named Knowledge-based Detector (K-Detector), which is verified by 11,208 samples and performs 0.986 in AUC. Furthermore, we have deployed K-Detector to the production environment, and it can save 97% human efforts in crash triage as statistics.

cs.SE↗

Noun2Verb: Probabilistic frame semantics for word class conversion

Humans can flexibly extend word usages across different grammatical classes, a phenomenon known as word class conversion. Noun-to-verb conversion, or denominal verb (e.g., to Google a cheap flight), is one of the most prevalent forms of word class conversion. However, existing natural language processing systems are impoverished in interpreting and generating novel denominal verb usages. Previous work has suggested that novel denominal verb usages are comprehensible if the listener can compute the intended meaning based on shared knowledge with the speaker. Here we explore a computational formalism for this proposal couched in frame semantics. We present a formal framework, Noun2Verb, that simulates the production and comprehension of novel denominal verb usages by modeling shared knowledge of speaker and listener in semantic frames. We evaluate an incremental set of probabilistic models that learn to interpret and generate novel denominal verb usages via paraphrasing. We show that a model where the speaker and listener cooperatively learn the joint distribution over semantic frame elements better explains the empirical denominal verb usages than state-of-the-art language models, evaluated against data from 1) contemporary English in both adult and child speech, 2) contemporary Mandarin Chinese, and 3) the historical development of English. Our work grounds word class conversion in probabilistic frame semantics and bridges the gap between natural language processing systems and humans in lexical creativity.

cs.CL↗

Semantically Informed Slang Interpretation

Slang is a predominant form of informal language making flexible and extended use of words that is notoriously hard for natural language processing systems to interpret. Existing approaches to slang interpretation tend to rely on context but ignore semantic extensions common in slang word usage. We propose a semantically informed slang interpretation (SSI) framework that considers jointly the contextual and semantic appropriateness of a candidate interpretation for a query slang. We perform rigorous evaluation on two large-scale online slang dictionaries and show that our approach not only achieves state-of-the-art accuracy for slang interpretation in English, but also does so in zero-shot and few-shot scenarios where training data is sparse. Furthermore, we show how the same framework can be applied to enhancing machine translation of slang from English to other languages. Our work creates opportunities for the automated interpretation and translation of informal language.

cs.CL↗

Ultrasensitive refractive index sensor with rotatory biased weak measurement

A modified weak measurement scheme, rotatory biased weak measurement, is proposed to significantly improve the sensitivity and resolution of the refractive index sensor on a total reflection structure. This method introduces an additional phase in the post-selected procedure and generates an extinction point in the spectrum distribution. The biased post-selection makes smaller coupling strength available, which leads to an enhancement of phase sensitivity and refractive index sensitivity. In rotatory biased weak measurement, we achieve an enhanced refractive index sensitivity of 13605 nm/RIU compared to 1644 nm/RIU in standard weak measurement. The performance of sensors with different sensitivity is analyzed, and we find the optimal refractive index resolution of sensors increases with sensitivity. In this work, we demonstrate an optimal refractive index resolution of $4\times10^{-7}$ RIU on a total reflection structure. The rabbit anti-mouse IgG and mouse IgG binding reaction experiments demonstrate that our system has a high response to the concentration of IgG in a wide range and the limit of detection is 15 ng/mL. The improvements in this work are helpful to the optimizations of other optical sensors with weak measurement.

quant-ph↗

Frustrated magnetic interactions in a Wigner-Mott insulator

Two-dimensional semiconductor moiré materials have emerged as a highly controllable platform to simulate and explore quantum condensed matter. Compared to real solids, electrons in semiconductor moiré materials are less strongly attracted to the moiré lattice sites, making the nonlocal contributions to the magnetic interactions as important as the Anderson super-exchange. It provides a unique platform to study the effects of competing magnetic interactions. Here, we report the observation of strongly frustrated magnetic interactions in a Wigner-Mott insulating state at 2/3 filling of the moiré lattice in angle-aligned WSe2/WS2 heterobilayers. Magneto-optical measurements show that the net exchange interaction is antiferromagnetic for filling factors below 1 with a strong suppression at 2/3 filling. The suppression is lifted upon screening of the long-range Coulomb interactions and melting of the Wigner-Mott insulator by a nearby metallic gate. The results can be qualitatively captured by a honeycomb-lattice spin model with an antiferromagnetic nearest-neighbor coupling and a ferromagnetic second-neighbor coupling. Our study establishes semiconductor moiré materials as a model system for the lattice-spin physics and frustrated magnetism.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

Ultrafast disinfection of SARS-CoV-2 viruses

The wide use of surgical masks has been proven effective for mitigating the spread of respiration diseases, such as COVID-19, alongside social distance control, vaccines, and other efforts. With the newly reported variants, such as Delta and Omicron, a higher spread rate had been found compared to the initial strains. People might get infected even by inhaling fewer loading of viruses. More frequent sterilization of surgical masks is needed to protect the wearers. However, it is challenging to sterilize the commodity surgical masks with a fast and effective method. Herein, we reported the sterilization of the SARS-CoV-2 viruses within an ultra-short time, while retaining the mask performance. Silver thin film is coated on commercial polyimide film by physical vapor deposition and patterned by laser scribing to form a Joule heating electrode. Another layer of the gold thin film was coated onto the opposite side of the device to promote the uniformity of the Joule heating through nano-heat transfer regulation. As a result, the surgical mask can be heated to inactivation temperature within a short time and with high uniformity. By Joule-heating the surgical mask with the temperature at 90 °C for 3 minutes, the inactivation of the SARS-CoV-2 showed an efficacy of 99.89%. Normal commodity surgical masks can be sterilized faster, more frequently, and efficiently against SARS-CoV-2 viruses and the new invariants.

physics.med-ph↗

Image Captioning In the Transformer Age

Image Captioning (IC) has achieved astonishing developments by incorporating various techniques into the CNN-RNN encoder-decoder architecture. However, since CNN and RNN do not share the basic network component, such a heterogeneous pipeline is hard to be trained end-to-end where the visual encoder will not learn anything from the caption supervision. This drawback inspires the researchers to develop a homogeneous architecture that facilitates end-to-end training, for which Transformer is the perfect one that has proven its huge potential in both vision and language domains and thus can be used as the basic component of the visual encoder and language decoder in an IC pipeline. Meantime, self-supervised learning releases the power of the Transformer architecture that a pre-trained large-scale one can be generalized to various tasks including IC. The success of these large-scale models seems to weaken the importance of the single IC task. However, we demonstrate that IC still has its specific significance in this age by analyzing the connections between IC with some popular self-supervised learning paradigms. Due to the page limitation, we only refer to highly important papers in this short survey and more related works can be found at https://github.com/SjokerLily/awesome-image-captioning.

cs.CV↗

The Machine Learning for Combinatorial Optimization Competition (ML4CO): Results and Insights

Combinatorial optimization is a well-established area in operations research and computer science. Until recently, its methods have focused on solving problem instances in isolation, ignoring that they often stem from related data distributions in practice. However, recent years have seen a surge of interest in using machine learning as a new approach for solving combinatorial problems, either directly as solvers or by enhancing exact solvers. Based on this context, the ML4CO aims at improving state-of-the-art combinatorial optimization solvers by replacing key heuristic components. The competition featured three challenging tasks: finding the best feasible solution, producing the tightest optimality certificate, and giving an appropriate solver configuration. Three realistic datasets were considered: balanced item placement, workload apportionment, and maritime inventory routing. This last dataset was kept anonymous for the contestants.

cs.LG↗

Robust Inertial-aided Underwater Localization based on Imaging Sonar Keyframes

This article focuses on feature-based underwater localization and navigation for autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) using 2D imaging sonar measurements. The sparsity of underwater acoustic features and the loss of elevation angle in sonar images may introduce wrong feature matches or insufficient features for optimization-based underwater localization (i.e. under-constrained/degeneracy cases). This motivates us to propose a novel inertial-aided sliding window optimization framework to improve the estimation accuracy and the robustness to front-end outliers. Concretely, we first discriminate under-constrained/ well-constrained sonar frames and define sonar keyframes (SKFs) based on the Jacobian matrix derived from odometry and sonar measurements. To utilize the past well-constrained SKFs mostly, we design a size-adjustable windowed back-end optimization scheme based on singular values. We also prove that the landmark triangulation failure (navigation problem) caused by sonar motion can be solved in 2D scenes. Comparative simulation and evaluation on a public dataset show the proposed method outperforms the existing ones in pose estimation and robustness even without loop closure and also ensures the real-time performance for online applications.

cs.RO↗

Axial and Vector Structure Functions for Lepton-Nucleon Scattering, NuFact 2021 Update

We report on an update (2021) of a phenomenological model for inelastic neutrino- and electron-nucleon scattering cross sections using effective leading order parton distribution functions with a new scaling variable $ξ_w$. Non-perturbative effects are well described using the $ξ_w$ scaling variable in combination with multiplicative $K$ factors at low $Q^2$. The model describes all inelastic charged-lepton-nucleon scattering data (HERA/NMC/BCDMS/SLAC/JLab) ranging from very high $Q^2$ to very low $Q^2$ and down to the $Q^2=0$ photo-production region. The model has been developed to be used in analyses of neutrino oscillation experiments in the few GeV region. The 2021 update accounts for the difference between axial and vector structure functions which brings it into much better agreement with neutrino-nucleon total cross section measurements. The model has been developed primarily for hadronic final state masses $W$ above 1.8 GeV. However with additional parameters the model also describes the $average$ neutrino cross sections in the resonance region down to $W$=1.4 GeV.

hep-ph↗

Pomeranchuk Effect and Tunable Quantum Phase Transitions in 3L-MoTe2/WSe2

Many sought-after exotic states of matter are known to emerge close to quantum phase transitions, such as quantum spin liquids (QSL) and unconventional superconductivity. It is thus desirable to experimentally explore systems that can be continuously tuned across these transitions. Here, we demonstrate such tunability and the electronic correlation effects in triangular moiré superlattices formed between trilayer MoTe$_2$ and monolayer WSe$_2$ (3L-MoTe$_2$/WSe$_2$). Through electric transport measurements, we firmly establish the Pomeranchuk effect observed at half filling of the first moiré subband, where increasing temperature paradoxically enhances charge localization. The system simultaneously exhibits the characteristic of a Fermi liquid with strongly renormalized effective mass, suggesting a correlated metal state. The state is highly susceptible to out-of-plane electric and magnetic fields, which induce a Lifshitz transition and a metal-insulator transition (MIT), respectively. It enables identification of a tricritical point in the quantum phase diagram at the base temperature. We explain the Lifshitz transition in terms of interlayer charge transfer by applying the vertical electric field, which leads to the emergence of a new Fermi surface and immediate suppression of the Pomeranchuk effect. The existence of quantum criticality in the magnetic filed induced MIT is supported by scaling behaviors of the resistance. Our work shows the 3L-MoTe$_2$/WSe$_2$ lies in the vicinity to the MIT point of the triangular lattice Hubbard model, rendering it a unique system to manifest the rich correlation effects at an intermediate interaction strength.

cond-mat.str-el↗

Neural reality of argument structure constructions

In lexicalist linguistic theories, argument structure is assumed to be predictable from the meaning of verbs. As a result, the verb is the primary determinant of the meaning of a clause. In contrast, construction grammarians propose that argument structure is encoded in constructions (or form-meaning pairs) that are distinct from verbs. Decades of psycholinguistic research have produced substantial empirical evidence in favor of the construction view. Here we adapt several psycholinguistic studies to probe for the existence of argument structure constructions (ASCs) in Transformer-based language models (LMs). First, using a sentence sorting experiment, we find that sentences sharing the same construction are closer in embedding space than sentences sharing the same verb. Furthermore, LMs increasingly prefer grouping by construction with more input data, mirroring the behaviour of non-native language learners. Second, in a "Jabberwocky" priming-based experiment, we find that LMs associate ASCs with meaning, even in semantically nonsensical sentences. Our work offers the first evidence for ASCs in LMs and highlights the potential to devise novel probing methods grounded in psycholinguistic research.

cs.CL↗

Improving short-term bike sharing demand forecast through an irregular convolutional neural network

As an important task for the management of bike sharing systems, accurate forecast of travel demand could facilitate dispatch and relocation of bicycles to improve user satisfaction. In recent years, many deep learning algorithms have been introduced to improve bicycle usage forecast. A typical practice is to integrate convolutional (CNN) and recurrent neural network (RNN) to capture spatial-temporal dependency in historical travel demand. For typical CNN, the convolution operation is conducted through a kernel that moves across a "matrix-format" city to extract features over spatially adjacent urban areas. This practice assumes that areas close to each other could provide useful information that improves prediction accuracy. However, bicycle usage in neighboring areas might not always be similar, given spatial variations in built environment characteristics and travel behavior that affect cycling activities. Yet, areas that are far apart can be relatively more similar in temporal usage patterns. To utilize the hidden linkage among these distant urban areas, the study proposes an irregular convolutional Long-Short Term Memory model (IrConv+LSTM) to improve short-term bike sharing demand forecast. The model modifies traditional CNN with irregular convolutional architecture to extract dependency among "semantic neighbors". The proposed model is evaluated with a set of benchmark models in five study sites, which include one dockless bike sharing system in Singapore, and four station-based systems in Chicago, Washington, D.C., New York, and London. We find that IrConv+LSTM outperforms other benchmark models in the five cities. The model also achieves superior performance in areas with varying levels of bicycle usage and during peak periods. The findings suggest that "thinking beyond spatial neighbors" can further improve short-term travel demand prediction of urban bike sharing systems.

cs.AI↗