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Zheng Zhu

Publications and source records attributed to Zheng Zhu.

At least 235 records · Page 13Linked to original sources
arXiv2020

Complex Phase Diagram of Doped XXZ Ladder: Localization and Pairing

How the ground state nature can be dramatically changed by the distinct underlying spin correlation is a central issue of doped Mott insulators. The two-leg XXZ ladder provides a prototypical spin background, which can be tuned from a long-range Néel order to a short-range ``spin liquid'' via the superexchange anisotropy, giving rise to a complex phase diagram at finite doping. By density matrix renormalization group method, we show that although the charge is always self-localized in the Néel ordered phase, a second insulating phase emerges, in which the doped holes become paired but remain localized while the transverse spin-spin correlation reduces to short-ranged one to make the Néel order classical. Only when the Néel order totally disappears by further reducing anisotropy, does the pairing become truly coherent as characterized by a Luther-Emery state. In sharp contrast, the pairing is totally absent in the in-plane ferromagnetic XXZ regime, where a direct transition from the charge self-localization in the Néel ordered phase to a Fermi-gas-like state in the spin liquid phase is found. A consistent physical picture is briefly discussed.

cond-mat.str-el↗
arXiv2020

Modeling indoor-level non-pharmaceutical interventions during the COVID-19 pandemic: a pedestrian dynamics-based microscopic simulation approach

Mathematical modeling of epidemic spreading has been widely adopted to estimate the threats of epidemic diseases (i.e., the COVID-19 pandemic) as well as to evaluate epidemic control interventions. The indoor place is considered to be a significant epidemic spreading risk origin, but existing widely-used epidemic spreading models are usually limited for indoor places since the dynamic physical distance changes between people are ignored, and the empirical features of the essential and non-essential travel are not differentiated. In this paper, we introduce a pedestrian-based epidemic spreading model that is capable of modeling indoor transmission risks of diseases during people's social activities. Taking advantage of the before-and-after mobility data from the University of Maryland COVID-19 Impact Analysis Platform, it's found that people tend to spend more time in grocery stores once their travel frequencies are restricted to a low level. In other words, an increase in dwell time could balance the decrease in travel frequencies and satisfy people's demand. Based on the pedestrian-based model and the empirical evidence, combined non-pharmaceutical interventions from different operational levels are evaluated. Numerical simulations show that restrictions on people's travel frequency and open-hours of indoor places may not be universally effective in reducing average infection risks for each pedestrian who visit the place. Entry limitations can be a widely effective alternative, whereas the decision-maker needs to balance the decrease in risky contacts and the increase in queue length outside the place that may impede people from fulfilling their travel needs.

physics.soc-ph↗
arXiv2019

Photo-thermoelectric properties and their use in study of transport properties of both carriers from a single bulk sample

We describe a theory on photo-thermoelectric properties of a semiconductor, which include photo-conductivity, photo-Seebeck coefficient, and photo-Hall effect. We demonstrate that these properties provide a powerful tool for the study of carrier transport in semiconductors. Even though photo-carrier generation is a complicated process which often prohibits quantitative analysis as their species or numbers are not known. Using bulk samples seems even less likely as the photo-carrier only affect a thin layer. Our method will allow researchers to bypass these difficulties, to use only measured properties and determine both electron and hole mobilities as well as the ratio between electrons and holes from a bulk sample. We provide initial experiment verification of our theory in the end using two distinctively different semiconductors.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗
arXiv2019

Tackling Challenges in Seebeck Coefficient Measurement of Ultra-High Resistance Samples with an AC Technique

Seebeck coefficient is a widely-studied semiconductor property. Conventional Seebeck coefficient measurements are based on DC voltage measurement. Normally this is performed on samples with low resistances below a few Mohm level. Meanwhile, certain semiconductors are highly intrinsic and resistive, many examples can be found in optical and photovoltaic materials. The hybrid halide perovskites that have gained extensive attention recently are a good example. Few credible studies exist on the Seebeck coefficient of, CH3NH3PbI3, for example. We report here an AC technique based Seebeck coefficient measurement, which makes high quality voltage measurement on samples with resistances up to 100Gohm. This is achieved through a specifically designed setup to enhance sample isolation and reduce meter loading. As a demonstration, we performed Seebeck coefficient measurement of a CH3NH3PbI3 thin film at dark and found S = +550 microV/K. Such property of this material has not been successfully studied before.

physics.app-ph↗
arXiv2019

Predicting origin-destination ride-sourcing demand with a spatio-temporal encoder-decoder residual multi-graph convolutional network

With the rapid development of mobile-internet technologies, on-demand ride-sourcing services have become increasingly popular and largely reshaped the way people travel. Demand prediction is one of the most fundamental components in supply-demand management systems of ride-sourcing platforms. With accurate short-term prediction for origin-destination (OD) demand, the platforms make precise and timely decisions on real-time matching, idle vehicle reallocations and ride-sharing vehicle routing, etc. Compared to zone-based demand prediction that has been examined by many previous studies, OD-based demand prediction is more challenging. This is mainly due to the complicated spatial and temporal dependencies among demand of different OD pairs. To overcome this challenge, we propose the Spatio-Temporal Encoder-Decoder Residual Multi-Graph Convolutional network (ST-ED-RMGC), a novel deep learning model for predicting ride-sourcing demand of various OD pairs. Firstly, the model constructs OD graphs, which utilize adjacent matrices to characterize the non-Euclidean pair-wise geographical and semantic correlations among different OD pairs. Secondly, based on the constructed graphs, a residual multi-graph convolutional (RMGC) network is designed to encode the contextual-aware spatial dependencies, and a long-short term memory (LSTM) network is used to encode the temporal dependencies, into a dense vector space. Finally, we reuse the RMGC networks to decode the compressed vector back to OD graphs and predict the future OD demand. Through extensive experiments on the for-hire-vehicles datasets in Manhattan, New York City, we show that our proposed deep learning framework outperforms the state-of-arts by a significant margin.

eess.SP↗
arXiv2019

Multi-Stage HRNet: Multiple Stage High-Resolution Network for Human Pose Estimation

Human pose estimation are of importance for visual understanding tasks such as action recognition and human-computer interaction. In this work, we present a Multiple Stage High-Resolution Network (Multi-Stage HRNet) to tackling the problem of multi-person pose estimation in images. Specifically, we follow the top-down pipelines and high-resolution representations are maintained during single-person pose estimation. In addition, multiple stage network and cross stage feature aggregation are adopted to further refine the keypoint position. The resulting approach achieves promising results in COCO datasets. Our single-model-single-scale test configuration obtains 77.1 AP score in test-dev using publicly available training data.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2019

The Field-of-View Constraint of Markers for Mobile Robot with Pan-Tilt Camera

In the field of navigation and visual servo, it is common to calculate relative pose by feature points on markers, so keeping markers in camera's view is an important problem. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to calculate field-of-view (FOV) constraint of markers for camera. Our method can make the camera maintain the visibility of all feature points during the motion of mobile robot. According to the angular aperture of camera, the mobile robot can obtain the FOV constraint region where the camera cannot keep all feature points in an image. Based on the FOV constraint region, the mobile robot can be guided to move from the initial position to destination. Finally simulations and experiments are conducted based on a mobile robot equipped with a pan-tilt camera, which validates the effectiveness of the method to obtain the FOV constraints.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2019

EPOSIT: An Absolute Pose Estimation Method for Pinhole and Fish-Eye Cameras

This paper presents a generic 6DOF camera pose estimation method, which can be used for both the pinhole camera and the fish-eye camera. Different from existing methods, relative positions of 3D points rather than absolute coordinates in the world coordinate system are employed in our method, and it has a unique solution. The application scope of POSIT (Pose from Orthography and Scaling with Iteration) algorithm is generalized to fish-eye cameras by combining with the radially symmetric projection model. The image point relationship between the pinhole camera and the fish-eye camera is derived based on their projection model. The general pose expression which fits for different cameras can be acquired by four noncoplanar object points and their corresponding image points. Accurate estimation results are calculated iteratively. Experimental results on synthetic and real data show that the pose estimation results of our method are more stable and accurate than state-of-the-art methods. The source code is available at https://github.com/k032131/EPOSIT.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2019

Human Following for Wheeled Robot with Monocular Pan-tilt Camera

Human following on mobile robots has witnessed significant advances due to its potentials for real-world applications. Currently most human following systems are equipped with depth sensors to obtain distance information between human and robot, which suffer from the perception requirements and noises. In this paper, we design a wheeled mobile robot system with monocular pan-tilt camera to follow human, which can stay the target in the field of view and keep following simultaneously. The system consists of fast human detector, real-time and accurate visual tracker, and unified controller for mobile robot and pan-tilt camera. In visual tracking algorithm, both Siamese networks and optical flow information are exploited to locate and regress human simultaneously. In order in perform following with a monocular camera, the constraint of human height is introduced to design the controller. In experiments, human following are conducted and analysed in simulations and a real robot platform, which demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the overall system.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2019

Singularities In L p-quasidisks

We study planar domains with exemplary boundary singularities of the form of cusps. A natural question is how much elastic energy is needed to flatten these cusps; that is, to remove singularities. We give, in a connection of quasidisks, a sharp integrability condition for the distortion function to answer this ques tion.

math.CA↗
arXiv2019

High Performance Visual Object Tracking with Unified Convolutional Networks

Convolutional neural networks (CNN) based tracking approaches have shown favorable performance in recent benchmarks. Nonetheless, the chosen CNN features are always pre-trained in different tasks and individual components in tracking systems are learned separately, thus the achieved tracking performance may be suboptimal. Besides, most of these trackers are not designed towards real-time applications because of their time-consuming feature extraction and complex optimization details. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end framework to learn the convolutional features and perform the tracking process simultaneously, namely, a unified convolutional tracker (UCT). Specifically, the UCT treats feature extractor and tracking process both as convolution operation and trains them jointly, which enables learned CNN features are tightly coupled with tracking process. During online tracking, an efficient model updating method is proposed by introducing peak-versus-noise ratio (PNR) criterion, and scale changes are handled efficiently by incorporating a scale branch into network. Experiments are performed on four challenging tracking datasets: OTB2013, OTB2015, VOT2015 and VOT2016. Our method achieves leading performance on these benchmarks while maintaining beyond real-time speed.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2019

Spin-Orbital Density Wave and a Mott Insulator in a Two-Orbital Hubbard Model on a Honeycomb Lattice

Inspired by recent discovery of correlated insulating states in twisted bilayer graphene (TBG), we study a two-orbital Hubbard model on the honeycomb lattice with two electrons per unit cell. Based on the real-space density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) simulation, we identify a metal-insulator transition around $U_c/t=2.5\sim3$. In the vicinity of $U_c$, we find strong spin/orbital density wave fluctuations at commensurate wavevectors, accompanied by weaker incommensurate charge density wave (CDW) fluctuations. The spin/orbital density wave fluctuations are enhanced with increasing system sizes, suggesting the possible emergence of long-range order in the two dimensional limit. At larger $U$, our calculations indicate a possible nonmagnetic Mott insulator phase without spin or orbital polarization. Our findings offer new insights into correlated electron phenomena in twisted bilayer graphene and other multi-orbital honeycomb materials.

cond-mat.str-el↗
arXiv2019

Camera Pose Correction in SLAM Based on Bias Values of Map Points

Accurate camera pose estimation result is essential for visual SLAM (VSLAM). This paper presents a novel pose correction method to improve the accuracy of the VSLAM system. Firstly, the relationship between the camera pose estimation error and bias values of map points is derived based on the optimized function in VSLAM. Secondly, the bias value of the map point is calculated by a statistical method. Finally, the camera pose estimation error is compensated according to the first derived relationship. After the pose correction, procedures of the original system, such as the bundle adjustment (BA) optimization, can be executed as before. Compared with existing methods, our algorithm is compact and effective and can be easily generalized to different VSLAM systems. Additionally, the robustness to system noise of our method is better than feature selection methods, due to all original system information is preserved in our algorithm while only a subset is employed in the latter. Experimental results on benchmark datasets show that our approach leads to considerable improvements over state-of-the-art algorithms for absolute pose estimation.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2019

FastPose: Towards Real-time Pose Estimation and Tracking via Scale-normalized Multi-task Networks

Both accuracy and efficiency are significant for pose estimation and tracking in videos. State-of-the-art performance is dominated by two-stages top-down methods. Despite the leading results, these methods are impractical for real-world applications due to their separated architectures and complicated calculation. This paper addresses the task of articulated multi-person pose estimation and tracking towards real-time speed. An end-to-end multi-task network (MTN) is designed to perform human detection, pose estimation, and person re-identification (Re-ID) tasks simultaneously. To alleviate the performance bottleneck caused by scale variation problem, a paradigm which exploits scale-normalized image and feature pyramids (SIFP) is proposed to boost both performance and speed. Given the results of MTN, we adopt an occlusion-aware Re-ID feature strategy in the pose tracking module, where pose information is utilized to infer the occlusion state to make better use of Re-ID feature. In experiments, we demonstrate that the pose estimation and tracking performance improves steadily utilizing SIFP through different backbones. Using ResNet-18 and ResNet-50 as backbones, the overall pose tracking framework achieves competitive performance with 29.4 FPS and 12.2 FPS, respectively. Additionally, occlusion-aware Re-ID feature decreases the identification switches by 37% in the pose tracking process.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2019

Creating and Flattening Cusp Singularities by Deformations of Bi-conformal Energy

Mappingsofbi-conformalenergyformthewidestclass of homeomorphisms that one can hope to build a viable extension of Geometric Function Theory with connections to mathematical models of Nonlinear Elasticity. Such mappings are exactly the ones with finite conformal energy and integrable inner distortion. It is in this way, that our studies extend the applications of quasiconformal homeomorphisms to the degenerate elliptic systems of PDEs. The present paper searches a bi-conformal variant of the Riemann Mapping Theorem, focusing on domains with exemplary singular boundaries that are not quasiballs. We establish the sharp description of boundary singularities that can be created and flattened by mappings of bi-conformal energy.

math.CA↗
arXiv2019

Readiness of Quantum Optimization Machines for Industrial Applications

There have been multiple attempts to demonstrate that quantum annealing and, in particular, quantum annealing on quantum annealing machines, has the potential to outperform current classical optimization algorithms implemented on CMOS technologies. The benchmarking of these devices has been controversial. Initially, random spin-glass problems were used, however, these were quickly shown to be not well suited to detect any quantum speedup. Subsequently, benchmarking shifted to carefully crafted synthetic problems designed to highlight the quantum nature of the hardware while (often) ensuring that classical optimization techniques do not perform well on them. Even worse, to date a true sign of improved scaling with the number of problem variables remains elusive when compared to classical optimization techniques. Here, we analyze the readiness of quantum annealing machines for real-world application problems. These are typically not random and have an underlying structure that is hard to capture in synthetic benchmarks, thus posing unexpected challenges for optimization techniques, both classical and quantum alike. We present a comprehensive computational scaling analysis of fault diagnosis in digital circuits, considering architectures beyond D-wave quantum annealers. We find that the instances generated from real data in multiplier circuits are harder than other representative random spin-glass benchmarks with a comparable number of variables. Although our results show that transverse-field quantum annealing is outperformed by state-of-the-art classical optimization algorithms, these benchmark instances are hard and small in the size of the input, therefore representing the first industrial application ideally suited for testing near-term quantum annealers and other quantum algorithmic strategies for optimization problems.

quant-ph↗
arXiv2019

Fair sampling of ground-state configurations of binary optimization problems

Although many efficient heuristics have been developed to solve binary optimization problems, these typically produce correlated solutions for degenerate problems. Most notably, transverse-field quantum annealing - the heuristic employed in current commercially-available quantum annealing machines - has been shown to often be exponentially biased when sampling the solution space. Here we present an approach to sample ground-state (or low-energy) configurations for binary optimization problems. The method samples degenerate states with almost equal probability and is based on a combination of parallel tempering Monte Carlo with isoenergetic cluster moves. We illustrate the approach using two-dimensional Ising spin glasses, as well as spin glasses on the D-Wave Systems Inc. quantum annealer chimera topology. In addition, a simple heuristic to approximate the number of solutions of a degenerate problem is introduced.

cond-mat.dis-nn↗