arXiv subjects

Zhicheng Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Zhicheng Zhang.

At least 109 records · Page 6Linked to original sources

arXiv2023

Measurement of $^{19}$F($p$,$γ$)$^{20}$Ne reaction suggests CNO break-out in first stars

The origin of calcium production in the first stars (Pop III stars), which formed out of the primordial matter of the Big Bang, and their fates, remain most fascinating mysteries in astrophysics. Advanced nuclear burning and supernovae were thought to be the dominant source of the Ca production seen in all stars. Here we report on a qualitatively different path to Ca production through break-out from the "warm" carbon-nitrogen-oxygen (CNO) cycle. We extend direct measurement of the $^{19}$F($p$, $γ$)$^{20}$Ne break-out reaction down to an unprecedentedly low energy point of 186 keV and discover a key resonance at 225 keV. In the domain of astrophysical interest, at around 0.1 giga kelvin, this thermonuclear $^{19}$F($p$,$γ$)$^{20}$Ne rate is up to a factor of 7.4 larger than the previous recommended rate. Our stellar models show a stronger break-out during stellar hydrogen burning than thought before, and may reveal the nature of Ca production in Pop III stars imprinted on the oldest known ultra-iron poor star, SMSS0313-6708. This result from the China Jinping Underground Laboratory, the deepest laboratory in the world, offering an environment with extremely low cosmic-ray induced background, has far-reaching implications on our understanding of how the first stars evolve and die. Our rate showcases the impact that faint Pop III star supernovae can have on the nucleosynthesis observed in the oldest known stars and first galaxies, key mission targets of the James Webb Space Telescope.

astro-ph.SR↗

arXiv2023

Protein Representation Learning via Knowledge Enhanced Primary Structure Modeling

Protein representation learning has primarily benefited from the remarkable development of language models (LMs). Accordingly, pre-trained protein models also suffer from a problem in LMs: a lack of factual knowledge. The recent solution models the relationships between protein and associated knowledge terms as the knowledge encoding objective. However, it fails to explore the relationships at a more granular level, i.e., the token level. To mitigate this, we propose Knowledge-exploited Auto-encoder for Protein (KeAP), which performs token-level knowledge graph exploration for protein representation learning. In practice, non-masked amino acids iteratively query the associated knowledge tokens to extract and integrate helpful information for restoring masked amino acids via attention. We show that KeAP can consistently outperform the previous counterpart on 9 representative downstream applications, sometimes surpassing it by large margins. These results suggest that KeAP provides an alternative yet effective way to perform knowledge enhanced protein representation learning.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

An end-to-end multi-scale network for action prediction in videos

In this paper, we develop an efficient multi-scale network to predict action classes in partial videos in an end-to-end manner. Unlike most existing methods with offline feature generation, our method directly takes frames as input and further models motion evolution on two different temporal scales.Therefore, we solve the complexity problems of the two stages of modeling and the problem of insufficient temporal and spatial information of a single scale. Our proposed End-to-End MultiScale Network (E2EMSNet) is composed of two scales which are named segment scale and observed global scale. The segment scale leverages temporal difference over consecutive frames for finer motion patterns by supplying 2D convolutions. For observed global scale, a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) is incorporated to capture motion features of observed frames. Our model provides a simple and efficient modeling framework with a small computational cost. Our E2EMSNet is evaluated on three challenging datasets: BIT, HMDB51, and UCF101. The extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method for action prediction in videos.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Robust output regulation of linear system subject to modeled and unmodeled uncertainty

In this paper, a novel robust output regulation control framework is proposed for the system subject to noise, modeled disturbance and unmodeled disturbance to seek tracking performance and robustness simultaneously. The output regulation scheme is utilized in the framework to track the reference in the presence of modeled disturbance, and the effect of unmodeled disturbance is reduced by an $\mathcal{H}_\infty$ compensator. The Kalman filter can be also introduced in the stabilization loop to deal with the white noise. Furthermore, the tracking error in the presence/absence of noise and disturbance is estimated. The effectiveness and performance of our proposed control framework is verified in the numerical example by applying in the Furuta Inverted Pendulum system.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2022

Quantum Algorithm for Fidelity Estimation

For two unknown mixed quantum states $ρ$ and $σ$ in an $N$-dimensional Hilbert space, computing their fidelity $F(ρ,σ)$ is a basic problem with many important applications in quantum computing and quantum information, for example verification and characterization of the outputs of a quantum computer, and design and analysis of quantum algorithms. In this paper, we propose a quantum algorithm that solves this problem in $\operatorname{poly}(\log (N), r, 1/\varepsilon)$ time, where $r$ is the lower rank of $ρ$ and $σ$, and $\varepsilon$ is the desired precision, provided that the purifications of $ρ$ and $σ$ are prepared by quantum oracles. This algorithm exhibits an exponential speedup over the best known algorithm (based on quantum state tomography) which has time complexity polynomial in $N$.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2022

Patient-specific mean teacher UNet for enhancing PET image and low-dose PET reconstruction on RefleXion X1 biology-guided radiotherapy system

The RefleXion X1 is the first biology-guided radiotherapy (BgRT) system. Its dual 90-degree PET detector collects fewer pair production events compared to a full-ring diagnostic PET system. In the proposed BgRT workflow, a short scan is acquired before treatment delivery to ensure image quality and consistency. The shorter scan time, a quarter of the simulation scan time, also leads to fewer coincidence events and hence reduced image quality. In this study, we proposed a patient-specific mean teacher UNet (MT-UNet) to enhance PET image quality and low-dose PET reconstruction on RefleXion X1. PET/CT scans of nine cancer patients were acquired using RefleXion X1. Every patient had one simulation scan. Five patients had additional scans acquired during the first and the final treatment fractions. Treatment scans were acquired using the same imaging protocol as the simulation scan. For each scan, we reconstructed a full-dose image and evenly split coincidence events into four sessions to reconstruct four quarter-dose PET images. For each patient, our proposed MT-UNet was trained using quarter-dose and full-dose images of the simulation scan. For the image quality enhancement task, we applied nine trained MT-UNets to full-dose simulation PET images of the nine patients to generate enhanced images, respectively. The enhanced images were compared with the original full-dose images using CNR and SNR. For the low-dose image reconstruction task, we applied five trained MT-UNets to ten quarter-dose treatment images of five patients to predict full-dose images, respectively. The predicted and ground truth full-dose images were compared using SSIM and PSNR. We also trained and evaluated patient-specific UNets for model comparison. Our proposed patient-specific MT-UNet achieved better performance in improving the quality of RefleXion low-dose and full-dose images compared to the patient-specific UNet.

physics.med-ph↗

arXiv2022

ProCo: Prototype-aware Contrastive Learning for Long-tailed Medical Image Classification

Medical image classification has been widely adopted in medical image analysis. However, due to the difficulty of collecting and labeling data in the medical area, medical image datasets are usually highly-imbalanced. To address this problem, previous works utilized class samples as prior for re-weighting or re-sampling but the feature representation is usually still not discriminative enough. In this paper, we adopt the contrastive learning to tackle the long-tailed medical imbalance problem. Specifically, we first propose the category prototype and adversarial proto-instance to generate representative contrastive pairs. Then, the prototype recalibration strategy is proposed to address the highly imbalanced data distribution. Finally, a unified proto-loss is designed to train our framework. The overall framework, namely as Prototype-aware Contrastive learning (ProCo), is unified as a single-stage pipeline in an end-to-end manner to alleviate the imbalanced problem in medical image classification, which is also a distinct progress than existing works as they follow the traditional two-stage pipeline. Extensive experiments on two highly-imbalanced medical image classification datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods by a large margin.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

MAVIPER: Learning Decision Tree Policies for Interpretable Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Many recent breakthroughs in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) require the use of deep neural networks, which are challenging for human experts to interpret and understand. On the other hand, existing work on interpretable reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promise in extracting more interpretable decision tree-based policies from neural networks, but only in the single-agent setting. To fill this gap, we propose the first set of algorithms that extract interpretable decision-tree policies from neural networks trained with MARL. The first algorithm, IVIPER, extends VIPER, a recent method for single-agent interpretable RL, to the multi-agent setting. We demonstrate that IVIPER learns high-quality decision-tree policies for each agent. To better capture coordination between agents, we propose a novel centralized decision-tree training algorithm, MAVIPER. MAVIPER jointly grows the trees of each agent by predicting the behavior of the other agents using their anticipated trees, and uses resampling to focus on states that are critical for its interactions with other agents. We show that both algorithms generally outperform the baselines and that MAVIPER-trained agents achieve better-coordinated performance than IVIPER-trained agents on three different multi-agent particle-world environments.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Tell Me the Evidence? Dual Visual-Linguistic Interaction for Answer Grounding

Answer grounding aims to reveal the visual evidence for visual question answering (VQA), which entails highlighting relevant positions in the image when answering questions about images. Previous attempts typically tackle this problem using pretrained object detectors, but without the flexibility for objects not in the predefined vocabulary. However, these black-box methods solely concentrate on the linguistic generation, ignoring the visual interpretability. In this paper, we propose Dual Visual-Linguistic Interaction (DaVI), a novel unified end-to-end framework with the capability for both linguistic answering and visual grounding. DaVI innovatively introduces two visual-linguistic interaction mechanisms: 1) visual-based linguistic encoder that understands questions incorporated with visual features and produces linguistic-oriented evidence for further answer decoding, and 2) linguistic-based visual decoder that focuses visual features on the evidence-related regions for answer grounding. This way, our approach ranked the 1st place in the answer grounding track of 2022 VizWiz Grand Challenge.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Noise-like Pulses from an All-Normal-Dispersion Fiber Laser with Weakened Spectrum Filtering

Noise-like pulses (NLP) are extremely sought after in many fields. Here, we experimentally and numerically investigated the generation of noise-like pulses in an all-normal-dispersion fiber laser with weak spectrum filtering. With the insertion of the grating as a tunable spectrum filter, the laser operates at a stable dissipative soliton state with a 3.84 ps duration. Replacing the grating with a mirror, NLPs with double-scale intensity autocorrelation trace is ultimately attained. Numerical simulations are performed in detail and demonstrated that with the absence of a spectrum filter, the stable state cannot be established but form the random pulse cluster. The random pulse cluster achieves dynamic stability with suitable feedback, and the NLP is ultimately generated. The NLP here is directly evolved by the initial noise, and no other states occur during its evolution. These explorations could deepen the understanding of NLP and enrich the complex dynamics of the ANDi ultrafast fiber laser.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2022

Model-based Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning: Recent Progress and Prospects

Significant advances have recently been achieved in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) which tackles sequential decision-making problems involving multiple participants. However, MARL requires a tremendous number of samples for effective training. On the other hand, model-based methods have been shown to achieve provable advantages of sample efficiency. However, the attempts of model-based methods to MARL have just started very recently. This paper presents a review of the existing research on model-based MARL, including theoretical analyses, algorithms, and applications, and analyzes the advantages and potential of model-based MARL. Specifically, we provide a detailed taxonomy of the algorithms and point out the pros and cons for each algorithm according to the challenges inherent to multi-agent scenarios. We also outline promising directions for future development of this field.

cs.MA↗

arXiv2022

Topological EEG Nonlinear Dynamics Analysis for Emotion Recognition

Emotional recognition through exploring the electroencephalography (EEG) characteristics has been widely performed in recent studies. Nonlinear analysis and feature extraction methods for understanding the complex dynamical phenomena are associated with the EEG patterns of different emotions. The phase space reconstruction is a typical nonlinear technique to reveal the dynamics of the brain neural system. Recently, the topological data analysis (TDA) scheme has been used to explore the properties of space, which provides a powerful tool to think over the phase space. In this work, we proposed a topological EEG nonlinear dynamics analysis approach using the phase space reconstruction (PSR) technique to convert EEG time series into phase space, and the persistent homology tool explores the topological properties of the phase space. We perform the topological analysis of EEG signals in different rhythm bands to build emotion feature vectors, which shows high distinguishing ability. We evaluate the approach with two well-known benchmark datasets, the DEAP and DREAMER datasets. The recognition results achieved accuracies of 99.37% and 99.35% in arousal and valence classification tasks with DEAP, and 99.96%, 99.93%, and 99.95% in arousal, valence, and dominance classifications tasks with DREAMER, respectively. The performances are supposed to be outperformed current state-of-art approaches in DREAMER (improved by 1% to 10% depends on temporal length), while comparable to other related works evaluated in DEAP. The proposed work is the first investigation in the emotion recognition oriented EEG topological feature analysis, which brought a novel insight into the brain neural system nonlinear dynamics analysis and feature extraction.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2021

Achieving Human Parity on Visual Question Answering

The Visual Question Answering (VQA) task utilizes both visual image and language analysis to answer a textual question with respect to an image. It has been a popular research topic with an increasing number of real-world applications in the last decade. This paper describes our recent research of AliceMind-MMU (ALIbaba's Collection of Encoder-decoders from Machine IntelligeNce lab of Damo academy - MultiMedia Understanding) that obtains similar or even slightly better results than human being does on VQA. This is achieved by systematically improving the VQA pipeline including: (1) pre-training with comprehensive visual and textual feature representation; (2) effective cross-modal interaction with learning to attend; and (3) A novel knowledge mining framework with specialized expert modules for the complex VQA task. Treating different types of visual questions with corresponding expertise needed plays an important role in boosting the performance of our VQA architecture up to the human level. An extensive set of experiments and analysis are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the new research work.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2021

Metal Artifact Reduction in 2D CT Images with Self-supervised Cross-domain Learning

The presence of metallic implants often introduces severe metal artifacts in the X-ray CT images, which could adversely influence clinical diagnosis or dose calculation in radiation therapy. In this work, we present a novel deep-learning-based approach for metal artifact reduction (MAR). In order to alleviate the need for anatomically identical CT image pairs (i.e., metal artifact-corrupted CT image and metal artifact-free CT image) for network learning, we propose a self-supervised cross-domain learning framework. Specifically, we train a neural network to restore the metal trace region values in the given metal-free sinogram, where the metal trace is identified by the forward projection of metal masks. We then design a novel FBP reconstruction loss to encourage the network to generate more perfect completion results and a residual-learning-based image refinement module to reduce the secondary artifacts in the reconstructed CT images. To preserve the fine structure details and fidelity of the final MAR image, instead of directly adopting CNN-refined images as output, we incorporate the metal trace replacement into our framework and replace the metal-affected projections of the original sinogram with the prior sinogram generated by the forward projection of the CNN output. We then use the filtered backward projection (FBP) algorithms for final MAR image reconstruction. We conduct an extensive evaluation on simulated and real artifact data to show the effectiveness of our design. Our method produces superior MAR results and outperforms other compelling methods. We also demonstrate the potential of our framework for other organ sites.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2021

TransCT: Dual-path Transformer for Low Dose Computed Tomography

Low dose computed tomography (LDCT) has attracted more and more attention in routine clinical diagnosis assessment, therapy planning, etc., which can reduce the dose of X-ray radiation to patients. However, the noise caused by low X-ray exposure degrades the CT image quality and then affects clinical diagnosis accuracy. In this paper, we train a transformer-based neural network to enhance the final CT image quality. To be specific, we first decompose the noisy LDCT image into two parts: high-frequency (HF) and low-frequency (LF) compositions. Then, we extract content features (X_{L_c}) and latent texture features (X_{L_t}) from the LF part, as well as HF embeddings (X_{H_f}) from the HF part. Further, we feed X_{L_t} and X_{H_f} into a modified transformer with three encoders and decoders to obtain well-refined HF texture features. After that, we combine these well-refined HF texture features with the pre-extracted X_{L_c} to encourage the restoration of high-quality LDCT images with the assistance of piecewise reconstruction. Extensive experiments on Mayo LDCT dataset show that our method produces superior results and outperforms other methods.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2021

MapGo: Model-Assisted Policy Optimization for Goal-Oriented Tasks

In Goal-oriented Reinforcement learning, relabeling the raw goals in past experience to provide agents with hindsight ability is a major solution to the reward sparsity problem. In this paper, to enhance the diversity of relabeled goals, we develop FGI (Foresight Goal Inference), a new relabeling strategy that relabels the goals by looking into the future with a learned dynamics model. Besides, to improve sample efficiency, we propose to use the dynamics model to generate simulated trajectories for policy training. By integrating these two improvements, we introduce the MapGo framework (Model-Assisted Policy Optimization for Goal-oriented tasks). In our experiments, we first show the effectiveness of the FGI strategy compared with the hindsight one, and then show that the MapGo framework achieves higher sample efficiency when compared to model-free baselines on a set of complicated tasks.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2021

Adaptive Deconvolution-based stereo matching Net for Local Stereo Matching

In deep learning-based local stereo matching methods, larger image patches usually bring better stereo matching accuracy. However, it is unrealistic to increase the size of the image patch size without restriction. Arbitrarily extending the patch size will change the local stereo matching method into the global stereo matching method, and the matching accuracy will be saturated. We simplified the existing Siamese convolutional network by reducing the number of network parameters and propose an efficient CNN based structure, namely Adaptive Deconvolution-based disparity matching Net (ADSM net) by adding deconvolution layers to learn how to enlarge the size of input feature map for the following convolution layers. Experimental results on the KITTI 2012 and 2015 datasets demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve a good trade-off between accuracy and complexity.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

Elastic Net based Feature Ranking and Selection

Feature selection is important in data representation and intelligent diagnosis. Elastic net is one of the most widely used feature selectors. However, the features selected are dependant on the training data, and their weights dedicated for regularized regression are irrelevant to their importance if used for feature ranking, that degrades the model interpretability and extension. In this study, an intuitive idea is put at the end of multiple times of data splitting and elastic net based feature selection. It concerns the frequency of selected features and uses the frequency as an indicator of feature importance. After features are sorted according to their frequency, linear support vector machine performs the classification in an incremental manner. At last, a compact subset of discriminative features is selected by comparing the prediction performance. Experimental results on breast cancer data sets (BCDR-F03, WDBC, GSE 10810, and GSE 15852) suggest that the proposed framework achieves competitive or superior performance to elastic net and with consistent selection of fewer features. How to further enhance its consistency on high-dimension small-sample-size data sets should be paid more attention in our future work. The proposed framework is accessible online (https://github.com/NicoYuCN/elasticnetFR).

cs.LG↗