21,754 research outputs found
Coherent States for Canonical Quantum General Relativity and the Infinite Tensor Product Extension
We summarize a recently proposed concrete programme for investigating the
(semi)classical limit of canonical, Lorentzian, continuum quantum general
relativity in four spacetime dimensions. The analysis is based on a novel set
of coherent states labelled by graphs. These fit neatly together with an
Infinite Tensor Product (ITP) extension of the currently used Hilbert space.
The ITP construction enables us to give rigorous meaning to the infinite volume
(thermodynamic) limit of the theory which has been out of reach so far.Comment: 37 p., latex2e, no figure
A bayesian approach to simultaneously recover camera pose and non-rigid shape from monocular images
© . This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/In this paper we bring the tools of the Simultaneous Localization and Map Building (SLAM) problem from a rigid to a deformable domain and use them to simultaneously recover the 3D shape of non-rigid surfaces and the sequence of poses of a moving camera. Under the assumption that the surface shape may be represented as a weighted sum of deformation modes, we show that the problem of estimating the modal weights along with the camera poses, can be probabilistically formulated as a maximum a posteriori estimate and solved using an iterative least squares optimization. In addition, the probabilistic formulation we propose is very general and allows introducing different constraints without requiring any extra complexity. As a proof of concept, we show that local inextensibility constraints that prevent the surface from stretching can be easily integrated.
An extensive evaluation on synthetic and real data, demonstrates that our method has several advantages over current non-rigid shape from motion approaches. In particular, we show that our solution is robust to large amounts of noise and outliers and that it does not need to track points over the whole sequence nor to use an initialization close from the ground truth.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
Chern-Simons Gauge Theory: Ten Years After
A brief review on the progress made in the study of Chern-Simons gauge theory
since its relation to knot theory was discovered ten years ago is presented.
Emphasis is made on the analysis of the perturbative study of the theory and
its connection to the theory of Vassiliev invariants. It is described how the
study of the quantum field theory for three different gauge fixings leads to
three different representations for Vassiliev invariants. Two of these gauge
fixings lead to well known representations: the covariant Landau gauge
corresponds to the configuration space integrals while the non-covariant
light-cone gauge to the Kontsevich integral. The progress made in the analysis
of the third gauge fixing, the non-covariant temporal gauge, is described in
detail. In this case one obtains combinatorial expressions, instead of integral
ones, for Vassiliev invariants. The approach based on this last gauge fixing
seems very promising to obtain a full combinatorial formula. We collect the
combinatorial expressions for all the Vassiliev invariants up to order four
which have been obtained in this approach.Comment: 62 pages, 21 figures, lecture delivered at the workshop "Trends in
Theoretical Physics II", Buenos Aires, November 199
Geometry Helps to Compare Persistence Diagrams
Exploiting geometric structure to improve the asymptotic complexity of
discrete assignment problems is a well-studied subject. In contrast, the
practical advantages of using geometry for such problems have not been
explored. We implement geometric variants of the Hopcroft--Karp algorithm for
bottleneck matching (based on previous work by Efrat el al.) and of the auction
algorithm by Bertsekas for Wasserstein distance computation. Both
implementations use k-d trees to replace a linear scan with a geometric
proximity query. Our interest in this problem stems from the desire to compute
distances between persistence diagrams, a problem that comes up frequently in
topological data analysis. We show that our geometric matching algorithms lead
to a substantial performance gain, both in running time and in memory
consumption, over their purely combinatorial counterparts. Moreover, our
implementation significantly outperforms the only other implementation
available for comparing persistence diagrams.Comment: 20 pages, 10 figures; extended version of paper published in ALENEX
201
Universality classes of interaction structures for NK fitness landscapes
Kauffman's NK-model is a paradigmatic example of a class of stochastic models
of genotypic fitness landscapes that aim to capture generic features of
epistatic interactions in multilocus systems. Genotypes are represented as
sequences of binary loci. The fitness assigned to a genotype is a sum of
contributions, each of which is a random function defined on a subset of loci. These subsets or neighborhoods determine the genetic interactions of
the model. Whereas earlier work on the NK model suggested that most of its
properties are robust with regard to the choice of neighborhoods, recent work
has revealed an important and sometimes counter-intuitive influence of the
interaction structure on the properties of NK fitness landscapes. Here we
review these developments and present new results concerning the number of
local fitness maxima and the statistics of selectively accessible (that is,
fitness-monotonic) mutational pathways. In particular, we develop a unified
framework for computing the exponential growth rate of the expected number of
local fitness maxima as a function of , and identify two different
universality classes of interaction structures that display different
asymptotics of this quantity for large . Moreover, we show that the
probability that the fitness landscape can be traversed along an accessible
path decreases exponentially in for a large class of interaction structures
that we characterize as locally bounded. Finally, we discuss the impact of the
NK interaction structures on the dynamics of evolution using adaptive walk
models.Comment: 61 pages, 9 figure
Scalable Approach to Uncertainty Quantification and Robust Design of Interconnected Dynamical Systems
Development of robust dynamical systems and networks such as autonomous
aircraft systems capable of accomplishing complex missions faces challenges due
to the dynamically evolving uncertainties coming from model uncertainties,
necessity to operate in a hostile cluttered urban environment, and the
distributed and dynamic nature of the communication and computation resources.
Model-based robust design is difficult because of the complexity of the hybrid
dynamic models including continuous vehicle dynamics, the discrete models of
computations and communications, and the size of the problem. We will overview
recent advances in methodology and tools to model, analyze, and design robust
autonomous aerospace systems operating in uncertain environment, with stress on
efficient uncertainty quantification and robust design using the case studies
of the mission including model-based target tracking and search, and trajectory
planning in uncertain urban environment. To show that the methodology is
generally applicable to uncertain dynamical systems, we will also show examples
of application of the new methods to efficient uncertainty quantification of
energy usage in buildings, and stability assessment of interconnected power
networks
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