Guiding CTC Posterior Spike Timings for Improved Posterior Fusion and Knowledge Distillation

Conventional automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems trained from frame-level alignments can easily leverage posterior fusion to improve ASR accuracy and build a better single model with knowledge distillation. End-to-end ASR systems trained using the Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) loss do not require frame-level alignment and hence simplify model training. However, sparse and arbitrary posterior spike timings from CTC models pose a new set of challenges in posterior fusion from multiple models and knowledge distillation between CTC models. We propose a method to train a CTC model so that its spike timings are guided to align with those of a pre-trained guiding CTC model. As a result, all models that share the same guiding model have aligned spike timings. We show the advantage of our method in various scenarios including posterior fusion of CTC models and knowledge distillation between CTC models with different architectures. With the 300-hour Switchboard training data, the single word CTC model distilled from multiple models improved the word error rates to 13.7%/23.1% from 14.9%/24.1% on the Hub5 2000 Switchboard/CallHome test sets without using any data augmentation, language model, or complex decoder.Comment: Accepted to Interspeech 201

Deep Learning of Atomically Resolved Scanning Transmission Electron Microscopy Images: Chemical Identification and Tracking Local Transformations

Recent advances in scanning transmission electron and scanning probe microscopies have opened exciting opportunities in probing the materials structural parameters and various functional properties in real space with angstrom-level precision. This progress has been accompanied by an exponential increase in the size and quality of datasets produced by microscopic and spectroscopic experimental techniques. These developments necessitate adequate methods for extracting relevant physical and chemical information from the large datasets, for which a priori information on the structures of various atomic configurations and lattice defects is limited or absent. Here we demonstrate an application of deep neural networks to extract information from atomically resolved images including location of the atomic species and type of defects. We develop a 'weakly-supervised' approach that uses information on the coordinates of all atomic species in the image, extracted via a deep neural network, to identify a rich variety of defects that are not part of an initial training set. We further apply our approach to interpret complex atomic and defect transformation, including switching between different coordination of silicon dopants in graphene as a function of time, formation of peculiar silicon dimer with mixed 3-fold and 4-fold coordination, and the motion of molecular 'rotor'. This deep learning based approach resembles logic of a human operator, but can be scaled leading to significant shift in the way of extracting and analyzing information from raw experimental data

Initial conditions for cold dark matter particles and General Relativity

We describe the irrotational dust component of the universe in terms of a relativistic gradient expansion and transform the resulting synchronous metric to a Newtonian coordinate system. The two metrics are connected via a space-like displacement field and a time-like perturbation, providing a relativistic generalization of the transformation from Lagrangian to Eulerian coordinates. The relativistic part of the displacement field generates already at initial time a non-local density perturbation at second order. This is a purely relativistic effect since it originates from space-time mixing. We give two options, the passive and the active approach, on how to include the relativistic corrections for example in N-body simulations. In the passive approach we treat the corrections as a non-Gaussian modification of the initial Gaussian field (primordial non-Gaussianity could be incorporated as well). The induced non-Gaussianity depends on scale and the redshift at which initial conditions are set, with f_NL ~ few for small enough scales and redshifts. In the active approach we show how to use the relativistic trajectory to obtain the initial displacement and velocity of particles for N-body simulations without modifying the initial Gaussian field.Comment: Title adjusted, added a table for clarity, matches published versio

Benchmark calculations for elastic fermion-dimer scattering

We present continuum and lattice calculations for elastic scattering between a fermion and a bound dimer in the shallow binding limit. For the continuum calculation we use the Skorniakov-Ter-Martirosian (STM) integral equation to determine the scattering length and effective range parameter to high precision. For the lattice calculation we use the finite-volume method of L\"uscher. We take into account topological finite-volume corrections to the dimer binding energy which depend on the momentum of the dimer. After subtracting these effects, we find from the lattice calculation kappa a_fd = 1.174(9) and kappa r_fd = -0.029(13). These results agree well with the continuum values kappa a_fd = 1.17907(1) and kappa r_fd = -0.0383(3) obtained from the STM equation. We discuss applications to cold atomic Fermi gases, deuteron-neutron scattering in the spin-quartet channel, and lattice calculations of scattering for nuclei and hadronic molecules at finite volume.Comment: 16 pages, 5 figure

Energy resolved STM mapping of C60_{60} on metal surfaces: A theoretical study

We present a detailed theoretical study of scanning tunneling imaging and spectroscopy of \Csixty on silver and gold surfaces, motivated by the recent experiments and discussion by X. Lu et al. [PRL \textbf{90}, 096802 (2003) and PRB \textbf{70}, 115418 (2004)]. The surface/sample/tip system is described within a self--consistent DFT based tight--binding model. The topographic and conductance images are computed at constant current from a full self--consistent transport theory based on nonequilibrium Green's functions and compared with those simulated from the local density of states. The molecular orbitals of \Csixty are clearly identified in the energy resolved maps, in close correspondence with the experimental results. We show how the tip structure and orientation can affect the images. In particular, we consider the effects of truncated tips on the energy resolved maps.Comment: 9 pages, 8 figure

The Effective Energy-Momentum Tensor in Kaluza-Klein Gravity With Large Extra Dimensions and Off-Diagonal Metrics

We consider a version of Kaluza-Klein theory where the cylinder condition is not imposed. The metric is allowed to have explicit dependence on the "extra" coordinate(s). This is the usual scenario in brane-world and space-time-matter theories. We extend the usual discussion by considering five-dimensional metrics with off-diagonal terms. We replace the condition of cylindricity by the requirement that physics in four-dimensional space-time should remain invariant under changes of coordinates in the five-dimensional bulk. This invariance does not eliminate physical effects from the extra dimension but separates them from spurious geometrical ones. We use the appropriate splitting technique to construct the most general induced energy-momentum tensor, compatible with the required invariance. It generalizes all previous results in the literature. In addition, we find two four-vectors, J_{m}^{mu} and J_{e}^{mu}, induced by off-diagonal metrics, that separately satisfy the usual equation of continuity in 4D. These vectors appear as source-terms in equations that closely resemble the ones of electromagnetism. These are Maxwell-like equations for an antisymmetric tensor {F-hat}_{mu nu} that generalizes the usual electromagnetic one. This generalization is not an assumption, but follows naturally from the dimensional reduction. Thus, if {F-hat}_{mu nu} could be identified with the electromagnetic tensor, then the theory would predict the existence of classical magnetic charge and current. The splitting formalism used allows us to construct 4D physical quantities from five-dimensional ones, in a way that is independent on how we choose our space-time coordinates from those of the bulk.Comment: New title, editorial changes made as to match the version to appear in International Journal of Modern Physics