Quantum mechanics without spacetime II : noncommutative geometry and the free point particle

In a recent paper we have suggested that a formulation of quantum mechanics should exist, which does not require the concept of time, and that the appropriate mathematical language for such a formulation is noncommutative differential geometry. In the present paper we discuss this formulation for the free point particle, by introducing a commutation relation for a set of noncommuting coordinates. The sought for background independent quantum mechanics is derived from this commutation relation for the coordinates. We propose that the basic equations are invariant under automorphisms which map one set of coordinates to another- this is a natural generalization of diffeomorphism invariance when one makes a transition to noncommutative geometry. The background independent description becomes equivalent to standard quantum mechanics if a spacetime manifold exists, because of the proposed automorphism invariance. The suggested basic equations also give a quantum gravitational description of the free particle.Comment: 8 page

On extensions of typical group actions

For every countable abelian group $G$ we find the set of all its subgroups $H$ ($H\leq G$) such that a typical measure-preserving $H$-action on a standard atomless probability space $(X,\mathcal{F}, \mu)$ can be extended to a free measure-preserving $G$-action on $(X,\mathcal{F}, \mu)$. The description of all such pairs $H\leq G$ was made in purely group terms, in the language of the dual $\hat{G}$, and $G$-actions with discrete spectrum. As an application, we answer a question when a typical $H$-action can be extended to a $G$-action with some dynamic property, or to a $G$-action at all. In particular, we offer first examples of pairs $H\leq G$ satisfying both $G$ is countable abelian, and a typical $H$-action is not embeddable in a $G$-action.Comment: 30 page

The bipartite Brill-Gordan locus and angular momentum

This paper is a sequel to math.AG/0411110. Let P denote the projective space of degree d forms in n+1 variables. Let e denote an integer < d/2, and consider the subvariety X of forms which factor as L^{d-e} M^e for some linear forms L,M. In the language of our earlier paper, this is the Brill-Gordan locus associated to the partition (d-e,e). In this paper we calculate the Castelnuovo regularity of X precisely, and moreover show that X is r-normal for r at least 3. In the case of binary forms, we give a classical invariant-theoretic description of the defining equations of this locus in terms of covariants of d-ics. Modulo standard cohomological arguments, the proof crucially relies upon showing that certain 3j-symbols from the quantum theory of angular momentum are nonzero.Comment: LaTeX, 37 page

Sequence to Sequence -- Video to Text

Real-world videos often have complex dynamics; and methods for generating open-domain video descriptions should be sensitive to temporal structure and allow both input (sequence of frames) and output (sequence of words) of variable length. To approach this problem, we propose a novel end-to-end sequence-to-sequence model to generate captions for videos. For this we exploit recurrent neural networks, specifically LSTMs, which have demonstrated state-of-the-art performance in image caption generation. Our LSTM model is trained on video-sentence pairs and learns to associate a sequence of video frames to a sequence of words in order to generate a description of the event in the video clip. Our model naturally is able to learn the temporal structure of the sequence of frames as well as the sequence model of the generated sentences, i.e. a language model. We evaluate several variants of our model that exploit different visual features on a standard set of YouTube videos and two movie description datasets (M-VAD and MPII-MD).Comment: ICCV 2015 camera-ready. Includes code, project page and LSMDC challenge result

Equivariant cohomology over Lie groupoids and Lie-Rinehart algebras

Using the language and terminology of relative homological algebra, in particular that of derived functors, we introduce equivariant cohomology over a general Lie-Rinehart algebra and equivariant de Rham cohomology over a locally trivial Lie groupoid in terms of suitably defined monads (also known as triples) and the associated standard constructions. This extends a characterization of equivariant de Rham cohomology in terms of derived functors developed earlier for the special case where the Lie groupoid is an ordinary Lie group, viewed as a Lie groupoid with a single object; in that theory over a Lie group, the ordinary Bott-Dupont-Shulman-Stasheff complex arises as an a posteriori object. We prove that, given a locally trivial Lie groupoid G and a smooth G-manifold f over the space B of objects of G, the resulting G-equivariant de Rham theory of f boils down to the ordinary equivariant de Rham theory of a vertex manifold relative to the corresponding vertex group, for any vertex in the space B of objects of G; this implies that the equivariant de Rham cohomology introduced here coincides with the stack de Rham cohomology of the associated transformation groupoid whence this stack de Rham cohomology can be characterized as a relative derived functor. We introduce a notion of cone on a Lie-Rinehart algebra and in particular that of cone on a Lie algebroid. This cone is an indispensable tool for the description of the requisite monads.Comment: 47 page