Opportunities, Challenges and Countermeasures proposed for the new retail industry in The COVID-19

It has been four years since the concept of “new retail” was proposed, and the layout of “new retail” of several major domestic enterprises has been intensified, which has a “unique landscape” compared to the foreign retail landscape. The trend, however, the sudden outbreak and continued spread of the COVID-19 has dealt a serious blow to the global economic development, from the domestic point of view, the epidemic caused by the decline in GDP, leading to a negative year-on-year growth in the total retail sales of consumer goods, the new retail industry is still in the development stage suffered a blow. On the other hand, however, the sinking of the new retail market driven by the consumer economy, the surge of private domain traffic on platforms and the rise of the “house economy” prompted the new retail industry to create new development opportunities during the epidemic, clarifying the development of the new retail industry in the post-epidemic era and pointing out the direction

Does Acupuncture Improve Quality of Life for Patients with Pain Associated with the Spine? A Systematic Review

This paper aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of acupuncture for qualities of life (QoL) in patients suffering from pain associated with the spine (PAWS). Acupuncture has been shown to reduce pain severity, but its effect on QoL is unknown. PubMed, CINAHL, and Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials as well as EMBASE were searched. Published randomized controlled trials on PAWS comparing acupuncture with waiting-list or sham interventions were considered. Eight out of 186 trials were included. For physical functioning, acupuncture was better than waiting-list at immediate and short-term followups; and was better than sham interventions at immediate assessment (SMD = 0.40. 95% CI 0.06 to 0.74). For mental functioning, acupuncture was better than waiting-list at short-term followup and sham interventions at intermediate-term followup (SMD = 0.27. 95% CI 0.03 to 0.51). A similar effect was observed on pain reduction. Discrepancies in point selection for relieving anxiety and insufficient training of trial acupuncturists were also identified. Acupuncture has a moderate effect on the improvement of physical functioning and pain for PAWS patients in the short term; but the effect for mental functioning is small and delayed. Future trials should address point selection and consistency in the qualifications of trial acupuncturists

Proximity effect at superconducting Sn-Bi2Se3 interface

We have investigated the conductance spectra of Sn-Bi2Se3 interface junctions down to 250 mK and in different magnetic fields. A number of conductance anomalies were observed below the superconducting transition temperature of Sn, including a small gap different from that of Sn, and a zero-bias conductance peak growing up at lower temperatures. We discussed the possible origins of the smaller gap and the zero-bias conductance peak. These phenomena support that a proximity-effect-induced chiral superconducting phase is formed at the interface between the superconducting Sn and the strong spin-orbit coupling material Bi2Se3.Comment: 7 pages, 8 figure

Anomalous Cooper pair interference on Bi2Te3 surface

It is believed that the edges of a chiral p-wave superconductor host Majorana modes, relating to a mysterious type of fermions predicted seven decades ago. Much attention has been paid to search for p-wave superconductivity in solid-state systems, including recently those with strong spin-orbit coupling (SOC). However, smoking-gun experiments are still awaited. In this work, we have performed phase-sensitive measurements on particularly designed superconducting quantum interference devices constructing on the surface of topological insulators Bi2Te3, in such a way that a substantial portion of the interference loop is built on the proximity-effect-induced superconducting surface. Two types of Cooper interference patterns have been recognized at low temperatures. One is s-wave like and is contributed by a zero-phase loop inhabited in the bulk of Bi2Te3. The other, being identified to relate to the surface states, is anomalous for that there is a phase shift between the positive and negative bias current directions. The results support that the Cooper pairs on the surface of Bi2Te3 have a 2\pi Berry phase which makes the superconductivity p_x+ip_y-wave-like. Mesoscopic hybrid rings as constructed in this experiment are presumably arbitrary-phase loops good for studying topological quantum phenomena.Comment: supplementary material adde

Fine-grained Audio-Visual Joint Representations for Multimodal Large Language Models

Audio-visual large language models (LLM) have drawn significant attention, yet the fine-grained combination of both input streams is rather under-explored, which is challenging but necessary for LLMs to understand general video inputs. To this end, a fine-grained audio-visual joint representation (FAVOR) learning framework for multimodal LLMs is proposed in this paper, which extends a text-based LLM to simultaneously perceive speech and audio events in the audio input stream and images or videos in the visual input stream, at the frame level. To fuse the audio and visual feature streams into joint representations and to align the joint space with the LLM input embedding space, we propose a causal Q-Former structure with a causal attention module to enhance the capture of causal relations of the audio-visual frames across time. An audio-visual evaluation benchmark (AVEB) is also proposed which comprises six representative single-modal tasks with five cross-modal tasks reflecting audio-visual co-reasoning abilities. While achieving competitive single-modal performance on audio, speech and image tasks in AVEB, FAVOR achieved over 20% accuracy improvements on the video question-answering task when fine-grained information or temporal causal reasoning is required. FAVOR, in addition, demonstrated remarkable video comprehension and reasoning abilities on tasks that are unprecedented by other multimodal LLMs. An interactive demo of FAVOR is available at https://github.com/BriansIDP/AudioVisualLLM.git, and the training code and model checkpoints will be released soon

Connecting Speech Encoder and Large Language Model for ASR

The impressive capability and versatility of large language models (LLMs) have aroused increasing attention in automatic speech recognition (ASR), with several pioneering studies attempting to build integrated ASR models by connecting a speech encoder with an LLM. This paper presents a comparative study of three commonly used structures as connectors, including fully connected layers, multi-head cross-attention, and Q-Former. Speech encoders from the Whisper model series as well as LLMs from the Vicuna model series with different model sizes were studied. Experiments were performed on the commonly used LibriSpeech, Common Voice, and GigaSpeech datasets, where the LLMs with Q-Formers demonstrated consistent and considerable word error rate (WER) reductions over LLMs with other connector structures. Q-Former-based LLMs can generalise well to out-of-domain datasets, where 12% relative WER reductions over the Whisper baseline ASR model were achieved on the Eval2000 test set without using any in-domain training data from Switchboard. Moreover, a novel segment-level Q-Former is proposed to enable LLMs to recognise speech segments with a duration exceeding the limitation of the encoders, which results in 17% relative WER reductions over other connector structures on 90-second-long speech data

Optimized Control Strategy for Photovoltaic Hydrogen Generation System with Particle Swarm Algorithm

Distributed generation is a vital component of the national economic sustainable development strategy and environmental protection, and also the inevitable way to optimize energy structure and promote energy diversification. The power generated by renewable energy is unstable, which easily causes voltage and frequency fluctuations and power quality problems. An adaptive online adjustment particle swarm optimization (AOA-PSO) algorithm for system optimization is proposed to solve the technical issues of large-scale wind and light abandonment. Firstly, a linear adjustment factor is introduced into the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm to adaptively adjust the search range of the maximum power point voltage when the environment changes. In addition, the maximum power point tracking method of the photovoltaic generator set with direct duty cycle control is put forward based on the basic PSO algorithm. Secondly, the concept of recognition is introduced. The particles with strong recognition ability directly enter the next iteration, ensuring the search accuracy and speed of the PSO algorithm in the later stage. Finally, the effectiveness of the AOA-PSO algorithm is verified by simulation and compared with the traditional control algorithm. The results demonstrate that the method is effective. The system successfully tracks the maximum power point within 0.89 s, 1.2 s faster than the traditional perturbation and observation method (TPOM), and 0.8 s faster than the incremental admittance method (IAM). The average maximum power point is 274.73 W, which is 98.87 W higher than the TPOM and 109.98 W more elevated than the IAM. Besides, the power oscillation range near the maximum power point is small, and the power loss is slight. The method reported here provides some guidance for the practical development of the system