Age structure of the population and the choice of household financial assets

China is undergoing changes in its demographic structure, and the burden of raising children and caring for the elderly is negatively affecting the welfare of Chinese families. Optimising the financial structure of households may be an effective solution. Using data from the 2017 Chinese Household Finance Survey, in this study, we empirically analyse how the age structure of the population affects a household’s finances by applying probit and tobit models. It was found that an increase in the proportion of infants in a family has a crowding-out effect on its investment in risky and deposit assets, and an increase in the proportion of elderly family members encourages the replacement of risky assets with savings. Further mechanism tests showed that the presence of infants affects the choice of financial assets by crowding a family’s labour or leisure time, increasing expenditures, and changing a family’s cash demand, while the presence of the elderly changes household finances because a family’s risk preferences are altered by the weakened cognitive abilities of the elderly. Finally, in this article, we advance some policy suggestions, such as regulating capital market management, increasing birth subsidies, and improving the financial literacy of the elderly, to ensure future pension securit

Wavelet-based Fourier Information Interaction with Frequency Diffusion Adjustment for Underwater Image Restoration

Underwater images are subject to intricate and diverse degradation, inevitably affecting the effectiveness of underwater visual tasks. However, most approaches primarily operate in the raw pixel space of images, which limits the exploration of the frequency characteristics of underwater images, leading to an inadequate utilization of deep models' representational capabilities in producing high-quality images. In this paper, we introduce a novel Underwater Image Enhancement (UIE) framework, named WF-Diff, designed to fully leverage the characteristics of frequency domain information and diffusion models. WF-Diff consists of two detachable networks: Wavelet-based Fourier information interaction network (WFI2-net) and Frequency Residual Diffusion Adjustment Module (FRDAM). With our full exploration of the frequency domain information, WFI2-net aims to achieve preliminary enhancement of frequency information in the wavelet space. Our proposed FRDAM can further refine the high- and low-frequency information of the initial enhanced images, which can be viewed as a plug-and-play universal module to adjust the detail of the underwater images. With the above techniques, our algorithm can show SOTA performance on real-world underwater image datasets, and achieves competitive performance in visual quality

High-speed photon correlation monitoring of amplified quantum noise by chaos using deep-learning balanced homodyne detection

Precision experimental determination of photon correlation requires the massive amounts of data and extensive measurement time. We present a technique to monitor second-order photon correlation $g^{(2)}(0)$ of amplified quantum noise based on wideband balanced homodyne detection and deep-learning acceleration. The quantum noise is effectively amplified by an injection of weak chaotic laser and the $g^{(2)}(0)$ of the amplified quantum noise is measured with a real-time sample rate of 1.4 GHz. We also exploit a photon correlation convolutional neural network accelerating correlation data using a few quadrature fluctuations to perform a parallel processing of the $g^{(2)}(0)$ for various chaos injection intensities and effective bandwidths. The deep-learning method accelerates the $g^{(2)}(0)$ experimental acquisition with a high accuracy, estimating 6107 sets of photon correlation data with a mean square error of 0.002 in 22 seconds and achieving a three orders of magnitude acceleration in data acquisition time. This technique contributes to a high-speed and precision coherence evaluation of entropy source in secure communication and quantum imaging.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figure

Explicit Attention-Enhanced Fusion for RGB-Thermal Perception Tasks

Recently, RGB-Thermal based perception has shown significant advances. Thermal information provides useful clues when visual cameras suffer from poor lighting conditions, such as low light and fog. However, how to effectively fuse RGB images and thermal data remains an open challenge. Previous works involve naive fusion strategies such as merging them at the input, concatenating multi-modality features inside models, or applying attention to each data modality. These fusion strategies are straightforward yet insufficient. In this paper, we propose a novel fusion method named Explicit Attention-Enhanced Fusion (EAEF) that fully takes advantage of each type of data. Specifically, we consider the following cases: i) both RGB data and thermal data, ii) only one of the types of data, and iii) none of them generate discriminative features. EAEF uses one branch to enhance feature extraction for i) and iii) and the other branch to remedy insufficient representations for ii). The outputs of two branches are fused to form complementary features. As a result, the proposed fusion method outperforms state-of-the-art by 1.6\% in mIoU on semantic segmentation, 3.1\% in MAE on salient object detection, 2.3\% in mAP on object detection, and 8.1\% in MAE on crowd counting. The code is available at https://github.com/FreeformRobotics/EAEFNet