Effective field theory with resonant P-wave interaction

A new effective field theory has been developed to describe shallow $P$-wave resonances using nonlocal, momentum-dependent two-body potentials. This approach is expected to facilitate many-body calculations and has been demonstrated to converge and to be renormalizable in perturbative calculations at subleading orders. The theory has been applied to the neutron-alpha system, with good agreement found between its predictions and a phase-shift analysis of neutron-alpha elastic scattering. In the three-body system consisting of two neutrons and an alpha particle, the nonlocal potential in this framework has been found to recover the same qualitative features as previously shown with energy-dependent formulations.Comment: 17 pages, 4 figure

QAScore -- An Unsupervised Unreferenced Metric for the Question Generation Evaluation

Question Generation (QG) aims to automate the task of composing questions for a passage with a set of chosen answers found within the passage. In recent years, the introduction of neural generation models has resulted in substantial improvements of automatically generated questions in terms of quality, especially compared to traditional approaches that employ manually crafted heuristics. However, the metrics commonly applied in QG evaluations have been criticized for their low agreement with human judgement. We therefore propose a new reference-free evaluation metric that has the potential to provide a better mechanism for evaluating QG systems, called QAScore. Instead of fine-tuning a language model to maximize its correlation with human judgements, QAScore evaluates a question by computing the cross entropy according to the probability that the language model can correctly generate the masked words in the answer to that question. Furthermore, we conduct a new crowd-sourcing human evaluation experiment for the QG evaluation to investigate how QAScore and other metrics can correlate with human judgements. Experiments show that QAScore obtains a stronger correlation with the results of our proposed human evaluation method compared to existing traditional word-overlap-based metrics such as BLEU and ROUGE, as well as the existing pretrained-model-based metric BERTScore.Comment: 19 pages, 5 figures, 7 table

BaySize: Bayesian Sample Size Planning for Phase I Dose-Finding Trials

We propose BaySize, a sample size calculator for phase I clinical trials using Bayesian models. BaySize applies the concept of effect size in dose finding, assuming the MTD is defined based on an equivalence interval. Leveraging a decision framework that involves composite hypotheses, BaySize utilizes two prior distributions, the fitting prior (for model fitting) and sampling prior (for data generation), to conduct sample size calculation under desirable statistical power. Look-up tables are generated to facilitate practical applications. To our knowledge, BaySize is the first sample size tool that can be applied to a broad range of phase I trial designs

Accelerated Federated Learning with Decoupled Adaptive Optimization

The federated learning (FL) framework enables edge clients to collaboratively learn a shared inference model while keeping privacy of training data on clients. Recently, many heuristics efforts have been made to generalize centralized adaptive optimization methods, such as SGDM, Adam, AdaGrad, etc., to federated settings for improving convergence and accuracy. However, there is still a paucity of theoretical principles on where to and how to design and utilize adaptive optimization methods in federated settings. This work aims to develop novel adaptive optimization methods for FL from the perspective of dynamics of ordinary differential equations (ODEs). First, an analytic framework is established to build a connection between federated optimization methods and decompositions of ODEs of corresponding centralized optimizers. Second, based on this analytic framework, a momentum decoupling adaptive optimization method, FedDA, is developed to fully utilize the global momentum on each local iteration and accelerate the training convergence. Last but not least, full batch gradients are utilized to mimic centralized optimization in the end of the training process to ensure the convergence and overcome the possible inconsistency caused by adaptive optimization methods