Template-Instance Loss for Offline Handwritten Chinese Character Recognition

The long-standing challenges for offline handwritten Chinese character recognition (HCCR) are twofold: Chinese characters can be very diverse and complicated while similarly looking, and cursive handwriting (due to increased writing speed and infrequent pen lifting) makes strokes and even characters connected together in a flowing manner. In this paper, we propose the template and instance loss functions for the relevant machine learning tasks in offline handwritten Chinese character recognition. First, the character template is designed to deal with the intrinsic similarities among Chinese characters. Second, the instance loss can reduce category variance according to classification difficulty, giving a large penalty to the outlier instance of handwritten Chinese character. Trained with the new loss functions using our deep network architecture HCCR14Layer model consisting of simple layers, our extensive experiments show that it yields state-of-the-art performance and beyond for offline HCCR.Comment: Accepted by ICDAR 201

Ground state baryons in the flux-tube three-body confinement model using Diffusion Monte Carlo

We make a systematical diffusion Monte Carlo (DMC) calculation for all ground state baryons in two confinement scenarios, the pairwise confinement and the three-body flux-tube confinement. With the baryons as an example, we illustrate a feasible procedure to investigate the few-quark states with possible few-body confinement mechanisms, which can be extended to the multiquark states easily. For each baryon, we extract the mass, mean-square radius, charge radius, and the quark distributions. We use the Jackknife resampling method to estimate the statistical uncertainties of masses to be less than 1 MeV. To determine the baryon charge radii, we include the constituent quark size effect, which is fixed by the experimental and lattice QCD results. Our results show that both two-body and three-body confinement mechanisms can give a good description of the experimental data if the parameters are chosen properly. In the flux-tube confinement, introducing different tension parameters for the baryons and mesons are necessary, specifically, $\sigma_Y= 0.9204 \sigma_{Q\bar{Q}}$. The lesson from the calculation of the nucleon mass with the DMC method is that the improper pre-assignment of the channels may prevent us from obtaining the real ground state. With this experience, we obtain the real ground state (the $\eta_c \eta_c$ threshold with the di-meson configuration) of the $cc\bar{c}\bar{c}$ system with $J^{PC}=0^{++}$ starting from the diquark-antidiquark spin-color channels alone, which is hard to achieve in the variational method and was not obtained in the previous DMC calculations.Comment: 24 pages, 18 figures. The Supplement material is attached in the source code of LaTeX. Comments are welcome