Did InsurTech Promote the Development of Insurance Inclusion? Empirical Evidence from Chinaʼs Rural Areas

departmental bulletin pape

2-(4-Pyridinio)benzimidazolium tetra­chloridopalladium(II)

The asymmetric unit of the title compound, (C12H11N3)[PdCl4], consists of a 2-(4-pyridinio)benzimidazolium cation and two half [PdCl4]2− anions, which are located on inversion centres. The cations lie in sheets parallel to (1). The cations and anions are connected by N—H⋯Cl and C—H⋯Cl contacts

Rectify the Regression Bias in Long-Tailed Object Detection

Long-tailed object detection faces great challenges because of its extremely imbalanced class distribution. Recent methods mainly focus on the classification bias and its loss function design, while ignoring the subtle influence of the regression branch. This paper shows that the regression bias exists and does adversely and seriously impact the detection accuracy. While existing methods fail to handle the regression bias, the class-specific regression head for rare classes is hypothesized to be the main cause of it in this paper. As a result, three kinds of viable solutions to cater for the rare categories are proposed, including adding a class-agnostic branch, clustering heads and merging heads. The proposed methods brings in consistent and significant improvements over existing long-tailed detection methods, especially in rare and common classes. The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance in the large vocabulary LVIS dataset with different backbones and architectures. It generalizes well to more difficult evaluation metrics, relatively balanced datasets, and the mask branch. This is the first attempt to reveal and explore rectifying of the regression bias in long-tailed object detection

A path to precision cosmology: synergy between four promising late-universe cosmological probes

In the next decades, it is necessary to forge new late-universe cosmological probes to precisely constrain the Hubble constant and the equation of state of dark energy simultaneously. In this work, we show that the four typical late-universe cosmological probes, the 21 cm intensity mapping (IM), fast radio burst (FRB), gravitational wave (GW) standard siren, and strong gravitational lensing (SGL), are expected to be forged into useful tools in solving the Hubble tension and exploring dark energy. We propose that the synergy of them is rather important in cosmology. We simulate the 21 cm IM, FRB, GW, and SGL data based on the hypothetical observations of the Hydrogen Intensity and Real-time Analysis eXperiment (HIRAX), the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), the Einstein Telescope (ET), and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), respectively. We find that the four probes show obviously different parameter degeneracy orientations in cosmological constraints, so any combination of them can break the parameter degeneracies and thus significantly improve the constraint precision. The joint 21 cm IM+FRB+GW+SGL data can provide the constraint errors of $\sigma(\Omega_{\rm m})=0.0022$ and $\sigma(H_0)=0.16\ \rm km\ s^{-1}\ Mpc^{-1}$ in the $\Lambda$CDM model, which meet the standard of precision cosmology, i.e., the constraint precision of parameters is better than 1%. In addition, the joint data give $\sigma(w)=0.020$ in the $w$CDM model, and $\sigma(w_0)=0.066$ and $\sigma(w_a)=0.25$ in the $w_0w_a$CDM model, which are all better than the constraints obtained by the CMB+BAO+SN data. We show that the synergy between the four late-universe cosmological probes has magnificent prospects.Comment: 28 pages, 9 figures; accepted for publication in JCA

A sex-role-preference model for HIV transmission among men who have sex with men in China

Background: Men who have sex with men (MSM) are much more likely to be infected with HIV than the general population. China has a sizable population of MSM, including gay, bisexual men, money boys and some rural workers. So reducing HIV infection in this population is an important component of the national HIV/AIDS prevention and control program. Methods: We develop a mathematical model using a sex-role-preference framework to predict HIV infection in the MSM population and to evaluate different intervention strategies. Results: An analytic formula for the basic reproduction ratio R0 was obtained; this yields R0 = 3.9296 in the current situation, so HIV will spread very fast in the MSM population if no intervention measure is implemented in a timely fashion. The persistence of HIV infection and the existence of disease equilibrium (or equilibria) are also shown. We utilized our model to simulate possible outcomes of antiretroviral therapy and vaccination for the MSM population. We compared the effects of these intervention measures under different assumptions about MSM behaviour. We also found that R0 is a decreasing function of the death rate of HIV-infected individuals, following a power law at least asymptotically. Conclusion: HIV will spread very fast in the MSM population unless intervention measures are implemented urgently. Antiretroviral therapy can have substantial impact on the reduction of HIV among the MSM population, even if disinhibition is considered. The effect of protected sexual behaviour on controlling the epidemic in the MSM population largely depends on the sex-ratio preference of different sub-populations

AdaDiff: Adaptive Step Selection for Fast Diffusion

Diffusion models, as a type of generative models, have achieved impressive results in generating images and videos conditioned on textual conditions. However, the generation process of diffusion models involves denoising for dozens of steps to produce photorealistic images/videos, which is computationally expensive. Unlike previous methods that design ``one-size-fits-all'' approaches for speed up, we argue denoising steps should be sample-specific conditioned on the richness of input texts. To this end, we introduce AdaDiff, a lightweight framework designed to learn instance-specific step usage policies, which are then used by the diffusion model for generation. AdaDiff is optimized using a policy gradient method to maximize a carefully designed reward function, balancing inference time and generation quality. We conduct experiments on three image generation and two video generation benchmarks and demonstrate that our approach achieves similar results in terms of visual quality compared to the baseline using a fixed 50 denoising steps while reducing inference time by at least 33%, going as high as 40%. Furthermore, our qualitative analysis shows that our method allocates more steps to more informative text conditions and fewer steps to simpler text conditions.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figure

Photon blockade with a trapped Λ\Lambda-type three-level atom in asymmetrical cavity

We propose a scheme to manipulate strong and nonreciprocal photon blockades in asymmetrical Fabry-Perot cavity with a $\Lambda$-type three-level atom. Utilizing the mechanisms of both conventional and unconventional blockade, the strong photon blockade is achieved by the anharmonic eigenenergy spectrum brought by $\Lambda$-type atom and the destructive quantum interference effect induced by a microwave field. By optimizing the system parameters, the manipulation of strong photon blockade over a wide range of cavity detuning can be realized. Using spatial symmetry breaking introduced by the asymmetry of cavity, the direction-dependent nonreciprocal photon blockade can be achieved, and the nonreciprocity can reach the maximum at optimal cavity detuning. In particular, manipulating the occurring position of nonreciprocal photon blockade can be implemented by simply adjusting the cavity detuning. Our scheme provides feasible access for generating high-quality nonreciprocal single-photon sources