Pose-Guided Multi-Granularity Attention Network for Text-Based Person Search

Text-based person search aims to retrieve the corresponding person images in an image database by virtue of a describing sentence about the person, which poses great potential for various applications such as video surveillance. Extracting visual contents corresponding to the human description is the key to this cross-modal matching problem. Moreover, correlated images and descriptions involve different granularities of semantic relevance, which is usually ignored in previous methods. To exploit the multilevel corresponding visual contents, we propose a pose-guided multi-granularity attention network (PMA). Firstly, we propose a coarse alignment network (CA) to select the related image regions to the global description by a similarity-based attention. To further capture the phrase-related visual body part, a fine-grained alignment network (FA) is proposed, which employs pose information to learn latent semantic alignment between visual body part and textual noun phrase. To verify the effectiveness of our model, we perform extensive experiments on the CUHK Person Description Dataset (CUHK-PEDES) which is currently the only available dataset for text-based person search. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by 15 \% in terms of the top-1 metric.Comment: published in AAAI2020(oral

Review of Technical and Vocational Institution Educators’ Critical Thinking Competencies and the Moderating Effect of Leadership Support

This review article highlights the increasing focus on developing critical thinking skills in technical and vocational education, underscoring the crucial role of educators' competencies and leadership support in this process. Drawing on research from nursing and higher education, the review presents a wide array of strategies for enhancing critical thinking, such as project-based learning and technology-enhanced tools, that can address existing gaps in vocational curricula. Supporting leadership is essential for successfully implementing these strategies, with effective leadership being linked to improved teaching confidence, innovative curriculum design, and better student engagement. Including insights from nursing and higher education enriches the understanding of critical thinking's universal significance and offers a diverse set of adaptable strategies for vocational education. The review concludes by emphasizing the importance of critical thinking competencies for educators and the significant impact of leadership support. It calls for continued research into effective development strategies and their long-term effects on student success. This multidisciplinary approach highlights the need to adapt educational practices to meet the modern workforce's demands, positioning critical thinking as a pivotal element in preparing students for future challenges and opportunities

Demonstration of Geometric Landau-Zener Interferometry in a Superconducting Qubit

Geometric quantum manipulation and Landau-Zener interferometry have been separately explored in many quantum systems. In this Letter, we combine these two approaches to study the dynamics of a superconducting phase qubit. We experimentally demonstrate Landau-Zener interferometry based on the pure geometric phases in this solid-state qubit. We observe the interference caused by a pure geometric phase accumulated in the evolution between two consecutive Landau-Zener transitions, while the dynamical phase is canceled out by a spin-echo pulse. The full controllability of the qubit state as a function of the intrinsically robust geometric phase provides a promising approach for quantum state manipulation.Comment: 5 pages + 3 pages supplemental Materia

Strong decays of the ϕ(2170)\phi(2170) as a fully-strange tetraquark state

We study strong decays of the $\phi(2170)$, along with its possible partner $X(2436)$, as two fully-strange tetraquark states of $J^{PC} = 1^{--}$. We consider seven decay channels: $\phi \eta$, $\phi \eta^\prime$, $\phi f_0(980)$, $\phi f_1(1420)$, $h_1(1415) \eta$, $h_1(1415) \eta^\prime$, and $h_1(1415) f_1(1420)$. Some of these channels are kinematically possible, and we calculate their relative branching ratios through the Fierz rearrangement. Future experimental measurements on these ratios can be useful in determining the nature of the $\phi(2170)$ and $X(2436)$. The $\phi(2170)$ has been observed in the $\phi f_0(980)$, $\phi \eta$, and $\phi \eta^\prime$ channels, and we propose to further examine it in the $h_1(1415) \eta$ channel. Evidences of the $X(2436)$ have been observed in the $\phi f_0(980)$ channel, and we propose to verify whether this structure exists or not in the $\phi \eta$, $\phi \eta^\prime$, $h_1(1415) \eta$, and $h_1(1415) \eta^\prime$ channels.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures, 1 table, suggestions and comments are welcom