Simulating dynamical quantum Hall effect with superconducting qubits

We propose an experimental scheme to simulate the dynamical quantum Hall effect and the related interaction-induced topological transition with a superconducting-qubit array. We show that a one-dimensional Heisenberg model with tunable parameters can be realized in an array of superconducting qubits. The quantized plateaus, which is a feature of the dynamical quantum Hall effect, will emerge in the Berry curvature of the superconducting qubits as a function of the coupling strength between nearest neighbor qubits. We numerically calculate the Berry curvatures of two-, four- and six-qubit arrays, and find that the interaction-induced topological transition can be easily observed with the simplest two-qubit array. Furthermore, we analyze some practical conditions in typical experiments for observing such dynamical quantum Hall effect.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures, version accepted by PR

Occlusion Aware Unsupervised Learning of Optical Flow

It has been recently shown that a convolutional neural network can learn optical flow estimation with unsupervised learning. However, the performance of the unsupervised methods still has a relatively large gap compared to its supervised counterpart. Occlusion and large motion are some of the major factors that limit the current unsupervised learning of optical flow methods. In this work we introduce a new method which models occlusion explicitly and a new warping way that facilitates the learning of large motion. Our method shows promising results on Flying Chairs, MPI-Sintel and KITTI benchmark datasets. Especially on KITTI dataset where abundant unlabeled samples exist, our unsupervised method outperforms its counterpart trained with supervised learning.Comment: CVPR 2018 Camera-read

Newton-MR: Inexact Newton Method With Minimum Residual Sub-problem Solver

We consider a variant of inexact Newton Method, called Newton-MR, in which the least-squares sub-problems are solved approximately using Minimum Residual method. By construction, Newton-MR can be readily applied for unconstrained optimization of a class of non-convex problems known as invex, which subsumes convexity as a sub-class. For invex optimization, instead of the classical Lipschitz continuity assumptions on gradient and Hessian, Newton-MR's global convergence can be guaranteed under a weaker notion of joint regularity of Hessian and gradient. We also obtain Newton-MR's problem-independent local convergence to the set of minima. We show that fast local/global convergence can be guaranteed under a novel inexactness condition, which, to our knowledge, is much weaker than the prior related works. Numerical results demonstrate the performance of Newton-MR as compared with several other Newton-type alternatives on a few machine learning problems.Comment: 35 page

Training a Binary Weight Object Detector by Knowledge Transfer for Autonomous Driving

Autonomous driving has harsh requirements of small model size and energy efficiency, in order to enable the embedded system to achieve real-time on-board object detection. Recent deep convolutional neural network based object detectors have achieved state-of-the-art accuracy. However, such models are trained with numerous parameters and their high computational costs and large storage prohibit the deployment to memory and computation resource limited systems. Low-precision neural networks are popular techniques for reducing the computation requirements and memory footprint. Among them, binary weight neural network (BWN) is the extreme case which quantizes the float-point into just $1$ bit. BWNs are difficult to train and suffer from accuracy deprecation due to the extreme low-bit representation. To address this problem, we propose a knowledge transfer (KT) method to aid the training of BWN using a full-precision teacher network. We built DarkNet- and MobileNet-based binary weight YOLO-v2 detectors and conduct experiments on KITTI benchmark for car, pedestrian and cyclist detection. The experimental results show that the proposed method maintains high detection accuracy while reducing the model size of DarkNet-YOLO from 257 MB to 8.8 MB and MobileNet-YOLO from 193 MB to 7.9 MB.Comment: Accepted by ICRA 201

Helicity hardens the gas

A screw generally works better than a nail, or a complicated rope knot better than a simple one, in fastening solid matter, but a gas is more tameless. However, a flow itself has a physical quantity, helicity, measuring the screwing strength of the velocity field and the degree of the knottedness of the vorticity ropes. It is shown that helicity favors the partition of energy to the vortical modes, compared to others such as the dilatation and pressure modes of turbulence; that is, helicity stiffens the flow, with nontrivial implications for aerodynamics, such as aeroacoustics, and conducting fluids, among others

Non-integrable stable approximation by Stein's method

We develop Stein's method for $\alpha$-stable approximation with $\alpha\in(0,1]$, continuing the recent line of research by Xu \cite{lihu} and Chen, Nourdin and Xu \cite{C-N-X} in the case $\alpha\in(1,2).$ The main results include an intrinsic upper bound for the error of the approximation in a variant of Wasserstein distance that involves the characterizing differential operators for stable distributions, and an application to the generalized central limit theorem. Due to the lack of first moment for the approximating sequence in the latter result, we appeal to an additional truncation procedure and investigate fine regularity properties of the solution to Stein's equation