102 research outputs found
Study on Evaluation Models of Highway Safety Based on Catastrophe Theory
Evaluating safety performance of first-class highways in China is important due to their high mortality rates. Traditional models for statistical crash prediction and traffic conflict techniques require long periods of data collection which is time-consuming and labor-intensive. This paper introduces a safety evaluation method based on catastrophe theory for highways in China. The method firstly divides the highway into multiple road sections and uses video-based road detection (VRD) system to collect video data of existing road conditions. Then, experienced drivers and experts are invited to watch the collected videos to establish a multilayer safety index system and assign values to bottom indexes. By applying catastrophe theory, a general safety index is derived, which indicates the relative safety level of a road section. Finally, all road sections can be ranked based on the general safety index. A case study shows encouraging results where (1) the safety index is highly correlated with real mortality rates and (2) the safety index successfully identifies most dangerous road sections. The proposed method can be considered as a promising supplementary safety evaluation method that could help traffic engineers to better understand safety implications of first-class highways in China
An Optimal Allocation Model of Public Transit Mode Proportion for the Low-Carbon Transportation
Public transit has been widely recognized as a potential way to develop low-carbon transportation. In this paper, an optimal allocation model of public transit mode proportion (MPMP) has been built to achieve the low-carbon public transit. Optimal ratios of passenger traffic for rail, bus, and taxi are derived by running the model using typical data. With different values of traffic demand, construction cost, travel time, and accessibilities, MPMP can generate corresponding optimal ratios, benefiting decision impacts analysis and decision makers. Instead of considering public transit as a united system, it is separated into units in this paper. And Shanghai is used to test model validity and practicality
A WEIGHT-BOUNDED IMPORTANCE SAMPLING METHOD FOR VARIANCE REDUCTION
Importance sampling (IS) is an important technique to reduce the estimation
variance in Monte Carlo simulations. In many practical problems, however, the
use of IS method may result in unbounded variance, and thus fail to provide
reliable estimates. To address the issue, we propose a method which can prevent
the risk of unbounded variance; the proposed method performs the standard IS
for the integral of interest in a region only in which the IS weight is bounded
and use the result as an approximation to the original integral. It can be
verified that the resulting estimator has a finite variance. Moreover, we also
provide a normality test based method to identify the region with bounded IS
weight (termed as the safe region) from the samples drawn from the standard IS
distribution. With numerical examples, we demonstrate that the proposed method
can yield rather reliable estimate when the standard IS fails, and it also
outperforms the defensive IS, a popular method to prevent unbounded variance
Improving E-Bike Safety on Urban Highways in China
This paper aims to examine characteristics of e-bike fatal crashes on urban highways in China. Crash data were retrieved from the three-year crash reports (2010–2012) of Taixing City. Descriptive analysis was conducted to examine characteristics of e-bike riders, drivers, and crashes. The important findings include the following: (1) most fatal crashes were related to e-bike riders’ aberrant driving behaviors, including driving in motorized lanes, red-light running, driving against the direction of traffic, inattentive driving, and drunk driving; (2) e-bike riders with lower educational background tended to perform illegal or inattentive driving behaviors in fatal crashes; (3) most drivers were not found to commit any faults and very few drivers were found to commit drunk driving offences; (4) most nighttime fatal crashes were related to absence of street lightings; (5) heavy good vehicles (HGVs) and small passenger cars were the two vehicle types that were mostly involved in the e-bike fatal crashes. This study provides useful information that can help traffic engineers better understand e-bike safety in China and develop safety countermeasures
KinD-LCE Curve Estimation And Retinex Fusion On Low-Light Image
Low-light images often suffer from noise and color distortion. Object
detection, semantic segmentation, instance segmentation, and other tasks are
challenging when working with low-light images because of image noise and
chromatic aberration. We also found that the conventional Retinex theory loses
information in adjusting the image for low-light tasks. In response to the
aforementioned problem, this paper proposes an algorithm for low illumination
enhancement. The proposed method, KinD-LCE, uses a light curve estimation
module to enhance the illumination map in the Retinex decomposed image,
improving the overall image brightness. An illumination map and reflection map
fusion module were also proposed to restore the image details and reduce detail
loss. Additionally, a TV(total variation) loss function was applied to
eliminate noise. Our method was trained on the GladNet dataset, known for its
diverse collection of low-light images, tested against the Low-Light dataset,
and evaluated using the ExDark dataset for downstream tasks, demonstrating
competitive performance with a PSNR of 19.7216 and SSIM of 0.8213.Comment: Accepted by Signal, Image and Video Processin
A weight-bounded importance sampling method for variance reduction
Importance sampling (IS) is an important technique to reduce the estimation variance in Monte Carlo simulations. In many practical problems, however, the use of IS method may result in unbounded variance, and thus fail to provide reliable estimates. To address the issue, we propose a method which can prevent the risk of unbounded variance; the proposed method performs the standard IS for the integral of interest in a region only in which the IS weight is bounded and use the result as an approximation to the original integral. It can be verified that the resulting estimator has a finite variance. Moreover, we also provide a normality test based method to identify the region with bounded IS weight (termed as the safe region) from the samples drawn from the standard IS distribution. With numerical examples, we demonstrate that the proposed method can yield rather reliable estimate when the standard IS fails, and it also outperforms the defensive IS, a popular method to prevent unbounded variance
BeamSearchQA: Large Language Models are Strong Zero-Shot QA Solver
Open-domain question answering is a crucial task that often requires
accessing external information. Existing methods typically adopt a single-turn
retrieve-then-read approach, where relevant documents are first retrieved, and
questions are then answered based on the retrieved information. However, there
are cases where answering a question requires implicit knowledge that is not
directly retrievable from the question itself. In this work, we propose a novel
question-answering pipeline called BeamSearchQA. Our approach leverages large
language models to iteratively generate new questions about the original
question, enabling an iterative reasoning process. By iteratively refining and
expanding the scope of the question, our method aims to capture and utilize
hidden knowledge that may not be directly obtainable through retrieval. We
evaluate our approach on the widely-used open-domain NQ and WebQ datasets. The
experimental results demonstrate that BeamSearchQA significantly outperforms
other zero-shot baselines, indicating its effectiveness in tackling the
challenges of open-domain question answering.Comment: Work in progres
LEAD: Liberal Feature-based Distillation for Dense Retrieval
Knowledge distillation is often used to transfer knowledge from a strong
teacher model to a relatively weak student model. Traditional knowledge
distillation methods include response-based methods and feature-based methods.
Response-based methods are used the most widely but suffer from lower upper
limit of model performance, while feature-based methods have constraints on the
vocabularies and tokenizers. In this paper, we propose a tokenizer-free method
liberal feature-based distillation (LEAD). LEAD aligns the distribution between
teacher model and student model, which is effective, extendable, portable and
has no requirements on vocabularies, tokenizer, or model architecture.
Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of LEAD on several widely-used
benchmarks, including MS MARCO Passage, TREC Passage 19, TREC Passage 20, MS
MARCO Document, TREC Document 19 and TREC Document 20.Comment: Work in progres
Direct-Current Generator Based on Dynamic Water-Semiconductor Junction with Polarized Water as Moving Dielectric Medium
There is a rising prospective in harvesting energy from water droplets, as
microscale energy is required for the distributed sensors in the interconnected
human society. However, achieving a sustainable direct-current generating
device from water flow is rarely reported, and the quantum polarization
principle of the water molecular remains uncovered. Herein, we propose a
dynamic water-semiconductor junction with moving water sandwiched between two
semiconductors as a moving dielectric medium, which outputs a sustainable
direct-current voltage of 0.3 V and current of 0.64 uA with low internal
resistance of 390 kilohm. The sustainable direct-current electricity is
originating from the dynamic water polarization process in water-semiconductor
junction, in which water molecules are continuously polarized and depolarized
driven by the mechanical force and Fermi level difference, during the movement
of the water on silicon. We further demonstrated an encapsulated portable
power-generating device with simple structure and continuous direct-current
voltage, which exhibits its promising potential application in the field of
wearable electronic generators
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