Inside and outside

In this thesis, I will focus on sculptural ceramic vessels. I regard the vessel not only as a physical object but also a container carrying memories, imaginations, and emotions. I use the vessel as a metaphor to relate to one person, one object, and one phenomenon, the way I see it. The thesis aims to explore the connections between what has happened in the past and what is happening now for a fuller understanding of self. Memory is an important subject matter for me. I believe life is not chronological, while the memory of what happened in the past and what is happening now is continually intertwined and profoundly leading each other. With my vessel sculptures, I want to take the viewers on a journey of how life passes through with the gain and loss, known and unknown, seen and unseen in life experience. Those experiences good or bad make who we are and who we will be. Many of my vessels result from the human figure and architectural language. Through exploration of the form and my aesthetics, organics profile, geometric structure, light, and shadow all work together to express a form language that has come to define the character of my work and communicate my ideas with the vessel

Hyperspherical Loss-Aware Ternary Quantization

Most of the existing works use projection functions for ternary quantization in discrete space. Scaling factors and thresholds are used in some cases to improve the model accuracy. However, the gradients used for optimization are inaccurate and result in a notable accuracy gap between the full precision and ternary models. To get more accurate gradients, some works gradually increase the discrete portion of the full precision weights in the forward propagation pass, e.g., using temperature-based Sigmoid function. Instead of directly performing ternary quantization in discrete space, we push full precision weights close to ternary ones through regularization term prior to ternary quantization. In addition, inspired by the temperature-based method, we introduce a re-scaling factor to obtain more accurate gradients by simulating the derivatives of Sigmoid function. The experimental results show that our method can significantly improve the accuracy of ternary quantization in both image classification and object detection tasks

Pruning On-the-Fly: A Recoverable Pruning Method without Fine-tuning

Most existing pruning works are resource-intensive, requiring retraining or fine-tuning of the pruned models for accuracy. We propose a retraining-free pruning method based on hyperspherical learning and loss penalty terms. The proposed loss penalty term pushes some of the model weights far from zero, while the rest weight values are pushed near zero and can be safely pruned with no need for retraining and a negligible accuracy drop. In addition, our proposed method can instantly recover the accuracy of a pruned model by replacing the pruned values with their mean value. Our method obtains state-of-the-art results in retraining-free pruning and is evaluated on ResNet-18/50 and MobileNetV2 with ImageNet dataset. One can easily get a 50\% pruned ResNet18 model with a 0.47\% accuracy drop. With fine-tuning, the experiment results show that our method can significantly boost the accuracy of the pruned models compared with existing works. For example, the accuracy of a 70\% pruned (except the first convolutional layer) MobileNetV2 model only drops 3.5\%, much less than the 7\% $\sim$ 10\% accuracy drop with conventional methods

An Experimental Proposal to Test Dynamic Quantum Non-locality with Single-Atom Interferometry

Quantum non-locality based on the well-known Bell inequality is of kinematic nature. A different type of quantum non-locality, the non-locality of the quantum equation of motion, is recently put forward with connection to the Aharonov-Bohm effect [Nature Phys. 6, 151 (2010)]. Evolution of the displacement operator provides an example to manifest such dynamic quantum non-locality. We propose an experiment using single-atom interferometry to test such dynamic quantum non-locality. We show how to measure evolution of the displacement operator with clod atoms in a spin-dependent optical lattice potential and discuss signature to identify dynamic quantum non-locality under a realistic experimental setting.Comment: 4 page