Control of surface texture in strip steel is essential to meet customer requirements during galvanizing and temper rolling processes. Traditional methods rely on post-production stylus measurements, while on-line techniques offer non-contact and real-time measurements of the entire strip. However, ensuring accurate measurement is imperative for their effective utilization in the manufacturing pipeline. Moreover, accurate on-line measurements enable real-time adjustments of manufacturing processing parameters during production, ensuring consistent quality and the possibility of closed-loop control of the temper mill. In this study, we leverage state-of-the-art machine learning models to enhance the transformation of on-line measurements into significantly a more accurate Ra surface roughness metric. By comparing a selection of data-driven approaches, including both deep learning and non-deep learning methods, to the close-form transformation, we evaluate their potential for improving surface texture control in temper strip steel manufacturing.
An ideal length-extrapolatable Transformer language model can handle sequences longer than the training length without any fine-tuning. Such long-context utilization capability relies heavily on a flexible positional embedding design. Upon investigating the flexibility of existing large pre-trained Transformer language models, we find that the T5 family deserves a closer look, as its positional embeddings capture rich and flexible attention patterns. However, T5 suffers from the dispersed attention issue: the longer the input sequence, the flatter the attention distribution. To alleviate the issue, we propose two attention alignment strategies via temperature scaling. Our findings show improvement on the long-context utilization capability of T5 on language modeling, retrieval, multi-document question answering, and code completion tasks without any fine-tuning. This suggests that a flexible positional embedding design and attention alignment can go a long way toward Transformer length extrapolation.
Video post-processing methods can improve the quality of compressed videos at the decoder side. Most of the existing methods need to train corresponding models for compressed videos with different quantization parameters to improve the quality of compressed videos. However, in most cases, the quantization parameters of the decoded video are unknown. This makes existing methods have their limitations in improving video quality. To tackle this problem, this work proposes a diffusion model based post-processing method for compressed videos. The proposed method first estimates the feature vectors of the compressed video and then uses the estimated feature vectors as the prior information for the quality enhancement model to adaptively enhance the quality of compressed video with different quantization parameters. Experimental results show that the quality enhancement results of our proposed method on mixed datasets are superior to existing methods.
Spectroscopic measurements can show distorted spectral shapes arising from a mixture of absorbing and scattering contributions. These distortions (or baselines) often manifest themselves as non-constant offsets or low-frequency oscillations. As a result, these baselines can adversely affect analytical and quantitative results. Baseline correction is an umbrella term where one applies pre-processing methods to obtain baseline spectra (the unwanted distortions) and then remove the distortions by differencing. However, current state-of-the art baseline correction methods do not utilize analyte concentrations even if they are available, or even if they contribute significantly to the observed spectral variability. We examine a class of state-of-the-art methods (penalized baseline correction) and modify them such that they can accommodate a priori analyte concentrations such that prediction can be enhanced. Performance will be assessed on two near infra-red data sets across both classical penalized baseline correction methods (without analyte information) and modified penalized baseline correction methods (leveraging analyte information).
Identifying meaningful concepts in large data sets can provide valuable insights into engineering design problems. Concept identification aims at identifying non-overlapping groups of design instances that are similar in a joint space of all features, but which are also similar when considering only subsets of features. These subsets usually comprise features that characterize a design with respect to one specific context, for example, constructive design parameters, performance values, or operation modes. It is desirable to evaluate the quality of design concepts by considering several of these feature subsets in isolation. In particular, meaningful concepts should not only identify dense, well separated groups of data instances, but also provide non-overlapping groups of data that persist when considering pre-defined feature subsets separately. In this work, we propose to view concept identification as a special form of clustering algorithm with a broad range of potential applications beyond engineering design. To illustrate the differences between concept identification and classical clustering algorithms, we apply a recently proposed concept identification algorithm to two synthetic data sets and show the differences in identified solutions. In addition, we introduce the mutual information measure as a metric to evaluate whether solutions return consistent clusters across relevant subsets. To support the novel understanding of concept identification, we consider a simulated data set from a decision-making problem in the energy management domain and show that the identified clusters are more interpretable with respect to relevant feature subsets than clusters found by common clustering algorithms and are thus more suitable to support a decision maker.
Advancements in LiDAR technology have led to more cost-effective production while simultaneously improving precision and resolution. As a result, LiDAR has become integral to vehicle localization, achieving centimeter-level accuracy through techniques like Normal Distributions Transform (NDT) and other advanced 3D registration algorithms. Nonetheless, these approaches are reliant on high-definition 3D point cloud maps, the creation of which involves significant expenditure. When such maps are unavailable or lack sufficient features for 3D registration algorithms, localization accuracy diminishes, posing a risk to road safety. To address this, we proposed to use LiDAR-equipped roadside unit and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) communication to accurately estimate the connected autonomous vehicle's position and help the vehicle when its self-localization is not accurate enough. Our simulation results indicate that this method outperforms traditional NDT scan matching-based approaches in terms of localization accuracy.
Quantum copy protection, introduced by Aaronson, enables giving out a quantum program-description that cannot be meaningfully duplicated. Despite over a decade of study, copy protection is only known to be possible for a very limited class of programs. As our first contribution, we show how to achieve "best-possible" copy protection for all programs. We do this by introducing quantum state indistinguishability obfuscation (qsiO), a notion of obfuscation for quantum descriptions of classical programs. We show that applying qsiO to a program immediately achieves best-possible copy protection. Our second contribution is to show that, assuming injective one-way functions exist, qsiO is concrete copy protection for a large family of puncturable programs -- significantly expanding the class of copy-protectable programs. A key tool in our proof is a new variant of unclonable encryption (UE) that we call coupled unclonable encryption (cUE). While constructing UE in the standard model remains an important open problem, we are able to build cUE from one-way functions. If we additionally assume the existence of UE, then we can further expand the class of puncturable programs for which qsiO is copy protection. Finally, we construct qsiO relative to an efficient quantum oracle.
Beam steering is the process involving the calibration of the angle and position at which a particle accelerator's electron beam is incident upon the x-ray target with respect to the rotation axis of the collimator. Beam Steering is an essential task for light sources. In the case under study, the LINAC To Undulator (LTU) section of the beamline is difficult to aim. Each use of the accelerator requires re-calibration of the magnets in this section. This involves a substantial amount of time and effort from human operators, while reducing scientific throughput of the light source. We investigate the use of deep neural networks to assist in this task. The deep learning models are trained on archival data and then validated on simulation data. The performance of the deep learning model is contrasted against that of trained human operators.
We propose a general method to break down a main complex task into a set of intermediary easier sub-tasks, which are formulated in natural language as binary questions related to the final target task. Our method allows for representing each example by a vector consisting of the answers to these questions. We call this representation Natural Language Learned Features (NLLF). NLLF is generated by a small transformer language model (e.g., BERT) that has been trained in a Natural Language Inference (NLI) fashion, using weak labels automatically obtained from a Large Language Model (LLM). We show that the LLM normally struggles for the main task using in-context learning, but can handle these easiest subtasks and produce useful weak labels to train a BERT. The NLI-like training of the BERT allows for tackling zero-shot inference with any binary question, and not necessarily the ones seen during the training. We show that this NLLF vector not only helps to reach better performances by enhancing any classifier, but that it can be used as input of an easy-to-interpret machine learning model like a decision tree. This decision tree is interpretable but also reaches high performances, surpassing those of a pre-trained transformer in some cases.We have successfully applied this method to two completely different tasks: detecting incoherence in students' answers to open-ended mathematics exam questions, and screening abstracts for a systematic literature review of scientific papers on climate change and agroecology.
2D-based Industrial Anomaly Detection has been widely discussed, however, multimodal industrial anomaly detection based on 3D point clouds and RGB images still has many untouched fields. Existing multimodal industrial anomaly detection methods directly concatenate the multimodal features, which leads to a strong disturbance between features and harms the detection performance. In this paper, we propose Multi-3D-Memory (M3DM), a novel multimodal anomaly detection method with hybrid fusion scheme: firstly, we design an unsupervised feature fusion with patch-wise contrastive learning to encourage the interaction of different modal features; secondly, we use a decision layer fusion with multiple memory banks to avoid loss of information and additional novelty classifiers to make the final decision. We further propose a point feature alignment operation to better align the point cloud and RGB features. Extensive experiments show that our multimodal industrial anomaly detection model outperforms the state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods on both detection and segmentation precision on MVTec-3D AD dataset. Code is available at //github.com/nomewang/M3DM.
Causality can be described in terms of a structural causal model (SCM) that carries information on the variables of interest and their mechanistic relations. For most processes of interest the underlying SCM will only be partially observable, thus causal inference tries to leverage any exposed information. Graph neural networks (GNN) as universal approximators on structured input pose a viable candidate for causal learning, suggesting a tighter integration with SCM. To this effect we present a theoretical analysis from first principles that establishes a novel connection between GNN and SCM while providing an extended view on general neural-causal models. We then establish a new model class for GNN-based causal inference that is necessary and sufficient for causal effect identification. Our empirical illustration on simulations and standard benchmarks validate our theoretical proofs.