Simulating stiff materials in applications where deformations are either not significant or can safely be ignored is a pivotal task across fields. Rigid body modeling has thus long remained a fundamental tool and is, by far, the most popular simulation strategy currently employed for modeling stiff solids. At the same time, numerical models of a rigid body continue to pose a number of known challenges and trade-offs including intersections, instabilities, inaccuracies, and/or slow performances that grow with contact-problem complexity. In this paper we revisit this problem and present ABD, a simple and highly effective affine body dynamics framework, which significantly improves state-of-the-art stiff simulations. We trace the challenges in the rigid-body IPC (incremental potential contact) method to the necessity of linearizing piecewise-rigid (SE(3)) trajectories and subsequent constraints. ABD instead relaxes the unnecessary (and unrealistic) constraint that each body's motion be exactly rigid with a stiff orthogonality potential, while preserving the rigid body model's key feature of a small coordinate representation. In doing so ABD replaces piecewise linearization with piecewise linear trajectories. This, in turn, combines the best from both parties: compact coordinates ensure small, sparse system solves, while piecewise-linear trajectories enable efficient and accurate constraint (contact and joint) evaluations. Beginning with this simple foundation, ABD preserves all guarantees of the underlying IPC model e.g., solution convergence, guaranteed non-intersection, and accurate frictional contact. Over a wide range and scale of simulation problems we demonstrate that ABD brings orders of magnitude performance gains (two- to three-order on the CPU and an order more utilizing the GPU, which is 10,000x speedups) over prior IPC-based methods with a similar or higher simulation quality.
The approximate uniform sampling of graph realizations with a given degree sequence is an everyday task in several social science, computer science, engineering etc. projects. One approach is using Markov chains. The best available current result about the well-studied switch Markov chain is that it is rapidly mixing on P-stable degree sequences (see DOI:10.1016/j.ejc.2021.103421). The switch Markov chain does not change any degree sequence. However, there are cases where degree intervals are specified rather than a single degree sequence. (A natural scenario where this problem arises is in hypothesis testing on social networks that are only partially observed.) Rechner, Strowick, and M\"uller-Hannemann introduced in 2018 the notion of degree interval Markov chain which uses three (separately well-studied) local operations (switch, hinge-flip and toggle), and employing on degree sequence realizations where any two sequences under scrutiny have very small coordinate-wise distance. Recently Amanatidis and Kleer published a beautiful paper (arXiv:2110.09068), showing that the degree interval Markov chain is rapidly mixing if the sequences are coming from a system of very thin intervals which are centered not far from a regular degree sequence. In this paper we extend substantially their result, showing that the degree interval Markov chain is rapidly mixing if the intervals are centred at P-stable degree sequences.
Quantum communications is a promising technology that will play a fundamental role in the design of future networks. In fact, significant efforts are being dedicated by both the quantum physics and the classical communications communities on developing new architectures, solutions, and practical implementations of quantum communication networks (QCNs). Although these efforts led to various advances in today's technologies, there still exists a non-trivial gap between the research efforts of the two communities on designing and optimizing the QCN performance. For instance, most prior works by the classical communications community ignore important quantum physics-based constraints when designing QCNs. For example, many works on entanglement distribution do not account for the decoherence of qubits inside quantum memories and, thus, their designs become impractical since they assume an infinite quantum states' lifetime. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework, dubbed physics-informed QCNs, for designing and analyzing the performance of QCNs, by relying on the quantum physics principles that underly the different QCN components. The need of the proposed approach is then assessed and its fundamental role in designing practical QCNs is analyzed across various open research areas. Moreover, we identify novel physics-informed performance metrics and controls that enable QCNs to leverage the state-of-the-art advancements in quantum technologies to enhance their performance. Finally, we analyze multiple pressing challenges and open research directions in QCNs that must be treated using a physics-informed approach to lead practically viable results. Ultimately, this work attempts to bridge the gap between the classical communications and the quantum physics communities in the area of QCNs to foster the development of future communication networks (6G and beyond, and the quantum Internet).
Semantic place annotation can provide individual semantics, which can be of great help in the field of trajectory data mining. Most existing methods rely on annotated or external data and require retraining following a change of region, thus preventing their large-scale applications. Herein, we propose an unsupervised method denoted as UPAPP for the semantic place annotation of trajectories using spatiotemporal information. The Bayesian Criterion is specifically employed to decompose the spatiotemporal probability of the candidate place into spatial probability, duration probability, and visiting time probability. Spatial information in ROI and POI data is subsequently adopted to calculate the spatial probability. In terms of the temporal probabilities, the Term Frequency Inverse Document Frequency weighting algorithm is used to count the potential visits to different place types in the trajectories, and generates the prior probabilities of the visiting time and duration. The spatiotemporal probability of the candidate place is then combined with the importance of the place category to annotate the visited places. Validation with a trajectory dataset collected by 709 volunteers in Beijing showed that our method achieved an overall and average accuracy of 0.712 and 0.720, respectively, indicating that the visited places can be annotated accurately without any external data.
Monocular SLAM in deformable scenes will open the way to multiple medical applications like computer-assisted navigation in endoscopy, automatic drug delivery or autonomous robotic surgery. In this paper we propose a novel method to simultaneously track the camera pose and the 3D scene deformation, without any assumption about environment topology or shape. The method uses an illumination-invariant photometric method to track image features and estimates camera motion and deformation combining reprojection error with spatial and temporal regularization of deformations. Our results in simulated colonoscopies show the method's accuracy and robustness in complex scenes under increasing levels of deformation. Our qualitative results in human colonoscopies from Endomapper dataset show that the method is able to successfully cope with the challenges of real endoscopies: deformations, low texture and strong illumination changes. We also compare with previous tracking methods in simpler scenarios from Hamlyn dataset where we obtain competitive performance, without needing any topological assumption.
This paper proposes a numerical method based on the Adomian decomposition approach for the time discretization, applied to Euler equations. A recursive property is demonstrated that allows to formulate the method in an appropriate and efficient way. To obtain a fully numerical scheme, the space discretization is achieved using the classical DG techniques. The efficiency of the obtained numerical scheme is demonstrated through numerical tests by comparison to exact solution and the popular Runge-Kutta DG method results.
The simulation of multi-body systems with frictional contacts is a fundamental tool for many fields, such as robotics, computer graphics, and mechanics. Hard frictional contacts are particularly troublesome to simulate because they make the differential equations stiff, calling for computationally demanding implicit integration schemes. We suggest to tackle this issue by using exponential integrators, a long-standing class of integration schemes (first introduced in the 60's) that in recent years has enjoyed a resurgence of interest. We show that this scheme can be easily applied to multi-body systems subject to stiff viscoelastic contacts, producing accurate results at lower computational cost than \changed{classic explicit or implicit schemes}. In our tests with quadruped and biped robots, our method demonstrated stable behaviors with large time steps (10 ms) and stiff contacts ($10^5$ N/m). Its excellent properties, especially for fast and coarse simulations, make it a valuable candidate for many applications in robotics, such as simulation, Model Predictive Control, Reinforcement Learning, and controller design.
Materialized model query aims to find the most appropriate materialized model as the initial model for model reuse. It is the precondition of model reuse, and has recently attracted much attention. Nonetheless, the existing methods suffer from low privacy protection, limited range of applications, and inefficiency since they do not construct a suitable metric to measure the target-related knowledge of materialized models. To address this, we present MMQ, a privacy-protected, general, efficient, and effective materialized model query framework. It uses a Gaussian mixture-based metric called separation degree to rank materialized models. For each materialized model, MMQ first vectorizes the samples in the target dataset into probability vectors by directly applying this model, then utilizes Gaussian distribution to fit for each class of probability vectors, and finally uses separation degree on the Gaussian distributions to measure the target-related knowledge of the materialized model. Moreover, we propose an improved MMQ (I-MMQ), which significantly reduces the query time while retaining the query performance of MMQ. Extensive experiments on a range of practical model reuse workloads demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of MMQ.
We present a new sublinear time algorithm for approximating the spectral density (eigenvalue distribution) of an $n\times n$ normalized graph adjacency or Laplacian matrix. The algorithm recovers the spectrum up to $\epsilon$ accuracy in the Wasserstein-1 distance in $O(n\cdot \text{poly}(1/\epsilon))$ time given sample access to the graph. This result compliments recent work by David Cohen-Steiner, Weihao Kong, Christian Sohler, and Gregory Valiant (2018), which obtains a solution with runtime independent of $n$, but exponential in $1/\epsilon$. We conjecture that the trade-off between dimension dependence and accuracy is inherent. Our method is simple and works well experimentally. It is based on a Chebyshev polynomial moment matching method that employees randomized estimators for the matrix trace. We prove that, for any Hermitian $A$, this moment matching method returns an $\epsilon$ approximation to the spectral density using just $O({1}/{\epsilon})$ matrix-vector products with $A$. By leveraging stability properties of the Chebyshev polynomial three-term recurrence, we then prove that the method is amenable to the use of coarse approximate matrix-vector products. Our sublinear time algorithm follows from combining this result with a novel sampling algorithm for approximating matrix-vector products with a normalized graph adjacency matrix. Of independent interest, we show a similar result for the widely used \emph{kernel polynomial method} (KPM), proving that this practical algorithm nearly matches the theoretical guarantees of our moment matching method. Our analysis uses tools from Jackson's seminal work on approximation with positive polynomial kernels.
CP decomposition (CPD) is prevalent in chemometrics, signal processing, data mining and many more fields. While many algorithms have been proposed to compute the CPD, alternating least squares (ALS) remains one of the most widely used algorithm for computing the decomposition. Recent works have introduced the notion of eigenvalues and singular values of a tensor and explored applications of eigenvectors and singular vectors in areas like signal processing, data analytics and in various other fields. We introduce a new formulation for deriving singular values and vectors of a tensor by considering the critical points of a function different from what is used in the previous work. Computing these critical points in an alternating manner motivates an alternating optimization algorithm which corresponds to alternating least squares algorithm in the matrix case. However, for tensors with order greater than equal to $3$, it minimizes an objective function which is different from the commonly used least squares loss. Alternating optimization of this new objective leads to simple updates to the factor matrices with the same asymptotic computational cost as ALS. We show that a subsweep of this algorithm can achieve a superlinear convergence rate for exact CPD with known rank and verify it experimentally. We then view the algorithm as optimizing a Mahalanobis distance with respect to each factor with ground metric dependent on the other factors. This perspective allows us to generalize our approach to interpolate between updates corresponding to the ALS and the new algorithm to manage the tradeoff between stability and fitness of the decomposition. Our experimental results show that for approximating synthetic and real-world tensors, this algorithm and its variants converge to a better conditioned decomposition with comparable and sometimes better fitness as compared to the ALS algorithm.
Decomposition-based evolutionary algorithms have become fairly popular for many-objective optimization in recent years. However, the existing decomposition methods still are quite sensitive to the various shapes of frontiers of many-objective optimization problems (MaOPs). On the one hand, the cone decomposition methods such as the penalty-based boundary intersection (PBI) are incapable of acquiring uniform frontiers for MaOPs with very convex frontiers. On the other hand, the parallel reference lines of the parallel decomposition methods including the normal boundary intersection (NBI) might result in poor diversity because of under-sampling near the boundaries for MaOPs with concave frontiers. In this paper, a collaborative decomposition method is first proposed to integrate the advantages of parallel decomposition and cone decomposition to overcome their respective disadvantages. This method inherits the NBI-style Tchebycheff function as a convergence measure to heighten the convergence and uniformity of distribution of the PBI method. Moreover, this method also adaptively tunes the extent of rotating an NBI reference line towards a PBI reference line for every subproblem to enhance the diversity of distribution of the NBI method. Furthermore, a collaborative decomposition-based evolutionary algorithm (CoDEA) is presented for many-objective optimization. A collaborative decomposition-based environmental selection mechanism is primarily designed in CoDEA to rank all the individuals associated with the same PBI reference line in the boundary layer and pick out the best ranks. CoDEA is compared with several popular algorithms on 85 benchmark test instances. The experimental results show that CoDEA achieves high competitiveness benefiting from the collaborative decomposition maintaining a good balance among the convergence, uniformity, and diversity of distribution.