Daily Papers

This paper aims to develop an accurate 3D geometry representation of satellite images using satellite-ground image pairs. Our focus is on the challenging problem of 3D-aware ground-views synthesis from a satellite image. We draw inspiration from the density field representation used in volumetric neural rendering and propose a new approach, called Sat2Density. Our method utilizes the properties of ground-view panoramas for the sky and non-sky regions to learn faithful density fields of 3D scenes in a geometric perspective. Unlike other methods that require extra depth information during training, our Sat2Density can automatically learn accurate and faithful 3D geometry via density representation without depth supervision. This advancement significantly improves the ground-view panorama synthesis task. Additionally, our study provides a new geometric perspective to understand the relationship between satellite and ground-view images in 3D space.

While surface-based view synthesis algorithms are appealing due to their low computational requirements, they often struggle to reproduce thin structures. In contrast, more expensive methods that model the scene's geometry as a volumetric density field (e.g. NeRF) excel at reconstructing fine geometric detail. However, density fields often represent geometry in a "fuzzy" manner, which hinders exact localization of the surface. In this work, we modify density fields to encourage them to converge towards surfaces, without compromising their ability to reconstruct thin structures. First, we employ a discrete opacity grid representation instead of a continuous density field, which allows opacity values to discontinuously transition from zero to one at the surface. Second, we anti-alias by casting multiple rays per pixel, which allows occlusion boundaries and subpixel structures to be modelled without using semi-transparent voxels. Third, we minimize the binary entropy of the opacity values, which facilitates the extraction of surface geometry by encouraging opacity values to binarize towards the end of training. Lastly, we develop a fusion-based meshing strategy followed by mesh simplification and appearance model fitting. The compact meshes produced by our model can be rendered in real-time on mobile devices and achieve significantly higher view synthesis quality compared to existing mesh-based approaches.

Presenting a 3D scene from multiview images remains a core and long-standing challenge in computer vision and computer graphics. Two main requirements lie in rendering and reconstruction. Notably, SOTA rendering quality is usually achieved with neural volumetric rendering techniques, which rely on aggregated point/primitive-wise color and neglect the underlying scene geometry. Learning of neural implicit surfaces is sparked from the success of neural rendering. Current works either constrain the distribution of density fields or the shape of primitives, resulting in degraded rendering quality and flaws on the learned scene surfaces. The efficacy of such methods is limited by the inherent constraints of the chosen neural representation, which struggles to capture fine surface details, especially for larger, more intricate scenes. To address these issues, we introduce GSDF, a novel dual-branch architecture that combines the benefits of a flexible and efficient 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) representation with neural Signed Distance Fields (SDF). The core idea is to leverage and enhance the strengths of each branch while alleviating their limitation through mutual guidance and joint supervision. We show on diverse scenes that our design unlocks the potential for more accurate and detailed surface reconstructions, and at the meantime benefits 3DGS rendering with structures that are more aligned with the underlying geometry.

We introduce a single-view reconstruction technique of volumetric fields in which multiple light scattering effects are omnipresent, such as in clouds. We model the unknown distribution of volumetric fields using an unconditional diffusion model trained on a novel benchmark dataset comprising 1,000 synthetically simulated volumetric density fields. The neural diffusion model is trained on the latent codes of a novel, diffusion-friendly, monoplanar representation. The generative model is used to incorporate a tailored parametric diffusion posterior sampling technique into different reconstruction tasks. A physically-based differentiable volume renderer is employed to provide gradients with respect to light transport in the latent space. This stands in contrast to classic NeRF approaches and makes the reconstructions better aligned with observed data. Through various experiments, we demonstrate single-view reconstruction of volumetric clouds at a previously unattainable quality.

The latest regularized Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) approaches produce poor geometry and view extrapolation for multiview stereo (MVS) benchmarks such as ETH3D. In this paper, we aim to create 3D models that provide accurate geometry and view synthesis, partially closing the large geometric performance gap between NeRF and traditional MVS methods. We propose a patch-based approach that effectively leverages monocular surface normal and relative depth predictions. The patch-based ray sampling also enables the appearance regularization of normalized cross-correlation (NCC) and structural similarity (SSIM) between randomly sampled virtual and training views. We further show that "density restrictions" based on sparse structure-from-motion points can help greatly improve geometric accuracy with a slight drop in novel view synthesis metrics. Our experiments show 4x the performance of RegNeRF and 8x that of FreeNeRF on average F1@2cm for ETH3D MVS benchmark, suggesting a fruitful research direction to improve the geometric accuracy of NeRF-based models, and sheds light on a potential future approach to enable NeRF-based optimization to eventually outperform traditional MVS.

Compared to frame-based methods, computational neuromorphic imaging using event cameras offers significant advantages, such as minimal motion blur, enhanced temporal resolution, and high dynamic range. The multi-view consistency of Neural Radiance Fields combined with the unique benefits of event cameras, has spurred recent research into reconstructing NeRF from data captured by moving event cameras. While showing impressive performance, existing methods rely on ideal conditions with the availability of uniform and high-quality event sequences and accurate camera poses, and mainly focus on the object level reconstruction, thus limiting their practical applications. In this work, we propose AE-NeRF to address the challenges of learning event-based NeRF from non-ideal conditions, including non-uniform event sequences, noisy poses, and various scales of scenes. Our method exploits the density of event streams and jointly learn a pose correction module with an event-based NeRF (e-NeRF) framework for robust 3D reconstruction from inaccurate camera poses. To generalize to larger scenes, we propose hierarchical event distillation with a proposal e-NeRF network and a vanilla e-NeRF network to resample and refine the reconstruction process. We further propose an event reconstruction loss and a temporal loss to improve the view consistency of the reconstructed scene. We established a comprehensive benchmark that includes large-scale scenes to simulate practical non-ideal conditions, incorporating both synthetic and challenging real-world event datasets. The experimental results show that our method achieves a new state-of-the-art in event-based 3D reconstruction.

The recently-discovered Eos molecular cloud, is a CO-dark, low-density cloud located at a distance of approximately 94 pc from the Sun which does not appear to have formed stars at any point in its history. In this paper we investigate the magnetic fields in the Eos cloud, near the interface between the atomic Cold Neutral Medium (CNM) and molecular gas, using dust emission and extinction polarimetry. A Histogram of Relative Orientation analysis shows that the magnetic field is preferentially parallel to the density structure of the cloud, while a Davis-Chandrasekhar-Fermi analysis finds magnetic field strengths of 8pm4 muG across the Eos cloud and 12pm4 muG in the somewhat denser MBM 40 sub-region. These results are consistent with a previous estimate of magnetic field strength in the Local Bubble and suggest that the fields in the Eos cloud are dynamically important compared to both gravity and turbulence. Our findings are fully consistent with the expected behavior of magnetized, non-self-gravitating gas near the CNM/molecular cloud boundary.

Fourier PlenOctrees have shown to be an efficient representation for real-time rendering of dynamic Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF). Despite its many advantages, this method suffers from artifacts introduced by the involved compression when combining it with recent state-of-the-art techniques for training the static per-frame NeRF models. In this paper, we perform an in-depth analysis of these artifacts and leverage the resulting insights to propose an improved representation. In particular, we present a novel density encoding that adapts the Fourier-based compression to the characteristics of the transfer function used by the underlying volume rendering procedure and leads to a substantial reduction of artifacts in the dynamic model. Furthermore, we show an augmentation of the training data that relaxes the periodicity assumption of the compression. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our enhanced Fourier PlenOctrees in the scope of quantitative and qualitative evaluations on synthetic and real-world scenes.

Conventional Computed Tomography (CT) methods require large numbers of noise-free projections for accurate density reconstructions, limiting their applicability to the more complex class of Cone Beam Geometry CT (CBCT) reconstruction. Recently, deep learning methods have been proposed to overcome these limitations, with methods based on neural fields (NF) showing strong performance, by approximating the reconstructed density through a continuous-in-space coordinate based neural network. Our focus is on improving such methods, however, unlike previous work, which requires training an NF from scratch for each new set of projections, we instead propose to leverage anatomical consistencies over different scans by training a single conditional NF on a dataset of projections. We propose a novel conditioning method where local modulations are modeled per patient as a field over the input domain through a Neural Modulation Field (NMF). The resulting Conditional Cone Beam Neural Tomography (CondCBNT) shows improved performance for both high and low numbers of available projections on noise-free and noisy data.

We present a novel method, called NeuralUDF, for reconstructing surfaces with arbitrary topologies from 2D images via volume rendering. Recent advances in neural rendering based reconstruction have achieved compelling results. However, these methods are limited to objects with closed surfaces since they adopt Signed Distance Function (SDF) as surface representation which requires the target shape to be divided into inside and outside. In this paper, we propose to represent surfaces as the Unsigned Distance Function (UDF) and develop a new volume rendering scheme to learn the neural UDF representation. Specifically, a new density function that correlates the property of UDF with the volume rendering scheme is introduced for robust optimization of the UDF fields. Experiments on the DTU and DeepFashion3D datasets show that our method not only enables high-quality reconstruction of non-closed shapes with complex typologies, but also achieves comparable performance to the SDF based methods on the reconstruction of closed surfaces.

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) methods have proved effective as compact, high-quality and versatile representations for 3D scenes, and enable downstream tasks such as editing, retrieval, navigation, etc. Various neural architectures are vying for the core structure of NeRF, including the plain Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP), sparse tensors, low-rank tensors, hashtables and their compositions. Each of these representations has its particular set of trade-offs. For example, the hashtable-based representations admit faster training and rendering but their lack of clear geometric meaning hampers downstream tasks like spatial-relation-aware editing. In this paper, we propose Progressive Volume Distillation (PVD), a systematic distillation method that allows any-to-any conversions between different architectures, including MLP, sparse or low-rank tensors, hashtables and their compositions. PVD consequently empowers downstream applications to optimally adapt the neural representations for the task at hand in a post hoc fashion. The conversions are fast, as distillation is progressively performed on different levels of volume representations, from shallower to deeper. We also employ special treatment of density to deal with its specific numerical instability problem. Empirical evidence is presented to validate our method on the NeRF-Synthetic, LLFF and TanksAndTemples datasets. For example, with PVD, an MLP-based NeRF model can be distilled from a hashtable-based Instant-NGP model at a 10X~20X faster speed than being trained the original NeRF from scratch, while achieving a superior level of synthesis quality. Code is available at https://github.com/megvii-research/AAAI2023-PVD.

We present a super-fast convergence approach to reconstructing the per-scene radiance field from a set of images that capture the scene with known poses. This task, which is often applied to novel view synthesis, is recently revolutionized by Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) for its state-of-the-art quality and flexibility. However, NeRF and its variants require a lengthy training time ranging from hours to days for a single scene. In contrast, our approach achieves NeRF-comparable quality and converges rapidly from scratch in less than 15 minutes with a single GPU. We adopt a representation consisting of a density voxel grid for scene geometry and a feature voxel grid with a shallow network for complex view-dependent appearance. Modeling with explicit and discretized volume representations is not new, but we propose two simple yet non-trivial techniques that contribute to fast convergence speed and high-quality output. First, we introduce the post-activation interpolation on voxel density, which is capable of producing sharp surfaces in lower grid resolution. Second, direct voxel density optimization is prone to suboptimal geometry solutions, so we robustify the optimization process by imposing several priors. Finally, evaluation on five inward-facing benchmarks shows that our method matches, if not surpasses, NeRF's quality, yet it only takes about 15 minutes to train from scratch for a new scene.

This paper proposes NeuralEditor that enables neural radiance fields (NeRFs) natively editable for general shape editing tasks. Despite their impressive results on novel-view synthesis, it remains a fundamental challenge for NeRFs to edit the shape of the scene. Our key insight is to exploit the explicit point cloud representation as the underlying structure to construct NeRFs, inspired by the intuitive interpretation of NeRF rendering as a process that projects or "plots" the associated 3D point cloud to a 2D image plane. To this end, NeuralEditor introduces a novel rendering scheme based on deterministic integration within K-D tree-guided density-adaptive voxels, which produces both high-quality rendering results and precise point clouds through optimization. NeuralEditor then performs shape editing via mapping associated points between point clouds. Extensive evaluation shows that NeuralEditor achieves state-of-the-art performance in both shape deformation and scene morphing tasks. Notably, NeuralEditor supports both zero-shot inference and further fine-tuning over the edited scene. Our code, benchmark, and demo video are available at https://immortalco.github.io/NeuralEditor.

Gaussian processes (GPs) are popular nonparametric statistical models for learning unknown functions and quantifying the spatiotemporal uncertainty in data. Recent works have extended GPs to model scalar and vector quantities distributed over non-Euclidean domains, including smooth manifolds appearing in numerous fields such as computer vision, dynamical systems, and neuroscience. However, these approaches assume that the manifold underlying the data is known, limiting their practical utility. We introduce RVGP, a generalisation of GPs for learning vector signals over latent Riemannian manifolds. Our method uses positional encoding with eigenfunctions of the connection Laplacian, associated with the tangent bundle, readily derived from common graph-based approximation of data. We demonstrate that RVGP possesses global regularity over the manifold, which allows it to super-resolve and inpaint vector fields while preserving singularities. Furthermore, we use RVGP to reconstruct high-density neural dynamics derived from low-density EEG recordings in healthy individuals and Alzheimer's patients. We show that vector field singularities are important disease markers and that their reconstruction leads to a comparable classification accuracy of disease states to high-density recordings. Thus, our method overcomes a significant practical limitation in experimental and clinical applications.

We study the problem of reconstructing 3D feature curves of an object from a set of calibrated multi-view images. To do so, we learn a neural implicit field representing the density distribution of 3D edges which we refer to as Neural Edge Field (NEF). Inspired by NeRF, NEF is optimized with a view-based rendering loss where a 2D edge map is rendered at a given view and is compared to the ground-truth edge map extracted from the image of that view. The rendering-based differentiable optimization of NEF fully exploits 2D edge detection, without needing a supervision of 3D edges, a 3D geometric operator or cross-view edge correspondence. Several technical designs are devised to ensure learning a range-limited and view-independent NEF for robust edge extraction. The final parametric 3D curves are extracted from NEF with an iterative optimization method. On our benchmark with synthetic data, we demonstrate that NEF outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on all metrics. Project page: https://yunfan1202.github.io/NEF/.

This paper studies the scale and redshift variation of density and velocity distributions in self-gravitating collisionless dark matter flow by a halo-based non-projection approach. All particles are divided into halo and out-of-halo particles for redshift variation of distributions. Without projecting particle fields onto a structured grid, the scale variation is analyzed by identifying all particle pairs on different scales r. We demonstrate that: i) Delaunay tessellation can be used to reconstruct the density field. The density correlation, spectrum, and dispersion functions were obtained, modeled, and compared with the N-body simulation; ii) the velocity distributions are symmetric on both small and large scales and are non-symmetric with a negative skewness on intermediate scales due to the inverse energy cascade at a constant rate varepsilon_u; iii) On small scales, the even order moments of pairwise velocity Delta u_L follow a two-thirds law (-varepsilon_ur)^{2/3}, while the odd order moments follow a linear scaling langle(Delta u_L)^{2n+1}rangle=(2n+1)langle(Delta u_L)^{2n}ranglelangleDelta u_Lrangler; iv) The scale variation of the velocity distributions was studied for longitudinal velocities u_L or u_L^{'}, pairwise velocity (velocity difference) Delta u_L=u_L^{'}-u_L and velocity sum Sigma u_L=u^{'}_L+u_L. Fully developed velocity fields are never Gaussian on any scale, despite that they can initially be Gaussian; v) On small scales, u_L and Sigma u_L can be modeled by a X distribution to maximize the system entropy; vi) On large scales, Delta u_L and Sigma u_L can be modeled by a logistic or a X distribution; vii) the redshift variation of the velocity distributions follows the evolution of the X distribution involving a shape parameter alpha(z) decreasing with time.

Neural implicit 3D representations have emerged as a powerful paradigm for reconstructing surfaces from multi-view images and synthesizing novel views. Unfortunately, existing methods such as DVR or IDR require accurate per-pixel object masks as supervision. At the same time, neural radiance fields have revolutionized novel view synthesis. However, NeRF's estimated volume density does not admit accurate surface reconstruction. Our key insight is that implicit surface models and radiance fields can be formulated in a unified way, enabling both surface and volume rendering using the same model. This unified perspective enables novel, more efficient sampling procedures and the ability to reconstruct accurate surfaces without input masks. We compare our method on the DTU, BlendedMVS, and a synthetic indoor dataset. Our experiments demonstrate that we outperform NeRF in terms of reconstruction quality while performing on par with IDR without requiring masks.

The choice of representation for geographic location significantly impacts the accuracy of models for a broad range of geospatial tasks, including fine-grained species classification, population density estimation, and biome classification. Recent works like SatCLIP and GeoCLIP learn such representations by contrastively aligning geolocation with co-located images. While these methods work exceptionally well, in this paper, we posit that the current training strategies fail to fully capture the important visual features. We provide an information-theoretic perspective on why the resulting embeddings from these methods discard crucial visual information that is important for many downstream tasks. To solve this problem, we propose a novel retrieval-augmented strategy called RANGE. We build our method on the intuition that the visual features of a location can be estimated by combining the visual features from multiple similar-looking locations. We evaluate our method across a wide variety of tasks. Our results show that RANGE outperforms the existing state-of-the-art models with significant margins in most tasks. We show gains of up to 13.1% on classification tasks and 0.145 R^2 on regression tasks. All our code and models will be made available at: https://github.com/mvrl/RANGE.

This study addresses the challenging problem of active view selection and uncertainty quantification within the domain of Radiance Fields. Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have greatly advanced image rendering and reconstruction, but the limited availability of 2D images poses uncertainties stemming from occlusions, depth ambiguities, and imaging errors. Efficiently selecting informative views becomes crucial, and quantifying NeRF model uncertainty presents intricate challenges. Existing approaches either depend on model architecture or are based on assumptions regarding density distributions that are not generally applicable. By leveraging Fisher Information, we efficiently quantify observed information within Radiance Fields without ground truth data. This can be used for the next best view selection and pixel-wise uncertainty quantification. Our method overcomes existing limitations on model architecture and effectiveness, achieving state-of-the-art results in both view selection and uncertainty quantification, demonstrating its potential to advance the field of Radiance Fields. Our method with the 3D Gaussian Splatting backend could perform view selections at 70 fps.

Unsupervised learning of 3D-aware generative adversarial networks has lately made much progress. Some recent work demonstrates promising results of learning human generative models using neural articulated radiance fields, yet their generalization ability and controllability lag behind parametric human models, i.e., they do not perform well when generalizing to novel pose/shape and are not part controllable. To solve these problems, we propose VeRi3D, a generative human vertex-based radiance field parameterized by vertices of the parametric human template, SMPL. We map each 3D point to the local coordinate system defined on its neighboring vertices, and use the corresponding vertex feature and local coordinates for mapping it to color and density values. We demonstrate that our simple approach allows for generating photorealistic human images with free control over camera pose, human pose, shape, as well as enabling part-level editing.

We propose a novel framework to reconstruct accurate appearance and geometry with neural radiance fields (NeRF) for interacting hands, enabling the rendering of photo-realistic images and videos for gesture animation from arbitrary views. Given multi-view images of a single hand or interacting hands, an off-the-shelf skeleton estimator is first employed to parameterize the hand poses. Then we design a pose-driven deformation field to establish correspondence from those different poses to a shared canonical space, where a pose-disentangled NeRF for one hand is optimized. Such unified modeling efficiently complements the geometry and texture cues in rarely-observed areas for both hands. Meanwhile, we further leverage the pose priors to generate pseudo depth maps as guidance for occlusion-aware density learning. Moreover, a neural feature distillation method is proposed to achieve cross-domain alignment for color optimization. We conduct extensive experiments to verify the merits of our proposed HandNeRF and report a series of state-of-the-art results both qualitatively and quantitatively on the large-scale InterHand2.6M dataset.

This paper presents a novel neural implicit radiance representation for free viewpoint relighting from a small set of unstructured photographs of an object lit by a moving point light source different from the view position. We express the shape as a signed distance function modeled by a multi layer perceptron. In contrast to prior relightable implicit neural representations, we do not disentangle the different reflectance components, but model both the local and global reflectance at each point by a second multi layer perceptron that, in addition, to density features, the current position, the normal (from the signed distace function), view direction, and light position, also takes shadow and highlight hints to aid the network in modeling the corresponding high frequency light transport effects. These hints are provided as a suggestion, and we leave it up to the network to decide how to incorporate these in the final relit result. We demonstrate and validate our neural implicit representation on synthetic and real scenes exhibiting a wide variety of shapes, material properties, and global illumination light transport.

Recent advances in neural rendering have shown that, albeit slow, implicit compact models can learn a scene's geometries and view-dependent appearances from multiple views. To maintain such a small memory footprint but achieve faster inference times, recent works have adopted `sampler' networks that adaptively sample a small subset of points along each ray in the implicit neural radiance fields. Although these methods achieve up to a 10times reduction in rendering time, they still suffer from considerable quality degradation compared to the vanilla NeRF. In contrast, we propose ProNeRF, which provides an optimal trade-off between memory footprint (similar to NeRF), speed (faster than HyperReel), and quality (better than K-Planes). ProNeRF is equipped with a novel projection-aware sampling (PAS) network together with a new training strategy for ray exploration and exploitation, allowing for efficient fine-grained particle sampling. Our ProNeRF yields state-of-the-art metrics, being 15-23x faster with 0.65dB higher PSNR than NeRF and yielding 0.95dB higher PSNR than the best published sampler-based method, HyperReel. Our exploration and exploitation training strategy allows ProNeRF to learn the full scenes' color and density distributions while also learning efficient ray sampling focused on the highest-density regions. We provide extensive experimental results that support the effectiveness of our method on the widely adopted forward-facing and 360 datasets, LLFF and Blender, respectively.

Neural fields excel in computer vision and robotics due to their ability to understand the 3D visual world such as inferring semantics, geometry, and dynamics. Given the capabilities of neural fields in densely representing a 3D scene from 2D images, we ask the question: Can we scale their self-supervised pretraining, specifically using masked autoencoders, to generate effective 3D representations from posed RGB images. Owing to the astounding success of extending transformers to novel data modalities, we employ standard 3D Vision Transformers to suit the unique formulation of NeRFs. We leverage NeRF's volumetric grid as a dense input to the transformer, contrasting it with other 3D representations such as pointclouds where the information density can be uneven, and the representation is irregular. Due to the difficulty of applying masked autoencoders to an implicit representation, such as NeRF, we opt for extracting an explicit representation that canonicalizes scenes across domains by employing the camera trajectory for sampling. Our goal is made possible by masking random patches from NeRF's radiance and density grid and employing a standard 3D Swin Transformer to reconstruct the masked patches. In doing so, the model can learn the semantic and spatial structure of complete scenes. We pretrain this representation at scale on our proposed curated posed-RGB data, totaling over 1.8 million images. Once pretrained, the encoder is used for effective 3D transfer learning. Our novel self-supervised pretraining for NeRFs, NeRF-MAE, scales remarkably well and improves performance on various challenging 3D tasks. Utilizing unlabeled posed 2D data for pretraining, NeRF-MAE significantly outperforms self-supervised 3D pretraining and NeRF scene understanding baselines on Front3D and ScanNet datasets with an absolute performance improvement of over 20% AP50 and 8% AP25 for 3D object detection.

We present a method that achieves state-of-the-art results for synthesizing novel views of complex scenes by optimizing an underlying continuous volumetric scene function using a sparse set of input views. Our algorithm represents a scene using a fully-connected (non-convolutional) deep network, whose input is a single continuous 5D coordinate (spatial location (x,y,z) and viewing direction (theta, phi)) and whose output is the volume density and view-dependent emitted radiance at that spatial location. We synthesize views by querying 5D coordinates along camera rays and use classic volume rendering techniques to project the output colors and densities into an image. Because volume rendering is naturally differentiable, the only input required to optimize our representation is a set of images with known camera poses. We describe how to effectively optimize neural radiance fields to render photorealistic novel views of scenes with complicated geometry and appearance, and demonstrate results that outperform prior work on neural rendering and view synthesis. View synthesis results are best viewed as videos, so we urge readers to view our supplementary video for convincing comparisons.

We present a new generalizable NeRF method that is able to directly generalize to new unseen scenarios and perform novel view synthesis with as few as two source views. The key to our approach lies in the explicitly modeled correspondence matching information, so as to provide the geometry prior to the prediction of NeRF color and density for volume rendering. The explicit correspondence matching is quantified with the cosine similarity between image features sampled at the 2D projections of a 3D point on different views, which is able to provide reliable cues about the surface geometry. Unlike previous methods where image features are extracted independently for each view, we consider modeling the cross-view interactions via Transformer cross-attention, which greatly improves the feature matching quality. Our method achieves state-of-the-art results on different evaluation settings, with the experiments showing a strong correlation between our learned cosine feature similarity and volume density, demonstrating the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed method. Code is at https://github.com/donydchen/matchnerf

The Cambrian explosion of easily accessible pre-trained diffusion models suggests a demand for methods that combine multiple different pre-trained diffusion models without incurring the significant computational burden of re-training a larger combined model. In this paper, we cast the problem of combining multiple pre-trained diffusion models at the generation stage under a novel proposed framework termed superposition. Theoretically, we derive superposition from rigorous first principles stemming from the celebrated continuity equation and design two novel algorithms tailor-made for combining diffusion models in SuperDiff. SuperDiff leverages a new scalable It\^o density estimator for the log likelihood of the diffusion SDE which incurs no additional overhead compared to the well-known Hutchinson's estimator needed for divergence calculations. We demonstrate that SuperDiff is scalable to large pre-trained diffusion models as superposition is performed solely through composition during inference, and also enjoys painless implementation as it combines different pre-trained vector fields through an automated re-weighting scheme. Notably, we show that SuperDiff is efficient during inference time, and mimics traditional composition operators such as the logical OR and the logical AND. We empirically demonstrate the utility of using SuperDiff for generating more diverse images on CIFAR-10, more faithful prompt conditioned image editing using Stable Diffusion, and improved unconditional de novo structure design of proteins. https://github.com/necludov/super-diffusion

Current methods for performing 3D reconstruction and novel view synthesis (NVS) in ultrasound imaging data often face severe artifacts when training NeRF-based approaches. The artifacts produced by current approaches differ from NeRF floaters in general scenes because of the unique nature of ultrasound capture. Furthermore, existing models fail to produce reasonable 3D reconstructions when ultrasound data is captured or obtained casually in uncontrolled environments, which is common in clinical settings. Consequently, existing reconstruction and NVS methods struggle to handle ultrasound motion, fail to capture intricate details, and cannot model transparent and reflective surfaces. In this work, we introduced NeRF-US, which incorporates 3D-geometry guidance for border probability and scattering density into NeRF training, while also utilizing ultrasound-specific rendering over traditional volume rendering. These 3D priors are learned through a diffusion model. Through experiments conducted on our new "Ultrasound in the Wild" dataset, we observed accurate, clinically plausible, artifact-free reconstructions.

Neural rendering combines ideas from classical computer graphics and machine learning to synthesize images from real-world observations. NeRF, short for Neural Radiance Fields, is a recent innovation that uses AI algorithms to create 3D objects from 2D images. By leveraging an interpolation approach, NeRF can produce new 3D reconstructed views of complicated scenes. Rather than directly restoring the whole 3D scene geometry, NeRF generates a volumetric representation called a ``radiance field,'' which is capable of creating color and density for every point within the relevant 3D space. The broad appeal and notoriety of NeRF make it imperative to examine the existing research on the topic comprehensively. While previous surveys on 3D rendering have primarily focused on traditional computer vision-based or deep learning-based approaches, only a handful of them discuss the potential of NeRF. However, such surveys have predominantly focused on NeRF's early contributions and have not explored its full potential. NeRF is a relatively new technique continuously being investigated for its capabilities and limitations. This survey reviews recent advances in NeRF and categorizes them according to their architectural designs, especially in the field of novel view synthesis.

Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) based rendering has attracted growing attention thanks to its state-of-the-art (SOTA) rendering quality and wide applications in Augmented and Virtual Reality (AR/VR). However, immersive real-time (> 30 FPS) NeRF based rendering enabled interactions are still limited due to the low achievable throughput on AR/VR devices. To this end, we first profile SOTA efficient NeRF algorithms on commercial devices and identify two primary causes of the aforementioned inefficiency: (1) the uniform point sampling and (2) the dense accesses and computations of the required embeddings in NeRF. Furthermore, we propose RT-NeRF, which to the best of our knowledge is the first algorithm-hardware co-design acceleration of NeRF. Specifically, on the algorithm level, RT-NeRF integrates an efficient rendering pipeline for largely alleviating the inefficiency due to the commonly adopted uniform point sampling method in NeRF by directly computing the geometry of pre-existing points. Additionally, RT-NeRF leverages a coarse-grained view-dependent computing ordering scheme for eliminating the (unnecessary) processing of invisible points. On the hardware level, our proposed RT-NeRF accelerator (1) adopts a hybrid encoding scheme to adaptively switch between a bitmap- or coordinate-based sparsity encoding format for NeRF's sparse embeddings, aiming to maximize the storage savings and thus reduce the required DRAM accesses while supporting efficient NeRF decoding; and (2) integrates both a dual-purpose bi-direction adder & search tree and a high-density sparse search unit to coordinate the two aforementioned encoding formats. Extensive experiments on eight datasets consistently validate the effectiveness of RT-NeRF, achieving a large throughput improvement (e.g., 9.7x - 3,201x) while maintaining the rendering quality as compared with SOTA efficient NeRF solutions.

Neural radiance fields, which represent a 3D scene as a color field and a density field, have demonstrated great progress in novel view synthesis yet are unfavorable for editing due to the implicitness. In view of such a deficiency, we propose to replace the color field with an explicit 2D appearance aggregation, also called canonical image, with which users can easily customize their 3D editing via 2D image processing. To avoid the distortion effect and facilitate convenient editing, we complement the canonical image with a projection field that maps 3D points onto 2D pixels for texture lookup. This field is carefully initialized with a pseudo canonical camera model and optimized with offset regularity to ensure naturalness of the aggregated appearance. Extensive experimental results on three datasets suggest that our representation, dubbed AGAP, well supports various ways of 3D editing (e.g., stylization, interactive drawing, and content extraction) with no need of re-optimization for each case, demonstrating its generalizability and efficiency. Project page is available at https://felixcheng97.github.io/AGAP/.

Ultracold gases of highly magnetic lanthanide atoms have enabled the realisation of dipolar quantum droplets and supersolids. However, future studies could be limited by the achievable atom numbers and hindered by high three-body loss rates. Here we study density-dependent atom loss in an ultracold gas of {}^{166}Er for magnetic fields below 4 G, identifying six previously unknown features which display both a strong temperature dependence and also sensitivity to the polarisation and intensity of the light used to optically trap the atoms. This detailed knowledge of the loss landscape allows us to optimise the production of dipolar BECs with more than 2 times 10^5 atoms and points towards optimal strategies for the study of large-atom-number dipolar gases in the droplet and supersolid regimes.

Text Normalization and Semantic Parsing have numerous applications in natural language processing, such as natural language programming, paraphrasing, data augmentation, constructing expert systems, text matching, and more. Despite the prominent achievements of deep learning in Large Language Models (LLMs), the interpretability of neural network architectures is still poor, which affects their credibility and hence limits the deployments of risk-sensitive scenarios. In certain scenario-specific domains with scarce data, rapidly obtaining a large number of supervised learning labels is challenging, and the workload of manually labeling data would be enormous. Catastrophic forgetting in neural networks further leads to low data utilization rates. In situations where swift responses are vital, the density of the model makes local deployment difficult and the response time long, which is not conducive to local applications of these fields. Inspired by the multiplication rule, a principle of combinatorial mathematics, and human thinking patterns, a multilayer framework along with its algorithm, the Digestion Algorithm in Hierarchical Symbolic Forests (DAHSF), is proposed to address these above issues, combining text normalization and semantic parsing workflows. The Chinese Scripting Language "Fire Bunny Intelligent Development Platform V2.0" is an important test and application of the technology discussed in this paper. DAHSF can run locally in scenario-specific domains on little datasets, with model size and memory usage optimized by at least two orders of magnitude, thus improving the execution speed, and possessing a promising optimization outlook.

We present Mesh2NeRF, an approach to derive ground-truth radiance fields from textured meshes for 3D generation tasks. Many 3D generative approaches represent 3D scenes as radiance fields for training. Their ground-truth radiance fields are usually fitted from multi-view renderings from a large-scale synthetic 3D dataset, which often results in artifacts due to occlusions or under-fitting issues. In Mesh2NeRF, we propose an analytic solution to directly obtain ground-truth radiance fields from 3D meshes, characterizing the density field with an occupancy function featuring a defined surface thickness, and determining view-dependent color through a reflection function considering both the mesh and environment lighting. Mesh2NeRF extracts accurate radiance fields which provides direct supervision for training generative NeRFs and single scene representation. We validate the effectiveness of Mesh2NeRF across various tasks, achieving a noteworthy 3.12dB improvement in PSNR for view synthesis in single scene representation on the ABO dataset, a 0.69 PSNR enhancement in the single-view conditional generation of ShapeNet Cars, and notably improved mesh extraction from NeRF in the unconditional generation of Objaverse Mugs.

Radiance Field methods have recently revolutionized novel-view synthesis of scenes captured with multiple photos or videos. However, achieving high visual quality still requires neural networks that are costly to train and render, while recent faster methods inevitably trade off speed for quality. For unbounded and complete scenes (rather than isolated objects) and 1080p resolution rendering, no current method can achieve real-time display rates. We introduce three key elements that allow us to achieve state-of-the-art visual quality while maintaining competitive training times and importantly allow high-quality real-time (>= 30 fps) novel-view synthesis at 1080p resolution. First, starting from sparse points produced during camera calibration, we represent the scene with 3D Gaussians that preserve desirable properties of continuous volumetric radiance fields for scene optimization while avoiding unnecessary computation in empty space; Second, we perform interleaved optimization/density control of the 3D Gaussians, notably optimizing anisotropic covariance to achieve an accurate representation of the scene; Third, we develop a fast visibility-aware rendering algorithm that supports anisotropic splatting and both accelerates training and allows realtime rendering. We demonstrate state-of-the-art visual quality and real-time rendering on several established datasets.

Scalar fields are ubiquitous in theories of high-energy physics. In the context of cosmic inflation, this suggests the existence of spectator fields, which provide a subdominant source of energy density. We show that spectator fields boost the inflationary production of primordial black holes, with single-field ultra-slow roll evolution supplanted by a phase of evolution along the spectator direction, and primordial perturbations amplified by the resulting multifield dynamics. This generic mechanism is largely free from the severe fine-tuning that afflicts single-field inflationary PBH models.

Systems of interacting objects often evolve under the influence of field effects that govern their dynamics, yet previous works have abstracted away from such effects, and assume that systems evolve in a vacuum. In this work, we focus on discovering these fields, and infer them from the observed dynamics alone, without directly observing them. We theorize the presence of latent force fields, and propose neural fields to learn them. Since the observed dynamics constitute the net effect of local object interactions and global field effects, recently popularized equivariant networks are inapplicable, as they fail to capture global information. To address this, we propose to disentangle local object interactions -- which are SE(n) equivariant and depend on relative states -- from external global field effects -- which depend on absolute states. We model interactions with equivariant graph networks, and combine them with neural fields in a novel graph network that integrates field forces. Our experiments show that we can accurately discover the underlying fields in charged particles settings, traffic scenes, and gravitational n-body problems, and effectively use them to learn the system and forecast future trajectories.

Diffusion models are generative models that have recently demonstrated impressive performances in terms of sampling quality and density estimation in high dimensions. They rely on a forward continuous diffusion process and a backward continuous denoising process, which can be described by a time-dependent vector field and is used as a generative model. In the original formulation of the diffusion model, this vector field is assumed to be the score function (i.e. it is the gradient of the log-probability at a given time in the diffusion process). Curiously, on the practical side, most studies on diffusion models implement this vector field as a neural network function and do not constrain it be the gradient of some energy function (that is, most studies do not constrain the vector field to be conservative). Even though some studies investigated empirically whether such a constraint will lead to a performance gain, they lead to contradicting results and failed to provide analytical results. Here, we provide three analytical results regarding the extent of the modeling freedom of this vector field. {Firstly, we propose a novel decomposition of vector fields into a conservative component and an orthogonal component which satisfies a given (gauge) freedom. Secondly, from this orthogonal decomposition, we show that exact density estimation and exact sampling is achieved when the conservative component is exactly equals to the true score and therefore conservativity is neither necessary nor sufficient to obtain exact density estimation and exact sampling. Finally, we show that when it comes to inferring local information of the data manifold, constraining the vector field to be conservative is desirable.

Observed dwarf galaxies tend to have linearly rising rotation curves, which indicate flat density cores in their centers. Furthermore, disk galaxies show a wide range of rotation curves shapes. High resolution simulations of cold collisionless dark matter do not reproduce flat central profiles, or the observed diversity of rotation curve shapes; even hydrodynamic simulations incorporating baryonic feedback cannot do that robustly. However, numerical simulations are not the only way to make predictions about density profiles of equilibrium dark matter halos. A theoretical model based on statistical mechanics shows that maximum entropy solutions for cold collisionless self-gravitating dark matter halos can have a range of inner density profiles, including flat density cores. These theoretical profiles, called DARKexp, have only one shape parameter, and are able to fit the observed rotation curves of galaxies with last measured velocities in the range ~20-200 km/s. Here we present fits to 96 SPARC catalog galaxies, and the Milky Way. DARKexp also provides good fits to the projected stellar density distributions of ultrafaint dwarfs that show cores, suggesting that the dark matter halo hosts could have flat density cores. Thus, DARKexp appears to be able to address the core-cusp problem and the diversity of rotation curves with cold collisionless dark matter alone, without baryonic feedback.

Generative models inspired by dynamical transport of measure -- such as flows and diffusions -- construct a continuous-time map between two probability densities. Conventionally, one of these is the target density, only accessible through samples, while the other is taken as a simple base density that is data-agnostic. In this work, using the framework of stochastic interpolants, we formalize how to couple the base and the target densities. This enables us to incorporate information about class labels or continuous embeddings to construct dynamical transport maps that serve as conditional generative models. We show that these transport maps can be learned by solving a simple square loss regression problem analogous to the standard independent setting. We demonstrate the usefulness of constructing dependent couplings in practice through experiments in super-resolution and in-painting.

We introduce Lagrangian Flow Networks (LFlows) for modeling fluid densities and velocities continuously in space and time. By construction, the proposed LFlows satisfy the continuity equation, a PDE describing mass conservation in its differentiable form. Our model is based on the insight that solutions to the continuity equation can be expressed as time-dependent density transformations via differentiable and invertible maps. This follows from classical theory of the existence and uniqueness of Lagrangian flows for smooth vector fields. Hence, we model fluid densities by transforming a base density with parameterized diffeomorphisms conditioned on time. The key benefit compared to methods relying on numerical ODE solvers or PINNs is that the analytic expression of the velocity is always consistent with changes in density. Furthermore, we require neither expensive numerical solvers, nor additional penalties to enforce the PDE. LFlows show higher predictive accuracy in density modeling tasks compared to competing models in 2D and 3D, while being computationally efficient. As a real-world application, we model bird migration based on sparse weather radar measurements.

Accurate 3D object pose estimation is key to enabling many robotic applications that involve challenging object interactions. In this work, we show that the density field created by a state-of-the-art efficient radiance field reconstruction method is suitable for highly accurate and robust pose estimation for objects with known 3D models, even when they are very small and with challenging reflective surfaces. We present a fully automatic object pose estimation system based on a robot arm with a single wrist-mounted camera, which can scan a scene from scratch, detect and estimate the 6-Degrees of Freedom (DoF) poses of multiple objects within a couple of minutes of operation. Small objects such as bolts and nuts are estimated with accuracy on order of 1mm.

In this work, we explore two classes of density dependent relativistic mean-field models, their predictions of proton fractions at high densities and neutron star structure. We have used a metamodelling approach to these relativistic density functionals. We have generated a large ensemble of models with these classes and then applied constraints from theoretical and experimental nuclear physics and astrophysical observations. We find that both models produce similar equations of state and neutron star mass-radius sequences. But, their underlying compositions, denoted by the proton fraction in this case, are vastly different. This reinstates previous findings that information on composition gets masqueraded in beta-equilibrium. Additional observations of non-equilibrium phenomena are necessary to pin it down.

Ultralight dark matter is an interesting dark matter candidate describing the lightest end of the mass parameter space. This model produces an oscillating granular pattern in halo densities. These fluctuations have the potential to produce a time-varying density along the line of sight creating a small lensing signal for any stars observed through a dark matter halo which oscillates on the de Broglie timescale. In this work, we study this stochastic lensing signal taking into account the impact of density granules as well as the central soliton. We calculate the amplitude and temporal properties of this signal and estimate how stellar observations may be used to constrain the ultralight dark matter mass and abundance.

We delve into the physics-informed neural reconstruction of smoke and obstacles through sparse-view RGB videos, tackling challenges arising from limited observation of complex dynamics. Existing physics-informed neural networks often emphasize short-term physics constraints, leaving the proper preservation of long-term conservation less explored. We introduce Neural Characteristic Trajectory Fields, a novel representation utilizing Eulerian neural fields to implicitly model Lagrangian fluid trajectories. This topology-free, auto-differentiable representation facilitates efficient flow map calculations between arbitrary frames as well as efficient velocity extraction via auto-differentiation. Consequently, it enables end-to-end supervision covering long-term conservation and short-term physics priors. Building on the representation, we propose physics-informed trajectory learning and integration into NeRF-based scene reconstruction. We enable advanced obstacle handling through self-supervised scene decomposition and seamless integrated boundary constraints. Our results showcase the ability to overcome challenges like occlusion uncertainty, density-color ambiguity, and static-dynamic entanglements. Code and sample tests are at https://github.com/19reborn/PICT_smoke.

We present the results of a systematic search for candidate quiescent galaxies in the distant Universe in eleven JWST fields with publicly available observations collected during the first three months of operations and covering an effective sky area of sim145 arcmin^2. We homogeneously reduce the new JWST data and combine them with existing observations from the Hubble,Space,Telescope. We select a robust sample of sim80 candidate quiescent and quenching galaxies at 3 < z < 5 using two methods: (1) based on their rest-frame UVJ colors, and (2) a novel quantitative approach based on Gaussian Mixture Modeling of the NUV-U, U-V, and V-J rest-frame color space, which is more sensitive to recently quenched objects. We measure comoving number densities of massive (M_stargeq 10^{10.6} M_odot) quiescent galaxies consistent with previous estimates relying on ground-based observations, after homogenizing the results in the literature with our mass and redshift intervals. However, we find significant field-to-field variations of the number densities up to a factor of 2-3, highlighting the effect of cosmic variance and suggesting the presence of overdensities of red quiescent galaxies at z>3, as it could be expected for highly clustered massive systems. Importantly, JWST enables the robust identification of quenching/quiescent galaxy candidates at lower masses and higher redshifts than before, challenging standard formation scenarios. All data products, including the literature compilation, are made publicly available.

Neural volume rendering became increasingly popular recently due to its success in synthesizing novel views of a scene from a sparse set of input images. So far, the geometry learned by neural volume rendering techniques was modeled using a generic density function. Furthermore, the geometry itself was extracted using an arbitrary level set of the density function leading to a noisy, often low fidelity reconstruction. The goal of this paper is to improve geometry representation and reconstruction in neural volume rendering. We achieve that by modeling the volume density as a function of the geometry. This is in contrast to previous work modeling the geometry as a function of the volume density. In more detail, we define the volume density function as Laplace's cumulative distribution function (CDF) applied to a signed distance function (SDF) representation. This simple density representation has three benefits: (i) it provides a useful inductive bias to the geometry learned in the neural volume rendering process; (ii) it facilitates a bound on the opacity approximation error, leading to an accurate sampling of the viewing ray. Accurate sampling is important to provide a precise coupling of geometry and radiance; and (iii) it allows efficient unsupervised disentanglement of shape and appearance in volume rendering. Applying this new density representation to challenging scene multiview datasets produced high quality geometry reconstructions, outperforming relevant baselines. Furthermore, switching shape and appearance between scenes is possible due to the disentanglement of the two.

We present a neural flow wavefunction, Gauge-Fermion FlowNet, and use it to simulate 2+1D lattice compact quantum electrodynamics with finite density dynamical fermions. The gauge field is represented by a neural network which parameterizes a discretized flow-based transformation of the amplitude while the fermionic sign structure is represented by a neural net backflow. This approach directly represents the U(1) degree of freedom without any truncation, obeys Guass's law by construction, samples autoregressively avoiding any equilibration time, and variationally simulates Gauge-Fermion systems with sign problems accurately. In this model, we investigate confinement and string breaking phenomena in different fermion density and hopping regimes. We study the phase transition from the charge crystal phase to the vacuum phase at zero density, and observe the phase seperation and the net charge penetration blocking effect under magnetic interaction at finite density. In addition, we investigate a magnetic phase transition due to the competition effect between the kinetic energy of fermions and the magnetic energy of the gauge field. With our method, we further note potential differences on the order of the phase transitions between a continuous U(1) system and one with finite truncation. Our state-of-the-art neural network approach opens up new possibilities to study different gauge theories coupled to dynamical matter in higher dimensions.

We propose a new method called the N-particle underdamped Langevin algorithm for optimizing a special class of non-linear functionals defined over the space of probability measures. Examples of problems with this formulation include training mean-field neural networks, maximum mean discrepancy minimization and kernel Stein discrepancy minimization. Our algorithm is based on a novel spacetime discretization of the mean-field underdamped Langevin dynamics, for which we provide a new, fast mixing guarantee. In addition, we demonstrate that our algorithm converges globally in total variation distance, bridging the theoretical gap between the dynamics and its practical implementation.

Density of the reachable states can help understand the risk of safety-critical systems, especially in situations when worst-case reachability is too conservative. Recent work provides a data-driven approach to compute the density distribution of autonomous systems' forward reachable states online. In this paper, we study the use of such approach in combination with model predictive control for verifiable safe path planning under uncertainties. We first use the learned density distribution to compute the risk of collision online. If such risk exceeds the acceptable threshold, our method will plan for a new path around the previous trajectory, with the risk of collision below the threshold. Our method is well-suited to handle systems with uncertainties and complicated dynamics as our data-driven approach does not need an analytical form of the systems' dynamics and can estimate forward state density with an arbitrary initial distribution of uncertainties. We design two challenging scenarios (autonomous driving and hovercraft control) for safe motion planning in environments with obstacles under system uncertainties. We first show that our density estimation approach can reach a similar accuracy as the Monte-Carlo-based method while using only 0.01X training samples. By leveraging the estimated risk, our algorithm achieves the highest success rate in goal reaching when enforcing the safety rate above 0.99.

We study the response of mono-energetic stellar populations with initially isotropic kinematics to impulsive and adiabatic changes to an underlying dark matter potential. Half-light radii expand and velocity dispersions decrease as enclosed dark matter is removed. The details of this expansion and cooling depend on the time scale on which the underlying potential changes. In the adiabatic regime, the product of half-light radius and average velocity dispersion is conserved. We show that the stellar populations maintain centrally isotropic kinematics throughout their adiabatic evolution, and their densities can be approximated by a family of analytical radial profiles. Metallicity gradients within the galaxy flatten as dark matter is slowly removed. In the case of strong impulsive perturbations, stellar populations develop power-law-like density tails with radially biased kinematics. We show that the distribution of stellar binding energies within the dark matter halo substantially widens after an impulsive perturbation, no matter the sign of the perturbation. This allows initially energetically separated stellar populations to mix, to the extent that previously chemo-dynamically distinct populations may masquerade as a single population with large metallicity and energy spread. Finally, we show that in response to an impulsive perturbation, stellar populations that are deeply embedded in cored dark matter halos undergo a series of damped oscillations before reaching a virialised equilibrium state, driven by inefficient phase mixing in the harmonic potentials of cored halos. This slow return to equilibrium adds substantial systematic uncertainty to dynamical masses estimated from Jeans modeling or the virial theorem.

Despite the widespread applications of machine learning force field (MLFF) on solids and small molecules, there is a notable gap in applying MLFF to complex liquid electrolytes. In this work, we introduce BAMBOO (ByteDance AI Molecular Simulation Booster), a novel framework for molecular dynamics (MD) simulations, with a demonstration of its capabilities in the context of liquid electrolytes for lithium batteries. We design a physics-inspired graph equivariant transformer architecture as the backbone of BAMBOO to learn from quantum mechanical simulations. Additionally, we pioneer an ensemble knowledge distillation approach and apply it on MLFFs to improve the stability of MD simulations. Finally, we propose the density alignment algorithm to align BAMBOO with experimental measurements. BAMBOO demonstrates state-of-the-art accuracy in predicting key electrolyte properties such as density, viscosity, and ionic conductivity across various solvents and salt combinations. Our current model, trained on more than 15 chemical species, achieves the average density error of 0.01 g/cm^3 on various compositions compared with experimental data. Moreover, our model demonstrates transferability to molecules not included in the quantum mechanical dataset. We envision this work as paving the way to a "universal MLFF" capable of simulating properties of common organic liquids.

Recent observations by the James Webb Space Telescope have revealed massive galaxies at very high redshift (zsimeq 7-15). The question of whether the existence of such galaxies is expected in the corresponding JWST surveys has received a lot of attention, though the answer straddles areas of cosmology and complex astrophysical details of high-redshift galaxy formation. The growth rate of density fluctuations determines the amplitude of overdensities that collapse to form galaxies. Late-time modifications of growth, combined with measurements at both zsim 1 from large-scale structure and zsim 1000 from the cosmic microwave background, affect the predictions for the abundance of first galaxies in the universe. In this paper, we point out that the late-time growth rate of structure affects the statistical significance of high-redshift, high-mass objects very weakly. Consequently, if the existence and abundance of these objects are confirmed to be unexpected, the variations in the late-time growth history are unlikely to explain these anomalies.

In this paper we tackle the problem of generating conformers of a molecule in 3D space given its molecular graph. We parameterize these conformers as continuous functions that map elements from the molecular graph to points in 3D space. We then formulate the problem of learning to generate conformers as learning a distribution over these functions using a diffusion generative model, called Molecular Conformer Fields (MCF). Our approach is simple and scalable, and achieves state-of-the-art performance on challenging molecular conformer generation benchmarks while making no assumptions about the explicit structure of molecules (e.g. modeling torsional angles). MCF represents an advance in extending diffusion models to handle complex scientific problems in a conceptually simple, scalable and effective manner.

Using a set of LambdaCDM simulations of cosmic structure formation, we study the evolving connectivity and changing topological structure of the cosmic web using state-of-the-art tools of multiscale topological data analysis (TDA). We follow the development of the cosmic web topology in terms of the evolution of Betti number curves and feature persistence diagrams of the three (topological) classes of structural features: matter concentrations, filaments and tunnels, and voids. The Betti curves specify the prominence of features as a function of density level, and their evolution with cosmic epoch reflects the changing network connections between these structural features. The persistence diagrams quantify the longevity and stability of topological features. In this study we establish, for the first time, the link between persistence diagrams, the features they show, and the gravitationally driven cosmic structure formation process. By following the diagrams' development over cosmic time, the link between the multiscale topology of the cosmic web and the hierarchical buildup of cosmic structure is established. The sharp apexes in the diagrams are intimately related to key transitions in the structure formation process. The apex in the matter concentration diagrams coincides with the density level at which, typically, they detach from the Hubble expansion and begin to collapse. At that level many individual islands merge to form the network of the cosmic web and a large number of filaments and tunnels emerge to establish its connecting bridges. The location trends of the apex possess a self-similar character that can be related to the cosmic web's hierarchical buildup. We find that persistence diagrams provide a significantly higher and more profound level of information on the structure formation process than more global summary statistics like Euler characteristic or Betti numbers.

Turbulent magnetic fields are to some extent a universal feature in astrophysical phenomena. Charged particles that encounter these turbulence get on average accelerated according to the so-called second-order Fermi process. However, in most astrophysical environments there are additional competing processes, such as different kinds of first-order energy changes and particle escape, that effect the resulting momentum distribution of the particles. In this work we provide to our knowledge the first semi-analytical solution of the isotropic steady-state momentum diffusion equation including continuous and catastrophic momentum changes that can be applied to any arbitrary astrophysical system of interest. Here, we adopt that the assigned magnetic turbulence is constrained on a finite range and the particle flux vanishes beyond these boundaries. Consequently, we show that the so-called pile-up bump -- that has for some special cases long been established -- is a universal feature of stochastic acceleration that emerges around the momentum chi_{rm eq} where acceleration and continuous loss are in equilibrium if the particle's residence time in the system is sufficient at chi_{rm eq}. In general, the impact of continuous and catastrophic momentum changes plays a crucial role in the shape of the steady-state momentum distribution of the accelerated particles, where simplified unbroken power-law approximations are often not adequate.

We present 850 {\mu}m thermal dust polarization observations with a resolution of 14.4"(~ 0.13 pc) towards an infrared dark cloud G16.96+0.27 using JCMT/POL-2. The average magnetic field orientation, which roughly agrees with the larger-scale magnetic field orientation traced by the Planck 353 GHz data, is approximately perpendicular to the filament structure. The estimated plane-of-sky magnetic field strength is ~ 96 {\mu}G and ~ 60 {\mu}G using two variants of the Davis-Chandrasekhar-Fermi methods. We calculate the virial and magnetic critical parameters to evaluate the relative importance of gravity, the magnetic field, and turbulence. The magnetic field and turbulence are both weaker than gravity, but magnetic fields and turbulence together are equal to gravity, suggesting that G16.96+0.27 is in a quasi-equilibrium state. The cloud-magnetic-field alignment is found to have a trend moving away from perpendicularity in the dense regions, which may serve as a tracer of potential fragmentation in such quiescent filaments.

The decay of metastable 'false vacuum' states via bubble nucleation plays a crucial role in many cosmological scenarios. Cold-atom analog experiments will soon provide the first empirical probes of this process, with potentially far-reaching implications for early-Universe cosmology and high-energy physics. However, an inevitable difference between these analog systems and the early Universe is that the former have a boundary. We show, using a combination of Euclidean calculations and real-time lattice simulations, that these boundaries generically cause rapid bubble nucleation on the edge of the experiment, obscuring the bulk nucleation that is relevant for cosmology. We demonstrate that implementing a high-density 'trench' region at the boundary completely eliminates this problem, and recovers the desired cosmological behavior. Our findings are relevant for ongoing efforts to probe vacuum decay in the laboratory, providing a practical solution to a key experimental obstacle.

We present AROMA (Attentive Reduced Order Model with Attention), a framework designed to enhance the modeling of partial differential equations (PDEs) using local neural fields. Our flexible encoder-decoder architecture can obtain smooth latent representations of spatial physical fields from a variety of data types, including irregular-grid inputs and point clouds. This versatility eliminates the need for patching and allows efficient processing of diverse geometries. The sequential nature of our latent representation can be interpreted spatially and permits the use of a conditional transformer for modeling the temporal dynamics of PDEs. By employing a diffusion-based formulation, we achieve greater stability and enable longer rollouts compared to conventional MSE training. AROMA's superior performance in simulating 1D and 2D equations underscores the efficacy of our approach in capturing complex dynamical behaviors.

A class of generative models that unifies flow-based and diffusion-based methods is introduced. These models extend the framework proposed in Albergo & Vanden-Eijnden (2023), enabling the use of a broad class of continuous-time stochastic processes called `stochastic interpolants' to bridge any two arbitrary probability density functions exactly in finite time. These interpolants are built by combining data from the two prescribed densities with an additional latent variable that shapes the bridge in a flexible way. The time-dependent probability density function of the stochastic interpolant is shown to satisfy a first-order transport equation as well as a family of forward and backward Fokker-Planck equations with tunable diffusion coefficient. Upon consideration of the time evolution of an individual sample, this viewpoint immediately leads to both deterministic and stochastic generative models based on probability flow equations or stochastic differential equations with an adjustable level of noise. The drift coefficients entering these models are time-dependent velocity fields characterized as the unique minimizers of simple quadratic objective functions, one of which is a new objective for the score of the interpolant density. We show that minimization of these quadratic objectives leads to control of the likelihood for generative models built upon stochastic dynamics, while likelihood control for deterministic dynamics is more stringent. We also discuss connections with other methods such as score-based diffusion models, stochastic localization processes, probabilistic denoising techniques, and rectifying flows. In addition, we demonstrate that stochastic interpolants recover the Schr\"odinger bridge between the two target densities when explicitly optimizing over the interpolant. Finally, algorithmic aspects are discussed and the approach is illustrated on numerical examples.

We present a neural network emulator to constrain the thermal parameters of the intergalactic medium (IGM) at 5.4z6.0 using the Lyman-displaystylealpha (Lydisplaystylealpha) forest flux auto-correlation function. Our auto-differentiable JAX-based framework accelerates the surrogate model generation process using approximately 100 sparsely sampled Nyx hydrodynamical simulations with varying combinations of thermal parameters, i.e., the temperature at mean density T_{{0}}, the slope of the temperaturedisplaystyle-density relation displaystylegamma, and the mean transmission flux langle{F}{rangle}. We show that this emulator has a typical accuracy of 1.0% across the specified redshift range. Bayesian inference of the IGM thermal parameters, incorporating emulator uncertainty propagation, is further expedited using NumPyro Hamiltonian Monte Carlo. We compare both the inference results and computational cost of our framework with the traditional nearest-neighbor interpolation approach applied to the same set of mock Lyalpha flux. By examining the credibility contours of the marginalized posteriors for T_{{0}},gamma,and{langle}{F}{rangle} obtained using the emulator, the statistical reliability of measurements is established through inference on 100 realistic mock data sets of the auto-correlation function.

In astrophysical and cosmological analyses, the increasing quality and volume of astronomical data demand efficient and precise computational tools. This work introduces a novel adaptive algorithm for automatic knots (AutoKnots) allocation in spline interpolation, designed to meet user-defined precision requirements. Unlike traditional methods that rely on manually configured knot distributions with numerous parameters, the proposed technique automatically determines the optimal number and placement of knots based on interpolation error criteria. This simplifies configuration, often requiring only a single parameter. The algorithm progressively improves the interpolation by adaptively sampling the function-to-be-approximated, f(x), in regions where the interpolation error exceeds the desired threshold. All function evaluations contribute directly to the final approximation, ensuring efficiency. While each resampling step involves recomputing the interpolation table, this process is highly optimized and usually computationally negligible compared to the cost of evaluating f(x). We show the algorithm's efficacy through a series of precision tests on different functions. However, the study underscores the necessity for caution when dealing with certain function types, notably those featuring plateaus. To address this challenge, a heuristic enhancement is incorporated, improving accuracy in flat regions. This algorithm has been extensively used and tested over the years. NumCosmo includes a comprehensive set of unit tests that rigorously evaluate the algorithm both directly and indirectly, underscoring its robustness and reliability. As a practical application, we compute the surface mass density Sigma(R) and the average surface mass density Sigma(<R) for Navarro-Frenk-White and Hernquist halo density profiles, which provide analytical benchmarks. (abridged)

The central molecular zone (CMZ) of our Galaxy exhibits widespread emission from SiO and various complex organic molecules (COMs), yet the exact origin of such emission is uncertain. Here we report the discovery of a unique class of long (>0.5 pc) and narrow (<0.03 pc) filaments in the emission of SiO 5-4 and eight additional molecular lines, including several COMs, in our ALMA 1.3 mm spectral line observations toward two massive molecular clouds in the CMZ, which we name as slim filaments. However, these filaments are not detected in the 1.3 mm continuum at the 5sigma level. Their line-of-sight velocities are coherent and inconsistent with being outflows. The column densities and relative abundances of the detected molecules are statistically similar to those in protostellar outflows but different from those in dense cores within the same clouds. Turbulent pressure in these filaments dominates over self gravity and leads to hydrostatic inequilibrium, indicating that they are a different class of objects than the dense gas filaments in dynamical equilibrium ubiquitously found in nearby molecular clouds. We argue that these newly detected slim filaments are associated with parsec-scale shocks, likely arising from dynamic interactions between shock waves and molecular clouds. The dissipation of the slim filaments may replenish SiO and COMs in the interstellar medium and lead to their widespread emission in the CMZ.

We model and study the processes of excitation, absorption, and transfer in various networks. The model consists of a harmonic oscillator representing a single-mode radiation field, a qubit acting as an antenna, a network through which the excitation propagates, and a qubit at the end serving as a sink. We investigate how off-resonant excitations can be optimally absorbed and transmitted through the network. Three strategies are considered: optimising network energies, adjusting the couplings between the radiation field, the antenna, and the network, or introducing and optimising driving fields at the start and end of the network. These strategies are tested on three different types of network with increasing complexity: nearest-neighbour and star configurations, and one associated with the Fenna-Matthews-Olson complex. The results show that, among the various strategies, the introduction of driving fields is the most effective, leading to a significant increase in the probability of reaching the sink in a given time. This result remains stable across networks of varying dimensionalities and types, and the driving process requires only a few parameters to be effective.

This paper will discuss the microphysical simulation of interactions in liquid xenon, the active detector medium in many leading rare-event searches for new physics, and describe experimental observables useful for understanding detector performance. The scintillation and ionization yield distributions for signal and background will be presented using the Noble Element Simulation Technique (NEST), which is a toolkit based on experimental data and simple, empirical formulae, which mimic previous microphysics modeling, but are guided by data. The NEST models for light and charge production as a function of the particle type, energy, and electric field will be reviewed, as well as models for energy resolution and final pulse areas. NEST will be compared to other models or sets of models, and vetted against real data, with several specific examples pulled from XENON, ZEPLIN, LUX, LZ, PandaX, and table-top experiments used for calibrations.

Scientific machine learning and the advent of the Physics-Informed Neural Network (PINN) show considerable potential in their capacity to identify solutions to complex differential equations. Over the past two years, much work has gone into the development of PINNs capable of solving the gravity field modeling problem -- i.e.\ learning a differentiable form of the gravitational potential from position and acceleration estimates. While the past PINN gravity models (PINN-GMs) have demonstrated advantages in model compactness, robustness to noise, and sample efficiency; there remain key modeling challenges which this paper aims to address. Specifically, this paper introduces the third generation of the Physics-Informed Neural Network Gravity Model (PINN-GM-III) which solves the problems of extrapolation error, bias towards low-altitude samples, numerical instability at high-altitudes, and compliant boundary conditions through numerous modifications to the model's design. The PINN-GM-III is tested by modeling a known heterogeneous density asteroid, and its performance is evaluated using seven core metrics which showcases its strengths against its predecessors and other analytic and numerical gravity models.

Recent observations have revealed an unusual stellar distribution within the almost dark dwarf galaxy Nube. The galaxy exhibits a remarkably flat stellar distribution, with an effective radius of approximately 6.9 kpc, exceeding the typical size of dwarf galaxies and even surpassing that of ultra-diffuse galaxies (UDGs) with similar stellar masses. The dynamical heating effect of fuzzy dark matter (FDM) may offer an explanation for this extremely diffuse stellar distribution in Nube. In this research, we utilize simulation techniques to investigate this issue and find that a particle mass O (1)times 10^{-23} eV offers a plausible explanation for this peculiar stellar distribution anomaly.

Galaxy number counts suggest that we are located within the Gpc-scale KBC void. The Hubble tension might arise due to gravitationally driven outflow from this void, as explored in detail by Haslbauer et al. We explore how the impact of the void on redshift decays at large distances. We define H_0(z) as the present expansion rate H_0 that would be inferred from observations in a narrow redshift range centred on z. We find H_0(z) in three different ways, all of which give similar results. We then compare these results with the observations of Jia et al., who were careful to minimise the impact of correlations between H_0 measurements from data in different redshift bins. We find reasonable agreement with their results for the Gaussian and Exponential void underdensity profiles, although the agreement is less good in the Maxwell-Boltzmann case. The latter profile causes severe disagreement with the observed bulk flow curve at z < 0.1 (Mazurenko et al.), so the tension with higher redshift data further highlights that the deepest part of the KBC void is probably near its centre. The observations show a decline of H_0(z) towards the background Planck value in qualitative agreement with the considered models, even if we use a larger void. The good overall agreement with the recent results of Jia et al. suggests that the local supervoid evident from the galaxy luminosity density out to a Gpc might also solve the Hubble tension while retaining a low background H_0 consistent with Planck data, assuming enhanced structure formation on >100 Mpc scales.

The peculiar velocities of biased tracers of the cosmic density field contain important information about the growth of large scale structure and generate anisotropy in the observed clustering of galaxies. Using N-body data, we show that velocity expansions for halo redshift-space power spectra are converged at the percent-level at perturbative scales for most line-of-sight angles mu when the first three pairwise velocity moments are included, and that the third moment is well-approximated by a counterterm-like contribution. We compute these pairwise-velocity statistics in Fourier space using both Eulerian and Lagrangian one-loop perturbation theory using a cubic bias scheme and a complete set of counterterms and stochastic contributions. We compare the models and show that our models fit both real-space velocity statistics and redshift-space power spectra for both halos and a mock sample of galaxies at sub-percent level on perturbative scales using consistent sets of parameters, making them appealing choices for the upcoming era of spectroscopic, peculiar-velocity and kSZ surveys.

We use two-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations to investigate the generation and evolution of the magnetic field associated with the propagation of a jet for various initial conditions. We demonstrate that, in general, the magnetic field is initially grown by the Weibel and Mushroom instabilities. However, the field is saturated by the Alfv'en current limit. For initially non-magnetized plasma, we show that the growth of the magnetic field is delayed when the matter density of the jet environment is lower, which are in agreement with simple analytical predictions. We show that the higher Lorentz factor (gtrsim 2) prevents rapid growth of the magnetic fields. When the initial field is troidal, the position of the magnetic filaments moves away from the jet as the field strength increases. The axial initial field helps the jet maintain its shape more effectively than the troidal initial field.

Adopting general frameworks for quantum-classical dynamics, we analyze the interaction between quantum matter and a classical gravitational field. We point out that, assuming conservation of momentum or energy, and assuming that the dynamics obeys Hamiltonian formalism or a particular decomposition property set out in the paper, the classical gravitational field cannot change the momentum or energy of the quantum system, whereas the quantum gravitational field can do so. Drawing upon the fundamental relationship between conservation laws and the quantum properties of objects, our analysis offers new perspectives for the study of quantum gravity and provides a novel interpretation of existing experimental observations, such as free fall.

The classical Coulomb gas model has served as one of the most versatile frameworks in statistical physics, connecting a vast range of phenomena across many different areas. Nonequilibrium generalisations of this model have so far been studied much more scarcely. With the abundance of contemporary research into active and driven systems, one would naturally expect that such generalisations of systems with long-ranged Coulomb-like interactions will form a fertile playground for interesting developments. Here, we present two examples of novel macroscopic behaviour that arise from nonequilibrium fluctuations in long-range interacting systems, namely (1) unscreened long-ranged correlations in strong electrolytes driven by an external electric field and the associated fluctuation-induced forces in the confined Casimir geometry, and (2) out-of-equilibrium critical behaviour in self-chemotactic models that incorporate the particle polarity in the chemotactic response of the cells. Both of these systems have nonlocal Coulomb-like interactions among their constituent particles, namely, the electrostatic interactions in the case of the driven electrolyte, and the chemotactic forces mediated by fast-diffusing signals in the case of self-chemotactic systems. The results presented here hint to the rich phenomenology of nonequilibrium effects that can arise from strong fluctuations in Coulomb interacting systems, and a rich variety of potential future directions, which are discussed.

Machine Learning Force Fields (MLFFs) are a promising alternative to expensive ab initio quantum mechanical molecular simulations. Given the diversity of chemical spaces that are of interest and the cost of generating new data, it is important to understand how MLFFs generalize beyond their training distributions. In order to characterize and better understand distribution shifts in MLFFs, we conduct diagnostic experiments on chemical datasets, revealing common shifts that pose significant challenges, even for large foundation models trained on extensive data. Based on these observations, we hypothesize that current supervised training methods inadequately regularize MLFFs, resulting in overfitting and learning poor representations of out-of-distribution systems. We then propose two new methods as initial steps for mitigating distribution shifts for MLFFs. Our methods focus on test-time refinement strategies that incur minimal computational cost and do not use expensive ab initio reference labels. The first strategy, based on spectral graph theory, modifies the edges of test graphs to align with graph structures seen during training. Our second strategy improves representations for out-of-distribution systems at test-time by taking gradient steps using an auxiliary objective, such as a cheap physical prior. Our test-time refinement strategies significantly reduce errors on out-of-distribution systems, suggesting that MLFFs are capable of and can move towards modeling diverse chemical spaces, but are not being effectively trained to do so. Our experiments establish clear benchmarks for evaluating the generalization capabilities of the next generation of MLFFs. Our code is available at https://tkreiman.github.io/projects/mlff_distribution_shifts/.

Implicit neural fields, typically encoded by a multilayer perceptron (MLP) that maps from coordinates (e.g., xyz) to signals (e.g., signed distances), have shown remarkable promise as a high-fidelity and compact representation. However, the lack of a regular and explicit grid structure also makes it challenging to apply generative modeling directly on implicit neural fields in order to synthesize new data. To this end, we propose HyperDiffusion, a novel approach for unconditional generative modeling of implicit neural fields. HyperDiffusion operates directly on MLP weights and generates new neural implicit fields encoded by synthesized MLP parameters. Specifically, a collection of MLPs is first optimized to faithfully represent individual data samples. Subsequently, a diffusion process is trained in this MLP weight space to model the underlying distribution of neural implicit fields. HyperDiffusion enables diffusion modeling over a implicit, compact, and yet high-fidelity representation of complex signals across 3D shapes and 4D mesh animations within one single unified framework.

Riemannian diffusion models draw inspiration from standard Euclidean space diffusion models to learn distributions on general manifolds. Unfortunately, the additional geometric complexity renders the diffusion transition term inexpressible in closed form, so prior methods resort to imprecise approximations of the score matching training objective that degrade performance and preclude applications in high dimensions. In this work, we reexamine these approximations and propose several practical improvements. Our key observation is that most relevant manifolds are symmetric spaces, which are much more amenable to computation. By leveraging and combining various ans\"{a}tze, we can quickly compute relevant quantities to high precision. On low dimensional datasets, our correction produces a noticeable improvement, allowing diffusion to compete with other methods. Additionally, we show that our method enables us to scale to high dimensional tasks on nontrivial manifolds. In particular, we model QCD densities on SU(n) lattices and contrastively learned embeddings on high dimensional hyperspheres.

Despite the recent advances in the field of computational Schr\"odinger Bridges (SB), most existing SB solvers are still heavy-weighted and require complex optimization of several neural networks. It turns out that there is no principal solver which plays the role of simple-yet-effective baseline for SB just like, e.g., k-means method in clustering, logistic regression in classification or Sinkhorn algorithm in discrete optimal transport. We address this issue and propose a novel fast and simple SB solver. Our development is a smart combination of two ideas which recently appeared in the field: (a) parameterization of the Schr\"odinger potentials with sum-exp quadratic functions and (b) viewing the log-Schr\"odinger potentials as the energy functions. We show that combined together these ideas yield a lightweight, simulation-free and theoretically justified SB solver with a simple straightforward optimization objective. As a result, it allows solving SB in moderate dimensions in a matter of minutes on CPU without a painful hyperparameter selection. Our light solver resembles the Gaussian mixture model which is widely used for density estimation. Inspired by this similarity, we also prove an important theoretical result showing that our light solver is a universal approximator of SBs. Furthemore, we conduct the analysis of the generalization error of our light solver. The code for our solver can be found at https://github.com/ngushchin/LightSB

In this paper we study quasinormal modes and absorption cross sections for the (1+3)-dimensional Bardeen black hole surrounded by perfect fluid dark matter. Studies of the massless scalar field is already done in Sun:2023slzl. Hence, in this paper we will focus on the massive scalar field perturbations and massless Dirac field perturbations. To compute the quasinormal modes we use the semi-analytical 3rd-order WKB method, which has been shown to be one of the best approaches when the effective potential is adequate and when n < ell and n < lambda. We have also utilized the P\"oschl-Teller method to compare the valus obtained using the WKB approach. We have computed quasinormal frequencies by varying various parameters of the theory such as the mass of the scalar field mu, dark matter parameter alpha and the magnetic charge g. We have summarized our solutions in tables and figures for clarity. As for the absorption cross section, we used third order WKB approach to compute reflection, transmission coefficients and partial absorption cross sections. Graphs are presented to demonstrate the behavior of the above quantities when the dark matter parameter and mass of the massive scalar field are varied.

Recent successful generative models are trained by fitting a neural network to an a-priori defined tractable probability density path taking noise to training examples. In this paper we investigate the space of Gaussian probability paths, which includes diffusion paths as an instance, and look for an optimal member in some useful sense. In particular, minimizing the Kinetic Energy (KE) of a path is known to make particles' trajectories simple, hence easier to sample, and empirically improve performance in terms of likelihood of unseen data and sample generation quality. We investigate Kinetic Optimal (KO) Gaussian paths and offer the following observations: (i) We show the KE takes a simplified form on the space of Gaussian paths, where the data is incorporated only through a single, one dimensional scalar function, called the data separation function. (ii) We characterize the KO solutions with a one dimensional ODE. (iii) We approximate data-dependent KO paths by approximating the data separation function and minimizing the KE. (iv) We prove that the data separation function converges to 1 in the general case of arbitrary normalized dataset consisting of n samples in d dimension as n/drightarrow 0. A consequence of this result is that the Conditional Optimal Transport (Cond-OT) path becomes kinetic optimal as n/drightarrow 0. We further support this theory with empirical experiments on ImageNet.

We tackle the problem of sampling from intractable high-dimensional density functions, a fundamental task that often appears in machine learning and statistics. We extend recent sampling-based approaches that leverage controlled stochastic processes to model approximate samples from these target densities. The main drawback of these approaches is that the training objective requires full trajectories to compute, resulting in sluggish credit assignment issues due to use of entire trajectories and a learning signal present only at the terminal time. In this work, we present Diffusion Generative Flow Samplers (DGFS), a sampling-based framework where the learning process can be tractably broken down into short partial trajectory segments, via parameterizing an additional "flow function". Our method takes inspiration from the theory developed for generative flow networks (GFlowNets), allowing us to make use of intermediate learning signals. Through various challenging experiments, we demonstrate that DGFS achieves more accurate estimates of the normalization constant than closely-related prior methods.

The accessibility of spatially distributed data, enabled by affordable sensors, field, and numerical experiments, has facilitated the development of data-driven solutions for scientific problems, including climate change, weather prediction, and urban planning. Neural Partial Differential Equations (Neural PDEs), which combine deep learning (DL) techniques with domain expertise (e.g., governing equations) for parameterization, have proven to be effective in capturing valuable correlations within spatiotemporal datasets. However, sparse and noisy measurements coupled with modeling approximation introduce aleatoric and epistemic uncertainties. Therefore, quantifying uncertainties propagated from model inputs to outputs remains a challenge and an essential goal for establishing the trustworthiness of Neural PDEs. This work evaluates various Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) approaches for both Forward and Inverse Problems in scientific applications. Specifically, we investigate the effectiveness of Bayesian methods, such as Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) and Monte-Carlo Dropout (MCD), and a more conventional approach, Deep Ensembles (DE). To illustrate their performance, we take two canonical PDEs: Burger's equation and the Navier-Stokes equation. Our results indicate that Neural PDEs can effectively reconstruct flow systems and predict the associated unknown parameters. However, it is noteworthy that the results derived from Bayesian methods, based on our observations, tend to display a higher degree of certainty in their predictions as compared to those obtained using the DE. This elevated certainty in predictions suggests that Bayesian techniques might underestimate the true underlying uncertainty, thereby appearing more confident in their predictions than the DE approach.

In this paper, we introduce a new class of score-based generative models (SGMs) designed to handle high-cardinality data distributions by leveraging concepts from mean-field theory. We present mean-field chaos diffusion models (MF-CDMs), which address the curse of dimensionality inherent in high-cardinality data by utilizing the propagation of chaos property of interacting particles. By treating high-cardinality data as a large stochastic system of interacting particles, we develop a novel score-matching method for infinite-dimensional chaotic particle systems and propose an approximation scheme that employs a subdivision strategy for efficient training. Our theoretical and empirical results demonstrate the scalability and effectiveness of MF-CDMs for managing large high-cardinality data structures, such as 3D point clouds.

Statistics that capture the directional dependence of the baryon distribution in the cosmic web enable unique tests of cosmology and astrophysical feedback. We use constrained oriented stacking of thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (tSZ) maps to measure the anisotropic distribution of hot gas 2.5-40 Mpc away from galaxy clusters embedded in massive filaments and superclusters. The cluster selection and orientation (at a scale of sim15 Mpc) use Dark Energy Survey (DES) Year 3 data, while expanded tSZ maps from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope Data Release 6 enable a sim3times more significant measurement of the extended gas compared to the technique's proof-of-concept. Decomposing stacks into cosine multipoles of order m, we detect a dipole (m=1) and quadrupole (m=2) at 8-10sigma, as well as evidence for m=4 signal at up to 6sigma, indicating sensitivity to late-time non-Gaussianity. We compare to the Cardinal simulations with spherical gas models pasted onto dark matter halos. The fiducial tSZ data can discriminate between two models that deplete pressure differently in low-mass halos (mimicking astrophysical feedback), preferring higher average pressure in extended structures. However, uncertainty in the amount of cosmic infrared background contamination reduces the constraining power. Additionally, we apply the technique to DES galaxy density and weak lensing to study for the first time their oriented relationships with tSZ. In the tSZ-to-lensing relation, averaged on 7.5 Mpc (transverse) scales, we observe dependence on redshift but not shape or radial distance. Thus, on large scales, the superclustering of gas pressure, galaxies, and total matter is coherent in shape and extent.

X-ray observing facilities, such as the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the eROSITA, have detected millions of astronomical sources associated with high-energy phenomena. The arrival of photons as a function of time follows a Poisson process and can vary by orders-of-magnitude, presenting obstacles for common tasks such as source classification, physical property derivation, and anomaly detection. Previous work has either failed to directly capture the Poisson nature of the data or only focuses on Poisson rate function reconstruction. In this work, we present Poisson Process AutoDecoder (PPAD). PPAD is a neural field decoder that maps fixed-length latent features to continuous Poisson rate functions across energy band and time via unsupervised learning. PPAD reconstructs the rate function and yields a representation at the same time. We demonstrate the efficacy of PPAD via reconstruction, regression, classification and anomaly detection experiments using the Chandra Source Catalog.

Rydberg atom arrays have emerged as a powerful platform to simulate a number of exotic quantum ground states and phase transitions. To verify these capabilities numerically, we develop a versatile quantum Monte Carlo sampling technique which operates in the reduced Hilbert space generated by enforcing the constraint of a Rydberg blockade. We use the framework of stochastic series expansion and show that in the restricted space, the configuration space of operator strings can be understood as a hard rod gas in d+1 dimensions. We use this mapping to develop cluster algorithms which can be visualized as various non-local movements of rods. We study the efficiency of each of our updates individually and collectively. To elucidate the utility of the algorithm, we show that it can efficiently generate the phase diagram of a Rydberg atom array, to temperatures much smaller than all energy scales involved, on a Kagom\'e link lattice. This is of broad interest as the presence of a Z_2 spin liquid has been hypothesized recently.

This paper concerns the derivation of radiative transfer equations for acoustic waves propagating in a randomly fluctuating slab (between two parallel planes) in the weak-scattering regime, and the study of boundary effects through an asymptotic analysis of the Wigner transform of the wave solution. These radiative transfer equations allow to model the transport of wave energy density, taking into account the scattering by random heterogeneities. The approach builds on the method of images, where the slab is extended to a full-space, with a periodic map of mechanical properties and a series of sources located along a periodic pattern. Two types of boundary effects, both on the (small) scale of the wavelength, are observed: one at the boundaries of the slab, and one inside the domain. The former impact the entire energy density (coherent as well as incoherent) and is also observed in half-spaces. The latter, more specific to slabs, corresponds to the constructive interference of waves that have reflected at least twice on the boundaries of the slab and only impacts the coherent part of the energy density.

We consider N classical particles interacting via the Coulomb potential in spatial dimension d and in the presence of an external trap, at equilibrium at inverse temperature beta. In the large N limit, the particles are confined within a droplet of finite size. We study smooth linear statistics, i.e. the fluctuations of sums of the form {cal L}_N = sum_{i=1}^N f({bf x}_i), where {bf x}_i's are the positions of the particles and where f({bf x}_i) is a sufficiently regular function. There exists at present standard results for the first and second moments of {cal L}_N in the large N limit, as well as associated Central Limit Theorems in general dimension and for a wide class of confining potentials. Here we obtain explicit expressions for the higher order cumulants of {cal L}_N at large N, when the function f({bf x})=f(|{bf x}|) and the confining potential are both rotationnally invariant. A remarkable feature of our results is that these higher cumulants depend only on the value of f'(|{bf x}|) and its higher order derivatives evaluated exactly at the boundary of the droplet, which in this case is a d-dimensional sphere. In the particular two-dimensional case d=2 at the special value beta=2, a connection to the Ginibre ensemble allows us to derive these results in an alternative way using the tools of determinantal point processes. Finally we also obtain the large deviation form of the full probability distribution function of {cal L}_N.

Normalizing flows (NF) are a class of powerful generative models that have gained popularity in recent years due to their ability to model complex distributions with high flexibility and expressiveness. In this work, we introduce a new type of normalizing flow that is tailored for modeling positions and orientations of multiple objects in three-dimensional space, such as molecules in a crystal. Our approach is based on two key ideas: first, we define smooth and expressive flows on the group of unit quaternions, which allows us to capture the continuous rotational motion of rigid bodies; second, we use the double cover property of unit quaternions to define a proper density on the rotation group. This ensures that our model can be trained using standard likelihood-based methods or variational inference with respect to a thermodynamic target density. We evaluate the method by training Boltzmann generators for two molecular examples, namely the multi-modal density of a tetrahedral system in an external field and the ice XI phase in the TIP4P water model. Our flows can be combined with flows operating on the internal degrees of freedom of molecules and constitute an important step towards the modeling of distributions of many interacting molecules.

Combinatorial inverse problems in high energy physics span enormous algorithmic challenges. This work presents a new deep learning driven clustering algorithm that utilizes a space-time non-local trainable graph constructor, a graph neural network, and a set transformer. The model is trained with loss functions at the graph node, edge and object level, including contrastive learning and meta-supervision. The algorithm can be applied to problems such as charged particle tracking, calorimetry, pile-up discrimination, jet physics, and beyond. We showcase the effectiveness of this cutting-edge AI approach through particle tracking simulations. The code is available online.

We introduce a new class of spatially stochastic physics and data informed deep latent models for parametric partial differential equations (PDEs) which operate through scalable variational neural processes. We achieve this by assigning probability measures to the spatial domain, which allows us to treat collocation grids probabilistically as random variables to be marginalised out. Adapting this spatial statistics view, we solve forward and inverse problems for parametric PDEs in a way that leads to the construction of Gaussian process models of solution fields. The implementation of these random grids poses a unique set of challenges for inverse physics informed deep learning frameworks and we propose a new architecture called Grid Invariant Convolutional Networks (GICNets) to overcome these challenges. We further show how to incorporate noisy data in a principled manner into our physics informed model to improve predictions for problems where data may be available but whose measurement location does not coincide with any fixed mesh or grid. The proposed method is tested on a nonlinear Poisson problem, Burgers equation, and Navier-Stokes equations, and we provide extensive numerical comparisons. We demonstrate significant computational advantages over current physics informed neural learning methods for parametric PDEs while improving the predictive capabilities and flexibility of these models.

Recently, the Segment Anything Model (SAM) has showcased remarkable capabilities of zero-shot segmentation, while NeRF (Neural Radiance Fields) has gained popularity as a method for various 3D problems beyond novel view synthesis. Though there exist initial attempts to incorporate these two methods into 3D segmentation, they face the challenge of accurately and consistently segmenting objects in complex scenarios. In this paper, we introduce the Segment Anything for NeRF in High Quality (SANeRF-HQ) to achieve high quality 3D segmentation of any object in a given scene. SANeRF-HQ utilizes SAM for open-world object segmentation guided by user-supplied prompts, while leveraging NeRF to aggregate information from different viewpoints. To overcome the aforementioned challenges, we employ density field and RGB similarity to enhance the accuracy of segmentation boundary during the aggregation. Emphasizing on segmentation accuracy, we evaluate our method quantitatively on multiple NeRF datasets where high-quality ground-truths are available or manually annotated. SANeRF-HQ shows a significant quality improvement over previous state-of-the-art methods in NeRF object segmentation, provides higher flexibility for object localization, and enables more consistent object segmentation across multiple views. Additional information can be found at https://lyclyc52.github.io/SANeRF-HQ/.

The collisionless Boltzmann equation (CBE) is a fundamental equation that governs the dynamics of a broad range of astrophysical systems from space plasma to star clusters and galaxies. It is computationally expensive to integrate the CBE directly in a multi-dimensional phase space, and thus the applications to realistic astrophysical problems have been limited so far. Recently, Todorova & Steijl (2020) proposed an efficient quantum algorithm to solve the CBE with significantly reduced computational complexity. We extend the algorithm to perform quantum simulations of self-gravitating systems, incorporating the method to calculate gravity with the major Fourier modes of the density distribution extracted from the solution-encoding quantum state. Our method improves the dependency of time and space complexities on Nv , the number of grid points in each velocity coordinate, compared to the classical simulation methods. We then conduct some numerical demonstrations of our method. We first run a 1+1 dimensional test calculation of free streaming motion on 64*64 grids using 13 simulated qubits and validate our method. We then perform simulations of Jeans collapse, and compare the result with analytic and linear theory calculations. It will thus allow us to perform large-scale CBE simulations on future quantum computers.

Understanding the loss landscape is an important problem in machine learning. One key feature of the loss function, common to many neural network architectures, is the presence of exponentially many low lying local minima. Physical systems with similar energy landscapes may provide useful insights. In this work, we point out that black holes naturally give rise to such landscapes, owing to the existence of black hole entropy. For definiteness, we consider 1/8 BPS black holes in N = 8 string theory. These provide an infinite family of potential landscapes arising in the microscopic descriptions of corresponding black holes. The counting of minima amounts to black hole microstate counting. Moreover, the exact numbers of the minima for these landscapes are a priori known from dualities in string theory. Some of the minima are connected by paths of low loss values, resembling mode connectivity. We estimate the number of runs needed to find all the solutions. Initial explorations suggest that Stochastic Gradient Descent can find a significant fraction of the minima.

Ultrasonic acoustic fields have recently been used to generate haptic effects on the human skin as well as to levitate small sub-wavelength size particles. Schlieren imaging and background-oriented schlieren techniques can be used for acoustic wave pattern and beam shape visualization. These techniques exploit variations in the refractive index of a propagation medium by applying refractive optics or cross-correlation algorithms of photographs of illuminated background patterns. Here both background-oriented and traditional schlieren systems are used to visualize the regions of the acoustic power involved in creating dynamic haptic sensations and dynamic levitation traps. We demonstrate for the first time the application of back-ground-oriented schlieren for imaging ultrasonic fields in air. We detail our imaging apparatus and present improved algorithms used to visualize these phenomena that we have produced using multiple phased arrays. Moreover, to improve imaging, we leverage an electronically controlled, high-output LED which is pulsed in synchrony with the ultrasonic carrier frequency.

Air quality prediction and modelling plays a pivotal role in public health and environment management, for individuals and authorities to make informed decisions. Although traditional data-driven models have shown promise in this domain, their long-term prediction accuracy can be limited, especially in scenarios with sparse or incomplete data and they often rely on black-box deep learning structures that lack solid physical foundation leading to reduced transparency and interpretability in predictions. To address these limitations, this paper presents a novel approach named Physics guided Neural Network for Air Quality Prediction (AirPhyNet). Specifically, we leverage two well-established physics principles of air particle movement (diffusion and advection) by representing them as differential equation networks. Then, we utilize a graph structure to integrate physics knowledge into a neural network architecture and exploit latent representations to capture spatio-temporal relationships within the air quality data. Experiments on two real-world benchmark datasets demonstrate that AirPhyNet outperforms state-of-the-art models for different testing scenarios including different lead time (24h, 48h, 72h), sparse data and sudden change prediction, achieving reduction in prediction errors up to 10%. Moreover, a case study further validates that our model captures underlying physical processes of particle movement and generates accurate predictions with real physical meaning.

Recent advances in Neural Fields have enabled powerful, discretization-invariant methods for learning neural operators that approximate solutions of Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) on general geometries. Building on these developments, we introduce enf2enf, an encoder--decoder methodology for predicting steady-state Partial Differential Equations with non-parameterized geometric variability, based on recently proposed Equivariant Neural Field architectures. In enf2enf, input geometries are encoded into latent point cloud embeddings that inherently preserve geometric grounding and capture local phenomena. The resulting representations are then combined with global parameters and directly decoded into continuous output fields, thus efficiently modeling the coupling between geometry and physics. By leveraging the inductive biases of locality and translation invariance, our approach is able to capture fine-scale physical features as well as complex shape variations, thereby enhancing generalization and physical compliance. Extensive experiments on a high-fidelity aerodynamic dataset, a hyper-elastic material benchmark, and multi-element airfoil geometries, demonstrate that the proposed model achieves superior or competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art graph based, operator learning, and neural field methods. Notably, our method supports real time inference and zero-shot super-resolution, enabling efficient training on low-resolution meshes while maintaining high accuracy on full-scale discretizations.

Automatic text-to-3D synthesis has achieved remarkable advancements through the optimization of 3D models. Existing methods commonly rely on pre-trained text-to-image generative models, such as diffusion models, providing scores for 2D renderings of Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) and being utilized for optimizing NeRFs. However, these methods often encounter artifacts and inconsistencies across multiple views due to their limited understanding of 3D geometry. To address these limitations, we propose a reformulation of the optimization loss using the diffusion prior. Furthermore, we introduce a novel training approach that unlocks the potential of the diffusion prior. To improve 3D geometry representation, we apply auxiliary depth supervision for NeRF-rendered images and regularize the density field of NeRFs. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method over prior works, resulting in advanced photo-realism and improved multi-view consistency.

Recent advancements in text-to-image generation have enabled significant progress in zero-shot 3D shape generation. This is achieved by score distillation, a methodology that uses pre-trained text-to-image diffusion models to optimize the parameters of a 3D neural presentation, e.g. Neural Radiance Field (NeRF). While showing promising results, existing methods are often not able to preserve the geometry of complex shapes, such as human bodies. To address this challenge, we present ZeroAvatar, a method that introduces the explicit 3D human body prior to the optimization process. Specifically, we first estimate and refine the parameters of a parametric human body from a single image. Then during optimization, we use the posed parametric body as additional geometry constraint to regularize the diffusion model as well as the underlying density field. Lastly, we propose a UV-guided texture regularization term to further guide the completion of texture on invisible body parts. We show that ZeroAvatar significantly enhances the robustness and 3D consistency of optimization-based image-to-3D avatar generation, outperforming existing zero-shot image-to-3D methods.

We confirm for the first time the existence of distinctive halo bias associated with the quadrupolar type of statistical anisotropy (SA) of the linear matter density field using cosmological N-body simulations. We find that the coefficient of the SA-induced bias for cluster-sized halos takes negative values and exhibits a decreasing trend with increasing halo mass. This results in the quadrupole halo power spectra in a statistically anisotropic universe being less amplified compared to the monopole spectra. The anisotropic feature in halo bias that we found presents a promising new tool for testing the hypothesis of a statistically anisotropic universe, with significant implications for the precise verification of anisotropic inflation scenarios and vector dark matter and dark energy models.

Colloids play an important role in fundamental science as well as in nature and technology. They have had a strong impact on the fundamental understanding of statistical physics. For example, colloids have helped to obtain a better understanding of collective phenomena, ranging from phase transitions and glass formation to the swarming of active Brownian particles. Yet the success of colloidal systems hinges crucially on the specific physical and chemical properties of the colloidal particles, i.e. particles with the appropriate characteristics must be available. Here we present an idea to create particles with freely selectable properties. The properties might depend, for example, on the presence of other particles (hence mimicking specific pair or many-body interactions), previous configurations (hence introducing some memory or feedback), or a directional bias (hence changing the dynamics). Without directly interfering with the sample, each particle is fully controlled and can receive external commands through a predefined algorithm that can take into account any input parameters. This is realized with computer-controlled colloids, which we term cybloids - short for cybernetic colloids. The potential of cybloids is illustrated by programming a time-delayed external potential acting on a single colloid and interaction potentials for many colloids. Both an attractive harmonic potential and an annular potential are implemented. For a single particle, this programming can cause subdiffusive behavior or lend activity. For many colloids, the programmed interaction potential allows to select a crystal structure at wish. Beyond these examples, we discuss further opportunities which cybloids offer.

The last few years have seen significant experimental progress in characterizing the copper-based hole-doped high temperature superconductors in the regime of low hole density, p. Quantum oscillations, NMR, X-ray, and STM experiments have shed much light on the nature of the ordering at low temperatures. We review evidence that the order parameter in the non-Lanthanum-based cuprates is a d-form factor density-wave. This novel order acts as an unexpected window into the electronic structure of the pseudogap phase at higher temperatures in zero field: we argue in favor of a `fractionalized Fermi liquid' (FL*) with 4 pockets of spin S=1/2, charge +e fermions enclosing an area specified by p.

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) have shown promise in applications like view synthesis and depth estimation, but learning from multiview images faces inherent uncertainties. Current methods to quantify them are either heuristic or computationally demanding. We introduce BayesRays, a post-hoc framework to evaluate uncertainty in any pre-trained NeRF without modifying the training process. Our method establishes a volumetric uncertainty field using spatial perturbations and a Bayesian Laplace approximation. We derive our algorithm statistically and show its superior performance in key metrics and applications. Additional results available at: https://bayesrays.github.io.

We present a new approach to constructing and fitting dipoles and higher-order multipoles in synthetic galaxy samples over the sky. Within our Bayesian paradigm, we illustrate that this technique is robust to masked skies, allowing us to make credible inferences about the relative contributions of each multipole. We also show that dipoles can be recovered in surveys with small footprints, determining the requisite source counts required for concrete estimation of the dipole parameters. This work is motivated by recent probes of the cosmic dipole in galaxy catalogues. Namely, the kinematic dipole of the Cosmic Microwave Background, as arising from the motion of our heliocentric frame at approx 370 km,s^{-1}, implies that an analogous dipole should be observed in the number counts of galaxies in flux-density-limited samples. Recent studies have reported a dipole aligning with the kinematic dipole but with an anomalously large amplitude. Accordingly, our new technique will be important as forthcoming galaxy surveys are made available and for revisiting previous data.

Despite the significant recent progress in deep generative models, the underlying structure of their latent spaces is still poorly understood, thereby making the task of performing semantically meaningful latent traversals an open research challenge. Most prior work has aimed to solve this challenge by modeling latent structures linearly, and finding corresponding linear directions which result in `disentangled' generations. In this work, we instead propose to model latent structures with a learned dynamic potential landscape, thereby performing latent traversals as the flow of samples down the landscape's gradient. Inspired by physics, optimal transport, and neuroscience, these potential landscapes are learned as physically realistic partial differential equations, thereby allowing them to flexibly vary over both space and time. To achieve disentanglement, multiple potentials are learned simultaneously, and are constrained by a classifier to be distinct and semantically self-consistent. Experimentally, we demonstrate that our method achieves both more qualitatively and quantitatively disentangled trajectories than state-of-the-art baselines. Further, we demonstrate that our method can be integrated as a regularization term during training, thereby acting as an inductive bias towards the learning of structured representations, ultimately improving model likelihood on similarly structured data.

Dark matter, one of the fundamental components of the universe, has remained mysterious in modern cosmology and particle physics, and hence, this field is of utmost importance at present moment. One of the foundational questions in this direction is the origin of dark matter which directly links with its creation. In the present article we study the gravitational production of dark matter in two distinct contexts: firstly, when reheating occurs through the gravitational particle production, and secondly, when it is driven by the inflaton's decay. We establish a connection between the reheating temperature and the mass of dark matter, and from the reheating bounds, we determine the range of viable dark matter mass values.

We introduce ensembles within score-based sampling methods to develop gradient-free approximate sampling techniques that leverage the collective dynamics of particle ensembles to compute approximate reverse diffusion drifts. We introduce the underlying methodology, emphasizing its relationship with generative diffusion models and the previously introduced F\"ollmer sampler. We demonstrate the efficacy of ensemble strategies through various examples, ranging from low- to medium-dimensionality sampling problems, including multi-modal and highly non-Gaussian probability distributions, and provide comparisons to traditional methods like NUTS. Our findings highlight the potential of ensemble strategies for modeling complex probability distributions in situations where gradients are unavailable. Finally, we showcase its application in the context of Bayesian inversion problems within the geophysical sciences.

Diffusion-based manifold learning methods have proven useful in representation learning and dimensionality reduction of modern high dimensional, high throughput, noisy datasets. Such datasets are especially present in fields like biology and physics. While it is thought that these methods preserve underlying manifold structure of data by learning a proxy for geodesic distances, no specific theoretical links have been established. Here, we establish such a link via results in Riemannian geometry explicitly connecting heat diffusion to manifold distances. In this process, we also formulate a more general heat kernel based manifold embedding method that we call heat geodesic embeddings. This novel perspective makes clearer the choices available in manifold learning and denoising. Results show that our method outperforms existing state of the art in preserving ground truth manifold distances, and preserving cluster structure in toy datasets. We also showcase our method on single cell RNA-sequencing datasets with both continuum and cluster structure, where our method enables interpolation of withheld timepoints of data. Finally, we show that parameters of our more general method can be configured to give results similar to PHATE (a state-of-the-art diffusion based manifold learning method) as well as SNE (an attraction/repulsion neighborhood based method that forms the basis of t-SNE).

Physics is based on probabilities as fundamental entities of a mathematical description. Expectation values of observables are computed according to the classical statistical rule. The overall probability distribution for one world covers all times. The quantum formalism arises once one focuses on the evolution of the time-local probabilistic information. Wave functions or the density matrix allow the formulation of a general linear evolution law for classical statistics. The quantum formalism for classical statistics is a powerful tool which allows us to implement for generalized Ising models the momentum observable with the associated Fourier representation. The association of operators to observables permits the computation of expectation values in terms of the density matrix by the usual quantum rule. We show that probabilistic cellular automata are quantum systems in a formulation with discrete time steps and real wave functions. With a complex structure the evolution operator for automata can be expressed in terms of a Hamiltonian involving fermionic creation and annihilation operators. The time-local probabilistic information amounts to a subsystem of the overall probabilistic system which is correlated with its environment consisting of the past and future. Such subsystems typically involve probabilistic observables for which only a probability distribution for their possible measurement values is available. Incomplete statistics does not permit to compute classical correlation functions for arbitrary subsystem-observables. Bell's inequalities are not generally applicable.

The study of high-speed rotating matter is a crucial research topic in physics due to the emergence of novel phenomena. In this paper, we combined cranking covariant density functional theory (CDFT) with a similar renormalization group approach to decompose the Hamiltonian from the cranking CDFT into different Hermit components, including the non-relativistic term, the dynamical term, the spin-orbit coupling, and the Darwin term. Especially, we obtained the rotational term, the term relating to Zeeman effect-like, and the spin-rotation coupling due to consideration of rotation and spatial component of vector potential. By exploring these operators, we aim to identify novel phenomena that may occur in rotating nuclei. Signature splitting, Zeeman effect-like, spin-rotation coupling, and spin current are among the potential novelties that may arise in rotating nuclei. Additionally, we investigated the observability of these phenomena and their dependence on various factors such as nuclear deformation, rotational angular velocity, and strength of magnetic field.

We describe in the context of the particle physics (PP) standard model (SM) `PP-SM' the understanding of the primordial properties and composition of the Universe in the temperature range 130GeV>T>20keV. The Universe evolution is described using FLRW cosmology. We present a global view on particle content across time and describe the different evolution eras using deceleration parameter q. We follow the arrow of time in the expanding and cooling Universe: After the PP-SM heavies (t, h, W, Z) diminish in abundance below Tsimeq 50GeV, the PP-SM plasma in the Universe is governed by the strongly interacting Quark-Gluon content. Once the temperature drops below Tsimeq 150MeV, quarks and gluons hadronize into strongly interacting matter particles. Rapid disappearance of baryonic antimatter completes at T_B=38.2MeV. We study the ensuing disappearance of strangeness and mesons in general. We show that the different eras defined by particle populations are barely separated from each other with abundance of muons fading out just prior to T=O(2.5)MeV, the era of emergence of the free-streaming neutrinos. We discuss the two relevant fundamental constants controlling the decoupling of neutrinos. We subsequently follow the primordial Universe as it passes through the hot dense electron-positron plasma epoch. The high density of positron antimatter disappears near T=20.3keV: Nuclear reactions occur in the presence of a highly mobile and relatively strongly interacting electron-positron plasma phase. We apply plasma theory methods to describe the strong screening effects between heavy dust particle (nucleons). We analyze the paramagnetic characteristics of the electron-positron plasma when exposed to an external primordial magnetic field.

We introduce a new family of physics-inspired generative models termed PFGM++ that unifies diffusion models and Poisson Flow Generative Models (PFGM). These models realize generative trajectories for N dimensional data by embedding paths in N{+}D dimensional space while still controlling the progression with a simple scalar norm of the D additional variables. The new models reduce to PFGM when D{=}1 and to diffusion models when D{to}infty. The flexibility of choosing D allows us to trade off robustness against rigidity as increasing D results in more concentrated coupling between the data and the additional variable norms. We dispense with the biased large batch field targets used in PFGM and instead provide an unbiased perturbation-based objective similar to diffusion models. To explore different choices of D, we provide a direct alignment method for transferring well-tuned hyperparameters from diffusion models (D{to} infty) to any finite D values. Our experiments show that models with finite D can be superior to previous state-of-the-art diffusion models on CIFAR-10/FFHQ 64{times}64 datasets, with FID scores of 1.91/2.43 when D{=}2048/128. In class-conditional setting, D{=}2048 yields current state-of-the-art FID of 1.74 on CIFAR-10. In addition, we demonstrate that models with smaller D exhibit improved robustness against modeling errors. Code is available at https://github.com/Newbeeer/pfgmpp

Context. Low-mass bodies, such as comets, asteroids, planetesimals, and free-floating planets, are continuously injected into the intra-cluster environment after expulsion from their host planetary systems. These can be modeled as massless particles (MLPs, hereafter). The dynamics of large populations of MLPs, however, has yet received little attention in literature. Aims. We investigate the dynamical evolution of MLP populations in star clusters, and characterize their kinematics and ejection rates. Methods. We present NBODY6++GPU-MASSLESS, a modified version of the N-body simulation code NBODY6++GPU, that allows fast integration of star clusters that contain large numbers of massless particles (MLPs). NBODY6++GPU-MASSLESS contains routines specifically directed at the dynamical evolution of low-mass bodies, such as planets. Results. Unlike stars, MLPs do not participate in the mass segregation process. Instead, MLPs mostly follow the gravitational potential of the star cluster, which gradually decreases over time due to stellar ejections and stellar evolution. The dynamical evolution of MLPs is primarily affected by the evolution of the core of the star cluster. This is most apparent in the outer regions for clusters with higher initial densities. High escape rates of MLPs are observed before the core-collapse, after which escape rates remain stable. Denser star clusters undergo a more intense core collapse, but this does not impact the dynamical evolution of MLPs. The speeds of escaping stars are similar to those of escaping MLPs, when disregarding the high-velocity ejections of neutron stars during the first 50 Myr.

Astrophysical uncertainties in dark matter direct detection experiments are typically addressed by parametrizing the velocity distribution in terms of a few uncertain parameters that vary around some central values. Here we propose a method to optimize over all velocity distributions lying within a given distance measure from a central distribution. We discretize the dark matter velocity distribution as a superposition of streams, and use a variety of information divergences to parametrize its uncertainties. With this, we bracket the limits on the dark matter-nucleon and dark matter-electron scattering cross sections, when the true dark matter velocity distribution deviates from the commonly assumed Maxwell-Boltzmann form. The methodology pursued is general and could be applied to other physics scenarios where a given physical observable depends on a function that is uncertain.

Fuzzy (wave) dark matter (FDM), the dynamical model underlying an ultralight bosonic dark matter species, produces a rich set of non-gravitational signatures that distinguishes it markedly from the phenomenologically related warm (particle) dark matter (WDM) scenario. The emergence of extended interference fringes hosted by cosmic filaments is one such phenomenon reported by cosmological simulations, and a detailed understanding of such may strengthen existing limits on the boson mass but also break the degeneracy with WDM, and provide a unique fingerprint of interference in cosmology. In this paper, we provide initial steps towards this goal. In particular, we show in a bottom-up approach, how the presence of interference in an idealised filament population can lead to a non-suppressive feature in the matter power spectrum -- an observation supported by fully-cosmological FDM simulations. To this end, we build on a theoretically motivated and numerically observed steady-state approximation for filaments and express the equilibrium dynamics of such in an expansion of FDM eigenstates. We optimise the size of the expansion by incorporating classical phase-space information. Ellipsoidal collapse considerations are used to construct a fuzzy filament mass function which, together with the reconstructed FDM wave function, allow us to efficiently compute the one-filament power spectrum. We showcase our non-perturbative interference model for a selection of boson masses and confirm our approach is able to produce the matter power boost observed in fully-cosmological FDM simulations. More precisely, we find an excess in correlation between the spatial scale associated with the FDM ground state and the quantum pressure scale. We speculate about applications of this effect in data analysis.

We present Manifold Diffusion Fields (MDF), an approach to learn generative models of continuous functions defined over Riemannian manifolds. Leveraging insights from spectral geometry analysis, we define an intrinsic coordinate system on the manifold via the eigen-functions of the Laplace-Beltrami Operator. MDF represents functions using an explicit parametrization formed by a set of multiple input-output pairs. Our approach allows to sample continuous functions on manifolds and is invariant with respect to rigid and isometric transformations of the manifold. Empirical results on several datasets and manifolds show that MDF can capture distributions of such functions with better diversity and fidelity than previous approaches.

There is a growing gap between the impressive results of deep image generative models and classical algorithms that offer theoretical guarantees. The former suffer from mode collapse or memorization issues, limiting their application to scientific data. The latter require restrictive assumptions such as log-concavity to escape the curse of dimensionality. We partially bridge this gap by introducing conditionally strongly log-concave (CSLC) models, which factorize the data distribution into a product of conditional probability distributions that are strongly log-concave. This factorization is obtained with orthogonal projectors adapted to the data distribution. It leads to efficient parameter estimation and sampling algorithms, with theoretical guarantees, although the data distribution is not globally log-concave. We show that several challenging multiscale processes are conditionally log-concave using wavelet packet orthogonal projectors. Numerical results are shown for physical fields such as the varphi^4 model and weak lensing convergence maps with higher resolution than in previous works.

Selecting an appropriate clustering method as well as an optimal number of clusters in road accident data is at times confusing and difficult. This paper analyzes shortcomings of different existing techniques applied to cluster accident-prone areas and recommends using Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise (DBSCAN) and Ordering Points To Identify the Clustering Structure (OPTICS) to overcome them. Comparative performance analysis based on real-life data on the recorded cases of road accidents in North Carolina also show more effectiveness and efficiency achieved by these algorithms.

The study of jet-inflated X-ray cavities provides a powerful insight into the energetics of hot galactic atmospheres and radio-mechanical AGN feedback. By estimating the volumes of X-ray cavities, the total energy and thus also the corresponding mechanical jet power required for their inflation can be derived. Properly estimating their total extent is, however, non-trivial, prone to biases, nearly impossible for poor-quality data, and so far has been done manually by scientists. We present a novel and automated machine-learning pipeline called Cavity Detection Tool (CADET), developed to detect and estimate the sizes of X-ray cavities from raw Chandra images. The pipeline consists of a convolutional neural network trained for producing pixel-wise cavity predictions and a DBSCAN clustering algorithm, which decomposes the predictions into individual cavities. The convolutional network was trained using mock observations of early-type galaxies simulated to resemble real noisy Chandra-like images. The network's performance has been tested on simulated data obtaining an average cavity volume error of 14 % at an 89 % true-positive rate. For simulated images without any X-ray cavities inserted, we obtain a 5 % false-positive rate. When applied to real Chandra images, the pipeline recovered 91 out of 100 previously known X-ray cavities in nearby early-type galaxies and all 14 cavities in chosen galaxy clusters. Besides that, the CADET pipeline discovered 8 new cavity pairs in atmospheres of early-type galaxies and galaxy clusters (IC4765, NGC533, NGC2300, NGC3091, NGC4073, NGC4125, NGC4472, NGC5129) and a number of potential cavity candidates.

We present cosmological parameter results from the final full-mission Planck measurements of the CMB anisotropies. We find good consistency with the standard spatially-flat 6-parameter LambdaCDM cosmology having a power-law spectrum of adiabatic scalar perturbations (denoted "base LambdaCDM" in this paper), from polarization, temperature, and lensing, separately and in combination. A combined analysis gives dark matter density Omega_c h^2 = 0.120pm 0.001, baryon density Omega_b h^2 = 0.0224pm 0.0001, scalar spectral index n_s = 0.965pm 0.004, and optical depth tau = 0.054pm 0.007 (in this abstract we quote 68,% confidence regions on measured parameters and 95,% on upper limits). The angular acoustic scale is measured to 0.03,% precision, with 100theta_*=1.0411pm 0.0003. These results are only weakly dependent on the cosmological model and remain stable, with somewhat increased errors, in many commonly considered extensions. Assuming the base-LambdaCDM cosmology, the inferred late-Universe parameters are: Hubble constant H_0 = (67.4pm 0.5)km/s/Mpc; matter density parameter Omega_m = 0.315pm 0.007; and matter fluctuation amplitude sigma_8 = 0.811pm 0.006. We find no compelling evidence for extensions to the base-LambdaCDM model. Combining with BAO we constrain the effective extra relativistic degrees of freedom to be N_{rm eff} = 2.99pm 0.17, and the neutrino mass is tightly constrained to sum m_nu< 0.12eV. The CMB spectra continue to prefer higher lensing amplitudes than predicted in base -LambdaCDM at over 2,sigma, which pulls some parameters that affect the lensing amplitude away from the base-LambdaCDM model; however, this is not supported by the lensing reconstruction or (in models that also change the background geometry) BAO data. (Abridged)