Liping Li

Shuai Wang, ChiYung Yam, Shuguang Chen et al.

Phosphorescent metal complexes have been under intense investigations as emissive dopants for energy efficient organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs). Among them, cyclometalated Pt(II) complexes are widespread triplet emitters with color-tunable emissions. To render their practical applications as OLED emitters, it is in great need to develop Pt(II) complexes with high radiative decay rate constant ($k_r$) and photoluminescence (PL) quantum yield. Thus, an efficient and accurate prediction tool is highly desirable. Here, we develop a general protocol for accurate predictions of emission wavelength, radiative decay rate constant, and PL quantum yield for phosphorescent Pt(II) emitters based on the combination of first-principles quantum mechanical method, machine learning (ML) and experimental calibration. A new dataset concerning phosphorescent Pt(II) emitters is constructed, with more than two hundred samples collected from the literature. Features containing pertinent electronic properties of the complexes are chosen. Our results demonstrate that ensemble learning models combined with stacking-based approaches exhibit the best performance, where the values of squared correlation coefficients ($R^2$), mean absolute error (MAE), and root mean square error (RMSE) are 0.96, 7.21 nm and 13.00 nm for emission wavelength prediction, and 0.81, 0.11 and 0.15 for PL quantum yield prediction. For radiative decay rate constant ($k_r$), the obtained value of $R^2$ is 0.67 while MAE and RMSE are 0.21 and 0.25 (both in log scale), respectively. The accuracy of the protocol is further confirmed using 24 recently reported Pt(II) complexes, which demonstrates its reliability for a broad palette of Pt(II) emitters.We expect this protocol will become a valuable tool, accelerating the rational design of novel OLED materials with desired properties.

Ling Liu, Qi Cao, Liping Li et al.

In this work, we investigate the performance of polar codes with the assistance of feedback in communication systems. Although it is well known that feedback does not improve the capacity of memoryless channels, we show that the finite length performance of polar codes can be significantly improved as feedback enables genie-aided decoding and allows more flexible thresholds for the polar coding construction. To analyze the performance under the new construction, we then propose an accurate characterization of the distribution of the error event under the genie-aided successive cancellation (SC) decoding. This characterization can be also used to predict the performance of the standard SC decoding of polar codes with rates close to capacity.

Kwok-Leung Chan, Liping Li, Arthur Wing-Tak Leung et al.

In current practice, scene survey is carried out by workers using total stations. The method has high accuracy, but it incurs high costs if continuous monitoring is needed. Techniques based on photogrammetry, with the relatively cheaper digital cameras, have gained wide applications in many fields. Besides point measurement, photogrammetry can also create a three-dimensional (3D) model of the scene. Accurate 3D model reconstruction depends on high quality images. Degraded images will result in large errors in the reconstructed 3D model. In this paper, we propose a method that can be used to improve the visibility of the images, and eventually reduce the errors of the 3D scene model. The idea is inspired by image dehazing. Each original image is first transformed into multiple exposure images by means of gamma-correction operations and adaptive histogram equalization. The transformed images are analyzed by the computation of the local binary patterns. The image is then enhanced, with each pixel generated from the set of transformed image pixels weighted by a function of the local pattern feature and image saturation. Performance evaluation has been performed on benchmark image dehazing datasets. Experimentations have been carried out on outdoor and indoor surveys. Our analysis finds that the method works on different types of degradation that exist in both outdoor and indoor images. When fed into the photogrammetry software, the enhanced images can reconstruct 3D scene models with sub-millimeter mean errors.

Xuyan Tan, Yuhang Wang, Bowen Du et al.

Mechanical analysis for the full face of tunnel structure is crucial to maintain stability, which is a challenge in classical analytical solutions and data analysis. Along this line, this study aims to develop a spatial deduction model to obtain the full-faced mechanical behaviors through integrating mechanical properties into pure data-driven model. The spatial tunnel structure is divided into many parts and reconstructed in a form of matrix. Then, the external load applied on structure in the field was considered to study the mechanical behaviors of tunnel. Based on the limited observed monitoring data in matrix and mechanical analysis results, a double-driven model was developed to obtain the full-faced information, in which the data-driven model was the dominant one and the mechanical constraint was the secondary one. To verify the presented spatial deduction model, cross-test was conducted through assuming partial monitoring data are unknown and regarding them as testing points. The well agreement between deduction results with actual monitoring results means the proposed model is reasonable. Therefore, it was employed to deduct both the current and historical performance of tunnel full face, which is crucial to prevent structural disasters.

Yang Liu, Yan Kang, Xinwei Zhang et al.

We introduce a collaborative learning framework allowing multiple parties having different sets of attributes about the same user to jointly build models without exposing their raw data or model parameters. In particular, we propose a Federated Stochastic Block Coordinate Descent (FedBCD) algorithm, in which each party conducts multiple local updates before each communication to effectively reduce the number of communication rounds among parties, a principal bottleneck for collaborative learning problems. We analyze theoretically the impact of the number of local updates and show that when the batch size, sample size, and the local iterations are selected appropriately, within $T$ iterations, the algorithm performs $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{T})$ communication rounds and achieves some $\mathcal{O}(1/\sqrt{T})$ accuracy (measured by the average of the gradient norm squared). The approach is supported by our empirical evaluations on a variety of tasks and datasets, demonstrating advantages over stochastic gradient descent (SGD) approaches.

Weiyu Li, Tianyi Chen, Liping Li et al.

This paper develops a communication-efficient algorithm to solve the stochastic optimization problem defined over a distributed network, aiming at reducing the burdensome communication in applications such as distributed machine learning.Different from the existing works based on quantization and sparsification, we introduce a communication-censoring technique to reduce the transmissions of variables, which leads to our communication-Censored distributed Stochastic Gradient Descent (CSGD) algorithm. Specifically, in CSGD, the latest mini-batch stochastic gradient at a worker will be transmitted to the server if and only if it is sufficiently informative. When the latest gradient is not available, the stale one will be reused at the server. To implement this communication-censoring strategy, the batch-size is increasing in order to alleviate the effect of stochastic gradient noise. Theoretically, CSGD enjoys the same order of convergence rate as that of SGD, but effectively reduces communication. Numerical experiments demonstrate the sizable communication saving of CSGD.

Liping Li, Wei Xu, Tianyi Chen et al.

In this paper, we propose a class of robust stochastic subgradient methods for distributed learning from heterogeneous datasets at presence of an unknown number of Byzantine workers. The Byzantine workers, during the learning process, may send arbitrary incorrect messages to the master due to data corruptions, communication failures or malicious attacks, and consequently bias the learned model. The key to the proposed methods is a regularization term incorporated with the objective function so as to robustify the learning task and mitigate the negative effects of Byzantine attacks. The resultant subgradient-based algorithms are termed Byzantine-Robust Stochastic Aggregation methods, justifying our acronym RSA used henceforth. In contrast to most of the existing algorithms, RSA does not rely on the assumption that the data are independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) on the workers, and hence fits for a wider class of applications. Theoretically, we show that: i) RSA converges to a near-optimal solution with the learning error dependent on the number of Byzantine workers; ii) the convergence rate of RSA under Byzantine attacks is the same as that of the stochastic gradient descent method, which is free of Byzantine attacks. Numerically, experiments on real dataset corroborate the competitive performance of RSA and a complexity reduction compared to the state-of-the-art alternatives.