A multitude of interconnected risk eventsranging from regulatory changes to geopolitical tensions-can trigger ripple effects across firms.Identifying inter-firm risk relations is thus crucial for applications like portfolio management and investment strategy.Traditionally, such assessments rely on expert judgment and manual analysis, which are, however, subjective, labor-intensive, and difficult to scale.To address this, we propose a systematic method for extracting inter-firm risk relations using Form 10-K filings-authoritative, standardized financial documents-as our data source.Leveraging recent advances in natural language processing, our approach captures implicit and abstract risk connections through unsupervised fine-tuning based on chronological and lexical patterns in the filings.This enables the development of a domain-specific financial encoder with a deeper contextual understanding and introduces a quantitative risk relation score for transparency, interpretable analysis.Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms strong baselines across multiple evaluation settings.

Dielectrophoresis (DEP) is a powerful tool for manipulating biological cells. However, single cell manipulation is usually time-consuming and skill-intensive. This paper presents a system that integrates AI for real-time image recognition with a programmable dielectrophoresis (DEP) array chip for automated particle manipulation. The system comprises a DEP chip, an FPGA, a computer, a microscope, and a server. The YOLO v8 model is used to detect particle positions within microscope images and generate DEP manipulation patterns. The system utilizes a Breadth-First Search (BFS) algorithm for path planning, ensuring collision-free movement of particles within a grid structure. Experimental results demonstrated the system’s effectiveness in manipulating 20 μm polystyrene particles with a success rate of over 90%. This system offers a significant advancement in automated DEP-based manipulation, providing precise control at micro scales with high computational efficiency.

We introduce a new graph diffusion model for small drug molecule generation which simultaneously offers a 10-fold reduction in the number of diffusion steps when compared to existing methods, preservation of small molecule graph motifs via motif compression, and an average 3\% improvement in SMILES validity over the DiGress model across all real-world molecule benchmarking datasets. Furthermore, our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art DeFoG method with respect to motif-conservation by roughly 4\%, as evidenced by high ChEMBL-likeness, QED and newly introduced shingles distance scores. The key ideas behind the approach are to use a combination of deterministic and random subgraph perturbations, so that the node and edge noise schedules are codependent; to modify the loss function of the training process in order to exploit the deterministic component of the schedule; and, to ''compress'' a collection of highly relevant carbon ring and other motif structures into supernodes in a way that allows for simple subsequent integration into the molecular scaffold.

Despite recent progress in Multiple Object Tracking (MOT), several obstacles such as occlusions, similar objects, and complex scenes remain an open challenge. Meanwhile, a systematic study of the cost-performance tradeoff for the popular tracking-by-detection paradigm is still lacking. This paper introduces SMILEtrack, an innovative object tracker that effectively addresses these challenges by integrating an efficient object detector with a Siamese network-based Similarity Learning Module (SLM). The technical contributions of SMILETrack are twofold. First, we propose an SLM that calculates the appearance similarity between two objects, overcoming the limitations of feature descriptors in Separate Detection and Embedding (SDE) models. The SLM incorporates a Patch Self-Attention (PSA) block inspired by the vision Transformer, which generates reliable features for accurate similarity matching. Second, we develop a Similarity Matching Cascade (SMC) module with a novel GATE function for robust object matching across consecutive video frames, further enhancing MOT performance. Together, these innovations help SMILETrack achieve an improved trade-off between the cost (e.g., running speed) and performance (e.g., tracking accuracy) over several existing state-of-the-art benchmarks, including the popular BYTETrack method. SMILETrack outperforms BYTETrack by 0.4-0.8 MOTA and 2.1-2.2 HOTA points on MOT17 and MOT20 datasets. Code is available at http://github.com/pingyang1117/SMILEtrack_official.

SUPERB was proposed to evaluate the generalizability of self-supervised learning (SSL) speech models across various tasks. However, it incurs high computational costs due to the large datasets and diverse tasks. In this paper, we introduce MiniSUPERB, a lightweight benchmark that efficiently evaluates SSL speech models with comparable results to SUPERB but lower computational costs significantly. We carefully select representative tasks, sample datasets, and extract model representations offline. Our approach achieves a Spearman’s rank correlation of 0.954 and 0.982 with SUPERB Paper and SUPERB Challenge, respectively. Additionally, we reduce the computational cost by 97 % in terms of Multiply-ACcumulate operations (MACs). Furthermore, we evaluate SSL speech models in few-shot scenarios and observe significant variations in their performance. To our knowledge, this is the first study to examine both the computational cost of the model itself and the cost of evaluating it on a benchmark.11Our code is available at https://github.com/Comet0322/MiniSUPERB

In this paper, two new families of asynchronous channel-hopping (CH) sequences—Symmetric Maximum-Length CH (SML-CH) Sequences and Relaxed Difference Set (RDS) of Maximum-Length CH (RDSML-CH) Sequences—are constructed. For the first time, the maximum-length sequences (also called as m-sequences) are used to create 2-D CH matrices with a reduced number of “jump” columns. The two new constructions carry the desirable properties of maximum rendezvous diversity (MRD) and even channel use (ECU) and, more importantly, have the shortest periods in their categories of constructions. Another contribution is on the embedment of optical orthogonal codes (OOCs) to eliminate “stay” columns in the RDSML-CH matrices, thus resulting in the first and only family of the asynchronous CH sequences that can asymptotically achieve the theoretical period lower bound. To support the RDSML-CH construction, a new shortened RDS algorithm for creating the OOCs with smaller weight-to-length ratios than the existing ones is proposed. Numerical and simulation analyses show that the two new constructions have a good balance of short period, MRD, ECU, short time-to-rendezvous (TTR) mean, small TTR variance, and short maximum-TTR, thus more suitable for practical CR wireless networks than the existing constructions.

In this paper, we propose a data prefetching scheme, History-Awoken Stride (HAS) prefetching, optimized with a warp scheduler, Prefetched-Then-Executed (PTE), and evaluate the performance on the platform that we developed. Our platform is a single instruction, multiple thread (SIMT) GPGPU environment, supporting OpenCL 1.2 runtime and TensorFlow framework with CUDA-on-CL technology. Enormous amount of executing threads in GPU demands critical memory performance. HAS exploits history table of related memory accesses in intra-warp and inter-warp of the same workgroup as well as among workgroups, and uses address strides and warp status to monitor the prefetching progress of the executed warp. PTE precisely issues warps according to prefetching status from HAS. The experimental results of LeNet-5 inference and 11 PolyBench test programs on CAS-GPU show that our mechanism can achieve an average IPC performance improvement of 10.4%, and 7.8% reduction in data cache miss rate. The prefetch accuracy can reach 67.7%, and the proportion of prefetch request arrived at the appropriate time reaches 48.2%.

Hyperspectral unmixing (HU) is an essential signal processing procedure for blindly extracting the hidden spectral signatures of materials (or endmembers) from observed hyperspectral imaging data. Craig's criterion, stating that the vertices of the minimum volume enclosing simplex (MVES) of the data cloud yield high-fidelity endmember estimates, has been widely used for designing endmember extraction algorithms (EEAs) especially in the scenario of no pure pixels. However, most Craig-criterion-based EEAs generally suffer from high computational complexity due to heavy simplex volume computations, and performance sensitivity to random initialization, etc. In this work, based on the idea that Craig's simplex with N vertices can be defined by N associated hyperplanes, we develop a fast and reproducible EEA by identifying these hyperplanes from N(N - 1) data pixels extracted via simple and effective linear algebraic formulations, together with endmember identifiability analysis. Some Monte Carlo simulations are provided to demonstrate the superior efficacy of the proposed EEA over state-of-the-art Craig-criterion-based EEAs in both computational efficiency and estimation accuracy.

In the conventional JPEG algorithm, an image is divided into eight by eight blocks and then the 2-D DCT is applied to encode each block. In this paper, we find that, in addition to rectangular blocks, the 2-D DCT is also orthogonal in the trapezoid and triangular blocks. Therefore, instead of eight by eight blocks, we can generalize the JPEG algorithm and divide an image into trapezoid and triangular blocks according to the shapes of objects and achieve higher compression ratio. Compared with the existing shape adaptive compression algorithms, as we do not try to match the shape of each object exactly, the number of bytes used for encoding the edges can be less and the error caused from the high frequency component at the boundary can be avoided. The simulations show that, when the bit rate is fixed, our proposed algorithm can achieve higher PSNR than the JPEG algorithm and other shape adaptive algorithms. Furthermore, in addition to the 2-D DCT, we can also use our proposed method to generate the 2-D complete and orthogonal sine basis, Hartley basis, Walsh basis, and discrete polynomial basis in a trapezoid or a triangular block.

Clinical examination of Congenital Muscular Torticollis (CMT) is often carried out by ultrasound equipments. However, a variety of subjective factors during diagnosis may result in wrong decision. Thus, we propose an image processing algorithm to derive the objective judgment on the healthiness of muscle in this paper. We first apply image segmentation technique, such as the fast scanning algorithm, for ultrasonic muscle image segmentation. Then, the proposed algorithms are applied to determine the healthiness of muscle fibers. We furthermore propose a score criterion to evaluate the degree of injury. The experimental results show that the injury score measured by the proposed methods can successfully determine whether the muscle is hurt and infer the extent of fibrosis.