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Nov 21

Street Gaussians for Modeling Dynamic Urban Scenes

This paper aims to tackle the problem of modeling dynamic urban street scenes from monocular videos. Recent methods extend NeRF by incorporating tracked vehicle poses to animate vehicles, enabling photo-realistic view synthesis of dynamic urban street scenes. However, significant limitations are their slow training and rendering speed, coupled with the critical need for high precision in tracked vehicle poses. We introduce Street Gaussians, a new explicit scene representation that tackles all these limitations. Specifically, the dynamic urban street is represented as a set of point clouds equipped with semantic logits and 3D Gaussians, each associated with either a foreground vehicle or the background. To model the dynamics of foreground object vehicles, each object point cloud is optimized with optimizable tracked poses, along with a dynamic spherical harmonics model for the dynamic appearance. The explicit representation allows easy composition of object vehicles and background, which in turn allows for scene editing operations and rendering at 133 FPS (1066times1600 resolution) within half an hour of training. The proposed method is evaluated on multiple challenging benchmarks, including KITTI and Waymo Open datasets. Experiments show that the proposed method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods across all datasets. Furthermore, the proposed representation delivers performance on par with that achieved using precise ground-truth poses, despite relying only on poses from an off-the-shelf tracker. The code is available at https://zju3dv.github.io/street_gaussians/.

  • 9 authors
·
Jan 2, 2024

SHaDe: Compact and Consistent Dynamic 3D Reconstruction via Tri-Plane Deformation and Latent Diffusion

We present a novel framework for dynamic 3D scene reconstruction that integrates three key components: an explicit tri-plane deformation field, a view-conditioned canonical radiance field with spherical harmonics (SH) attention, and a temporally-aware latent diffusion prior. Our method encodes 4D scenes using three orthogonal 2D feature planes that evolve over time, enabling efficient and compact spatiotemporal representation. These features are explicitly warped into a canonical space via a deformation offset field, eliminating the need for MLP-based motion modeling. In canonical space, we replace traditional MLP decoders with a structured SH-based rendering head that synthesizes view-dependent color via attention over learned frequency bands improving both interpretability and rendering efficiency. To further enhance fidelity and temporal consistency, we introduce a transformer-guided latent diffusion module that refines the tri-plane and deformation features in a compressed latent space. This generative module denoises scene representations under ambiguous or out-of-distribution (OOD) motion, improving generalization. Our model is trained in two stages: the diffusion module is first pre-trained independently, and then fine-tuned jointly with the full pipeline using a combination of image reconstruction, diffusion denoising, and temporal consistency losses. We demonstrate state-of-the-art results on synthetic benchmarks, surpassing recent methods such as HexPlane and 4D Gaussian Splatting in visual quality, temporal coherence, and robustness to sparse-view dynamic inputs.

  • 1 authors
·
May 22

Compact 3D Gaussian Splatting for Static and Dynamic Radiance Fields

3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) has recently emerged as an alternative representation that leverages a 3D Gaussian-based representation and introduces an approximated volumetric rendering, achieving very fast rendering speed and promising image quality. Furthermore, subsequent studies have successfully extended 3DGS to dynamic 3D scenes, demonstrating its wide range of applications. However, a significant drawback arises as 3DGS and its following methods entail a substantial number of Gaussians to maintain the high fidelity of the rendered images, which requires a large amount of memory and storage. To address this critical issue, we place a specific emphasis on two key objectives: reducing the number of Gaussian points without sacrificing performance and compressing the Gaussian attributes, such as view-dependent color and covariance. To this end, we propose a learnable mask strategy that significantly reduces the number of Gaussians while preserving high performance. In addition, we propose a compact but effective representation of view-dependent color by employing a grid-based neural field rather than relying on spherical harmonics. Finally, we learn codebooks to compactly represent the geometric and temporal attributes by residual vector quantization. With model compression techniques such as quantization and entropy coding, we consistently show over 25x reduced storage and enhanced rendering speed compared to 3DGS for static scenes, while maintaining the quality of the scene representation. For dynamic scenes, our approach achieves more than 12x storage efficiency and retains a high-quality reconstruction compared to the existing state-of-the-art methods. Our work provides a comprehensive framework for 3D scene representation, achieving high performance, fast training, compactness, and real-time rendering. Our project page is available at https://maincold2.github.io/c3dgs/.

  • 5 authors
·
Aug 7, 2024 3

Geographic Location Encoding with Spherical Harmonics and Sinusoidal Representation Networks

Learning feature representations of geographical space is vital for any machine learning model that integrates geolocated data, spanning application domains such as remote sensing, ecology, or epidemiology. Recent work mostly embeds coordinates using sine and cosine projections based on Double Fourier Sphere (DFS) features -- these embeddings assume a rectangular data domain even on global data, which can lead to artifacts, especially at the poles. At the same time, relatively little attention has been paid to the exact design of the neural network architectures these functional embeddings are combined with. This work proposes a novel location encoder for globally distributed geographic data that combines spherical harmonic basis functions, natively defined on spherical surfaces, with sinusoidal representation networks (SirenNets) that can be interpreted as learned Double Fourier Sphere embedding. We systematically evaluate the cross-product of positional embeddings and neural network architectures across various classification and regression benchmarks and synthetic evaluation datasets. In contrast to previous approaches that require the combination of both positional encoding and neural networks to learn meaningful representations, we show that both spherical harmonics and sinusoidal representation networks are competitive on their own but set state-of-the-art performances across tasks when combined. We provide source code at www.github.com/marccoru/locationencoder

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 10, 2023

Real-time Photorealistic Dynamic Scene Representation and Rendering with 4D Gaussian Splatting

Reconstructing dynamic 3D scenes from 2D images and generating diverse views over time is challenging due to scene complexity and temporal dynamics. Despite advancements in neural implicit models, limitations persist: (i) Inadequate Scene Structure: Existing methods struggle to reveal the spatial and temporal structure of dynamic scenes from directly learning the complex 6D plenoptic function. (ii) Scaling Deformation Modeling: Explicitly modeling scene element deformation becomes impractical for complex dynamics. To address these issues, we consider the spacetime as an entirety and propose to approximate the underlying spatio-temporal 4D volume of a dynamic scene by optimizing a collection of 4D primitives, with explicit geometry and appearance modeling. Learning to optimize the 4D primitives enables us to synthesize novel views at any desired time with our tailored rendering routine. Our model is conceptually simple, consisting of a 4D Gaussian parameterized by anisotropic ellipses that can rotate arbitrarily in space and time, as well as view-dependent and time-evolved appearance represented by the coefficient of 4D spherindrical harmonics. This approach offers simplicity, flexibility for variable-length video and end-to-end training, and efficient real-time rendering, making it suitable for capturing complex dynamic scene motions. Experiments across various benchmarks, including monocular and multi-view scenarios, demonstrate our 4DGS model's superior visual quality and efficiency.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 16, 2023

HRTFformer: A Spatially-Aware Transformer for Personalized HRTF Upsampling in Immersive Audio Rendering

Personalized Head-Related Transfer Functions (HRTFs) are starting to be introduced in many commercial immersive audio applications and are crucial for realistic spatial audio rendering. However, one of the main hesitations regarding their introduction is that creating personalized HRTFs is impractical at scale due to the complexities of the HRTF measurement process. To mitigate this drawback, HRTF spatial upsampling has been proposed with the aim of reducing measurements required. While prior work has seen success with different machine learning (ML) approaches, these models often struggle with long-range spatial consistency and generalization at high upsampling factors. In this paper, we propose a novel transformer-based architecture for HRTF upsampling, leveraging the attention mechanism to better capture spatial correlations across the HRTF sphere. Working in the spherical harmonic (SH) domain, our model learns to reconstruct high-resolution HRTFs from sparse input measurements with significantly improved accuracy. To enhance spatial coherence, we introduce a neighbor dissimilarity loss that promotes magnitude smoothness, yielding more realistic upsampling. We evaluate our method using both perceptual localization models and objective spectral distortion metrics. Experiments show that our model surpasses leading methods by a substantial margin in generating realistic, high-fidelity HRTFs.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 2

Enabling Efficient Equivariant Operations in the Fourier Basis via Gaunt Tensor Products

Developing equivariant neural networks for the E(3) group plays an important role in modeling 3D data across real-world applications. Enforcing this equivariance primarily involves the tensor products of irreducible representations (irreps). However, the computational complexity of such operations increases significantly as higher-order tensors are used. In this work, we propose a systematic approach to substantially accelerate the computation of the tensor products of irreps. We mathematically connect the commonly used Clebsch-Gordan coefficients to the Gaunt coefficients, which are integrals of products of three spherical harmonics. Through Gaunt coefficients, the tensor product of irreps becomes equivalent to the multiplication between spherical functions represented by spherical harmonics. This perspective further allows us to change the basis for the equivariant operations from spherical harmonics to a 2D Fourier basis. Consequently, the multiplication between spherical functions represented by a 2D Fourier basis can be efficiently computed via the convolution theorem and Fast Fourier Transforms. This transformation reduces the complexity of full tensor products of irreps from O(L^6) to O(L^3), where L is the max degree of irreps. Leveraging this approach, we introduce the Gaunt Tensor Product, which serves as a new method to construct efficient equivariant operations across different model architectures. Our experiments on the Open Catalyst Project and 3BPA datasets demonstrate both the increased efficiency and improved performance of our approach.

  • 3 authors
·
Jan 18, 2024

Astrometric Effects of a Stochastic Gravitational Wave Background

A stochastic gravitational wave background causes the apparent positions of distant sources to fluctuate, with angular deflections of order the characteristic strain amplitude of the gravitational waves. These fluctuations may be detectable with high precision astrometry, as first suggested by Braginsky et al. in 1990. Several researchers have made order of magnitude estimates of the upper limits obtainable on the gravitational wave spectrum \Omega_gw(f), at frequencies of order f ~ 1 yr^-1, both for the future space-based optical interferometry missions GAIA and SIM, and for VLBI interferometry in radio wavelengths with the SKA. For GAIA, tracking N ~ 10^6 quasars over a time of T ~ 1 yr with an angular accuracy of \Delta \theta ~ 10 \mu as would yield a sensitivity level of \Omega_gw ~ (\Delta \theta)^2/(N T^2 H_0^2) ~ 10^-6, which would be comparable with pulsar timing. In this paper we take a first step toward firming up these estimates by computing in detail the statistical properties of the angular deflections caused by a stochastic background. We compute analytically the two point correlation function of the deflections on the sphere, and the spectrum as a function of frequency and angular scale. The fluctuations are concentrated at low frequencies (for a scale invariant stochastic background), and at large angular scales, starting with the quadrupole. The magnetic-type and electric-type pieces of the fluctuations have equal amounts of power.

  • 2 authors
·
Sep 21, 2010

Relightable Gaussian Codec Avatars

The fidelity of relighting is bounded by both geometry and appearance representations. For geometry, both mesh and volumetric approaches have difficulty modeling intricate structures like 3D hair geometry. For appearance, existing relighting models are limited in fidelity and often too slow to render in real-time with high-resolution continuous environments. In this work, we present Relightable Gaussian Codec Avatars, a method to build high-fidelity relightable head avatars that can be animated to generate novel expressions. Our geometry model based on 3D Gaussians can capture 3D-consistent sub-millimeter details such as hair strands and pores on dynamic face sequences. To support diverse materials of human heads such as the eyes, skin, and hair in a unified manner, we present a novel relightable appearance model based on learnable radiance transfer. Together with global illumination-aware spherical harmonics for the diffuse components, we achieve real-time relighting with spatially all-frequency reflections using spherical Gaussians. This appearance model can be efficiently relit under both point light and continuous illumination. We further improve the fidelity of eye reflections and enable explicit gaze control by introducing relightable explicit eye models. Our method outperforms existing approaches without compromising real-time performance. We also demonstrate real-time relighting of avatars on a tethered consumer VR headset, showcasing the efficiency and fidelity of our avatars.

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 6, 2023 1

Analyzing black-hole ringdowns II: data conditioning

Time series data from observations of black hole ringdown gravitational waves are often analyzed in the time domain by using damped sinusoid models with acyclic boundary conditions. Data conditioning operations, including downsampling, filtering, and the choice of data segment duration, reduce the computational cost of such analyses and can improve numerical stability. Here we analyze simulated damped sinsuoid signals to illustrate how data conditioning operations, if not carefully applied, can undesirably alter the analysis' posterior distributions. We discuss how currently implemented downsampling and filtering methods, if applied too aggressively, can introduce systematic errors and skew tests of general relativity. These issues arise because current downsampling and filtering methods do not operate identically on the data and model. Alternative downsampling and filtering methods which identically operate on the data and model may be achievable, but we argue that the current operations can still be implemented safely. We also show that our preferred anti-alias filtering technique, which has an instantaneous frequency-domain response at its roll-off frequency, preserves the structure of posterior distributions better than other commonly used filters with transient frequency-domain responses. Lastly, we highlight that exceptionally long data segments may need to be analyzed in cases where thin lines in the noise power spectral density overlap with central signal frequencies. Our findings may be broadly applicable to any analysis of truncated time domain data with acyclic boundary conditions.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 3, 2024

Multi-mode Pulsations in AGB Stars: Insights from 3D RHD CO5BOLD Simulations

Stars on the AGB can exhibit acoustic pulsation modes of different radial orders, along with non-radial modes. These pulsations are essential to the mass-loss process and influence the evolutionary pathways of AGB stars. P-L relations serve as a valuable diagnostic for understanding stellar evolution along the AGB. 3D RHD simulations provide a powerful tool for investigating pulsation phenomena driven by convective processes and their non-linear coupling with stellar oscillations. We investigate multi-mode pulsations in AGB stars using advanced 3D 'star-in-a-box' simulations with the CO5BOLD code. Signatures of these multi-mode pulsations were weak in our previous 3D models. Our focus is on identifying and characterising the various pulsation modes, examining their persistence and transitions, and comparing the results with 1D model predictions and observational data where applicable. We produced a new model grid comprising AGB stars with current masses of 0.7, 0.8, and 1,M_{odot}. Fourier analysis was applied to dynamic, time-dependent quantities to extract dominant pulsation modes and their corresponding periods. Additionally, wavelet transforms were employed to identify mode-switching behaviour over time. The models successfully reproduce the P-L sequences found in AGB stars. Mode-switching phenomena are found in both the models and wavelet analyses of observational data, allowing us to infer similarities in the underlying pulsation dynamics. These 3D simulations highlight the natural emergence of multi-mode pulsations, including both radial and non-radial modes, driven by the self-consistent interplay of convection and oscillations. Our findings underscore the value of 3D RHD models in capturing the non-linear behaviour of AGB pulsations, providing insights into mode switching, envelope structures, and potential links to episodic mass-loss events.

  • 3 authors
·
Feb 17

Relightable Full-Body Gaussian Codec Avatars

We propose Relightable Full-Body Gaussian Codec Avatars, a new approach for modeling relightable full-body avatars with fine-grained details including face and hands. The unique challenge for relighting full-body avatars lies in the large deformations caused by body articulation and the resulting impact on appearance caused by light transport. Changes in body pose can dramatically change the orientation of body surfaces with respect to lights, resulting in both local appearance changes due to changes in local light transport functions, as well as non-local changes due to occlusion between body parts. To address this, we decompose the light transport into local and non-local effects. Local appearance changes are modeled using learnable zonal harmonics for diffuse radiance transfer. Unlike spherical harmonics, zonal harmonics are highly efficient to rotate under articulation. This allows us to learn diffuse radiance transfer in a local coordinate frame, which disentangles the local radiance transfer from the articulation of the body. To account for non-local appearance changes, we introduce a shadow network that predicts shadows given precomputed incoming irradiance on a base mesh. This facilitates the learning of non-local shadowing between the body parts. Finally, we use a deferred shading approach to model specular radiance transfer and better capture reflections and highlights such as eye glints. We demonstrate that our approach successfully models both the local and non-local light transport required for relightable full-body avatars, with a superior generalization ability under novel illumination conditions and unseen poses.

NeRF-DS: Neural Radiance Fields for Dynamic Specular Objects

Dynamic Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) is a powerful algorithm capable of rendering photo-realistic novel view images from a monocular RGB video of a dynamic scene. Although it warps moving points across frames from the observation spaces to a common canonical space for rendering, dynamic NeRF does not model the change of the reflected color during the warping. As a result, this approach often fails drastically on challenging specular objects in motion. We address this limitation by reformulating the neural radiance field function to be conditioned on surface position and orientation in the observation space. This allows the specular surface at different poses to keep the different reflected colors when mapped to the common canonical space. Additionally, we add the mask of moving objects to guide the deformation field. As the specular surface changes color during motion, the mask mitigates the problem of failure to find temporal correspondences with only RGB supervision. We evaluate our model based on the novel view synthesis quality with a self-collected dataset of different moving specular objects in realistic environments. The experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly improves the reconstruction quality of moving specular objects from monocular RGB videos compared to the existing NeRF models. Our code and data are available at the project website https://github.com/JokerYan/NeRF-DS.

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 25, 2023

RayGauss: Volumetric Gaussian-Based Ray Casting for Photorealistic Novel View Synthesis

Differentiable volumetric rendering-based methods made significant progress in novel view synthesis. On one hand, innovative methods have replaced the Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) network with locally parameterized structures, enabling high-quality renderings in a reasonable time. On the other hand, approaches have used differentiable splatting instead of NeRF's ray casting to optimize radiance fields rapidly using Gaussian kernels, allowing for fine adaptation to the scene. However, differentiable ray casting of irregularly spaced kernels has been scarcely explored, while splatting, despite enabling fast rendering times, is susceptible to clearly visible artifacts. Our work closes this gap by providing a physically consistent formulation of the emitted radiance c and density {\sigma}, decomposed with Gaussian functions associated with Spherical Gaussians/Harmonics for all-frequency colorimetric representation. We also introduce a method enabling differentiable ray casting of irregularly distributed Gaussians using an algorithm that integrates radiance fields slab by slab and leverages a BVH structure. This allows our approach to finely adapt to the scene while avoiding splatting artifacts. As a result, we achieve superior rendering quality compared to the state-of-the-art while maintaining reasonable training times and achieving inference speeds of 25 FPS on the Blender dataset. Project page with videos and code: https://raygauss.github.io/

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 6, 2024 2

Mapping gravitational-wave backgrounds in modified theories of gravity using pulsar timing arrays

We extend our previous work on applying CMB techniques to the mapping of gravitational-wave backgrounds to backgrounds which have non-GR polarisations. Our analysis and results are presented in the context of pulsar-timing array observations, but the overarching methods are general, and can be easily applied to LIGO or eLISA observations using appropriately modified response functions. Analytic expressions for the pulsar-timing response to gravitational waves with non-GR polarisation are given for each mode of a spin-weighted spherical-harmonic decomposition of the background, which permit the signal to be mapped across the sky to any desired resolution. We also derive the pulsar-timing overlap reduction functions for the various non-GR polarisations, finding analytic forms for anisotropic backgrounds with scalar-transverse ("breathing") and vector-longitudinal polarisations, and a semi-analytic form for scalar-longitudinal backgrounds. Our results indicate that pulsar-timing observations will be completely insensitive to scalar-transverse mode anisotropies in the polarisation amplitude beyond dipole, and anisotropies in the power beyond quadrupole. Analogously to our previous findings that pulsar-timing observations lack sensitivity to tensor-curl modes for a transverse-traceless tensor background, we also find insensitivity to vector-curl modes for a vector-longitudinal background.

  • 3 authors
·
Jun 29, 2015

ConvNets for Counting: Object Detection of Transient Phenomena in Steelpan Drums

We train an object detector built from convolutional neural networks to count interference fringes in elliptical antinode regions in frames of high-speed video recordings of transient oscillations in Caribbean steelpan drums illuminated by electronic speckle pattern interferometry (ESPI). The annotations provided by our model aim to contribute to the understanding of time-dependent behavior in such drums by tracking the development of sympathetic vibration modes. The system is trained on a dataset of crowdsourced human-annotated images obtained from the Zooniverse Steelpan Vibrations Project. Due to the small number of human-annotated images and the ambiguity of the annotation task, we also evaluate the model on a large corpus of synthetic images whose properties have been matched to the real images by style transfer using a Generative Adversarial Network. Applying the model to thousands of unlabeled video frames, we measure oscillations consistent with audio recordings of these drum strikes. One unanticipated result is that sympathetic oscillations of higher-octave notes significantly precede the rise in sound intensity of the corresponding second harmonic tones; the mechanism responsible for this remains unidentified. This paper primarily concerns the development of the predictive model; further exploration of the steelpan images and deeper physical insights await its further application.

  • 2 authors
·
Jan 31, 2021

Model-agnostic search for the quasinormal modes of gravitational wave echoes

Post-merger gravitational wave echoes provide a unique opportunity to probe the near-horizon structure of astrophysical black holes, that may be modified due to non-perturbative quantum gravity phenomena. However, since the waveform is subject to large theoretical uncertainties, it is necessary to develop model-agnostic search methods for detecting echoes from observational data. A promising strategy is to identify the characteristic quasinormal modes (QNMs) associated with echoes, {\it in frequency space}, which complements existing searches of quasiperiodic pulses in time. In this study, we build upon our previous work targeting these modes by incorporating relative phase information to optimize the Bayesian search algorithm. Using a new phase-marginalized likelihood, the performance can be significantly improved for well-resolved QNMs. This enables an efficient model-agnostic search for QNMs of different shapes by using a simple search template. To demonstrate the robustness of the search algorithm, we construct four complementary benchmarks for the echo waveform that span a diverse range of different theoretical possibilities for the near-horizon structure. We then validate our Bayesian search algorithms by injecting the benchmark models into different realizations of Gaussian noise. Using two types of phase-marginalized likelihoods, we find that the search algorithm can efficiently detect the corresponding QNMs. Therefore, our search strategy provides a concrete Bayesian and model-agnostic approach to "quantum black hole seismology".

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 2, 2023

Mixed Neural Voxels for Fast Multi-view Video Synthesis

Synthesizing high-fidelity videos from real-world multi-view input is challenging because of the complexities of real-world environments and highly dynamic motions. Previous works based on neural radiance fields have demonstrated high-quality reconstructions of dynamic scenes. However, training such models on real-world scenes is time-consuming, usually taking days or weeks. In this paper, we present a novel method named MixVoxels to better represent the dynamic scenes with fast training speed and competitive rendering qualities. The proposed MixVoxels represents the 4D dynamic scenes as a mixture of static and dynamic voxels and processes them with different networks. In this way, the computation of the required modalities for static voxels can be processed by a lightweight model, which essentially reduces the amount of computation, especially for many daily dynamic scenes dominated by the static background. To separate the two kinds of voxels, we propose a novel variation field to estimate the temporal variance of each voxel. For the dynamic voxels, we design an inner-product time query method to efficiently query multiple time steps, which is essential to recover the high-dynamic motions. As a result, with 15 minutes of training for dynamic scenes with inputs of 300-frame videos, MixVoxels achieves better PSNR than previous methods. Codes and trained models are available at https://github.com/fengres/mixvoxels

  • 5 authors
·
Nov 30, 2022

Analytical sensitivity curves of the second-generation time-delay interferometry

Forthcoming space-based gravitational-wave (GW) detectors will employ second-generation time-delay interferometry (TDI) to suppress laser frequency noise and achieve the sensitivity required for GW detection. We introduce an inverse light-path operator P_{i_{1}i_{2}i_{3}ldots i_{n-1}i_{n}}, which enables simple representation of second-generation TDI combinations and a concise description of light propagation. Analytical expressions and high-accuracy approximate formulas are derived for the sky- and polarization-averaged response functions, noise power spectral densities (PSDs), and sensitivity curves of TDI Michelson, (alpha,beta,gamma), Monitor, Beacon, Relay, and Sagnac combinations, as well as their orthogonal A, E, T channels. Our results show that: (i) second-generation TDIs have the same sensitivities as their first-generation counterparts; (ii) the A, E, T sensitivities and the optimal sensitivity are independent of the TDI generation and specific combination; (iii) the A and E channels have equal averaged responses, noise PSDs, and sensitivities, while the T channel has much weaker response and sensitivity at low frequencies (2pi fL/clesssim3); (iv) except for the (alpha,beta,gamma) and zeta combinations and the T channel, all sensitivity curves exhibit a flat section in the range f_{n}<flesssim 1.5/(2pi L/c), where the noise-balance frequency f_{n} separates the proof-mass- and optical-path-dominated regimes, while the response-transition frequency sim 1.5/(2pi L/c) separates the response function's low- and high-frequency behaviors; (v) the averaged response, noise PSD, and sensitivity of zeta scales with those of the T channel. These analytical and approximate formulations provide useful benchmarks for instrument optimization and data-analysis studies for future space-based GW detectors.

  • 1 authors
·
Nov 3

Forecasting Thermoacoustic Instabilities in Liquid Propellant Rocket Engines Using Multimodal Bayesian Deep Learning

The 100 MW cryogenic liquid oxygen/hydrogen multi-injector combustor BKD operated by the DLR Institute of Space Propulsion is a research platform that allows the study of thermoacoustic instabilities under realistic conditions, representative of small upper stage rocket engines. We use data from BKD experimental campaigns in which the static chamber pressure and fuel-oxidizer ratio are varied such that the first tangential mode of the combustor is excited under some conditions. We train an autoregressive Bayesian neural network model to forecast the amplitude of the dynamic pressure time series, inputting multiple sensor measurements (injector pressure/ temperature measurements, static chamber pressure, high-frequency dynamic pressure measurements, high-frequency OH* chemiluminescence measurements) and future flow rate control signals. The Bayesian nature of our algorithms allows us to work with a dataset whose size is restricted by the expense of each experimental run, without making overconfident extrapolations. We find that the networks are able to accurately forecast the evolution of the pressure amplitude and anticipate instability events on unseen experimental runs 500 milliseconds in advance. We compare the predictive accuracy of multiple models using different combinations of sensor inputs. We find that the high-frequency dynamic pressure signal is particularly informative. We also use the technique of integrated gradients to interpret the influence of different sensor inputs on the model prediction. The negative log-likelihood of data points in the test dataset indicates that predictive uncertainties are well-characterized by our Bayesian model and simulating a sensor failure event results as expected in a dramatic increase in the epistemic component of the uncertainty.

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 1, 2021

Dynamic Modeling and Vibration Analysis of Large Deployable Mesh Reflectors

Large deployable mesh reflectors are essential for space applications, providing precise reflecting surfaces for high-gain antennas used in satellite communications, Earth observation, and deep-space missions. During on-orbit missions, active shape adjustment and attitude control are crucial for maintaining surface accuracy and proper orientation for these reflectors, ensuring optimal performance. Preventing resonance through thorough dynamic modeling and vibration analysis is vital to avoid structural damage and ensure stability and reliability. Existing dynamic modeling approaches, such as wave and finite element methods, often fail to accurately predict dynamic responses due to the limited capability of handling three-dimensional reflectors or the oversimplification of cable members of a reflector. This paper proposes the Cartesian spatial discretization method for dynamic modeling and vibration analysis of cable-network structures in large deployable mesh reflectors. This method defines cable member positions as a summation of internal and boundary-induced terms within a global Cartesian coordinate system. Numerical simulation on a two-dimensional cable-network structure and a center-feed mesh reflector demonstrates the superiority of the proposed method over traditional approaches, highlighting its accuracy and versatility, and establishing it as a robust tool for analyzing three-dimensional complex reflector configurations.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 23, 2024

GENIE: Gaussian Encoding for Neural Radiance Fields Interactive Editing

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) and Gaussian Splatting (GS) have recently transformed 3D scene representation and rendering. NeRF achieves high-fidelity novel view synthesis by learning volumetric representations through neural networks, but its implicit encoding makes editing and physical interaction challenging. In contrast, GS represents scenes as explicit collections of Gaussian primitives, enabling real-time rendering, faster training, and more intuitive manipulation. This explicit structure has made GS particularly well-suited for interactive editing and integration with physics-based simulation. In this paper, we introduce GENIE (Gaussian Encoding for Neural Radiance Fields Interactive Editing), a hybrid model that combines the photorealistic rendering quality of NeRF with the editable and structured representation of GS. Instead of using spherical harmonics for appearance modeling, we assign each Gaussian a trainable feature embedding. These embeddings are used to condition a NeRF network based on the k nearest Gaussians to each query point. To make this conditioning efficient, we introduce Ray-Traced Gaussian Proximity Search (RT-GPS), a fast nearest Gaussian search based on a modified ray-tracing pipeline. We also integrate a multi-resolution hash grid to initialize and update Gaussian features. Together, these components enable real-time, locality-aware editing: as Gaussian primitives are repositioned or modified, their interpolated influence is immediately reflected in the rendered output. By combining the strengths of implicit and explicit representations, GENIE supports intuitive scene manipulation, dynamic interaction, and compatibility with physical simulation, bridging the gap between geometry-based editing and neural rendering. The code can be found under (https://github.com/MikolajZielinski/genie)

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 4 2

Parameter estimation from the core-bounce phase of rotating core collapse supernovae in real interferometer noise

In this work we propose an analytical model that reproduces the core-bounds phase of gravitational waves (GW) of Rapidly Rotating (RR) from Core Collapse Supernovae (CCSNe), as a function of three parameters, the arrival time tau, the ratio of the kinetic and potential energy beta and a phenomenological parameter alpha related to rotation and equation of state (EOS). To validate the model we use 126 waveforms from the Richers catalog Richers_2017 selected with the criteria of exploring a range of rotation profiles, and involving EOS. To quantify the degree of accuracy of the proposed model, with a particular focus on the rotation parameter beta, we show that the average Fitting Factor (FF) between the simulated waveforms with the templates is 94.4\%. In order to estimate the parameters we propose a frequentist matched filtering approach in real interferometric noise which does not require assigning any priors. We use the Matched Filter (MF) technique, where we inject a bank of templates considering simulated colored Gaussian noise and the real noise of O3L1. For example for A300w6.00\_BHBLP at 10Kpc we obtain a standar deviation of sigma = 3.34times 10^{-3} for simulated colored Gaussian noise and sigma= 1.46times 10^{-2} for real noise. On the other hand, from the asymptotic expansion of the variance we obtain the theoretical minimum error for beta at 10 kpc and optimal orientation. The estimation error in this case is from 10^{-2} to 10^{-3} as beta increases. We show that the results of the estimation error of beta for the 3-parameter space (3D) is consistent with the single-parameter space (1D), which allows us to conclude that beta is decoupled from the others two parameters.

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 3, 2023

KETJU -- resolving small-scale supermassive black hole dynamics in GADGET-4

We present the new public version of the KETJU supermassive black hole (SMBH) dynamics module, as implemented into GADGET-4. KETJU adds a small region around each SMBH where the dynamics of the SMBHs and stellar particles are integrated using an algorithmically regularised integrator instead of the leapfrog integrator with gravitational softening used by GADGET-4. This enables modelling SMBHs as point particles even during close interactions with stellar particles or other SMBHs, effectively removing the spatial resolution limitation caused by gravitational softening. KETJU also includes post-Newtonian corrections, which allows following the dynamics of SMBH binaries to sub-parsec scales and down to tens of Schwarzschild radii. Systems with multiple SMBHs are also supported, with the code also including the leading non-linear cross terms that appear in the post-Newtonian equations for such systems. We present tests of the code showing that it correctly captures, at sufficient mass resolution, the sinking driven by dynamical friction and binary hardening driven by stellar scattering. We also present an example application demonstrating how the code can be applied to study the dynamics of SMBHs in mergers of multiple galaxies and the effect they have on the properties of the surrounding galaxy. We expect that the presented KETJU SMBH dynamics module can also be straightforwardly incorporated into other codes similar to GADGET-4, which would allow coupling small-scale SMBH dynamics to the rich variety of galactic physics models that exist in the literature.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 8, 2023

Lighting Every Darkness with 3DGS: Fast Training and Real-Time Rendering for HDR View Synthesis

Volumetric rendering based methods, like NeRF, excel in HDR view synthesis from RAWimages, especially for nighttime scenes. While, they suffer from long training times and cannot perform real-time rendering due to dense sampling requirements. The advent of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) enables real-time rendering and faster training. However, implementing RAW image-based view synthesis directly using 3DGS is challenging due to its inherent drawbacks: 1) in nighttime scenes, extremely low SNR leads to poor structure-from-motion (SfM) estimation in distant views; 2) the limited representation capacity of spherical harmonics (SH) function is unsuitable for RAW linear color space; and 3) inaccurate scene structure hampers downstream tasks such as refocusing. To address these issues, we propose LE3D (Lighting Every darkness with 3DGS). Our method proposes Cone Scatter Initialization to enrich the estimation of SfM, and replaces SH with a Color MLP to represent the RAW linear color space. Additionally, we introduce depth distortion and near-far regularizations to improve the accuracy of scene structure for downstream tasks. These designs enable LE3D to perform real-time novel view synthesis, HDR rendering, refocusing, and tone-mapping changes. Compared to previous volumetric rendering based methods, LE3D reduces training time to 1% and improves rendering speed by up to 4,000 times for 2K resolution images in terms of FPS. Code and viewer can be found in https://github.com/Srameo/LE3D .

  • 7 authors
·
Jun 10, 2024 5

Gravitational waves in massive gravity: Waveforms generated by a particle plunging into a black hole and the excitation of quasinormal modes and quasibound states

With the aim of testing massive gravity in the context of black hole physics, we investigate the gravitational radiation emitted by a massive particle plunging into a Schwarzschild black hole from slightly below the innermost stable circular orbit. To do so, we first construct the quasinormal and quasibound resonance spectra of the spin-2 massive field for odd and even parity. Then, we compute the waveforms produced by the plunging particle and study their spectral content. This allows us to highlight and interpret important phenomena in the plunge regime, including (i) the excitation of quasibound states, with particular emphasis on the amplification and slow decay of the post-ringdown phase of the even-parity dipolar mode due to harmonic resonance; (ii) during the adiabatic phase, the waveform emitted by the plunging particle is very well described by the waveform emitted by the particle living on the innermost stable circular orbit, and (iii) the regularized waveforms and their unregularized counterparts constructed from the quasinormal mode spectrum are in excellent agreement. Finally, we construct, for arbitrary directions of observation and, in particular, outside the orbital plane of the plunging particle, the regularized multipolar waveforms, i.e., the waveforms constructed by summing over partial waveforms.

  • 1 authors
·
Nov 25, 2024

Fully Compressible Magnetohydrodynamic Simulations of Solar Convection Zones with CHORUS++

The objective of this study is to develop a fully compressible magnetohydrodynamic solver for fast simulations of the global dynamo of the Sun using unstructured grids and GPUs. Accurate modeling of the Sun's convective layers is vital to predicting the Sun's behavior, including the solar dynamo and sunspot cycles. Currently, there are many efficient codes capable of conducting these large simulations; however, many assume an anealastic density distribution. The anelastic assumption is capable of producing accurate results for low mach numbers; however, it fails in regions with a higher mach number and a fully compressible flow must be considered. To avoid these issues, Wang et al. [1] created a Compressible High-ORder Unstructured Spectral difference (CHORUS) code for simulating fluid dynamics inside stars and planets. CHORUS++ augmented the CHORUS code to adopt a higher degree of polynomials by using cubed-sphere meshing and transfinite mapping to perform simulations on unstructured grids [2]. Recently, CHORUS++ was further developed for parallel magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) solutions on GPUs at Clarkson University. In this study the solar benchmark problems presented by Chen et al. [2] are extended to unsteady solar dynamo problems, with two different density scale heights. The CHORUS-MHD code is further accelerated by multiple GPUs and used to successfully solve these solar dynamo benchmark problems. [1] Wang, J., Liang, C., and Miesch, M. S., "A Compressible High-Order Unstructured Spectral Difference Code for Stratified Convection in Rotating Spherical Shells," Journal of Computational Physics, Vol. 290, 2015, pp. 90-111. [2] Chen, K., Liang, C., and Wan, M., "Arbitrarily high-order accurate simulations of compressible rotationally constrained convection using a transfinite mapping on cubed-sphere grids," Physics of Fluids, Vol. 35, 2023, p. 086120.

  • 2 authors
·
Feb 24

NeuRBF: A Neural Fields Representation with Adaptive Radial Basis Functions

We present a novel type of neural fields that uses general radial bases for signal representation. State-of-the-art neural fields typically rely on grid-based representations for storing local neural features and N-dimensional linear kernels for interpolating features at continuous query points. The spatial positions of their neural features are fixed on grid nodes and cannot well adapt to target signals. Our method instead builds upon general radial bases with flexible kernel position and shape, which have higher spatial adaptivity and can more closely fit target signals. To further improve the channel-wise capacity of radial basis functions, we propose to compose them with multi-frequency sinusoid functions. This technique extends a radial basis to multiple Fourier radial bases of different frequency bands without requiring extra parameters, facilitating the representation of details. Moreover, by marrying adaptive radial bases with grid-based ones, our hybrid combination inherits both adaptivity and interpolation smoothness. We carefully designed weighting schemes to let radial bases adapt to different types of signals effectively. Our experiments on 2D image and 3D signed distance field representation demonstrate the higher accuracy and compactness of our method than prior arts. When applied to neural radiance field reconstruction, our method achieves state-of-the-art rendering quality, with small model size and comparable training speed.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 27, 2023 2

OmniZoomer: Learning to Move and Zoom in on Sphere at High-Resolution

Omnidirectional images (ODIs) have become increasingly popular, as their large field-of-view (FoV) can offer viewers the chance to freely choose the view directions in immersive environments such as virtual reality. The M\"obius transformation is typically employed to further provide the opportunity for movement and zoom on ODIs, but applying it to the image level often results in blurry effect and aliasing problem. In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning-based approach, called OmniZoomer, to incorporate the M\"obius transformation into the network for movement and zoom on ODIs. By learning various transformed feature maps under different conditions, the network is enhanced to handle the increasing edge curvatures, which alleviates the blurry effect. Moreover, to address the aliasing problem, we propose two key components. Firstly, to compensate for the lack of pixels for describing curves, we enhance the feature maps in the high-resolution (HR) space and calculate the transformed index map with a spatial index generation module. Secondly, considering that ODIs are inherently represented in the spherical space, we propose a spherical resampling module that combines the index map and HR feature maps to transform the feature maps for better spherical correlation. The transformed feature maps are decoded to output a zoomed ODI. Experiments show that our method can produce HR and high-quality ODIs with the flexibility to move and zoom in to the object of interest. Project page is available at http://vlislab22.github.io/OmniZoomer/.

  • 6 authors
·
Aug 15, 2023

Pattern and Origin for the Extreme γ-ray Flares of 3C 454.3 and 3C 279: An Astrophysical Critical Damper?

We apply a Gaussian process method to the extreme gamma-ray flares of 3C 454.3 and 3C 279 to discover the variable patterns and then to investigate the physical origins of the giant flares. The kernels of stochastically driven damped simple harmonic oscillator (SHO), the damped random-walk (DRW), and Matrm ern-3/2 are respectively used to describe the adaptive-binning gamma-ray light curves of the two flares. Our findings show that both the extreme gamma-ray flares of 3C 454.3 and 3C 279 clearly prefer the SHO kernel in the over-damped mode and the Matrm ern-3/2 kernel over the DRW kernel. The resulted SHO and Matrm ern-3/2 power spectral densities (PSDs) are the same for each object, with the index changing from -4 at high frequencies to 0 at low frequencies. The patterns of the two flares are both approaching the critical damping mode with the quality factor Q approx 0.4 (i.e., the damping ratio eta approx 1.25), but with slightly different damping timescales. The characteristic timescale (corresponding to the broken frequency in the PSD) for 3C 454.3 is 2-3 days and 3-5 days for 3C 279. The variable patterns found here suggest that once the system responds to the energy injection disturbance, the release of the energy in the system is finished abruptly. The obtained timescale provides a constraint on the size of energy dissipation region for each source.

  • 5 authors
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Feb 28

Flat-sky Angular Power Spectra Revisited

We revisit the flat-sky approximation for evaluating the angular power spectra of projected random fields by retaining information about the correlations along the line of sight. With broad, overlapping radial window functions, these line-of-sight correlations are suppressed and are ignored in the Limber approximation. However, retaining the correlations is important for narrow window functions or unequal-time spectra but introduces significant computational difficulties due to the highly oscillatory nature of the integrands involved. We deal with the integral over line-of-sight wave-modes in the flat-sky approximation analytically, using the FFTlog expansion of the 3D power spectrum. This results in an efficient computational method, which is a substantial improvement compared to any full-sky approaches. We apply our results to galaxy clustering (with and without redshift-space distortions), CMB lensing and galaxy lensing observables. For clustering, we find excellent agreement with the full-sky results on large (percent-level agreement) and intermediate or small (subpercent agreement) scales, dramatically out-performing the Limber approximation for both wide and narrow window functions, and in equal- and unequal-time cases. In the case of lensing, we show on the full sky that the angular power spectrum of the convergence can be very well approximated by projecting the 3D Laplacian (rather than the correct angular Laplacian) of the gravitational potential, even on large scales. Combining this approximation with our flat-sky techniques provides an efficient and accurate evaluation of the CMB lensing angular power spectrum on all scales.

  • 3 authors
·
Jul 25, 2023

TempoRL: laser pulse temporal shape optimization with Deep Reinforcement Learning

High Power Laser's (HPL) optimal performance is essential for the success of a wide variety of experimental tasks related to light-matter interactions. Traditionally, HPL parameters are optimised in an automated fashion relying on black-box numerical methods. However, these can be demanding in terms of computational resources and usually disregard transient and complex dynamics. Model-free Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) offers a promising alternative framework for optimising HPL performance since it allows to tune the control parameters as a function of system states subject to nonlinear temporal dynamics without requiring an explicit dynamics model of those. Furthermore, DRL aims to find an optimal control policy rather than a static parameter configuration, particularly suitable for dynamic processes involving sequential decision-making. This is particularly relevant as laser systems are typically characterised by dynamic rather than static traits. Hence the need for a strategy to choose the control applied based on the current context instead of one single optimal control configuration. This paper investigates the potential of DRL in improving the efficiency and safety of HPL control systems. We apply this technique to optimise the temporal profile of laser pulses in the L1 pump laser hosted at the ELI Beamlines facility. We show how to adapt DRL to the setting of spectral phase control by solely tuning dispersion coefficients of the spectral phase and reaching pulses similar to transform limited with full-width at half-maximum (FWHM) of ca1.6 ps.

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 20, 2023

On the Dynamics of Acceleration in First order Gradient Methods

Ever since the original algorithm by Nesterov (1983), the true nature of the acceleration phenomenon has remained elusive, with various interpretations of why the method is actually faster. The diagnosis of the algorithm through the lens of Ordinary Differential Equations (ODEs) and the corresponding dynamical system formulation to explain the underlying dynamics has a rich history. In the literature, the ODEs that explain algorithms are typically derived by considering the limiting case of the algorithm maps themselves, that is, an ODE formulation follows the development of an algorithm. This obfuscates the underlying higher order principles and thus provides little evidence of the working of the algorithm. Such has been the case with Nesterov algorithm and the various analogies used to describe the acceleration phenomena, viz, momentum associated with the rolling of a Heavy-Ball down a slope, Hessian damping etc. The main focus of our work is to ideate the genesis of the Nesterov algorithm from the viewpoint of dynamical systems leading to demystifying the mathematical rigour behind the algorithm. Instead of reverse engineering ODEs from discrete algorithms, this work explores tools from the recently developed control paradigm titled Passivity and Immersion approach and the Geometric Singular Perturbation theory which are applied to arrive at the formulation of a dynamical system that explains and models the acceleration phenomena. This perspective helps to gain insights into the various terms present and the sequence of steps used in Nesterovs accelerated algorithm for the smooth strongly convex and the convex case. The framework can also be extended to derive the acceleration achieved using the triple momentum method and provides justifications for the non-convergence to the optimal solution in the Heavy-Ball method.

  • 5 authors
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Sep 22

Characterising gravitational wave stochastic background anisotropy with Pulsar Timing Arrays

Detecting a stochastic gravitational wave background, particularly radiation from individually unresolvable super-massive black hole binary systems, is one of the primary targets for Pulsar Timing Arrays. Increasingly more stringent upper limits are being set on these signals under the assumption that the background radiation is isotropic. However, some level of anisotropy may be present and the characterisation of the power at different angular scales carries important information. We show that the standard analysis for isotropic backgrounds can be generalised in a conceptually straightforward way to the case of generic anisotropic background radiation by decomposing the angular distribution of the gravitational wave power on the sky into multipole moments. We introduce the concept of generalised overlap reduction functions which characterise the effect of the anisotropy multipoles on the correlation of the timing residuals from the pulsars timed by a Pulsar Timing Array. In a search for a signal characterised by a generic anisotropy, the generalised overlap reduction functions play the role of the so-called Hellings and Downs curve used for isotropic radiation. We compute the generalised overlap reduction functions for a generic level of anisotropy and Pulsar Timing Array configuration. We also provide an order of magnitude estimate of the level of anisotropy that can be expected in the background generated by super-massive black hole binary systems.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 23, 2013

Deep Learning solutions to singular ordinary differential equations: from special functions to spherical accretion

Singular regular points often arise in differential equations describing physical phenomena such as fluid dynamics, electromagnetism, and gravitation. Traditional numerical techniques often fail or become unstable near these points, requiring the use of semi-analytical tools, such as series expansions and perturbative methods, in combination with numerical algorithms; or to invoke more sophisticated methods. In this work, we take an alternative route and leverage the power of machine learning to exploit Physics Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) as a modern approach to solving ordinary differential equations with singular points. PINNs utilize deep learning architectures to approximate solutions by embedding the differential equations into the loss function of the neural network. We discuss the advantages of PINNs in handling singularities, particularly their ability to bypass traditional grid-based methods and provide smooth approximations across irregular regions. Techniques for enhancing the accuracy of PINNs near singular points, such as adaptive loss weighting, are used in order to achieve high efficiency in the training of the network. We exemplify our results by studying four differential equations of interest in mathematics and gravitation -- the Legendre equation, the hypergeometric equation, the solution for black hole space-times in theories of Lorentz violating gravity, and the spherical accretion of a perfect fluid in a Schwarzschild geometry.

  • 3 authors
·
Sep 30, 2024

Huge Ensembles Part I: Design of Ensemble Weather Forecasts using Spherical Fourier Neural Operators

Studying low-likelihood high-impact extreme weather events in a warming world is a significant and challenging task for current ensemble forecasting systems. While these systems presently use up to 100 members, larger ensembles could enrich the sampling of internal variability. They may capture the long tails associated with climate hazards better than traditional ensemble sizes. Due to computational constraints, it is infeasible to generate huge ensembles (comprised of 1,000-10,000 members) with traditional, physics-based numerical models. In this two-part paper, we replace traditional numerical simulations with machine learning (ML) to generate hindcasts of huge ensembles. In Part I, we construct an ensemble weather forecasting system based on Spherical Fourier Neural Operators (SFNO), and we discuss important design decisions for constructing such an ensemble. The ensemble represents model uncertainty through perturbed-parameter techniques, and it represents initial condition uncertainty through bred vectors, which sample the fastest growing modes of the forecast. Using the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts Integrated Forecasting System (IFS) as a baseline, we develop an evaluation pipeline composed of mean, spectral, and extreme diagnostics. Using large-scale, distributed SFNOs with 1.1 billion learned parameters, we achieve calibrated probabilistic forecasts. As the trajectories of the individual members diverge, the ML ensemble mean spectra degrade with lead time, consistent with physical expectations. However, the individual ensemble members' spectra stay constant with lead time. Therefore, these members simulate realistic weather states, and the ML ensemble thus passes a crucial spectral test in the literature. The IFS and ML ensembles have similar Extreme Forecast Indices, and we show that the ML extreme weather forecasts are reliable and discriminating.

  • 16 authors
·
Aug 6, 2024

Gaussian-Flow: 4D Reconstruction with Dynamic 3D Gaussian Particle

We introduce Gaussian-Flow, a novel point-based approach for fast dynamic scene reconstruction and real-time rendering from both multi-view and monocular videos. In contrast to the prevalent NeRF-based approaches hampered by slow training and rendering speeds, our approach harnesses recent advancements in point-based 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). Specifically, a novel Dual-Domain Deformation Model (DDDM) is proposed to explicitly model attribute deformations of each Gaussian point, where the time-dependent residual of each attribute is captured by a polynomial fitting in the time domain, and a Fourier series fitting in the frequency domain. The proposed DDDM is capable of modeling complex scene deformations across long video footage, eliminating the need for training separate 3DGS for each frame or introducing an additional implicit neural field to model 3D dynamics. Moreover, the explicit deformation modeling for discretized Gaussian points ensures ultra-fast training and rendering of a 4D scene, which is comparable to the original 3DGS designed for static 3D reconstruction. Our proposed approach showcases a substantial efficiency improvement, achieving a 5times faster training speed compared to the per-frame 3DGS modeling. In addition, quantitative results demonstrate that the proposed Gaussian-Flow significantly outperforms previous leading methods in novel view rendering quality. Project page: https://nju-3dv.github.io/projects/Gaussian-Flow

  • 4 authors
·
Dec 6, 2023

Solving High Frequency and Multi-Scale PDEs with Gaussian Processes

Machine learning based solvers have garnered much attention in physical simulation and scientific computing, with a prominent example, physics-informed neural networks (PINNs). However, PINNs often struggle to solve high-frequency and multi-scale PDEs, which can be due to spectral bias during neural network training. To address this problem, we resort to the Gaussian process (GP) framework. To flexibly capture the dominant frequencies, we model the power spectrum of the PDE solution with a student t mixture or Gaussian mixture. We apply the inverse Fourier transform to obtain the covariance function (by Wiener-Khinchin theorem). The covariance derived from the Gaussian mixture spectrum corresponds to the known spectral mixture kernel. Next, we estimate the mixture weights in the log domain, which we show is equivalent to placing a Jeffreys prior. It automatically induces sparsity, prunes excessive frequencies, and adjusts the remaining toward the ground truth. Third, to enable efficient and scalable computation on massive collocation points, which are critical to capture high frequencies, we place the collocation points on a grid, and multiply our covariance function at each input dimension. We use the GP conditional mean to predict the solution and its derivatives so as to fit the boundary condition and the equation itself. As a result, we can derive a Kronecker product structure in the covariance matrix. We use Kronecker product properties and multilinear algebra to promote computational efficiency and scalability, without low-rank approximations. We show the advantage of our method in systematic experiments. The code is released at https://github.com/xuangu-fang/Gaussian-Process-Slover-for-High-Freq-PDE.

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 8, 2023

VolSegGS: Segmentation and Tracking in Dynamic Volumetric Scenes via Deformable 3D Gaussians

Visualization of large-scale time-dependent simulation data is crucial for domain scientists to analyze complex phenomena, but it demands significant I/O bandwidth, storage, and computational resources. To enable effective visualization on local, low-end machines, recent advances in view synthesis techniques, such as neural radiance fields, utilize neural networks to generate novel visualizations for volumetric scenes. However, these methods focus on reconstruction quality rather than facilitating interactive visualization exploration, such as feature extraction and tracking. We introduce VolSegGS, a novel Gaussian splatting framework that supports interactive segmentation and tracking in dynamic volumetric scenes for exploratory visualization and analysis. Our approach utilizes deformable 3D Gaussians to represent a dynamic volumetric scene, allowing for real-time novel view synthesis. For accurate segmentation, we leverage the view-independent colors of Gaussians for coarse-level segmentation and refine the results with an affinity field network for fine-level segmentation. Additionally, by embedding segmentation results within the Gaussians, we ensure that their deformation enables continuous tracking of segmented regions over time. We demonstrate the effectiveness of VolSegGS with several time-varying datasets and compare our solutions against state-of-the-art methods. With the ability to interact with a dynamic scene in real time and provide flexible segmentation and tracking capabilities, VolSegGS offers a powerful solution under low computational demands. This framework unlocks exciting new possibilities for time-varying volumetric data analysis and visualization.

  • 2 authors
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Jul 16

Cybloids - Creation and Control of Cybernetic Colloids

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.

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 1, 2024

Diffusion Sampling with Momentum for Mitigating Divergence Artifacts

Despite the remarkable success of diffusion models in image generation, slow sampling remains a persistent issue. To accelerate the sampling process, prior studies have reformulated diffusion sampling as an ODE/SDE and introduced higher-order numerical methods. However, these methods often produce divergence artifacts, especially with a low number of sampling steps, which limits the achievable acceleration. In this paper, we investigate the potential causes of these artifacts and suggest that the small stability regions of these methods could be the principal cause. To address this issue, we propose two novel techniques. The first technique involves the incorporation of Heavy Ball (HB) momentum, a well-known technique for improving optimization, into existing diffusion numerical methods to expand their stability regions. We also prove that the resulting methods have first-order convergence. The second technique, called Generalized Heavy Ball (GHVB), constructs a new high-order method that offers a variable trade-off between accuracy and artifact suppression. Experimental results show that our techniques are highly effective in reducing artifacts and improving image quality, surpassing state-of-the-art diffusion solvers on both pixel-based and latent-based diffusion models for low-step sampling. Our research provides novel insights into the design of numerical methods for future diffusion work.

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 20, 2023

Wavehax: Aliasing-Free Neural Waveform Synthesis Based on 2D Convolution and Harmonic Prior for Reliable Complex Spectrogram Estimation

Neural vocoders often struggle with aliasing in latent feature spaces, caused by time-domain nonlinear operations and resampling layers. Aliasing folds high-frequency components into the low-frequency range, making aliased and original frequency components indistinguishable and introducing two practical issues. First, aliasing complicates the waveform generation process, as the subsequent layers must address these aliasing effects, increasing the computational complexity. Second, it limits extrapolation performance, particularly in handling high fundamental frequencies, which degrades the perceptual quality of generated speech waveforms. This paper demonstrates that 1) time-domain nonlinear operations inevitably introduce aliasing but provide a strong inductive bias for harmonic generation, and 2) time-frequency-domain processing can achieve aliasing-free waveform synthesis but lacks the inductive bias for effective harmonic generation. Building on this insight, we propose Wavehax, an aliasing-free neural WAVEform generator that integrates 2D convolution and a HArmonic prior for reliable Complex Spectrogram estimation. Experimental results show that Wavehax achieves speech quality comparable to existing high-fidelity neural vocoders and exhibits exceptional robustness in scenarios requiring high fundamental frequency extrapolation, where aliasing effects become typically severe. Moreover, Wavehax requires less than 5% of the multiply-accumulate operations and model parameters compared to HiFi-GAN V1, while achieving over four times faster CPU inference speed.

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 11, 2024

High-order finite element method for atomic structure calculations

We introduce featom, an open source code that implements a high-order finite element solver for the radial Schr\"odinger, Dirac, and Kohn-Sham equations. The formulation accommodates various mesh types, such as uniform or exponential, and the convergence can be systematically controlled by increasing the number and/or polynomial order of the finite element basis functions. The Dirac equation is solved using a squared Hamiltonian approach to eliminate spurious states. To address the slow convergence of the kappa=pm1 states due to divergent derivatives at the origin, we incorporate known asymptotic forms into the solutions. We achieve a high level of accuracy (10^{-8} Hartree) for total energies and eigenvalues of heavy atoms such as uranium in both Schr\"odinger and Dirac Kohn-Sham solutions. We provide detailed convergence studies and computational parameters required to attain commonly required accuracies. Finally, we compare our results with known analytic results as well as the results of other methods. In particular, we calculate benchmark results for atomic numbers (Z) from 1 to 92, verifying current benchmarks. We demonstrate significant speedup compared to the state-of-the-art shooting solver dftatom. An efficient, modular Fortran 2008 implementation, is provided under an open source, permissive license, including examples and tests, wherein particular emphasis is placed on the independence (no global variables), reusability, and generality of the individual routines.

  • 8 authors
·
Jul 11, 2023

Dynamical evolution of massless particles in star clusters with NBODY6++GPU-MASSLESS: I. Free-floating MLPs

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.

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 11, 2024

Robust Depth Linear Error Decomposition with Double Total Variation and Nuclear Norm for Dynamic MRI Reconstruction

Compressed Sensing (CS) significantly speeds up Magnetic Resonance Image (MRI) processing and achieves accurate MRI reconstruction from under-sampled k-space data. According to the current research, there are still several problems with dynamic MRI k-space reconstruction based on CS. 1) There are differences between the Fourier domain and the Image domain, and the differences between MRI processing of different domains need to be considered. 2) As three-dimensional data, dynamic MRI has its spatial-temporal characteristics, which need to calculate the difference and consistency of surface textures while preserving structural integrity and uniqueness. 3) Dynamic MRI reconstruction is time-consuming and computationally resource-dependent. In this paper, we propose a novel robust low-rank dynamic MRI reconstruction optimization model via highly under-sampled and Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) called the Robust Depth Linear Error Decomposition Model (RDLEDM). Our method mainly includes linear decomposition, double Total Variation (TV), and double Nuclear Norm (NN) regularizations. By adding linear image domain error analysis, the noise is reduced after under-sampled and DFT processing, and the anti-interference ability of the algorithm is enhanced. Double TV and NN regularizations can utilize both spatial-temporal characteristics and explore the complementary relationship between different dimensions in dynamic MRI sequences. In addition, Due to the non-smoothness and non-convexity of TV and NN terms, it is difficult to optimize the unified objective model. To address this issue, we utilize a fast algorithm by solving a primal-dual form of the original problem. Compared with five state-of-the-art methods, extensive experiments on dynamic MRI data demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed method in terms of both reconstruction accuracy and time complexity.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 23, 2023

Sound propagation in realistic interactive 3D scenes with parameterized sources using deep neural operators

We address the challenge of sound propagation simulations in 3D virtual rooms with moving sources, which have applications in virtual/augmented reality, game audio, and spatial computing. Solutions to the wave equation can describe wave phenomena such as diffraction and interference. However, simulating them using conventional numerical discretization methods with hundreds of source and receiver positions is intractable, making stimulating a sound field with moving sources impractical. To overcome this limitation, we propose using deep operator networks to approximate linear wave-equation operators. This enables the rapid prediction of sound propagation in realistic 3D acoustic scenes with moving sources, achieving millisecond-scale computations. By learning a compact surrogate model, we avoid the offline calculation and storage of impulse responses for all relevant source/listener pairs. Our experiments, including various complex scene geometries, show good agreement with reference solutions, with root mean squared errors ranging from 0.02 Pa to 0.10 Pa. Notably, our method signifies a paradigm shift as no prior machine learning approach has achieved precise predictions of complete wave fields within realistic domains. We anticipate that our findings will drive further exploration of deep neural operator methods, advancing research in immersive user experiences within virtual environments.

  • 5 authors
·
Aug 9, 2023

RED-PSM: Regularization by Denoising of Partially Separable Models for Dynamic Imaging

Dynamic imaging addresses the recovery of a time-varying 2D or 3D object at each time instant using its undersampled measurements. In particular, in the case of dynamic tomography, only a single projection at a single view angle may be available at a time, making the problem severely ill-posed. In this work, we propose an approach, RED-PSM, which combines for the first time two powerful techniques to address this challenging imaging problem. The first, are partially separable models, which have been used to efficiently introduce a low-rank prior for the spatio-temporal object. The second is the recent Regularization by Denoising (RED), which provides a flexible framework to exploit the impressive performance of state-of-the-art image denoising algorithms, for various inverse problems. We propose a partially separable objective with RED and a computationally efficient and scalable optimization scheme with variable splitting and ADMM. Theoretical analysis proves the convergence of our objective to a value corresponding to a stationary point satisfying the first-order optimality conditions. Convergence is accelerated by a particular projection-domain-based initialization. We demonstrate the performance and computational improvements of our proposed RED-PSM with a learned image denoiser by comparing it to a recent deep-prior-based method known as TD-DIP. Although the main focus is on dynamic tomography, we also show the performance advantages of RED-PSM in a cardiac dynamic MRI setting.

  • 3 authors
·
Apr 7, 2023

First Light And Reionisation Epoch Simulations (FLARES) I: Environmental Dependence of High-Redshift Galaxy Evolution

We introduce the First Light And Reionisation Epoch Simulations (FLARES), a suite of zoom simulations using the EAGLE model. We resimulate a range of overdensities during the Epoch of Reionisation (EoR) in order to build composite distribution functions, as well as explore the environmental dependence of galaxy formation and evolution during this critical period of galaxy assembly. The regions are selected from a large (3.2 ;cGpc)^{3} parent volume, based on their overdensity within a sphere of radius 14,h^{-1};cMpc. We then resimulate with full hydrodynamics, and employ a novel weighting scheme that allows the construction of composite distribution functions that are representative of the full parent volume. This significantly extends the dynamic range compared to smaller volume periodic simulations. We present an analysis of the galaxy stellar mass function (GSMF), the star formation rate distribution function (SFRF) and the star forming sequence (SFS) predicted by \flares, and compare to a number of observational and model constraints. We also analyse the environmental dependence over an unprecedented range of overdensity. Both the GSMF and the SFRF exhibit a clear double-Schechter form, up to the highest redshifts (z = 10). We also find no environmental dependence of the SFS normalisation. The increased dynamic range probed by FLARES will allow us to make predictions for a number of large area surveys that will probe the EoR in coming years, such as WFIRST and Euclid.

  • 7 authors
·
Apr 15, 2020

4D Gaussian Splatting: Towards Efficient Novel View Synthesis for Dynamic Scenes

We consider the problem of novel view synthesis (NVS) for dynamic scenes. Recent neural approaches have accomplished exceptional NVS results for static 3D scenes, but extensions to 4D time-varying scenes remain non-trivial. Prior efforts often encode dynamics by learning a canonical space plus implicit or explicit deformation fields, which struggle in challenging scenarios like sudden movements or capturing high-fidelity renderings. In this paper, we introduce 4D Gaussian Splatting (4DGS), a novel method that represents dynamic scenes with anisotropic 4D XYZT Gaussians, inspired by the success of 3D Gaussian Splatting in static scenes. We model dynamics at each timestamp by temporally slicing the 4D Gaussians, which naturally compose dynamic 3D Gaussians and can be seamlessly projected into images. As an explicit spatial-temporal representation, 4DGS demonstrates powerful capabilities for modeling complicated dynamics and fine details, especially for scenes with abrupt motions. We further implement our temporal slicing and splatting techniques in a highly optimized CUDA acceleration framework, achieving real-time inference rendering speeds of up to 277 FPS on an RTX 3090 GPU and 583 FPS on an RTX 4090 GPU. Rigorous evaluations on scenes with diverse motions showcase the superior efficiency and effectiveness of 4DGS, which consistently outperforms existing methods both quantitatively and qualitatively.

  • 6 authors
·
Feb 5, 2024

The nature of an imaginary quasi-periodic oscillation in the soft-to-hard transition of MAXI J1820+070

A recent study shows that if the power spectra (PS) of accreting compact objects consist of a combination of Lorentzian functions that are coherent in different energy bands but incoherent with each other, the same is true for the Real and Imaginary parts of the cross spectrum (CS). Using this idea, we discovered imaginary quasi-periodic oscillations (QPOs) in NICER observations of the black hole candidate MAXI J1820+070. The imaginary QPOs appear as narrow features with a small Real and large Imaginary part in the CS but are not significantly detected in the PS when they overlap in frequency with other variability components. The coherence function drops and the phase lags increase abruptly at the frequency of the imaginary QPO. We show that the multi-Lorentzian model that fits the PS and CS of the source in two energy bands correctly reproduces the lags and the coherence, and that the narrow drop of the coherence is caused by the interaction of the imaginary QPO with other variability components. The imaginary QPO appears only in the decay of the outburst, during the transition from the high-soft to the low-hard state of MAXI J1820+070, and its frequency decreases from approximately 5 Hz to around 1 Hz as the source spectrum hardens. We also analysed the earlier observations of the transition, where no narrow features were seen, and we identified a QPO in the PS that appears to evolve into the imaginary QPO as the source hardens. As for the type-B and C QPOs in this source, the rms spectrum of the imaginary QPO increases with energy. The lags of the imaginary QPO are similar to those of the type-B and C QPOs above 2 keV but differ from the lags of those other QPOs below that energy. While the properties of this imaginary QPO resemble those of type-C QPOs, we cannot rule out that it is a new type of QPO.

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 17

VI-Net: Boosting Category-level 6D Object Pose Estimation via Learning Decoupled Rotations on the Spherical Representations

Rotation estimation of high precision from an RGB-D object observation is a huge challenge in 6D object pose estimation, due to the difficulty of learning in the non-linear space of SO(3). In this paper, we propose a novel rotation estimation network, termed as VI-Net, to make the task easier by decoupling the rotation as the combination of a viewpoint rotation and an in-plane rotation. More specifically, VI-Net bases the feature learning on the sphere with two individual branches for the estimates of two factorized rotations, where a V-Branch is employed to learn the viewpoint rotation via binary classification on the spherical signals, while another I-Branch is used to estimate the in-plane rotation by transforming the signals to view from the zenith direction. To process the spherical signals, a Spherical Feature Pyramid Network is constructed based on a novel design of SPAtial Spherical Convolution (SPA-SConv), which settles the boundary problem of spherical signals via feature padding and realizesviewpoint-equivariant feature extraction by symmetric convolutional operations. We apply the proposed VI-Net to the challenging task of category-level 6D object pose estimation for predicting the poses of unknown objects without available CAD models; experiments on the benchmarking datasets confirm the efficacy of our method, which outperforms the existing ones with a large margin in the regime of high precision.

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 19, 2023

An Embedding-Dynamic Approach to Self-supervised Learning

A number of recent self-supervised learning methods have shown impressive performance on image classification and other tasks. A somewhat bewildering variety of techniques have been used, not always with a clear understanding of the reasons for their benefits, especially when used in combination. Here we treat the embeddings of images as point particles and consider model optimization as a dynamic process on this system of particles. Our dynamic model combines an attractive force for similar images, a locally dispersive force to avoid local collapse, and a global dispersive force to achieve a globally-homogeneous distribution of particles. The dynamic perspective highlights the advantage of using a delayed-parameter image embedding (a la BYOL) together with multiple views of the same image. It also uses a purely-dynamic local dispersive force (Brownian motion) that shows improved performance over other methods and does not require knowledge of other particle coordinates. The method is called MSBReg which stands for (i) a Multiview centroid loss, which applies an attractive force to pull different image view embeddings toward their centroid, (ii) a Singular value loss, which pushes the particle system toward spatially homogeneous density, (iii) a Brownian diffusive loss. We evaluate downstream classification performance of MSBReg on ImageNet as well as transfer learning tasks including fine-grained classification, multi-class object classification, object detection, and instance segmentation. In addition, we also show that applying our regularization term to other methods further improves their performance and stabilize the training by preventing a mode collapse.

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 7, 2022

simple-idealized-1d-nlse: Pseudo-Spectral Solver for the 1D Nonlinear Schrödinger Equation

We present an open-source Python implementation of an idealized high-order pseudo-spectral solver for the one-dimensional nonlinear Schr\"odinger equation (NLSE). The solver combines Fourier spectral spatial discretization with an adaptive eighth-order Dormand-Prince time integration scheme to achieve machine-precision conservation of mass and near-perfect preservation of momentum and energy for smooth solutions. The implementation accurately reproduces fundamental NLSE phenomena including soliton collisions with analytically predicted phase shifts, Akhmediev breather dynamics, and the development of modulation instability from noisy initial conditions. Four canonical test cases validate the numerical scheme: single soliton propagation, two-soliton elastic collision, breather evolution, and noise-seeded modulation instability. The solver employs a 2/3 dealiasing rule with exponential filtering to prevent aliasing errors from the cubic nonlinearity. Statistical analysis using Shannon, R\'enyi, and Tsallis entropies quantifies the spatio-temporal complexity of solutions, while phase space representations reveal the underlying coherence structure. The implementation prioritizes code transparency and educational accessibility over computational performance, providing a valuable pedagogical tool for exploring nonlinear wave dynamics. Complete source code, documentation, and example configurations are freely available, enabling reproducible computational experiments across diverse physical contexts where the NLSE governs wave evolution, including nonlinear optics, Bose-Einstein condensates, and ocean surface waves.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 6

DynamicScaler: Seamless and Scalable Video Generation for Panoramic Scenes

The increasing demand for immersive AR/VR applications and spatial intelligence has heightened the need to generate high-quality scene-level and 360{\deg} panoramic video. However, most video diffusion models are constrained by limited resolution and aspect ratio, which restricts their applicability to scene-level dynamic content synthesis. In this work, we propose the DynamicScaler, addressing these challenges by enabling spatially scalable and panoramic dynamic scene synthesis that preserves coherence across panoramic scenes of arbitrary size. Specifically, we introduce a Offset Shifting Denoiser, facilitating efficient, synchronous, and coherent denoising panoramic dynamic scenes via a diffusion model with fixed resolution through a seamless rotating Window, which ensures seamless boundary transitions and consistency across the entire panoramic space, accommodating varying resolutions and aspect ratios. Additionally, we employ a Global Motion Guidance mechanism to ensure both local detail fidelity and global motion continuity. Extensive experiments demonstrate our method achieves superior content and motion quality in panoramic scene-level video generation, offering a training-free, efficient, and scalable solution for immersive dynamic scene creation with constant VRAM consumption regardless of the output video resolution. Our project page is available at https://dynamic-scaler.pages.dev/.

  • 4 authors
·
Dec 15, 2024 2

GASP: Gaussian Splatting for Physic-Based Simulations

Physics simulation is paramount for modeling and utilizing 3D scenes in various real-world applications. However, integrating with state-of-the-art 3D scene rendering techniques such as Gaussian Splatting (GS) remains challenging. Existing models use additional meshing mechanisms, including triangle or tetrahedron meshing, marching cubes, or cage meshes. Alternatively, we can modify the physics-grounded Newtonian dynamics to align with 3D Gaussian components. Current models take the first-order approximation of a deformation map, which locally approximates the dynamics by linear transformations. In contrast, our GS for Physics-Based Simulations (GASP) pipeline uses parametrized flat Gaussian distributions. Consequently, the problem of modeling Gaussian components using the physics engine is reduced to working with 3D points. In our work, we present additional rules for manipulating Gaussians, demonstrating how to adapt the pipeline to incorporate meshes, control Gaussian sizes during simulations, and enhance simulation efficiency. This is achieved through the Gaussian grouping strategy, which implements hierarchical structuring and enables simulations to be performed exclusively on selected Gaussians. The resulting solution can be integrated into any physics engine that can be treated as a black box. As demonstrated in our studies, the proposed pipeline exhibits superior performance on a diverse range of benchmark datasets designed for 3D object rendering. The project webpage, which includes additional visualizations, can be found at https://waczjoan.github.io/GASP.

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 9, 2024

Generalization in diffusion models arises from geometry-adaptive harmonic representations

Deep neural networks (DNNs) trained for image denoising are able to generate high-quality samples with score-based reverse diffusion algorithms. These impressive capabilities seem to imply an escape from the curse of dimensionality, but recent reports of memorization of the training set raise the question of whether these networks are learning the "true" continuous density of the data. Here, we show that two DNNs trained on non-overlapping subsets of a dataset learn nearly the same score function, and thus the same density, when the number of training images is large enough. In this regime of strong generalization, diffusion-generated images are distinct from the training set, and are of high visual quality, suggesting that the inductive biases of the DNNs are well-aligned with the data density. We analyze the learned denoising functions and show that the inductive biases give rise to a shrinkage operation in a basis adapted to the underlying image. Examination of these bases reveals oscillating harmonic structures along contours and in homogeneous regions. We demonstrate that trained denoisers are inductively biased towards these geometry-adaptive harmonic bases since they arise not only when the network is trained on photographic images, but also when it is trained on image classes supported on low-dimensional manifolds for which the harmonic basis is suboptimal. Finally, we show that when trained on regular image classes for which the optimal basis is known to be geometry-adaptive and harmonic, the denoising performance of the networks is near-optimal.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 3, 2023

DDoS-UNet: Incorporating temporal information using Dynamic Dual-channel UNet for enhancing super-resolution of dynamic MRI

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) provides high spatial resolution and excellent soft-tissue contrast without using harmful ionising radiation. Dynamic MRI is an essential tool for interventions to visualise movements or changes of the target organ. However, such MRI acquisition with high temporal resolution suffers from limited spatial resolution - also known as the spatio-temporal trade-off of dynamic MRI. Several approaches, including deep learning based super-resolution approaches, have been proposed to mitigate this trade-off. Nevertheless, such an approach typically aims to super-resolve each time-point separately, treating them as individual volumes. This research addresses the problem by creating a deep learning model which attempts to learn both spatial and temporal relationships. A modified 3D UNet model, DDoS-UNet, is proposed - which takes the low-resolution volume of the current time-point along with a prior image volume. Initially, the network is supplied with a static high-resolution planning scan as the prior image along with the low-resolution input to super-resolve the first time-point. Then it continues step-wise by using the super-resolved time-points as the prior image while super-resolving the subsequent time-points. The model performance was tested with 3D dynamic data that was undersampled to different in-plane levels. The proposed network achieved an average SSIM value of 0.951pm0.017 while reconstructing the lowest resolution data (i.e. only 4\% of the k-space acquired) - which could result in a theoretical acceleration factor of 25. The proposed approach can be used to reduce the required scan-time while achieving high spatial resolution.

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 10, 2022

DynamicCity: Large-Scale LiDAR Generation from Dynamic Scenes

LiDAR scene generation has been developing rapidly recently. However, existing methods primarily focus on generating static and single-frame scenes, overlooking the inherently dynamic nature of real-world driving environments. In this work, we introduce DynamicCity, a novel 4D LiDAR generation framework capable of generating large-scale, high-quality LiDAR scenes that capture the temporal evolution of dynamic environments. DynamicCity mainly consists of two key models. 1) A VAE model for learning HexPlane as the compact 4D representation. Instead of using naive averaging operations, DynamicCity employs a novel Projection Module to effectively compress 4D LiDAR features into six 2D feature maps for HexPlane construction, which significantly enhances HexPlane fitting quality (up to 12.56 mIoU gain). Furthermore, we utilize an Expansion & Squeeze Strategy to reconstruct 3D feature volumes in parallel, which improves both network training efficiency and reconstruction accuracy than naively querying each 3D point (up to 7.05 mIoU gain, 2.06x training speedup, and 70.84% memory reduction). 2) A DiT-based diffusion model for HexPlane generation. To make HexPlane feasible for DiT generation, a Padded Rollout Operation is proposed to reorganize all six feature planes of the HexPlane as a squared 2D feature map. In particular, various conditions could be introduced in the diffusion or sampling process, supporting versatile 4D generation applications, such as trajectory- and command-driven generation, inpainting, and layout-conditioned generation. Extensive experiments on the CarlaSC and Waymo datasets demonstrate that DynamicCity significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art 4D LiDAR generation methods across multiple metrics. The code will be released to facilitate future research.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 23, 2024 2

The Price of Freedom: Exploring Expressivity and Runtime Tradeoffs in Equivariant Tensor Products

E(3)-equivariant neural networks have demonstrated success across a wide range of 3D modelling tasks. A fundamental operation in these networks is the tensor product, which interacts two geometric features in an equivariant manner to create new features. Due to the high computational complexity of the tensor product, significant effort has been invested to optimize the runtime of this operation. For example, Luo et al. (2024) recently proposed the Gaunt tensor product (GTP) which promises a significant speedup. In this work, we provide a careful, systematic analysis of a number of tensor product operations. In particular, we emphasize that different tensor products are not performing the same operation. The reported speedups typically come at the cost of expressivity. We introduce measures of expressivity and interactability to characterize these differences. In addition, we realized the original implementation of GTP can be greatly simplified by directly using a spherical grid at no cost in asymptotic runtime. This spherical grid approach is faster on our benchmarks and in actual training of the MACE interatomic potential by 30%. Finally, we provide the first systematic microbenchmarks of the various tensor product operations. We find that the theoretical runtime guarantees can differ wildly from empirical performance, demonstrating the need for careful application-specific benchmarking. Code is available at https://github.com/atomicarchitects/PriceofFreedom.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 16

Compact 3D Gaussian Representation for Radiance Field

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) have demonstrated remarkable potential in capturing complex 3D scenes with high fidelity. However, one persistent challenge that hinders the widespread adoption of NeRFs is the computational bottleneck due to the volumetric rendering. On the other hand, 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) has recently emerged as an alternative representation that leverages a 3D Gaussisan-based representation and adopts the rasterization pipeline to render the images rather than volumetric rendering, achieving very fast rendering speed and promising image quality. However, a significant drawback arises as 3DGS entails a substantial number of 3D Gaussians to maintain the high fidelity of the rendered images, which requires a large amount of memory and storage. To address this critical issue, we place a specific emphasis on two key objectives: reducing the number of Gaussian points without sacrificing performance and compressing the Gaussian attributes, such as view-dependent color and covariance. To this end, we propose a learnable mask strategy that significantly reduces the number of Gaussians while preserving high performance. In addition, we propose a compact but effective representation of view-dependent color by employing a grid-based neural field rather than relying on spherical harmonics. Finally, we learn codebooks to compactly represent the geometric attributes of Gaussian by vector quantization. In our extensive experiments, we consistently show over 10times reduced storage and enhanced rendering speed, while maintaining the quality of the scene representation, compared to 3DGS. Our work provides a comprehensive framework for 3D scene representation, achieving high performance, fast training, compactness, and real-time rendering. Our project page is available at https://maincold2.github.io/c3dgs/.

  • 5 authors
·
Nov 22, 2023

Implicit Gaussian process representation of vector fields over arbitrary latent manifolds

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.

  • 9 authors
·
Sep 28, 2023

Tides on Lava Worlds: Application to Close-in Exoplanets and the Early Earth-Moon System

Understanding the physics of planetary magma oceans has been the subject of growing efforts, in light of the increasing abundance of Solar system samples and extrasolar surveys. A rocky planet harboring such an ocean is likely to interact tidally with its host star, planetary companions, or satellites. To date, however, models of the tidal response and heat generation of magma oceans have been restricted to the framework of weakly viscous solids, ignoring the dynamical fluid behavior of the ocean beyond a critical melt fraction. Here we provide a handy analytical model that accommodates this phase transition, allowing for a physical estimation of the tidal response of lava worlds. We apply the model in two settings: The tidal history of the early Earth-Moon system in the aftermath of the giant impact; and the tidal interplay between short-period exoplanets and their host stars. For the former, we show that the fluid behavior of the Earth's molten surface drives efficient early Lunar recession to {sim} 25 Earth radii within 10^4{-} 10^5 years, in contrast with earlier predictions. For close-in exoplanets, we report on how their molten surfaces significantly change their spin-orbit dynamics, allowing them to evade spin-orbit resonances and accelerating their track towards tidal synchronization from a Gyr to Myr timescale. Moreover, we re-evaluate the energy budgets of detected close-in exoplanets, highlighting how the surface thermodynamics of these planets are likely controlled by enhanced, fluid-driven tidal heating, rather than vigorous insolation, and how this regime change substantially alters predictions for their surface temperatures.

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 10, 2024

Probing the shape of the Milky Way dark matter halo with hypervelocity stars: a new method

We propose a new method to determine the shape of the gravitational potential of the dark matter (DM) halo of the Milky Way (MW) with the galactocentric tangential velocities of a sample of hypervelocity stars (HVSs). We compute the trajectories of different samples of HVSs in a MW where the baryon distribution is axisymmetric and the DM potential either is spherical or is spheroidal or triaxial with radial-dependent axis ratios. We determine the shape of the DM potential with the distribution of the latitudinal velocity |v_{vartheta}| in axisymmetric Galactic potentials, or with the distribution of |v_{vartheta}| and of a function bar v_{varphi} of the azimuthal velocity in non-axisymmetric Galactic potentials. We recover the correct shape of the DM potential by comparing the distribution of |v_{vartheta}| and bar v_{varphi} against the corresponding distributions of mock samples of HVSs that traveled in DM halos of different shapes. We use the largest possible sample of sim 800 HVSs of 4~M_odot ejected with the Hills mechanism at a rate sim 10^{-4} yr^{-1}, currently outgoing, and located at more than 10 kpc from the Galactic center. In our ideal case of galactocentric velocities with null uncertainties and no observational limitations, our method recovers the correct shape of the DM potential with a success rate Sgtrsim 89% in axisymmetric Galactic potentials, and S > 96% in the explored non-axisymmetric cases. The unsuccessful cases yield axis ratios of the DM potential that are off by pm 0.1. The success rate decreases with decreasing sample size: for example, for a spherical DM halo, S drops from sim 98% to sim 38% when the sample size decreases from sim 800 to sim 40 HVSs. A robust determination of the shape of the DM potential thus requires the measure of the galactocentric velocity of a few hundred genuine HVSs.

  • 5 authors
·
Nov 18, 2021

A Comprehensive Perturbative Formalism for Phase Mixing in Perturbed Disks. II. Phase Spirals in an Inhomogeneous Disk Galaxy with a Non-responsive Dark Matter Halo

We develop a linear perturbative formalism to compute the response of an inhomogeneous stellar disk embedded in a non-responsive dark matter halo to perturbations like bars, spiral arms and satellite galaxy encounters. Without self-gravity to reinforce it, the response of a Fourier mode phase mixes away due to an intrinsic spread in the vertical (Omega_z), radial (Omega_r) and azimuthal (Omega_phi) frequencies, giving rise to local phase-space spirals. Collisional diffusion due to scattering of stars by structures like giant molecular clouds causes super-exponential damping of the phase-spiral amplitude. The z-v_z phase-spiral is 1-armed (2-armed) for vertically anti-symmetric (symmetric) bending (breathing) modes. Only transient perturbations with timescales (tau_{P}) comparable to the vertical oscillation period (tau_z sim 1/Omega_z) trigger z-v_z phase-spirals. Each (n,l,m) mode of the response to impulsive (tau_{P}<tau=1/(nOmega_z+lOmega_r+mOmega_phi)) perturbations is power law (sim tau_{P}/tau) suppressed, but that to adiabatic (tau_{P}>tau) perturbations is exponentially weak (sim left[-left(tau_{mathrm{P}/tauright)^alpharight]}) except resonant (tauto infty) modes. Slower (tau_{P}>tau_z) perturbations, e.g., distant encounters with satellite galaxies, induce stronger bending modes. If the Gaia phase-spiral was triggered by a satellite, Sagittarius is the leading contender as it dominates the Solar neighborhood response of the Milky Way disk to satellite encounters. However, survival against collisional damping necessitates that the impact occurred within sim 0.6-0.7 Gyr ago. We discuss how the detailed galactic potential dictates the phase-spiral shape: phase mixing occurs slower and phase-spirals are less wound in the outer disk and in presence of an ambient halo.

  • 3 authors
·
Feb 28, 2023

NeRSemble: Multi-view Radiance Field Reconstruction of Human Heads

We focus on reconstructing high-fidelity radiance fields of human heads, capturing their animations over time, and synthesizing re-renderings from novel viewpoints at arbitrary time steps. To this end, we propose a new multi-view capture setup composed of 16 calibrated machine vision cameras that record time-synchronized images at 7.1 MP resolution and 73 frames per second. With our setup, we collect a new dataset of over 4700 high-resolution, high-framerate sequences of more than 220 human heads, from which we introduce a new human head reconstruction benchmark. The recorded sequences cover a wide range of facial dynamics, including head motions, natural expressions, emotions, and spoken language. In order to reconstruct high-fidelity human heads, we propose Dynamic Neural Radiance Fields using Hash Ensembles (NeRSemble). We represent scene dynamics by combining a deformation field and an ensemble of 3D multi-resolution hash encodings. The deformation field allows for precise modeling of simple scene movements, while the ensemble of hash encodings helps to represent complex dynamics. As a result, we obtain radiance field representations of human heads that capture motion over time and facilitate re-rendering of arbitrary novel viewpoints. In a series of experiments, we explore the design choices of our method and demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art dynamic radiance field approaches by a significant margin.

  • 5 authors
·
May 4, 2023

SUDS: Scalable Urban Dynamic Scenes

We extend neural radiance fields (NeRFs) to dynamic large-scale urban scenes. Prior work tends to reconstruct single video clips of short durations (up to 10 seconds). Two reasons are that such methods (a) tend to scale linearly with the number of moving objects and input videos because a separate model is built for each and (b) tend to require supervision via 3D bounding boxes and panoptic labels, obtained manually or via category-specific models. As a step towards truly open-world reconstructions of dynamic cities, we introduce two key innovations: (a) we factorize the scene into three separate hash table data structures to efficiently encode static, dynamic, and far-field radiance fields, and (b) we make use of unlabeled target signals consisting of RGB images, sparse LiDAR, off-the-shelf self-supervised 2D descriptors, and most importantly, 2D optical flow. Operationalizing such inputs via photometric, geometric, and feature-metric reconstruction losses enables SUDS to decompose dynamic scenes into the static background, individual objects, and their motions. When combined with our multi-branch table representation, such reconstructions can be scaled to tens of thousands of objects across 1.2 million frames from 1700 videos spanning geospatial footprints of hundreds of kilometers, (to our knowledge) the largest dynamic NeRF built to date. We present qualitative initial results on a variety of tasks enabled by our representations, including novel-view synthesis of dynamic urban scenes, unsupervised 3D instance segmentation, and unsupervised 3D cuboid detection. To compare to prior work, we also evaluate on KITTI and Virtual KITTI 2, surpassing state-of-the-art methods that rely on ground truth 3D bounding box annotations while being 10x quicker to train.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 25, 2023

Spectral-Refiner: Fine-Tuning of Accurate Spatiotemporal Neural Operator for Turbulent Flows

Recent advancements in operator-type neural networks have shown promising results in approximating the solutions of spatiotemporal Partial Differential Equations (PDEs). However, these neural networks often entail considerable training expenses, and may not always achieve the desired accuracy required in many scientific and engineering disciplines. In this paper, we propose a new Spatiotemporal Fourier Neural Operator (SFNO) that learns maps between Bochner spaces, and a new learning framework to address these issues. This new paradigm leverages wisdom from traditional numerical PDE theory and techniques to refine the pipeline of commonly adopted end-to-end neural operator training and evaluations. Specifically, in the learning problems for the turbulent flow modeling by the Navier-Stokes Equations (NSE), the proposed architecture initiates the training with a few epochs for SFNO, concluding with the freezing of most model parameters. Then, the last linear spectral convolution layer is fine-tuned without the frequency truncation. The optimization uses a negative Sobolev norm for the first time as the loss in operator learning, defined through a reliable functional-type a posteriori error estimator whose evaluation is almost exact thanks to the Parseval identity. This design allows the neural operators to effectively tackle low-frequency errors while the relief of the de-aliasing filter addresses high-frequency errors. Numerical experiments on commonly used benchmarks for the 2D NSE demonstrate significant improvements in both computational efficiency and accuracy, compared to end-to-end evaluation and traditional numerical PDE solvers.

  • 4 authors
·
May 27, 2024

High-Dynamic Radar Sequence Prediction for Weather Nowcasting Using Spatiotemporal Coherent Gaussian Representation

Weather nowcasting is an essential task that involves predicting future radar echo sequences based on current observations, offering significant benefits for disaster management, transportation, and urban planning. Current prediction methods are limited by training and storage efficiency, mainly focusing on 2D spatial predictions at specific altitudes. Meanwhile, 3D volumetric predictions at each timestamp remain largely unexplored. To address such a challenge, we introduce a comprehensive framework for 3D radar sequence prediction in weather nowcasting, using the newly proposed SpatioTemporal Coherent Gaussian Splatting (STC-GS) for dynamic radar representation and GauMamba for efficient and accurate forecasting. Specifically, rather than relying on a 4D Gaussian for dynamic scene reconstruction, STC-GS optimizes 3D scenes at each frame by employing a group of Gaussians while effectively capturing their movements across consecutive frames. It ensures consistent tracking of each Gaussian over time, making it particularly effective for prediction tasks. With the temporally correlated Gaussian groups established, we utilize them to train GauMamba, which integrates a memory mechanism into the Mamba framework. This allows the model to learn the temporal evolution of Gaussian groups while efficiently handling a large volume of Gaussian tokens. As a result, it achieves both efficiency and accuracy in forecasting a wide range of dynamic meteorological radar signals. The experimental results demonstrate that our STC-GS can efficiently represent 3D radar sequences with over 16times higher spatial resolution compared with the existing 3D representation methods, while GauMamba outperforms state-of-the-art methods in forecasting a broad spectrum of high-dynamic weather conditions.

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 17

Facet: highly efficient E(3)-equivariant networks for interatomic potentials

Computational materials discovery is limited by the high cost of first-principles calculations. Machine learning (ML) potentials that predict energies from crystal structures are promising, but existing methods face computational bottlenecks. Steerable graph neural networks (GNNs) encode geometry with spherical harmonics, respecting atomic symmetries -- permutation, rotation, and translation -- for physically realistic predictions. Yet maintaining equivariance is difficult: activation functions must be modified, and each layer must handle multiple data types for different harmonic orders. We present Facet, a GNN architecture for efficient ML potentials, developed through systematic analysis of steerable GNNs. Our innovations include replacing expensive multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) for interatomic distances with splines, which match performance while cutting computational and memory demands. We also introduce a general-purpose equivariant layer that mixes node information via spherical grid projection followed by standard MLPs -- faster than tensor products and more expressive than linear or gate layers. On the MPTrj dataset, Facet matches leading models with far fewer parameters and under 10% of their training compute. On a crystal relaxation task, it runs twice as fast as MACE models. We further show SevenNet-0's parameters can be reduced by over 25% with no accuracy loss. These techniques enable more than 10x faster training of large-scale foundation models for ML potentials, potentially reshaping computational materials discovery.

  • 9 authors
·
Sep 10

Impulsive mixing of stellar populations in dwarf spheroidal galaxies

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.

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 26

NeFII: Inverse Rendering for Reflectance Decomposition with Near-Field Indirect Illumination

Inverse rendering methods aim to estimate geometry, materials and illumination from multi-view RGB images. In order to achieve better decomposition, recent approaches attempt to model indirect illuminations reflected from different materials via Spherical Gaussians (SG), which, however, tends to blur the high-frequency reflection details. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end inverse rendering pipeline that decomposes materials and illumination from multi-view images, while considering near-field indirect illumination. In a nutshell, we introduce the Monte Carlo sampling based path tracing and cache the indirect illumination as neural radiance, enabling a physics-faithful and easy-to-optimize inverse rendering method. To enhance efficiency and practicality, we leverage SG to represent the smooth environment illuminations and apply importance sampling techniques. To supervise indirect illuminations from unobserved directions, we develop a novel radiance consistency constraint between implicit neural radiance and path tracing results of unobserved rays along with the joint optimization of materials and illuminations, thus significantly improving the decomposition performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art on multiple synthetic and real datasets, especially in terms of inter-reflection decomposition.Our code and data are available at https://woolseyyy.github.io/nefii/.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 29, 2023

HoloBeam: Learning Optimal Beamforming in Far-Field Holographic Metasurface Transceivers

Holographic Metasurface Transceivers (HMTs) are emerging as cost-effective substitutes to large antenna arrays for beamforming in Millimeter and TeraHertz wave communication. However, to achieve desired channel gains through beamforming in HMT, phase-shifts of a large number of elements need to be appropriately set, which is challenging. Also, these optimal phase-shifts depend on the location of the receivers, which could be unknown. In this work, we develop a learning algorithm using a {\it fixed-budget multi-armed bandit framework} to beamform and maximize received signal strength at the receiver for far-field regions. Our algorithm, named \Algo exploits the parametric form of channel gains of the beams, which can be expressed in terms of two {\it phase-shifting parameters}. Even after parameterization, the problem is still challenging as phase-shifting parameters take continuous values. To overcome this, {\it\HB} works with the discrete values of phase-shifting parameters and exploits their unimodal relations with channel gains to learn the optimal values faster. We upper bound the probability of {\it\HB} incorrectly identifying the (discrete) optimal phase-shift parameters in terms of the number of pilots used in learning. We show that this probability decays exponentially with the number of pilot signals. We demonstrate that {\it\HB} outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms through extensive simulations.

  • 3 authors
·
Dec 29, 2023

Testing the extended corona model with the optical/UV reverberation mapping of the accretion disk

The illumination of the accretion disks is frequently studied assuming that the incident X-ray flux is a point-like source. The approach is referred as lamppost model.The most recent computations of the X-ray reprocessing by the disk take into account the departure from the simple lamppost models. However, in computations of the incident flux thermalization and subsequent re-emission in the optical-UV band the lamppost approximation is most frequently assumed. We test if the UV-optical reverberation mapping and time delay measurements are sensitive to this assumption. We assume that the incident radiation originates from a region extended along the symmetry axis. To model this, we adopt a simple setup by representing the emission as two lamps irradiating the disk simultaneously from two different heights. We then compare the resulting predictions with those obtained for a single lamppost located at an intermediate height. We show at the basis of the transfer function that the deviation of the wavelength-dependent delay curve shows at most a difference of 20% in comparison to a single lamppost, assuming the black hole mass of 10^8 M_{odot}, Eddington ratio 1, and the location of the lamps at 5 and 100 rg. The maximum deviation happens for the lamp luminosity ratio sim3. When simulating light curves for a two-lamp setup and a standard lamppost with the same black hole mass and a sampling rate of 0.1 days, we find no measurable differences in the ICCF profiles between the two setups. Larger black hole mass and considerably lower Eddington ratio would allow to see larger differences between a single lamppost and a two-lampost model. UV/optical reverberation mapping is not very sensitive to the vertical extension of the corona.

  • 2 authors
·
Jan 1