Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
R OBUSTNESS OF CLASSIFIERS TO UNIVERSAL PERTURBATIONS : A GEOMETRIC PERSPECTIVE

Deep networks have recently been shown to be vulnerable to universal perturbations: there exist very small image-agnostic perturbations that cause most natural images to be misclassified by such classifiers. In this paper, we provide a quantitative analysis of the robustness of classifiers to universal perturbations, and draw a formal link between the robustness to universal perturbations, and the geometry of the decision boundary. Specifically, we establish theoretical bounds on the robustness of classifiers under two decision boundary models (flat and curved models). We show in particular that the robustness of deep networks to universal perturbations is driven by a key property of their curvature: there exist shared directions along which the decision boundary of deep networks is systematically positively curved. Under such conditions, we prove the existence of small universal perturbations. Our analysis further provides a novel geometric method for computing universal perturbations, in addition to explaining their properties.
How Biology Became Social, and What it Means for Social Theory

In this paper I first offer a systematic outline of a series of conceptual novelties in the life-sciences that have favoured, over the last three decades, the emergence of a more social view of biology. I focus in particular on three areas of investigation: (1) technical changes in evolutionary literature that have provoked a rethinking of the possibility of altruism, morality and prosocial behaviours in evolution; (2) changes in neuroscience, from an understanding of the brain as an isolated data processor to the ultrasocial and multiply connected social brain of contemporary neuroscience; and (3) changes in molecular biology, from the view of the gene as an autonomous master of development to the ‘reactive genome’ of the new emerging field of molecular epigenetics. In the second section I reflect on the possible implications for the social sciences of this novel biosocial terrain and argue that the postgenomic language of extended epigenetic inheritance and blurring of the nature/nurture boundaries will be as provocative for neo-Darwinism as it is for the social sciences as we have known them. Signs of a new biosocial language are emerging in several social-science disciplines and this may represent an exciting theoretical novelty for twenty-first social theory.
Reinforcement Learning on Web Interfaces Using Workflow-Guided Exploration

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents improve through trial-and-error, but when reward is sparse and the agent cannot discover successful action sequences, learning stagnates. This has been a notable problem in training deep RL agents to perform web-based tasks, such as booking flights or replying to emails, where a single mistake can ruin the entire sequence of actions. A common remedy is to "warm-start" the agent by pre-training it to mimic expert demonstrations, but this is prone to overfitting. Instead, we propose to constrain exploration using demonstrations. From each demonstration, we induce high-level "workflows" which constrain the allowable actions at each time step to be similar to those in the demonstration (e.g., "Step 1: click on a textbox; Step 2: enter some text"). Our exploration policy then learns to identify successful workflows and samples actions that satisfy these workflows. Workflows prune out bad exploration directions and accelerate the agent's ability to discover rewards. We use our approach to train a novel neural policy designed to handle the semi-structured nature of websites, and evaluate on a suite of web tasks, including the recent World of Bits benchmark. We achieve new state-of-the-art results, and show that workflow-guided exploration improves sample efficiency over behavioral cloning by more than 100x.
Flour protein antigens in occupational flour hypersensitivity.

Thirty serum samples from clinical cases of flour hypersensitivity were analyzed for wheat or rye flour protein antibodies. The patients included 20 bakers and 10 others who also had occupational flour exposure. Twenty-three cases had antiflour antibodies which recognized antigens other than control sera in the flour protein patterns. The immunologic response of individual cases seemed very variable in view of the numerous differences between the cases in the antigen-antibody reactions. For the practical purposes, the flour protein antigens were divided in three groups, i.e., those larger than 80 kDa, those between 80 and 50 kDa and those smaller than 50 kDa. Cases with flour-induced dermatitis (n = 8) showed sensitization towards antigens in all size classes while those with rhinitis or asthma showed more antigens with a molecular weight less than 50 kDa. The test offers a possibility to independently verify an exposure to flour while it does not substitute for the conventional immunologic diagnostic tests.
Long-term patterns in vegetation-site relationships in a southern Appalachian forest

depth, soil clay content, depth of A-horizon, potential solar radiation, and mean temperature during the growing season. Fifty percent of the variation in the vegetation distribution was explained by the site variables used in the canonical correspondence analysis. Soil organic matter, terrain shape, and elevation were the variables most strongly related to vegetation distribution. Species associated with convex terrain (upper slopes and ridges), such as Pinus rigida, Quercus coccinea, and Quercus velutina, decreased in abundance from the 1970s to the 1990s; species associated with soils having high organic matter content and deep A-horizons, such as Liriodendron tulipifera, Rhododendron maximum, and Tsuga canadensis increased in abundance. Individual species responded differently to site gradients. For example, Acer rubrum, Quercus prinus, Oxydendrum arboreum, and Nyssa sylvatica were located in the center of the ordination space (i.e., their occurrence was not related to any of the site variables), which suggests that these species are habitat generalists.
Cutting Your Cloud Computing Cost for Deadline-Constrained Batch Jobs

Many web service providers use commercial cloud computing infrastructures like Amazon for flexible and reliable service deployment. For these web service providers, the cost of cloud computing usage becomes a big part of their IT department cost. Facing the diverse pricing models including on-demand, reserved, and spot instance, it is difficult for web service providers to optimize their cost. This paper introduces a new cloud brokerage service to help web service providers to minimize their cloud computing cost for deadline-constrained batch jobs, which have been a significant workload in web services. Our cloud brokerage service associates each batch job with deadline, and always tries to use cheaper reserved instances for computation to maintain a minimum cost. We achieve this with the following two steps: (1) given a set of jobs' specifications, determine the scheduling of jobs, (2) given the scheduling and pricing options, find an optimal instance renting strategy. We prove that both problems in two steps are computation intractable, and propose approximation algorithms for them. Trace-based evaluation shows that our cloud brokerage service can reduce up to 57% of the cloud computing cost.
The advantage of story-telling: children's interpretation of reported speech in narratives*

Abstract Children struggle with the interpretation of pronouns in direct speech (Ann said, “I get a cookie”), but not in indirect speech (Ann said that she gets a cookie) (Köder & Maier, 2016). Yet children's books consistently favor direct over indirect speech (Baker & Freebody, 1989). To reconcile these seemingly contradictory findings, we hypothesize that the poor performance found by Köder and Maier (2016) is due to the information-transmission setting of that experiment, and that a narrative setting facilitates children's processing of direct speech. We tested 42 Dutch children (4;1–7;2) and 20 adults with a modified version of Köder and Maier's referent selection task, where participants interpret speech reports in an interactive story book. Results confirm our hypothesis: children are much better at interpreting pronouns in direct speech in such a narrative setting than they were in an information-transmission setting. This indicates that the pragmatic context of reports affects their processing effort.
Modelling and simulation of channel power delay profile under indoor stair environment

An empirical stochastic discrete tapped delay line (DTDL) power delay profile (PDP) model is presented. It is used for characterising the multipath effects under indoor stair environment. In this model, the amplitude at each DTDL tap and stair step follows the Nakagami distribution. Its scale parameters are lognormally distributed, and its shape parameters are distance and propagation delay dependent. Then, the procedure for simulating the PDPs is given. In addition, the average PDP, root mean square delay spread and capacity extracted using the measured and simulated channels are compared to validate the accuracy of the proposed model. Finally, a measurement-based channel simulator is developed by implementing an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing communication procedure on the simulated channel. These works can provide important information about the designs of the physical layer algorithms in small cells scenarios.
Specifying and detecting meaningful changes in programs

Software developers are often interested in particular changes in programs that are relevant to their current tasks: not all changes to evolving software are equally important. However, most existing differencing tools, such as diff, notify developers of more changes than they wish to see. In this paper, we propose a technique to specify and automatically detect only those changes in programs deemed meaningful, or relevant, to a particular development task. Using four elementary annotations on the grammar of any programming language, namely Ignore, Order, Prefer and Scope, developers can specify, with limited effort, the type of change they wish to detect. Our algorithms use these annotations to transform the input programs into a normalised form, and to remove clones across different normalised programs in order to detect non-trivial and relevant differences. We evaluate our tool on a benchmark of programs to demonstrate its improved precision compared to other differencing approaches.
Magnetic properties of vacancies in graphene and single-walled carbon nanotubes

Spin-polarized density functional theory has been used to study the properties of vacancies in a graphene sheet and in single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs). For graphene, we find that the vacancies are magnetic and the symmetry of the sheet is broken by the distortion of an atom next to the vacancy site. We also studied vacancies in four armchair SWNTs from (3,3) to (6,6) and six zigzag SWNTs from (5,0) to (10,0). Our calculations demonstrate that vacancies can change the electronic structure of SWNTs, converting some metallic nanotubes to semiconductors and vice versa. Metallic nanotubes with vacancies exhibit ferro- or ferrimagnetism, whereas some semiconducting nanotubes with vacancies show an antiferromagnetic order. The magnetic properties depend on chiralities of the tubes, the configuration of the vacancy and the concentration of the vacancies.
Asymptotic inference for nearly unstable INAR(1) models

A sequence of first-order integer-valued autoregressive (INAR(1)) processes is investigated, where the autoregressive-type coefficient converges to 1. It is shown that the limiting distribution of the conditional least squares estimator for this coefficient is normal and the rate of convergence is n 3/2. Nearly critical Galton–Watson processes with unobservable immigration are also discussed.
Detection of Dientamoeba fragilis by culture

Abstract Symptoms associated with Dientamoeba fragilis include diarrhoea, abdominal pain, nausea, vomiting, epigastric pain and weight loss. A possible link between D. fragilis and irritable bowel syndrome (IBS)-like symptoms has been reported, and therefore the presence of this parasite should be excluded before making a diagnosis of IBS. Over a six-month period, 976 faecal samples were submitted to NPHS Microbiology Aberystwyth for routine microbiological analysis. All samples were also cultured for parasites using Robinson’s xenic medium. Trichrome staining was undertaken whenever practicable, but many stools had insufficient material. D. fragilis was isolated from 25 (2.6%) patients, whereas Cryptosporidium spp. was detected in 16 (1.6%) patients. D. fragilis was only detected in nine (1.3%) out of 685 specimens stained with trichrome, although four of the 25 culture-positive stools had insufficient sample for staining. Parasite culture proved to be less laborious than trichrome staining and dramatically increased D. fragilis detection rate.
Dynamic model of three wheeled narrow tilting vehicle and corresponding experiment verification

The traffic congestion is growing in urban area these days due to the rapidly increasing number of automobiles. One of the traffic problem solutions is to increase the flow rate of a particular traffic artery. To make the vehicle smaller and narrower might be a good idea. We developed a new conceptual Narrow Tilting Vehicle (NTV) that has one front wheel and two rear wheels. The proposed NTV is very narrow and all three wheels can tilt to improve the stability during turning. We also derive a new switching dynamical model of the NTV. This model considers several states including normal running, temporary running with one rear wheel not on the ground and totally falling down. Based on this model, a simulation platform is established, which is useful to test different control methods and to investigate dangerous driving situations in case hurt drivers in real experiments. The effectiveness of proposed dynamical model is verified through comparison study of simulations and corresponding experiments.
The nutritional value of raw, autoclaved and dehulled peas (Pisum sativum L.) in chicken diets as affected by enzyme supplementation

The effects of added crude enzyme preparations, autoclaving and dehulling on the nutritional value of diets containing a low-tannin (Trapper) and high-tannin (Maple) cultivar of peas (Pisum sativum L.) for chicks were determined in four experiments. The addition of crude enzymes from different sources and at different concentrations to a diet containing 75% of the low-tannin peas did not improve chick performance (exp. 1). Similarly, no improvement in performance was observed when a combination of crude enzymes was added to the diet containing whole or dehulled low-tannin peas, (exp. 2). Autoclaved treatment and enzyme addition to the diet containing the high-tannin Maple peas improved (P < 0.05) the feed-to-gain ratio but not the weight gain (exp. 3). Autoclaving or dehulling improved the apparent metabolizable energy (21 vs. 30%) and apparent protein digestibility (11 vs. 15%) of the high-tannin peas, respectively, in contrast to the low-tannin peas (experiment 4). Dehulling improved the feed-to-gain ra.
Contribution of polymeric materials to progress in xenotransplantation of microencapsulated cells: a review

Cell microencapsulation and subsequent transplantation of the microencapsulated cells require multidisciplinary approaches. Physical, chemical, biological, engineering, and medical expertise has to be combined. Several natural and synthetic polymeric materials and different technologies have been reported for the preparation of hydrogels, which are suitable to protect cells by microencapsulation. However, owing to the frequent lack of adequate characterization of the hydrogels and their components as well as incomplete description of the technology, many results of in vitro and in vivo studies appear contradictory or cannot reliably be reproduced. This review addresses the state of the art in cell microencapsulation with special focus on microencapsulated cells intended for xenotransplantation cell therapies. The choice of materials, the design and fabrication of the microspheres, as well as the conditions to be met during the cell microencapsulation process, are summarized and discussed prior to presenting research results of in vitro and in vivo studies. Overall, this review will serve to sensitize medically educated specialists for materials and technological aspects of cell microencapsulation.
Reaction norms for age and size at maturation: Study of the long-term trend (1970-1998) for Georges Bank and Gulf of Maine cod stocks

Average age and size at maturation have decreased in many commercially exploited fish stocks during the last decades. This phenomenon could be either a direct phenotypic response to some environmental variation, or the evolutionary consequence of some selective pressure. Traditionally used maturation indices, i.e., the age and size at which 50% of individuals are mature, are not appropriate to assess the causes of changes in maturation because they are influenced, in addition to maturation per se, by growth and survival. To make up for this shortcoming, we use a reaction norm based approach to disentangle evolutionary changes and phenotypic plasticity. A method is presented to estimate the reaction norm for age and size at maturation from data commonly gathered for the maturation of fisheries. This method is applied to data on Georges Bank Gulf of Maine stocks of Atlantic cod ("Gadus morhua"). The results show that maturation reaction norms in these stocks have shifted significantly downwards, resulting in a tendency to mature earlier at smaller size. These findings support the hypothesis that an evolutionary trend, probably caused by high fishing mortalities, is partially responsible for the observed decrease in age and size at maturation in these cod stocks. Two independent reasons justify this interpretation. First, there is no corresponding trend in growth that would suggest that improved feeding conditions could have facilitated maturation. Second, the results are based on maturation reaction norms, from which the known confounding effects of the growth and mortality variations are removed. Consequences of fisheries-induced evolution for the sustainability of the fisheries are discussed.
Discrete-time model predictive control for high performance speed control in an induction motor drive

This paper proposes a discrete-time predictive controller for providing high performance speed control in an induction motor drive. Specifically, the conventional speed PI controller is replaced by a model predictive controller and the control law is derived by the optimization of an objective function that considers the reference and the real speed as well as the acceleration of the induction motor by using the state-space model. Thus, high dynamic performance can be attained at any load and speed conditions, whereas in a conventional speed PI controller, the parameters are optimally tuned only for a specific operating condition of load and speed. Furthermore, since the developed predictive control algorithm is based on the discrete model of the induction motor, it can be more effectively implemented in a motor drive microcontroller. Also, since the acceleration of the induction motor is considered in the control algorithm, fast dynamic response and satisfactory rejection of the load disturbances can be accomplished. The proposed discrete-time model predictive control system has been simulated in the Matlab/Simulink environment. Several simulation results have been presented in order to validate the effectiveness and demonstrate the operational improvements of the proposed control scheme.
The role of pitch range in establishing intonational contrasts in Catalan

In Catalan, the same rising nuclear pitch accent L+H* is used in three different sentence-types, namely statements, contrastive foci, and echo questions. Since the peak height of the rising pitch accent seems to indicate sentence type, we hypothesized that these three pragmatic meanings would be differentiated by pitch accent range. We undertook two identification tasks and analyzed the patterns of responses found as well as reaction times (RTs). The results of the identification tasks show that there is a contrast between the statement interpretation on the one hand (L+H*) and the contrastive foci and echo question interpretation on the other (L+iH*). However, RTs clearly show that while there is a categorical difference between the statement interpretation (L+H*) and the echo question interpretation (L+iH*), the difference between a statement interpretation and a contrastive focus interpretation is gradient. This represents further evidence that pitch range can be used to make phonological distinctions between a variety of pragmatic meanings, and strengthens the argument that this needs to be represented descriptively at the phonological level.
Balanced sequences and optimal routing

The objective pursued in this paper is two-fold. The first part addresses the following combinatorial problem: is it possible to construct an infinite sequence over n letters where each letter is distributed as “evenly” as possible and appears with a given rate? The second objective of the paper is to use this construction in the framework of optimal routing in queuing networks. We show under rather general assumptions that the optimal deterministic routing in stochastic event graphs is such a sequence.
The MgcRacGAP SxIP motif tethers Centralspindlin to microtubule plus ends in Xenopus laevis

ABSTRACT Centralspindlin, a complex of the kinesin-6-family member MKLP1 and MgcRacGAP (also known as Kif23 and Racgap1, respectively), is required for cytokinesis and cell–cell junctions. During anaphase, Centralspindlin accumulates at overlapping central spindle microtubules and directs contractile ring formation by recruiting the GEF Ect2 to the cell equator to activate RhoA. We found that MgcRacGAP localized to the plus ends of equatorial astral microtubules during cytokinesis in Xenopus laevis embryos. How MgcRacGAP is stabilized at microtubule plus ends is unknown. We identified an SxIP motif in X. laevis MgcRacGAP that is conserved with other proteins that bind to EB1 (also known as Mapre1), a microtubule plus-end tracking protein. Mutation of the SxIP motif in MgcRacGAP resulted in loss of MgcRacGAP tracking with EB3 (also known as Mapre3) on growing microtubule plus ends, abnormal astral microtubule organization, redistribution of MgcRacGAP from the contractile ring to the polar cell cortex, and mislocalization of RhoA and its downstream targets, which together contributed to severe cytokinesis defects. Furthermore, mutation of the MgcRacGAP SxIP motif perturbed adherens junctions. We propose that the MgcRacGAP SxIP motif is functionally important both for its role in regulating adherens junction structure during interphase and for regulating Rho GTPase activity during cytokinesis. Highlighted Article: This article demonstrates that Centralspindlin is tethered to microtubule plus ends via an SxIP motif, and disruption of this motif causes defects in cytokinesis and cell–cell junctions.