Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Hard X-Ray Irradiation Potentially Drives Negative AGN Feedback by Altering Molecular Gas Properties

To investigate the role of active galactic nucleus (AGN) X-ray irradiation on the interstellar medium (ISM), we systematically analyzed Chandra and Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array CO (J = 2–1) data for 26 hard X-ray (>10 keV) selected AGNs at redshifts below 0.05. While Chandra unveils the distribution of X-ray-irradiated gas via Fe-Kα emission, the CO (J = 2–1) observations reveal that of cold molecular gas. At high resolutions ≲1″, we derive Fe-Kα and CO (J = 2–1) maps for the nuclear 2″ region and for the external annular region of 2″–4″, where 2″ is ∼100–600 pc for most of our AGNs. First, focusing on the external regions, we find the Fe-Kα emission for six AGNs above 2σ. Their large equivalent widths (≳1 keV) suggest a fluorescent process as their origin. Moreover, by comparing the 6–7 keV/3–6 keV ratio, as a proxy of Fe-Kα, and CO (J = 2–1) images for three AGNs with the highest significant Fe-Kα detections, we find a possible spatial separation. These suggest the presence of X-ray-irradiated ISM and the change in the ISM properties. Next, examining the nuclear regions, we find that (1) the 20–50 keV luminosity increases with the CO (J = 2–1) luminosity; (2) the ratio of CO (J = 2–1)/HCN (J = 1–0) luminosities increases with 20–50 keV luminosity, suggesting a decrease in the dense gas fraction with X-ray luminosity; and (3) the Fe-Kα-to-X-ray continuum luminosity ratio decreases with the molecular gas mass. This may be explained by a negative AGN feedback scenario: the mass accretion rate increases with gas mass, and simultaneously, the AGN evaporates a portion of the gas, which possibly affects star formation.
TrOCR: Transformer-based Optical Character Recognition with Pre-trained Models

Text recognition is a long-standing research problem for document digitalization. Existing approaches are usually built based on CNN for image understanding and RNN for char-level text generation. In addition, another language model is usually needed to improve the overall accuracy as a post-processing step. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end text recognition approach with pre-trained image Transformer and text Transformer models, namely TrOCR, which leverages the Transformer architecture for both image understanding and wordpiece-level text generation. The TrOCR model is simple but effective, and can be pre-trained with large-scale synthetic data and fine-tuned with human-labeled datasets. Experiments show that the TrOCR model outperforms the current state-of-the-art models on the printed, handwritten and scene text recognition tasks. The TrOCR models and code are publicly available at https://aka.ms/trocr.
Knowledge Distillation with Noisy Labels for Natural Language Understanding

Knowledge Distillation (KD) is extensively used to compress and deploy large pre-trained language models on edge devices for real-world applications. However, one neglected area of research is the impact of noisy (corrupted) labels on KD. We present, to the best of our knowledge, the first study on KD with noisy labels in Natural Language Understanding (NLU). We document the scope of the problem and present two methods to mitigate the impact of label noise. Experiments on the GLUE benchmark show that our methods are effective even under high noise levels. Nevertheless, our results indicate that more research is necessary to cope with label noise under the KD.
Hyper Suprime-Cam Subaru Strategic Program: A Mass-dependent Slope of the Galaxy Size−Mass Relation at z < 1

We present the galaxy size−mass (R e –M *) distributions using a stellar mass complete sample of ∼1.5 million galaxies, covering ∼100 deg2, with log(M*/M⊙)>10.2(9.2) over the redshift range 0.2 < z < 1.0 (z < 0.6) from the second public data release of the Hyper Suprime-Cam Subaru Strategic Program. We confirm that, at fixed redshift and stellar mass over the range of log(M*/M⊙)<11 , star-forming galaxies are on average larger than quiescent galaxies. The large sample of galaxies with accurate size measurements, thanks to the excellent imaging quality, also enables us to demonstrate that the R e –M * relations of both populations have a form of a broken power law, with a clear change of slopes at a pivot stellar mass M p . For quiescent galaxies, below an (evolving) pivot mass of log(Mp/M⊙)=10.2–10.6 , the relation follows Re∝M∗0.1 ; above M p the relation is steeper and follows Re∝M*0.6–0.7 . For star-forming galaxies, below log(Mp/M⊙)∼10.7 the relation follows Re∝M*0.2 ; above M p the relation evolves with redshift and follows Re∝M*0.3–0.6 . The shallow power-law slope for quiescent galaxies below M p indicates that large low-mass quiescent galaxies have sizes similar to those of their counterpart star-forming galaxies. We take this as evidence that large low-mass quiescent galaxies have been recently quenched (presumably through environment-specific processes) without significant structural transformation. Interestingly, the pivot stellar mass of the R e –M * relations for both populations also coincides with the mass at which half of the galaxy population is quiescent, implying that the pivot mass represents the transition of galaxy growth from being dominated by in situ star formation to being dominated by (dry) mergers.
Emergence of Lie group symmetric classical spacetimes in canonical tensor model

We analyze a wave function of a tensor model in the canonical formalism, when the argument of the wave function takes Lie group invariant or nearby values. Numerical computations show that there are two phases, which we call the quantum and the classical phases, respectively. In the classical phase, fluctuations are suppressed, and there emerge configurations which are discretizations of the classical geometric spaces invariant under the Lie group symmetries. This is explicitly demonstrated for the emergence of $S^n\ (n=1,2,3)$ for $SO(n+1)$ symmetries by checking the topological and the geometric (Laplacian) properties of the emerging configurations. The transition between the two phases has the form of splitting/merging of distributions of variables, resembling a matrix model counterpart, namely, the transition between one-cut and two-cut solutions. However this resemblance is obscured by a difference of the mechanism of the distribution in our setup from that in the matrix model. We also discuss this transition as a replica symmetry breaking. We perform various preliminary studies of the properties of the phases and the transition for such values of the argument.
PDFNet: Pointwise Dense Flow Network for Urban-Scene Segmentation

In recent years, using a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) as a feature encoder (or backbone) is the most commonly observed architectural pattern in several computer vision methods, and semantic segmentation is no exception. The two major drawbacks of this architectural pattern are: (i) the networks often fail to capture small classes such as wall, fence, pole, traffic light, traffic sign, and bicycle, which are crucial for autonomous vehicles to make accurate decisions. (ii) due to the arbitrarily increasing depth, the networks require massive labeled data and additional regularization techniques to converge and to prevent the risk of over-fitting, respectively. While regularization techniques come at minimal cost, the collection of labeled data is an expensive and laborious process. In this work, we address these two drawbacks by proposing a novel lightweight architecture named point-wise dense flow network (PDFNet). In PDFNet, we employ dense, residual, and multiple shortcut connections to allow a smooth gradient flow to all parts of the network. The extensive experiments on Cityscapes and CamVid benchmarks demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms baselines in capturing small classes and in few-data regimes. Moreover, our method achieves considerable performance in classifying out-of-the training distribution samples, evaluated on Cityscapes to KITTI dataset.
Dependency Induction Through the Lens of Visual Perception

Most previous work on grammar induction focuses on learning phrasal or dependency structure purely from text. However, because the signal provided by text alone is limited, recently introduced visually grounded syntax models make use of multimodal information leading to improved performance in constituency grammar induction. However, as compared to dependency grammars, constituency grammars do not provide a straightforward way to incorporate visual information without enforcing language-specific heuristics. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised grammar induction model that leverages word concreteness and a structural vision-based heuristic to jointly learn constituency-structure and dependency-structure grammars. Our experiments find that concreteness is a strong indicator for learning dependency grammars, improving the direct attachment score (DAS) by over 50% as compared to state-of-the-art models trained on pure text. Next, we propose an extension of our model that leverages both word concreteness and visual semantic role labels in constituency and dependency parsing. Our experiments show that the proposed extension outperforms the current state-of-the-art visually grounded models in constituency parsing even with a smaller grammar size.
C/2014 UN271 (Bernardinelli-Bernstein): The Nearly Spherical Cow of Comets

Comet C/2014 UN271 (Bernardinelli-Bernstein), incoming from the Oort cloud, is remarkable in having the brightest (and presumably largest) nucleus of any well-measured comet and having been discovered at the heliocentric distance r h ≈ 29 au, farther than any Oort cloud comet. In this work, we describe the discovery process and observations and the properties that can be inferred from images recorded until the first reports of activity in 2021 June. The orbit has i = 95°, with a perihelion of 10.97 au to be reached in 2031 and a previous aphelion at 40,400 ± 260 au. Backward integration of the orbit under a standard Galactic tidal model and known stellar encounters suggests a perihelion of q ≈ 18 au on its previous perihelion passage 3.5 Myr ago; hence, the current data could be the first ever obtained of a comet that has not been inside Uranus’s orbit in 4 Gyr. The photometric data show an unresolved nucleus with absolute magnitude H r = 8.0, colors that are typical of comet nuclei or Damocloids, and no secular trend as it traversed the range 34–23 au. For the r-band geometric albedo p r , this implies a diameter of 150(pr/0.04)−0.5 km. There is strong evidence of brightness fluctuations at the ±0.2 mag level, but no rotation period can be discerned. A coma, nominally consistent with a “stationary” 1/ρ surface brightness distribution, grew in scattering cross section at an exponential rate from A f ρ ≈ 1 to ≈150 m as the comet approached from 28 to 20 au. The activity rate is consistent with a very simple model of sublimation of a surface species in radiative equilibrium with the Sun. The inferred enthalpy of sublimation matches those of CO2 and NH3. More volatile species, such as N2, CH4, and CO, must be far less abundant on the sublimating surfaces.
TAG: Gradient Attack on Transformer-based Language Models

Although federated learning has increasingly gained attention in terms of effectively utilizing local devices for data privacy enhancement, recent studies show that publicly shared gradients in the training process can reveal the private training images (gradient leakage) to a third-party in computer vision. We have, however, no systematic understanding of the gradient leakage mechanism on the Transformer based language models. In this paper, as the first attempt, we formulate the gradient attack problem on the Transformer-based language models and propose a gradient attack algorithm, TAG, to reconstruct the local training data. We develop a set of metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed attack algorithm quantitatively. Experimental results on Transformer, TinyBERT$_{4}$, TinyBERT$_{6}$, BERT$_{BASE}$, and BERT$_{LARGE}$ using GLUE benchmark show that TAG works well on more weight distributions in reconstructing training data and achieves 1.5$\times$ recover rate and 2.5$\times$ ROUGE-2 over prior methods without the need of ground truth label. TAG can obtain up to 90$\%$ data by attacking gradients in CoLA dataset. In addition, TAG has a stronger adversary on large models, small dictionary size, and small input length. We hope the proposed TAG will shed some light on the privacy leakage problem in Transformer-based NLP models.
A MULTIPHASE CAHN-HILLIARD SYSTEM WITH MOBILITIES FOR THE SIMULATION OF WETTING

A BSTRACT . We propose in this paper a new multiphase Cahn–Hilliard model with doubly degenerate mobilities. We prove by matched asymptotic expansion that it approximates with a second order accuracy the multiphase surface diffusion ﬂow with mobilities and surface tensions. To show that it is very well suited for numerical approximation, we propose a simple and efﬁcient numerical scheme together with a very compact Matlab implementation. We illustrate with various numerical experiments the inﬂuence of mobility and surface tension coefﬁcients. The second-order accuracy of our model, and its appropriateness for numerical implementation, makes it suitable for tackling notably difﬁcult surface diffusion problems. In particular, we show that it can be used very effectively to simulate the wetting of thin liquid tubes even on rough solid supports without requiring nonlinear boundary conditions.
LS3: Latent Space Safe Sets for Long-Horizon Visuomotor Control of Sparse Reward Iterative Tasks

Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown impressive success in exploring high-dimensional environments to learn complex tasks, but can often exhibit unsafe behaviors and require extensive environment interaction when exploration is unconstrained. A promising strategy for learning in dynamically uncertain environments is requiring that the agent can robustly return to learned safe sets, where task success (and therefore safety) can be guaranteed. While this approach has been successful in low-dimensions, enforcing this constraint in environments with visual observations is exceedingly challenging. We present a novel continuous representation for safe sets by framing it as a binary classification problem in a learned latent space, which flexibly scales to image observations. We then present a new algorithm, Latent Space Safe Sets (LS3), which uses this representation for long-horizon tasks with sparse rewards. We evaluate LS3 on 4 domains, including a challenging sequential pushing task in simulation and a physical cable routing task. We find that LS3 can use prior task successes to restrict exploration and learn more efficiently than prior algorithms while satisfying constraints. See https://tinyurl.com/latent-ss for code and supplementary material.
Cost-Effectiveness of a Proteomic Test for Preterm Birth Prediction

Background Preterm birth (PTB) carries increased risk of short- and long-term health problems as well as higher healthcare costs. Current strategies using clinically accepted maternal risk factors (prior PTB, short cervix) can only identify a minority of singleton PTBs. Objective We modeled the cost-effectiveness of a risk-screening-and-treat strategy versus usual care for commercially insured pregnant US women without clinically accepted PTB risk factors. The risk-screening-and-treat strategy included use of a novel PTB prognostic blood test (PreTRM®) in the 19th–20th week of pregnancy, followed by treatment with a combined regimen of multi-component high-intensity-case-management and pharmacologic interventions for the remainder of the pregnancy for women assessed as higher-risk by the test, and usual care in women without higher risk. Methods We built a cost-effectiveness model using a combined decision-tree/Markov approach and a US payer perspective. We modeled 1-week cycles of pregnancy from week 19 to birth (preterm or term) and assessed costs throughout the pregnancy, and further to 12-months post-delivery in mothers and 30-months in infants. PTB rates and costs were based on >40,000 mothers and infants from the HealthCore Integrated Research Database® with birth events in 2016. Estimates of test performance, treatment effectiveness, and other model inputs were derived from published literature. Results In the base case, the risk-screening-and-treat strategy dominated usual care with an estimated 870 fewer PTBs (20% reduction) and $54 million less in total cost ($863 net savings per pregnant woman). Reductions were projected for neonatal intensive care admissions (10%), overall length-of-stay (7%), and births <32 weeks (33%). Treatment effectiveness had the strongest influence on cost-effectiveness estimates. The risk-screening-and-treat strategy remained dominant in the majority of probabilistic sensitivity analysis simulations and model scenarios. Conclusion Use of a novel prognostic test during pregnancy to identify women at risk of PTB combined with evidence-based treatment is estimated to reduce total costs while preventing PTBs and their consequences.
Parental Education Differently Boosts Health and Happiness of American Men and Women

Background: Parental educational attainment is a strong social determinant of health. Parental educational attainment may, however, be differently important for the health and happiness of various demographic groups. Aim: To understand if parental educational attainment is similarly salient for men and women, we tested gender differences in the association between parental educational attainment and health and happiness of American adults. Methods: This cross-sectional study used data of the General Social Survey (1972-2018), a series of nationally representative surveys in the United States. Our analytical sample included 65,814 adults. The main independent variable was parental education attainment. Outcomes were self-rated health and happiness measured using single items. Age, gender, marital status, employment, and year of the study were the covariates. Gender was the moderator. Results: Overall, individuals with more educated parents reported better self-rated health and happiness. We, however, found significant interactions between gender and parental educational attainment on the outcomes, which suggested that the effect of high parental educational attainment on self-rated health and happiness is larger for women than men. Conclusion: In the United States, while parental educational attainment is an important social determinant of health and happiness, this effect may be more pronounced among women than men.
Empathy and its associations with age and sociodemographic characteristics in a large UK population sample

Objectives Empathy is fundamental to social cognition, driving prosocial behaviour and mental health but associations with aging and other socio-demographic characteristics are unclear. We therefore aimed to characterise associations of these characteristics with two main self-reported components of empathy, namely empathic-concern (feeling compassion) and perspective-taking (understanding others’ perspective). Methods We asked participants in an internet-based survey of UK-dwelling adults aged ≥18 years to complete the Interpersonal Reactivity Index subscales measuring empathic concern and perspective taking, and sociodemographic and personality questionnaires. We weighted the sample to be UK population representative and employed multivariable weighted linear regression models. Results In 30,033 respondents, mean empathic concern score was 3.86 (95% confidence interval 3.85, 3.88) and perspective taking was 3.57 (3.56. 3.59); the correlation between these sub-scores was 0.45 (p < 0.001). Empathic concern and perspective taking followed an inverse-u shape trajectory in women with peak between 40 and 50 years whereas in men, perspective taking declines with age but empathic concern increases. In fully adjusted models, greater empathic concern was associated with female gender, non-white ethnicity, having more education, working in health, social-care, or childcare professions, and having higher neuroticism, extroversion, openness to experience and agreeableness traits. Perspective taking was associated with younger age, female gender, more education, employment in health or social-care, neuroticism, openness, and agreeableness. Conclusions Empathic compassion and understanding are distinct dimensions of empathy with differential demographic associations. Perspective taking may decline due to cognitive inflexibility with older age whereas empathic concern increases in older men suggesting it is socially-driven.
Acute intestinal intussusception among children under five years of age admitted in an Ouagadougou hospital, Burkina Faso, 2008-2013: epidemiological, clinical and therapeutic aspects

Introduction acute intestinal intussusception is a life-threatening surgical condition. In some settings, rotavirus vaccines have been associated with a low-level increased risk of intussusception. We describe the epidemiology, clinical manifestations and management of intussusception in a tertiary referral hospital in Burkina Faso prior to the introduction of rotavirus vaccine in October 2013. Methods we retrospectively reviewed medical records of all children under 5 years of age treated at the Charles de Gaulle Pediatric Hospital for intussusception meeting the Brighton level 1 diagnostic criteria, from October 31st, 2008 to October 30th, 2013. We report the incidence of intussusception as well as descriptive characteristics of these cases. Results a total of 107 Brighton level 1 intussusception cases were identified, representing a hospital incidence of 21.4 cases / year. There were 69 males and 38 females (sex ratio of 1.8), with a median age of 8 months (range 2 months to 4 years). Sixty-two percent of intussusception cases occurred among infants (n = 67 cases). The average time from symptom onset to seeking medical consultation was 3.8 days +/- 2.7 (range 0 to 14 days). Treatment was mainly surgical (105 patients, 98.1%) with 35 patients (32.7%) undergoing intestinal resection. Thirty-seven patients (35.5%) experienced post-operative complications. The mortality rate was 9.3%. Intestinal resection was a risk factor for death from intussusception. Conclusion in this review of intussusception hospitalizations prior to rotavirus vaccine introduction in Burkina Faso, delays in seeking care were common and were associated with mortality.