Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Exploiting stochasticity in multi-agent systems

To control multi-agent systems one can exploit the recurrence properties of stochastic processes. We illustrate this principle through two applications. In both applications, systems are modeled as hybrid systems where Markov transitions on the discrete variables depend on the continuous variables. In the first application, stochasticity is introduced to overcome uncertainty about the environment. Inspired by bacterial chemotaxis, we design algorithms that control the spatial distribution of mobile agents that can take point measurements of a monitored function but cannot measure their own positions. Applications include source-seeking, monitoring and deployment. We prove that the probability density of agents is led to converge exponentially to a predetermined function of the measurements, much like in Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods. In the process of designing these control algorithms, we prove results on piecewise deterministic Markov processes that can find application outside this particular design problem. In the second application, we control the level of stochasticity in a networked control system. Given that the probability of successful communication can be significantly increased by transmitting multiple copies of the same message, we show that, by dynamically assigning the number of transmitted copies of the same data, one can obtain significant performance gains with only a modest increase in the total number of transmissions. We develop techniques to design communication protocols that exploit the transmission of multiple packets, while seeking a balance between stability/estimation performance and communication rate. An average cost optimality criterion is employed to obtain a number of optimal protocols applicable to networks with different computational capabilities. Other capacity scheduling techniques are also explored.
DPRml: distributed phylogeny reconstruction by maximum likelihood

MOTIVATION In recent years there has been increased interest in producing large and accurate phylogenetic trees using statistical approaches. However for a large number of taxa, it is not feasible to construct large and accurate trees using only a single processor. A number of specialized parallel programs have been produced in an attempt to address the huge computational requirements of maximum likelihood. We express a number of concerns about the current set of parallel phylogenetic programs which are currently severely limiting the widespread availability and use of parallel computing in maximum likelihood-based phylogenetic analysis. RESULTS We have identified the suitability of phylogenetic analysis to large-scale heterogeneous distributed computing. We have completed a distributed and fully cross-platform phylogenetic tree building program called distributed phylogeny reconstruction by maximum likelihood. It uses an already proven maximum likelihood-based tree building algorithm and a popular phylogenetic analysis library for all its likelihood calculations. It offers one of the most extensive sets of DNA substitution models currently available. We are the first, to our knowledge, to report the completion of a distributed phylogenetic tree building program that can achieve near-linear speedup while only using the idle clock cycles of machines. For those in an academic or corporate environment with hundreds of idle desktop machines, we have shown how distributed computing can deliver a 'free' ML supercomputer.
Effects of Cassava Wastewater on the Quality of Receiving Water Body Intended for Fish Farming

Aim: The goal of the study is to determine the suitability of a pond into which cassava mill wastewater is discharged for fish farming. The pond which is located adjacent the Faculty of Engineering of the Delta State University, Oleh Campus is currently being proposed for acquisition by the Faculty for the project. Methodology: A total of 13 physicochemical parameters were analysed from samples collected at four different points around the pond. The parameters investigated were pH, CN, BOD, COD, DO, turbidity, conductivity, hardness, Pb2+, Hg2+ and Fe2+. The TSS, TDS, DO, total hardness were determined by the UV absorption spectrophotometer at 220 and the metal ions at 420nm respectively; while the Winkler’s titrimetric method was used to determine the COD and BOD. The pH, conductivity and turbidity were determined using the pH meter, conductivity meter and turbidity meter respectively. Results: The average cyanide content at the discharge point over the four weeks experimental period was 39.0±1.69 with a highly significant effect (p=0.042) and the lowest value of 3.8±0.01 mg/l was recorded 10 metres downstream of the discharge point. The COD, BOD, TDS and TSS at the discharge point were 1236±0.63 mg/l, 430.7±0.53 mg/l, 975±0.90 mg/l and 4030±9.26 mg/l respectively; while the Pb2+ and Hg2+ were higher at the sample point close to a refuse dump. Values recorded for all the tested parameters were far higher than that recommended for water Original Research Article Oghenejoboh; BJAST, 6(2): 164-171, 2015; Article no.BJAST. 2015.077 165 bodies suitable for fish farming. Conclusion: The pond cannot be used for the intended project at its present form, it could be considered for use however, if all sources of pollution are stopped with proper remediation.
More On the Quasi-Stationary Distribution of the Shiryaev--Roberts Diffusion

We consider the classical Shiryaev--Roberts martingale diffusion, $(R_t)_{t\ge0}$, restricted to the interval $[0,A]$, where $A>0$ is a preset absorbing boundary. We take yet another look at the well-known phenomenon of quasi-stationarity (time-invariant probabilistic behavior, conditional on no absorbtion hitherto) exhibited by the diffusion in the temporal limit, as $t\to+\infty$, for each $A>0$. We obtain new upper- and lower-bounds for the quasi-stationary distribution's probability density function (pdf), $q_{A}(x)$; the bounds vary in the trade-off between simplicity and tightness. The bounds imply directly the expected result that $q_{A}(x)$ converges to the pdf, $h(x)$, of the diffusion's stationary distribution, as $A\to+\infty$; the convergence is pointwise, for all $x\ge0$. The bounds also yield an explicit upperbound for the gap between $q_{A}(x)$ and $h(x)$ for a fixed $x$. By virtue of integration the bounds for the pdf $q_{A}(x)$ translate into new bounds for the corresponding cumulative distribution function (cdf), $Q_{A}(x)$. All of our results are established explicitly, using certain latest monotonicity properties of the modified Bessel $K$ function involved in the exact closed-form formula for $q_{A}(x)$ recently obtained by Polunchenko (2017). We conclude with a discussion of potential applications of our results in quickest change-point detection: our bounds allow for a very accurate performance analysis of the so-called randomized Shiryaev--Roberts--Pollak change-point detection procedure.
Harvest Video Foundation Models via Efficient Post-Pretraining

Building video-language foundation models is costly and difficult due to the redundant nature of video data and the lack of high-quality video-language datasets. In this paper, we propose an efficient framework to harvest video foundation models from image ones. Our method is intuitively simple by randomly dropping input video patches and masking out input text during the post-pretraining procedure. The patch dropping boosts the training efficiency significantly and text masking enforces the learning of cross-modal fusion. We conduct extensive experiments to validate the effectiveness of our method on a wide range of video-language downstream tasks including various zero-shot tasks, video question answering, and video-text retrieval. Despite its simplicity, our method achieves state-of-the-art performances, which are comparable to some heavily pretrained video foundation models. Our method is extremely efficient and can be trained in less than one day on 8 GPUs, requiring only WebVid-10M as pretraining data. We hope our method can serve as a simple yet strong counterpart for prevalent video foundation models, provide useful insights when building them, and make large pretrained models more accessible and sustainable. This is part of the InternVideo project \url{https://github.com/OpenGVLab/InternVideo}.
Refining Diffusion Planner for Reliable Behavior Synthesis by Automatic Detection of Infeasible Plans

Diffusion-based planning has shown promising results in long-horizon, sparse-reward tasks by training trajectory diffusion models and conditioning the sampled trajectories using auxiliary guidance functions. However, due to their nature as generative models, diffusion models are not guaranteed to generate feasible plans, resulting in failed execution and precluding planners from being useful in safety-critical applications. In this work, we propose a novel approach to refine unreliable plans generated by diffusion models by providing refining guidance to error-prone plans. To this end, we suggest a new metric named restoration gap for evaluating the quality of individual plans generated by the diffusion model. A restoration gap is estimated by a gap predictor which produces restoration gap guidance to refine a diffusion planner. We additionally present an attribution map regularizer to prevent adversarial refining guidance that could be generated from the sub-optimal gap predictor, which enables further refinement of infeasible plans. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on three different benchmarks in offline control settings that require long-horizon planning. We also illustrate that our approach presents explainability by presenting the attribution maps of the gap predictor and highlighting error-prone transitions, allowing for a deeper understanding of the generated plans.
TOI-5344 b: A Saturn-like Planet Orbiting a Super-solar Metallicity M0 Dwarf

We confirm the planetary nature of TOI-5344 b as a transiting giant exoplanet around an M0-dwarf star. TOI-5344 b was discovered with the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite photometry and confirmed with ground-based photometry (the Red Buttes Observatory 0.6 m telescope), radial velocity (the Habitable-zone Planet Finder), and speckle imaging (the NN-Explore Exoplanet Stellar Speckle Imager). TOI-5344 b is a Saturn-like giant planet (ρ = 0.80 −0.15+0.17 g cm−3) with a planetary radius of 9.7 ± 0.5 R ⊕ (0.87 ± 0.04 R Jup) and a planetary mass of 135−18+17M⊕ (0.42 −0.06+0.05MJup ). It has an orbital period of 3.792622−0.000010+0.000010 days and an orbital eccentricity of 0.06−0.04+0.07 . We measure a high metallicity for TOI-5344 of [Fe/H] = 0.48 ± 0.12, where the high metallicity is consistent with expectations from formation through core accretion. We compare the metallicity of the M-dwarf hosts of giant exoplanets to that of M-dwarf hosts of nongiants (≲8 R ⊕). While the two populations appear to show different metallicity distributions, quantitative tests are prohibited by various sample caveats.
DrM: Mastering Visual Reinforcement Learning through Dormant Ratio Minimization

Visual reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promise in continuous control tasks. Despite its progress, current algorithms are still unsatisfactory in virtually every aspect of the performance such as sample efficiency, asymptotic performance, and their robustness to the choice of random seeds. In this paper, we identify a major shortcoming in existing visual RL methods that is the agents often exhibit sustained inactivity during early training, thereby limiting their ability to explore effectively. Expanding upon this crucial observation, we additionally unveil a significant correlation between the agents' inclination towards motorically inactive exploration and the absence of neuronal activity within their policy networks. To quantify this inactivity, we adopt dormant ratio as a metric to measure inactivity in the RL agent's network. Empirically, we also recognize that the dormant ratio can act as a standalone indicator of an agent's activity level, regardless of the received reward signals. Leveraging the aforementioned insights, we introduce DrM, a method that uses three core mechanisms to guide agents' exploration-exploitation trade-offs by actively minimizing the dormant ratio. Experiments demonstrate that DrM achieves significant improvements in sample efficiency and asymptotic performance with no broken seeds (76 seeds in total) across three continuous control benchmark environments, including DeepMind Control Suite, MetaWorld, and Adroit. Most importantly, DrM is the first model-free algorithm that consistently solves tasks in both the Dog and Manipulator domains from the DeepMind Control Suite as well as three dexterous hand manipulation tasks without demonstrations in Adroit, all based on pixel observations.
Wood fiber production from downed timber for manufacturing wood polymer composite: fiber property characterization

Massive amount of downed timber is generated by hurricanes and tornados. This research studied the properties of wood ﬁ bers (WFs) generated from downed loblolly pine ( Pinus taeda L.) trees at di ﬀ erent maturity (ages 15, 30, and 39 years) with various natural environmental exposure periods (0, 6, and 12 months) for wood polymer composite (WPC) manufacturing. The wood ﬁ ber critical properties for WPC manufacturing, including particle size and morphologies, physical and chemical properties, and thermal stability, were characterized. Prolonged environmental exposure increased WF surface roughness. The density and 1% sodium hydroxide solubility of WFs for the 15 – and 30-year-old tree decreased after 12 months of environmental exposure. The WFs generated from the 39-year-old tree contain extractives due to heartwood development, resulting in signi ﬁ cantly less moisture absorption. Thermogravimetric analysis results showed no signi ﬁ cant change in the thermal stability of WFs generated from the 15 – and 30-year-old trees after natural environmental exposure because of the loss of degraded wood components. The cellulose and lignin thermal degradation peak temperatures decreased by up to 9 and 6 °C for WFs extracted from the 39-year-old tree. The degraded wood components were ﬁ xed within WFs due to extractives, causing thermal degradation peak temperatures to decrease.
A Survey on Watching Social Issue Videos among YouTube and TikTok Users

The openness and influence of video-sharing platforms (VSPs) such as YouTube and TikTok attracted creators to share videos on various social issues. Although social issue videos (SIVs) affect public opinions and breed misinformation, how VSP users obtain information and interact with SIVs is under-explored. This work surveyed 659 YouTube and 127 TikTok users to understand the motives for consuming SIVs on VSPs. We found that VSP users are primarily motivated by the information and entertainment gratifications to use the platform. VSP users use SIVs for information-seeking purposes and find YouTube and TikTok convenient to interact with SIVs. VSP users moderately watch SIVs for entertainment and inactively engage in social interactions. SIV consumption is associated with information and socialization gratifications of the platform. VSP users appreciate the diversity of information and opinions but would also do their own research and are concerned about the misinformation and echo chamber problems.
The Impact of the Free-floating Planet Mass Function on the Event Rate for Accurate Microlensing Parallax Determination: Application to Euclid and Roman Parallax Observation

A microlensing event is mainly used to search for free-floating planets (FFPs). To estimate the FFP mass and distance via the microlensing effect, a microlensing parallax is one of the key parameters. A short duration of FFP microlensing makes it difficult to yield a parallax by the observer’s motion at a recognizable level, so the FFP microlensing parallax is expected on the simultaneous observation by multiple telescopes. Here, we approach the FFP detection by considering a variation in the FFP mass functions and the event rate of accurately measured microlensing parallaxes. We used our FFP microlensing simulator assuming a parallax observation between upcoming space-based missions (Euclid and Roman) with full kinematics. As a result, we confirmed that the event rate of accurately measured microlensing parallaxes (i.e., within a factor of 2 uncertainty) does not simply follow the number of FFPs at a given mass but the ratio of the FFP population per star. This is because the population ratio determines the optical depth for a given mass and potential sources. In addition, we found that the probability of the event that can estimate the FFP mass and distance within a factor of 2 is not so high: ∼40% of Earth-mass, ∼16% of Neptune-mass, and ∼4% of Jupiter-mass FFP events under our criteria. The probability can be improved by some technical approach such as using high cadence and observation in parallax of more than two observers.
In-Situ Chemical Oxidation

III. TECHNOLOGY DESCRIPTION AND TECHNOLOGY SELECTION FACTORS III.A. Bench-Scale Studies III.A. 1. Objectives III.A. 2. General Guidelines III.A. 3. Oxidant Demand III.B. Pilot-Scale Studies III.B. 1. Objectives III.B. 2. General Guidelines III.C. Technology Applicability III.C. 1. Location of Oxidant Application III.C. 2. Contaminant Characteristics III.C. 3. Subsurface Characteristics III.D. Site Requirements and Operational Issues III.D. 1. Site Characterization Data III.D. 2. Required Site Infrastructure III.D. 3. Regulatory Constraints on Injection of Reagents III.E. Field-Scale Implementation and Engineering Design Considerations III.E. 1. Treatment Objectives III.E. 2. General Conceptual Approach to ISCO III.E. 3. Oxidant Delivery III.E. 4. Monitoring III.E. 5. Summary of Contaminant Transport and Fate Mechanisms during ISCO III.E. 6. Safety Issues III.E. 7. Treatment Trains III.F. Limitations/Interferences/Impacts III.F. 1. Untreated COCs/Rebound III.F. 2. Toxic Reaction Byproducts III.F. 3. Process Residuals III.F. 4. Geochemical Impacts III.F. 5. Impact of ISCO on Natural Attenuation and Biodegradation III.G. Summary
L-moments Method for Flood Frequency Analysis of River Owan at Owan in Benin Owena River Basin in Nigeria

Flood frequency analysis of River Owan at Owan site in Benin Owena River Basin in Nigeria was carried out using annual flood peak series for 20 years (1989-2008). The objective of the study was to determine the best fit probability distribution model applicable to the site from among three selected 3- parameter distribution models namely: generalized extreme value distribution (GEV), generalized logistic distribution (GLO) and generalized Pareto distribution (GPA) whose parameters were estimated using the method of L-moments. The best fit distribution was selected based on comparisonof results of four goodness of fit tests namely: root mean square error (RMSE), relative root mean square error (RRMSE), mean absolute deviation index (MADI) and probability plot correlation coefficient (PPCC) applied to the values predicted by the candidate distributions. Our results indicate that GPA is the best fit distribution model for analyzing the annual maximum flood series at the study site and that the selected best fit model predicted flood quantile magnitudes (QT) ranging from 69.81 m 3 /s at 2years return period to 111.49m 3 /s at 200 years return period. It is concluded that L-moments and L -moment ratios are useful summary statistics for analyzing sample flood data. The study recommends improved density of gauging networks to enhance water resources planning and development and further study of the catchment by regional frequency analysis using L-moments approach. Keywords-Flood Frequency Analysis; L-moments; Probability distribution; Best fit distribution; Quantile estimation
Utilization of Bread and Milled Corn Waste to Support Energy Sources of Kacang Goats

This study aimed to evaluate the production performance of Kacang goats fed with bread waste and ground corn as an energy source in a concentrated arrangement. The research cattle were 12 female Kacang goats. This study used t-test analysis to compare the two treatments. The results of the t-test analysis showed that bread waste as an energy source increased body weight gain, efficiency in the use of dry matter and crude protein rations, carcass percentage, internal non-carcass percentage, external non-carcass percentage and nonedible carcass percentage compared to goats given ground corn as a source of energy in a concentrated form. However, slaughter weight, dry matter consumption, crude protein consumption, carcass weight, carcass component weight, internal non-carcass weight, external non-carcass weight, and edible non-carcass weight showed no significant difference between the treatments.
Study of Physico-Chemical Characteristics of Surface and Ground Water in Raipur Region of Chattisgarh ( India )

Water is one of the most important and essential component of the ecosystem. The quality of water is determined by its physical, chemical and biological nature. The present studies has been focused on physico-chemical parameters to determine the pollution level in major surface and ground water bodies of Raipur region supplying potable water to a large number of population. The result of present work reveals that surface and ground water collected from all sites show alkalinity except site 6 where as parameters such as TS, TSS, TDS, T-H, alkalinity, sulphate, Na, K and Fe conc. values are highest at site 4 whereas in case of ground water these parameters shows highest degree of occurrence at site 4 including chloride and conductance.
Stress, fluid pressure and structural permeability in seismogenic crust, North Island, New Zealand

SUMMARY Stress and fluid-pressure conditions within seismogenic crust are compared for two subparallel belts of active deformation and fluid redistribution associated with the obliquely convergent Pacific‐Australia plate boundary in the North Island of New Zealand. Whereas seismic activity on extensional normal faults in the arc-backarc Taupo volcanic zone is restricted to <8 km depth in a high heat-flow, near-hydrostatic fluid-pressure regime undergoing vigorous hydrothermal convection, rupturing along the thrust interface of the contractional Hikurangi subduction margin and in its hangingwall extends to ∼25 km depth in crust with fluids overpressured towards lithostatic values. The contrast in fluid-pressure levels stems partly from the abundance of low-permeability mudrocks in the forearc and partly from superior containment of overpressures by a compressional thrust-fault regime. Maximum supportable levels of differential stress and fluid pressure are critically interdependent in the overpressured regime of the Hikurangi subduction margin. Frictional instability leading to fault rupture in such settings may be triggered by increasing fluid pressure as well as by accumulating shear stress, so that nucleation and recurrence of earthquake ruptures are likely to be affected by cycling of fluid pressure through fault-valve action as well as by stress accumulation. Coupling across the subduction interface is also likely to be highly sensitive to the degree of overpressuring. Different factors are responsible for the localization of active deformation within the two crustal seismic belts. Within the magmatically active Taupo volcanic zone, thermal weakening is clearly responsible for concentrating seismicity and deformation with respect to the surrounding crust. However, in the hangingwall of the Hikurangi subduction margin, where heat flow has been reduced by subduction refrigeration and frictional interaction extends to ∼25 km depth, relative weakening arises principally from reduction of frictional resistance by fluid overpressuring.