Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Impact of Popular Content Relational Structure on Joint Caching and Recommendation Policies

Recent work has shown that the performance of caching systems can be boosted by the delivery of alternative but related content. In this setup, recommendation systems are exploited to offer the user appealing alternatives if the original request is not found in the cache. This framework relies on the assumption that a content can partially or completely substitute another if they are sufficiently similar. In this work we model these similarity relations as a graph, where each content is a node and related contents are linked by an edge. We then study how the characteristics of this content graph constrain the gains of designing jointly the caching and the recommendations with respect to just using a simple baseline in the soft cache hits setup. We start by selecting a number of descriptive graph features that we expect to play a role in the performance of related content delivery policies. We then analyze the effect of each of these features on the policies’ performance through extensive simulations with synthetic data. Our results confirm that features such as the degree distribution and clustering coefficient of the graph are crucial to decide whether the close-to-optimal algorithm will perform significantly better than the simple baseline. Our experiments with four real-world distinct datasets further support these observations. Motivated by these clear dependencies, we conclude by showing that we can train a classifier to predict the gains attainable by a “smart” policy with respect to a low-complexity baseline using only a few macroscopic graph features as predictor variables.
Scalable Nonparametric Factorization for High-Order Interaction Events

Interaction events among multiple entities are ubiquitous in real-world applications. Although these interactions can be naturally represented by tensors and analyzed by tensor decomposition, most existing approaches are limited to multilin-ear decomposition forms, and cannot estimate complex, nonlinear relationships in data. More importantly, the existing approaches severely un-derexploit the time stamps information. They either drop/discretize the time stamps or set a lo-cal window to ignore the long-term dependency between the events. To address these issues, we propose a Bayesian nonparametric factorization model for high-order interaction events, which can ﬂexibly estimate/embed the static, nonlinear relationships and capture various long-term and short-term excitations effects, encoding these effects and their decaying patterns into the latent factors. Speciﬁcally, we use the latent factors to construct a set of mutually excited Hawkes processes, where we place a Gaussian process prior over the background rates to estimate the static, nonlinear relationships of the entities and propose novel triggering kernels to embed the excitation strengths and their time decaying rates among the interactions. For scalable inference, we derive a fully-decomposed model evidence lower bound to dispose of the huge covariance matrix and expensive log summation terms. Then we develop an efﬁcient stochastic optimization algorithm. We show the advantage of our approach in four real-world applications.
Analyzing Functional Pathways and constructing gene-gene network for Narcolepsy based on candidate genes

Aims: To investigate the interactions among narcolepsy-associated genes and reveal the pathways these genes involved through bioinformatics analyses. Methods: The study was performed with the following steps: 1) Selected the previously discovered narcolepsy risk genes through literature review, 2) pathway enrichment analysis, and construction of gene-gene and protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks for narcolepsy. Results: 1) GO analysis revealed the positive regulation of interferon-gamma production as the most enriched terms in biological process, and C-C chemokine receptor activity as the most enriched term in molecular function, 2) KEGG pathway enrichment analysis revealed selective enrichment of genes in cytokine-cytokine receptor interaction signaling pathways, and 3) five hub genes were identified (IFNAR1, IL10RB, DNMT1, TNFSF4 and NFATC2). Conclusion: The bioinformatics results provide new insights into the molecular pathogenesis of narcolepsy and the identification of potential therapeutic targets for narcolepsy treatment.
Variation in rDNA loci of polyploid Solanum elaeagnifolium (Solanaceae)

Fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) was applied to detect gene rearrangements and genome downsizing in Solanum elaeagnifolium, an invasive weed with 2n = 24, 48 and 72 populations. The probes employed were pTa71 containing the 18S–5.8S–26S gene, and a 5S rDNA probe obtained from S. stuckertii. As a result, diploids presented a pair of 18S–5.8S–26S signals and a pair of 5S, whereas tetra- and hexaploids increased their FISH marks proportional to the ploidy level. In all cases, rDNA loci were non-syntenic, and position was conserved along the polyploid series. The cytotypes would have formed recently and drastic rearrangements have not yet occurred. However, in each cell of the 4x and 6x individuals, signal intensity in one locus of the 18S–5.8S–26S was stronger, suggesting a potential loss of copies in the remaining loci. In addition, one hexaploid showed an extra 5S signal in heterozygosis. The data obtained suggest a recent, recurrent autopolyploidy.
Learning to Plan via Deep Optimistic Value Exploration

Deep exploration requires coordinated long-term planning. We present a model-based reinforcement learning algorithm that guides policy learning through a value function that exhibits optimism in the face of uncertainty. We capture uncertainty over values by combining predictions from an ensemble of models and formulate an upper conﬁdence bound (UCB) objective to recover optimistic estimates. Training the policy on ensemble rollouts with the learned value function as the terminal cost allows for projecting long-term interactions into a limited planning horizon, thus enabling deep optimistic exploration. We do not assume a priori knowledge of either the dynamics or reward function. We demonstrate that our approach can accommodate both dense and sparse reward signals, while improving sample complexity on a variety of benchmarking tasks.
Supplementary materials for SCOUT: Self-aware Discriminant Counterfactual Explanation

Both datasets were subject to standard normalizations. Training images were first resized to 224 × 224 and then randomly flipped, whereas test images were first resized to 256 × 256 and then center-cropped to 224 × 224. All images were also first converted to [0.0, 1.0] from [0, 255] and then normalized by subtracting the mean ([0.471, 0.460, 0.454]) and dividing by the standard deviation ([0.267, 0.266, 0.271]) of each RGB color channel. All results are presented on the standard CUB200 test set and the official validation set of ADE20K. Experiments were ran three times. Used classifiers and predictors are trained by standard strategies [3, 1, 2, 6, 4].
The impact of employment protection on the temporary employment services sector: Evidence from South Africa using data from tax records

Attempts to regulate the temporary employment sector have had mixed results internationally. In South Africa, temporary employment was regulated in 2015 through amendments to the Labour Relations Act. This paper uses administrative data to examine the short-term impact of strengthening employment protection legislation in the temporary employment services (TES) sector, focusing on employment, job duration, and wages. A regression discontinuity design is used as the amendments applied only to employees earning below a certain threshold.
Supplementary Material for Deep Shutter Unrolling Network

In this section, we present the details of our network architecture and all the other baseline networks proposed in our ablation study. Deep shutter unrolling network: Fig. 1 demonstrates the overall architecture of our deep shutter unrolling network. It consists of four main parts: an image encoder network, a motion estimation network, a differentiable forward warping block and an image decoder network. The details of the image encoder network are shown in Fig. 2. It consists of three pyramid levels. Each level has a convolutional layer followed by a ReLU activation function and three ResNet blocks [1]. The convolutional layer of the first pyramid level has a kernel size 7 × 7, 32 filters and uses a stride size 1. The convolutional layers of both the second pyramid level and the third pyramid level have a kernel size 3× 3 and use a stride size 2 to down-sample the learned feature representations. The number of filters are 64 and 128 respectively. The number of filters for the corresponding ResNet blocks are 32, 64 and 128 for the first, the second and the third pyramid levels, respectively.
Supplementary Materials for “Closed-loop Matters: Dual Regression Networks for Single Image Super-Resolution”

We organize our supplementary materials as follows. First, we provide the derivation of generalization error bound for the dual regression scheme in Section A. Second, we provide more details on the architecture of the proposed DRN model in Section B. Third, we provide more implementation details on the training method for the SR tasks with paired data and unpaired data in Section C. Fourth, we conduct more ablation studies on the proposed dual regression scheme in Section D. Last, we report more visual comparison results in Section E.
Software Documentation: The Practitioners' Perspective

In theory, (good) documentation is an invaluable asset to any software project, as it helps stakeholders to use, understand, maintain, and evolve a system. In practice, however, documentation is generally affected by numerous shortcomings and issues, such as insufficient and inadequate content and obsolete, ambiguous information. To counter this, researchers are investigating the development of advanced recommender systems that automatically suggest high-quality documentation, useful for a given task. A crucial first step is to understand what quality means for practitioners and what information is actually needed for specific tasks. We present two surveys performed with 146 practitioners to investigate (i) the documentation issues they perceive as more relevant together with solutions they apply when these issues arise; and (ii) the types of documentation considered as important in different tasks. Our findings can help researchers in designing the next generation of documentation recommender systems.
Adaptive evolution of sea lions and walruses

Repenning, Charles A. , (U.S. Geological Survey, 345 Middlefield Road, Menlo Park, CA 94025) 1976. Adaptive evolution of sea lions and walruses. Syst. Zool. 25:375-390.The order Otarioidea includes two living and two extinct families. Of these four, the extinct Enaliarctidae were ancestral to the others and were derived from canoid fissiped carnivores. This family, which was most diverse from 22 to 16 million years ago, rapidly developed the locomotor, cerebral, and olfactory adaptations to marine life. The extinct Desmatophocidae and the extant Odobenidae (walruses) and Otariidae (sea lions) evolved from the Enaliarctidae at different times and in the order in which they have been mentioned. Each of these three went through their period of greatest diversity in the same order; the Otariidae of today represent the period of greatest diversity of this family. Each of these three independently developed similar dental, vascular, and social adaptations to marine existence but in different ways. All families were native to the North Pacific. The odobenids alone entered the North Atlantic through the Central American Seaway about 8 million years ago, and the otariids alone invaded the southern hemisphere by 5 million years ago. There are at least eight types of marine adaptations recognizable to -some degree in the skeletal morphology of the marine carnivores of the North Pacific Ocean, the sea lions and the walruses. These adaptations involve hearing, seeing, smelling, eating, oxygen conservation, body heat conservation, locomotion, and behavior in both social and environmental contexts. As noted by Bartholomew (1970) in his analytical hypothesis of the evolution of of pinniped polygyny, each adaptive specialization has an effect on others and develops in harmony with others so that, viewed in
Looking Beyond Sentence-Level Natural Language Inference for Downstream Tasks

In recent years, the Natural Language Inference (NLI) task has garnered significant attention, with new datasets and models achieving near human-level performance on it. However, the full promise of NLI -- particularly that it learns knowledge that should be generalizable to other downstream NLP tasks -- has not been realized. In this paper, we study this unfulfilled promise from the lens of two downstream tasks: question answering (QA), and text summarization. We conjecture that a key difference between the NLI datasets and these downstream tasks concerns the length of the premise; and that creating new long premise NLI datasets out of existing QA datasets is a promising avenue for training a truly generalizable NLI model. We validate our conjecture by showing competitive results on the task of QA and obtaining the best reported results on the task of Checking Factual Correctness of Summaries.
Studies on Virgin Hardwood Forest: III. Warren's Woods, A Beech-Maple Climax Forest in Berrien County, Michigan

ward K. Warren Foundation of Three Oaks, Berrien County, Michigan. The only recent modification of the area studied, north and west of the Galien River, a small, sluggish stream which penetrates the tract, is that resulting from the removal of dead timber for firewood-a practice of the last four decades. A conversation with an old resident, Mr. Greenberry King, of Three Oaks, who has been in the employ of the owners for several decades,
Strengthening the password authenticated key exchange protocols due to the use of asymmetric execution of cryptosystems

— Protocols for generating high-entropy cryptographic session keys from long-term low-entropy keys or passwords (PAKE - Password Authenticated Key Exchange) are used to increase the security of information protection in information systems. The paper shows how to increase the security of the PAKE protocols themselves by using the concept of asymmetric execution of cryptosystems proposed by the author (see, for example, at SIBCON 2016, RusCrypto 2018). Asymmetric execution of cryptosystems implies a deliberate significant increase in the complexity of performing operations for one of the legitimate users (for example, for the server, due to additional transformations of the plaintext, increasing the password by a random value, choosing the mode of the cipher, hiding part of the information necessary for the operation), resulting in significant increasing the complexity of finding the secret keys and for the attacker. The proposed strengthening of cryptographic protocols is especially relevant in the context of restrictions on the parameters used in the primitives of cryptographic protocol.
IEOR8100: Economics, AI, and Optimization Lecture Note 3: Online Convex Optimization and Sion’s Minimax Theorem

In OCO, we are faced with a similar, but more general, setting than in the regret-minimization setup from last time. In the OCO setting, we are making decisions from some compact convex set X ∈ Rn (analogous to the fact that we were previously choosing probability distributions from ∆n). After choosing a decision xt, we suffer a convex loss ft(xt). We will assume that ft is differentiable for convenience, but this assumption is not necessary. As before, we would like to minimize the regret:
Comparative Efficiency of Economic Security Tools for Innovative Projects

Insurance, which is the method of economic protection of projects, widespread in industrialized countries, cannot fully balance various types of threats due to the high level of uncertainty, characteristic of developing economies. At the same time, the use of other protection methods, such as redundancy, is justified only in the presence of certain conditions and a certain state of the external environment. A dynamic model of decision support when choosing the most effective method of economic protection of an innovation project, which also takes into account risks, the amount of investment and the amount of possible damage, is proposed herein. The model establishes the relationship between the marginal value of the insurance rate and the factors affecting the implementation of the project. The solution makes it possible to develop the most optimal economic protection strategy. Key-Words: economic security, reservation, insurance, risks, uncertainty, cost of capital, innovative project.
Dscorer: A Fast Evaluation Metric for Discourse Representation Structure Parsing

Discourse representation structures (DRSs) are scoped semantic representations for texts of arbitrary length. Evaluating the accuracy of predicted DRSs plays a key role in developing semantic parsers and improving their performance. DRSs are typically visualized as boxes which are not straightforward to process automatically. Counter transforms DRSs to clauses and measures clause overlap by searching for variable mappings between two DRSs. However, this metric is computationally costly (with respect to memory and CPU time) and does not scale with longer texts. We introduce Dscorer, an efficient new metric which converts box-style DRSs to graphs and then measures the overlap of n-grams. Experiments show that Dscorer computes accuracy scores that are correlated with Counter at a fraction of the time.
IGF-1C hydrogel improves the therapeutic effects of MSCs on colitis in mice through PGE2-mediated M2 macrophage polarization

Background: Mesenchymal stem cell (MSC)-based therapies hold great promise for the treatment of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). In order to optimize and maximize the therapeutic benefits of MSCs, we investigated whether cotransplantation of a chitosan (CS)-based injectable hydrogel with immobilized IGF-1 C domain peptide (CS-IGF-1C) and human placenta-derived MSCs (hP-MSCs) could ameliorate colitis in mice. Methods: IGF-1C hydrogel was generated by immobilizing IGF-1C to CS hydrogel. Colitis was induced by 2,4,6-trinitrobenzene sulfonic acid (TNBS) in mice. We initially applied hP-MSCs and CS-IGF-1C hydrogel for the treatment of colitis by in situ injection, and molecular imaging methods were used for real-time imaging of reactive oxygen species (ROS) and tracking of transplanted hP-MSCs by bioluminescence imaging (BLI). Furthermore, the effects of CS-IGF-1C hydrogel on prostaglandin E2 (PGE2) secretion of hP-MSCs and polarization of M2 macrophages were investigated as well. Results: The CS-IGF-1C hydrogel significantly increased hP-MSC proliferation and promoted the production of PGE2 from hP-MSCs in vitro. Moreover, in vivo studies indicated that the CS-IGF-1C hydrogel promoted hP-MSC survival as visualized by BLI and markedly alleviated mouse colitis, which was possibly mediated by hP-MSC production of PGE2 and interleukin-10 (IL-10) production by polarized M2 macrophages. Conclusions: The CS-IGF-1C hydrogel improved the engraftment of transplanted hP-MSCs, ameliorated inflammatory responses, and further promoted the functional and structural recovery of colitis through PGE2-mediated M2 macrophage polarization. Molecular imaging approaches and therapeutic strategies for hydrogel application provide a versatile platform for exploring the promising therapeutic potential of MSCs in the treatment of IBD.
Quasi-likelihood Estimation of Marked Fish Recapture

In models of the fraction of fish recaptured in field experiments on gear efficiency the binomial error distribution is usually assumed. However, variance in excess of that defined by the error distribution (overdispersion) is typical in fish capture because of heterogeneity among and within groups of individuals and incomplete model specification. Quasi-likelihood offers a parsimonious solution to the typical problem of incomplete definition of an error distribution with discrete responses. An example is given from the recapture of marked fish following rotenone treatment in lake enclosures, in which a generalized linear-logistic model includes an extra-binomial variance as a function of the mean. Estimated standard errors of fitted parameters were two to three times lower in a linear-logistic maximum likelihood model than in the quasi-likelihood model because extra-binomial variation (overdispersion) was ignored in the former model. In a cross-validation trial, 95% confidence intervals included 85% of i.
Geographic patterns of diversification and the latitudinal gradient of richness of rocky intertidal gastropods: the ‘into the tropical museum’ hypothesis

Aim To evaluate the existence of a latitudinal gradient of richness (LGR) in rocky intertidal gastropods and the role of evolutionary processes in shaping the LGR. Location The entire eastern Pacific coast, from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, encompassing ca. 120° latitude. Methods The LGR was assessed using field surveys and a comprehensive literature dataset from 308 rocky intertidal sites, representing 328 species and 159 genera. The importance of geographic patterns of diversification in shaping the LGR was assessed using three complementary approaches. First, we used the fossil record to evaluate the region of origination of genera (tropical vs. extra-tropical). Secondly, we used a nestedness analysis to compare present-day biogeographic distributions of genera with their region of origin. Finally, we evaluated the importance of biogeographic dynamics for shaping the LGR using a projection matrix and estimating transition probabilities among different biogeographic states. Results Eastern Pacific rocky intertidal gastropods follow the canonical latitudinal gradient of richness (higher richness in the tropics). Originations were similar in the tropics and extra-tropics, a pattern that was robust to geographic differences in fossil sampling. The biogeographic distribution of genera was significantly nested, irrespective of the region of origin of genera. The distribution dynamics model accurately reproduced the LGR and showed that key-transitions are low extinction in the tropics and high dispersal of taxa from the extra-tropics to the tropics. Conclusions The existence of a canonical LGR in rocky intertidal gastropods can be explained by the combined effect of reduced extinction rates in the tropics and the range expansion of taxa from the extra-tropics toward the tropics, in what we have called the ‘into the tropical museum’ hypothesis.