Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
General Munchausen Reinforcement Learning with Tsallis Kullback-Leibler Divergence

Many policy optimization approaches in reinforcement learning incorporate a Kullback-Leilbler (KL) divergence to the previous policy, to prevent the policy from changing too quickly. This idea was initially proposed in a seminal paper on Conservative Policy Iteration, with approximations given by algorithms like TRPO and Munchausen Value Iteration (MVI). We continue this line of work by investigating a generalized KL divergence -- called the Tsallis KL divergence -- which use the $q$-logarithm in the definition. The approach is a strict generalization, as $q = 1$ corresponds to the standard KL divergence; $q>1$ provides a range of new options. We characterize the types of policies learned under the Tsallis KL, and motivate when $q>1$ could be beneficial. To obtain a practical algorithm that incorporates Tsallis KL regularization, we extend MVI, which is one of the simplest approaches to incorporate KL regularization. We show that this generalized MVI($q$) obtains significant improvements over the standard MVI($q = 1$) across 35 Atari games.
Is virtual reality so user-friendly for non-designers in early design activities? Comparing skills needed to traditional sketching versus virtual reality sketching

Abstract Virtual reality (VR) sketching has many advantages for product design and tends to be more and more used among designers and non-designers (end-users). Nevertheless, few studies have focused on the skills needed to use VR sketching for non-designers especially VR novices in VR software. This study focuses on identifying the cognitive impact of VR sketching compared to traditional sketching on VR expert and VR novice in an experimental setting. Thirty-one participants composed of VR experts (N = 15) and VR novices (N = 16) completed a mental rotation test and then performed one traditional paper and pencil sketching task and two VR sketching tasks. We also measured the participants’ movements when using the VR sketching. Results show that VR experts perform better than VR novices in VR sketching because training is an essential element for the quality of traditional and VR sketching. Nevertheless, VR novices with previous training in traditional drawing and/or high mental rotation skills will be able to produce good-quality sketches. In addition, the results show that users moving more in the immersive environment performed better quality sketches if the drawing requires more complex shapes. Our results suggest that VR sketching can be complex to use for a part of the population that may be end-users, especially for those with little experience in traditional and VR sketching and with poor visuospatial abilities. We, therefore, advise to check the non-designers’ prior skills, otherwise, it will be necessary to train these users in VR sketching.
Phenformin’s impact on lifespan in C. elegans is resilient to environmental factors that inhibit metformin-induced longevity downstream of skn-1/Nrf and AMP-activated protein kinase

Despite being principally prescribed to treat type 2 diabetes, biguanides, especially metformin and phenformin, have been shown to extend lifespan and healthspan in preclinical models, and to reduce the impact of aging-associated diseases such as cancer. While there have been conflicting results in studies involving rodents and humans, consistent evidence from laboratories worldwide, including our own, indicates metformin and phenformin’s ability to significantly extend lifespan in C. elegans. However, the pro-longevity effect of metformin can vary depending on environmental conditions. Specifically, the choice of agar from different manufacturers or batches influences metformin’s ability to extend lifespan in C. elegans. We traced ability of certain agar batches to interfere with metformin-prompted lifespan extension to the presence of a factor that acts directly in the worm, independently of the bacterial food source, that prevents longevity promoting effects downstream of longevity effectors skn-1 and AMPK. In contrast, phenformin prompts robust lifespan extension in the face of environmental changes and exhibits broad positive effects in aging across genetically diverse Caenorhabditis species where the impact of metformin is highly variable. Thus metformin effects in aging are impacted by heretofore unappreciated environmental factors. Phenformin may represent a more robust agent with which to understand the longevity promoting mechanisms downstream of biguanides.
Comparative transcriptomics of Venus flytrap (Dionaea muscipula) across stages of prey capture and digestion

The Venus flytrap, Dionaea muscipula, is perhaps the world’s best-known botanical carnivore. The act of prey capture and digestion along with its rapidly closing, charismatic traps make this species a compelling model for studying the evolution and fundamental biology of carnivorous plants. There is a growing body of research on the genome, transcriptome, and digestome of Dionaea muscipula, but surprisingly limited information on changes in trap transcript abundance over time since feeding. Here we present the results of a comparative transcriptomics project exploring the transcriptomic changes across seven timepoints in a 72-hour time series of prey digestion and three timepoints directly comparing triggered traps with and without prey items. We document a dynamic response to prey capture including changes in abundance of transcripts with Gene Ontology (GO) annotations related to digestion and nutrient uptake. Comparisons of traps with and without prey documented 174 significantly differentially expressed genes at 1 hour after triggering and 151 genes with significantly different abundances at 24 hours. Approximately 50% of annotated protein-coding genes in Venus flytrap genome exhibit change (10041 of 21135) in transcript abundance following prey capture. Whereas peak abundance for most of these genes was observed within 3 hours, an expression cluster of 3009 genes exhibited continuously increasing abundance over the 72-hour sampling period, and transcript for these genes with GO annotation terms including both catabolism and nutrient transport may continue to accumulate beyond 72 hours.
Cold-induced skin darkening does not protect amphibian larvae from UV-associated DNA damage

Many amphibian declines are correlated with increasing levels of ultraviolet radiation (UVR). While disease is often implicated in declines, environmental factors such as temperature and UVR play an important role in disease epidemiology. The mutagenic effects of UVR exposure on amphibians are worse at low temperatures. Amphibians from cold environments may be more susceptible to increasing UVR. However, larvae of some species demonstrate cold acclimation, reducing UV-induced DNA damage at low temperatures. Understanding of the mechanisms underpinning this response is lacking. We reared Limnodynastes peronii larvae in cool (15°C) or warm (25°C) waters before acutely exposing them to 1.5 h of high intensity (80 μW cm-2) UVBR. We measured the colour of larvae and mRNA levels of a DNA repair enzyme. We reared larvae at 25°C in black or white containers to elicit a skin colour response, and then measured DNA damage levels in the skin and remaining carcass following UVBR exposure. Cold acclimated larvae were darker and displayed lower levels of DNA damage than warm-acclimated larvae. There was no difference in CPD-photolyase mRNA levels between cold- and warm-acclimated larvae. Skin darkening in larvae did not reduce larval accumulation of DNA damage following UVR exposure. Our results showed that skin darkening alone does not explain cold-induced reductions in UV-associated DNA damage in L. peronii larvae. Beneficial cold-acclimation is more likely underpinned by increased CPD-photolyase abundance and/or increased photolyase activity at low temperatures. Research Highlights L. peroniii larvae darken when exposed to cold temperatures Darker larvae were not protected from the effects of UV on DNA damage Cold acclimation of larvae when exposed to UV is likely driven by DNA repair enzymes not melanin
SMPR: Single-Stage Multi-Person Pose Regression

Existing multi-person pose estimators can be roughly divided into two-stage approaches (top-down and bottom-up approaches) and one-stage approaches. The two-stage methods either suffer high computational redundancy for additional person detectors or group keypoints heuristically after predicting all the instance-free keypoints. The recently proposed single-stage methods do not rely on the above two extra stages but have lower performance than the latest bottom-up approaches. In this work, a novel single-stage multi-person pose regression, termed SMPR, is presented. It follows the paradigm of dense prediction and predicts instance-aware keypoints from every location. Besides feature aggregation, we propose better strategies to define positive pose hypotheses for training which all play an important role in dense pose estimation. The network also learns the scores of estimated poses. The pose scoring strategy further improves the pose estimation performance by prioritizing superior poses during non-maximum suppression (NMS). We show that our method not only outperforms existing single-stage methods and but also be competitive with the latest bottom-up methods, with 70.2 AP and 77.5 AP75 on the COCO test-dev pose benchmark. Code is available at this https URL.
In nite Objects in Type Theory

We show that innite objects can be constructively understood without the consideration of partial elements, or greatest xed-points, through the explicit consideration of proof objects. We present then a proof system based on these explanations. According to this analysis, the proof expressions should have the same structure as the program expressions of a pure functional
Design of partial liquid-filled hollow-core photonic bandgap fiber polarizer

A novel polarizer is designed by liquid filling in the partial air holes of hollow-core photonic bandgap fiber (PBGF) forming an asymmetric waveguide structure. Applied a full-vector finite-element (FEM) method, it is demonstrated that the proposed polarizer has a high polarization extinction ratio more than 35 dB.
Reinforcement Learning Methods for Computing Offloading: A Systematic Review

copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org. © 2023 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM. 0360-0300/2023/1-ART1 $15.00 http://dx.doi. org/10.1145/3603703 ACM Comput. Surv. Reinforcement Learning Methods for Computing Offloading: A Systematic Review
Wgen: A Model for Generating Daily Weather Variables

Richardson, C. W. , and D. A. Wright. 1984. WGEN: A Model for Generating Daily Weather Variables. U. S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service, ARS-8, 83 p. A computer simulation model called WGEN (Weather Generator) that provides daily values for precipitation, maximum temperature, minimum temperature, and solar radiation is described. The model accounts for the persistence of each variable, the dependence among the variables, and the seasonal characteristics of each variable. Its parameters are defined for locations in the United States, enabling use of the model in the 48 contiguous States without reference to actual data. Examples of model applications are given, and weather data generated by the model are compared with actual data.
VU Human twinning is not linked to the region of chromosome 4 syntetic with the sheep twinning gene FecB

The tendency to dizygotic (DZ) twinning is inherited in both humans and sheep, and a fecundity gene in sheep ( FecB ) maps to sheep chromosome 6, syntenic with human 4q21-25. Our aim was to see whether a gene predisposing to human DZ twinning mapped to this region. DNA was collected from 169 pairs and 17 sets of 3 sisters (trios) from Australia and New Zealand who had each had spontaneous DZ twins, mostly before the age of 35, and from a replication sample of 111 families (92 affected sister pairs) from The Netherlands. Exclusion mapping was carried out after typing 26 markers on chromosome 4, of which 8 spanned the region likely to contain the human homologue of the sheep
Detecting Transient Changes in Gait Using Fractal Scaling of Gait Variability in Conjunction with Gaussian Continuous Wavelet Transform

Accelerometer data can be analyzed using a variety of methods which are effective in the clinical setting. Time-series analysis is used to analyze spatiotemporal variables in various populations. More recently, investigators have focused on gait complexity and the structure of spatiotemporal variations during walking and running. This study evaluated the use of time-series analyses to determine gait parameters during running. Subjects were college-age female soccer players. Accelerometer data were collected using GPS-embedded trunk-mounted accelerometers. Customized Matlab programs were developed that included Gaussian continuous wavelet transform (CWT) to determine spatiotemporal characteristics, detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA) to examine gait complexity and autocorrelation analyses (ACF) to assess gait regularity. Reliability was examined using repeated running efforts and intraclass correlation. Proof of concept was determined by examining differences in each variable between various running speeds. Applicability was established by examining gait before and after fatiguing activity. The results showed most variables had excellent reliability. Test-retest R values for these variables ranged from 0.8 to 1.0. Low reliability was seen in bilateral comparisons of gait symmetry. Increases in running speed resulted in expected changes in spatiotemporal and acceleration variables. Fatiguing exercise had minimal effects on spatiotemporal variables but resulted in noticeable declines in complexity. This investigation shows that GPS-embedded trunk-mounted accelerometers can be effectively used to assess running gait. CWT and DFA yield reliable measures of spatiotemporal characteristics of gait and gait complexity. The effects of running speed and fatigue on these variables provides proof of concepts and applicability for this analytical approach. Detecting Transient Changes in Gait Using Fractal Scaling of Gait Variability in Conjunction with Gaussian Continuous Wavelet Transform
PENERAPAN METODE TOPSIS UNTUKSISTEM PENDUKUNG KEPUTUSANPEMILIHAN LEMBAGA BIMBINGAN BELAJARDI PURWOKERTO

Sekarang banyak terdapat lembaga bimbingan belajar yang menawarkan jasa pendidikan tambahan selain pendidikan formal (sekolah). Lembaga tersebut biasa dikenal istilah bimbel (bimbingan belajar), kursus ataupun les. Lembagalembaga tersebut menyediakan sarana prasarana yang berbeda-beda sesuai dengan kebutuhan siswa. Oleh karena itu siswa harus bisa memilih dengan tepat lembaga bimbingan belajar yang akan diikuti agar tidak menyesal dikemudian hari, untuk itu diperlukan sistem pendukung keputusan untuk membantu peserta menentukan lembaga bimbingan belajar yang tepat.Salah satu metode yang dapat digunakan adalah metode TOPSIS (Technique For Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution). Pemilihan lembaga bimbingan belajar bagi siswa sekolah menengah atas ditentukan oleh beberapa kriteria yaitu biaya, fasilitas, kapasitas per kelas, staff pengajar, metode pembelajaran, dan lokasi. Langkah-langkah TOPSIS yaitu, membangun sebuah matriks keputusan, membuat matriks keputusan yang ternormalisasi, membuat matriks keputusan yang ternormalisasi terbobot, menentukan solusi ideal positif dan negatif, menghitung kedekatan relatif terhadap solusi ideal positif dan merangking alternatif. Hasil akhir dari sistem ini berupa pengurutan data lembaga bimbingan belajar yang akan dijadikan sebagai alat bantu dalam pengambilan keputusan. Sistem pendukung keputusan ini akan membantu siswa dalam memilih lembaga bimbingan belajar yang tepat sesuai dengan kebutuhan.
Overview of RepLab 2012: Evaluating Online Reputation Management Systems

This paper summarizes the goals, organization and results of the rst RepLab competitive evaluation campaign for Online Reputation Management Systems (RepLab 2012). RepLab focused on the reputation of companies, and asked participant systems to annotate dierent types of information on tweets containing the names of several companies. Two tasks were proposed: a proling task, where tweets had to be annotated for relevance and polarity for reputation, and a monitoring task, where tweets had to be clustered thematically and clusters had to be ordered by priority (for reputation management purposes). The gold standard con- sisted of annotations made by reputation management experts, a feature which turns the RepLab 2012 test collection in a useful source not only to evaluate systems, but also to reach a better understanding of the notions of polarity and priority in the context of reputation management.
The peach RGF/GLV signalling peptide pCTG134 is involved in a regulatory circuit that sustains auxin and ethylene actions

Peach is a climacteric species whose ripening is regulated by the plant hormone ethylene. A crosstalk mechanism with auxin is necessary to support climacteric ethylene synthesis. The homeostasis control of auxin is regulated also by the activity of peptide hormones (PHs), acting both as short and long distant ligands. In this work, we investigated the role of CTG134, a peach gene encoding a GOLVEN-like PH isolated in mesocarp at the onset of ripening. In peach fruit, CTG134 was expressed during the climacteric transition and its mRNA level was induced by auxin and 1-methylcyclopropene (1-MCP) treatments, whereas it was minimally affected by ethylene. To better elucidate its function, CTG134 was overexpressed in Arabidopsis and tobacco, which showed abnormal root hair growth, similar to wild-type plants treated with a synthetic form of the peptide. Molecular surveys demonstrated an impaired hormonal crosstalk, resulting in a re-modulated expression of a set of genes involved in both ethylene and auxin domains. In addition, the promoter of pCTG134 fused with GUS reporter highlighted gene activity in plant organs in which the auxin-ethylene interplay is known to occur. These data support the role of pCTG134 as mediator in an auxin-ethylene regulatory circuit. Highlight The role of the peach RGF/GLV peptide during root hair formation in Arabidopsis and tobacco supports its involvement in a cross-hormonal auxin-ethylene regulatory circuit.
An Ultra-Wideband Digitally Programmable Power Amplifier with Efficiency Enhancement for Cellular and Emerging Wireless Communication Standards. IEEE

— The design and measurements of a fabricated novel digitally programmable wideband power amplifier (PA) are presented. The PA is made suitable for use in all communication standards, including GSM, 3G, LTE and Femto-cells, offering a bandwidth of several octaves covering presently 300MHz to 3.5GHz. It meets power, efficiency and linearity specifications. The amplifier showed excellent performances. The uniquely linear and high power SONY GaAs J-PHEMT process along with novel output-stage multiple cascode topology structure are discussed. This enabled a distinctive larger output impedance and power and low voltage operation. The output stage offered 15-20dB of gain without a driver. The circuit requires only little output or input matching for gain or impedance, depending on the application. In order to obtain higher gain and optimal application specific performance, a driver stage was added on the same die. A digitally programmable tuning chip was incorporated to the solution to optimize the performance for large bandwidths exceeding 40%. For smaller bandwidths no digital tuning was required. Digital pre-distortion algorithm was tested for better linearization. To the best knowledge of the authors, this is the first comprehensive plug-and-play solution for multi-band and multi-mode handset transmitters with the single chip one PA.
Scene statistics: neural representation of real-world structure in rapid visual perception

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Remote sensing flow velocity of debris-covered glaciers using Landsat 8 data

Changes in ice velocity of a glacier regulate its mass balance and dynamics. The estimation of glacier flow velocity is therefore an important aspect of temporal glacier monitoring. The utilisation of conventional ground-based techniques for detecting glacier surface flow velocity in the rugged and alpine Himalayan terrain is extremely difficult. Remote sensing-based techniques can provide such observations on a regular basis for a large geographical area. Obtaining freely available high quality remote sensing data for the Himalayan regions is challenging. In the present work, we adopted a differential band composite approach, for the first time, in order to estimate glacier surface velocity for non-debris and supraglacial debris covered areas of a glacier, separately. We employed various bandwidths of the Landsat 8 data for velocity estimation using the COSI-Corr (co-registration of optically sensed images and correlation) tool. We performed the accuracy assessment with respect to field measurements for two glaciers in the Indian Himalaya. The panchromatic band worked best for non-debris parts of the glaciers while band 6 (SWIR – short wave infrared) performed best in case of debris cover. We correlated six temporal Landsat 8 scenes in order to ensure the performance of the proposed algorithm on monthly as well as yearly timescales. We identified sources of error and generated a final velocity map along with the flow lines. Over- and underestimates of the yearly glacier velocity were found to be more in the case of slow moving areas with annual displacements less than 5 m. Landsat 8 has great capabilities for such velocity estimation work for a large geographic extent because of its global coverage, improved spectral and radiometric resolutions, free availability and considerable revisit time.
Traffic speed prediction in the Lyon area using DCRNN (extended abstract)

HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés. Traffic speed prediction in the Lyon area using DCRNN Fabio Mensi, Rémy Cazabet, Angelo Furno