Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Gibberellin levels and cold-induced floral stalk elongation in tulip.

To investigate the role of gibberellins (GAs) in the cold requirement of tulip (Tulipa gesneriana L. cv. Apeldoorn), bulbs were dry-stored at 5°C or at 17°C for 12 weeks prior to planting at 20°C. Only precooled bulbs showed rapid sprout growth and developed a full-grown flower. Endogenous GA levels were measured in sprouts and basal plates at the time of planting and in the second week after planting, by combined gas chromatography-mass spectrometry using deuterated internal standards. GA4 was the major gibberellin, while GA 1 , GA 9 and GA 34 were present in lower amounts. At the time of planting, sprouts from non-cooled bulbs contained significantly more GA 4 and GA 1 per sprout than those from precooled bulbs. Hence, there is no direct correlation between rapid sprout growth after planting and high GA levels at planting. In the second week after planting, floral stalks of precooled bulbs contained 2 to 3 times more GA 4 and its metabolite GA 34 per floral stalk and per g fresh weight than those of non-cooled bulbs. The results are discussed with regard to the role of gibberellins in the cold-induced floral stalk elongation of tulip.
Is a starving host tastier? Reproduction in fleas parasitizing food‐limited rodents

Summary 1. We hypothesized that food availability, and therefore body condition, of a rodent host, Meriones crassus , affects egg production and survival, and development time of preimago and adults of the first generation of the flea Xenopsylla ramesis . 2. Egg production was significantly higher in fleas parasitizing underfed than control animals. 3. Food availability for hosts affected survival of eggs and larvae produced by fleas on these rodents, but did not affect survival of pupae. More than twice the number of eggs from fleas on food-limited hosts survived than those from fleas on control rodents. Highest larval survival was recorded in fleas on rodents with 30% of maintenance energy intake. 4. Survival of new generation imagos was lowest in fleas from parents on hosts with the highest food limitation. By contrast, survival of parent fleas was highest on hosts offered 30% of maintenance energy intake. 5. Time of egg and larval development was longest on hosts consuming 30% of energy requirements for maintenance. By contrast, there was no difference in time to emergence in pupae from flea females on rodents from different treatments. Survival time under starvation of imago of the first generation was shortest in offspring of fleas that parasitized M. crassus offered the minimal amount of food. The opposite was true for parent fleas. 6. The results suggest nutritional and/or energetic cost of host resistance, measured as host-mediated parasite fitness loss, as well as possible adaptive stress-induced immunosuppression.
Karyotype, DNA Content and Meiotic Behaviour in Five South American Species ofVicia(Fabaceae)☆

Abstract This paper presents the karyotype, DNA content and meiotic behaviour of five species of Vicia from Argentina ( V. macrograminea Burk., V. graminea SM., V. epetiolaris Burk., V. pampicola Burk. and V. nana Vog.). All the species have the same chromosome number and karyotype formula ( 2n =14; 6 m +4 st +4 t ). Each species, however, displays a characteristic number and position of the nucleolar organizer region (NOR) and different sizes of the respective satellites, confirmed by Ag-NOR banding. Moreover, significant differences were found in the total chromosome volume (TCV) and DNA content of the species. Positive correlations between DNA content and TCV, and between DNA content and type of life cycle were also found. TCV and DNA content are lower in V. nana (annual) and higher in V. macrograminea (biennial–perennial). The material displayed marked karyotypic orthoselection, with similar karyotypes in all studied species, even when the overall chromosome size varied. Evolutionary changes in DNA amount are proportional to the relative length of each chromosome arm, maintaining karyotypic uniformity. Significant differences were found between the meiotic behaviour of V. graminea and that of the other species. V. graminea has a lower frequency of ring bivalents and chiasmata per cell, and also has a lower interstitial chiasma frequency. In general, the results are congruent with the morphological data reported for these species.
Non-cooperative Multi-agent Systems with Exploring Agents

Multi-agent learning is a challenging problem in machine learning that has applications in different domains such as distributed control, robotics, and economics. We develop a prescriptive model of multi-agent behavior using Markov games. Since in many multi-agent systems, agents do not necessary select their optimum strategies against other agents (e.g., multi-pedestrian interaction), we focus on models in which the agents play "exploration but near optimum strategies". We model such policies using the Boltzmann-Gibbs distribution. This leads to a set of coupled Bellman equations that describes the behavior of the agents. We introduce a set of conditions under which the set of equations admit a unique solution and propose two algorithms that provably provide the solution in finite and infinite time horizon scenarios. We also study a practical setting in which the interactions can be described using the occupancy measures and propose a simplified Markov game with less complexity. Furthermore, we establish the connection between the Markov games with exploration strategies and the principle of maximum causal entropy for multi-agent systems. Finally, we evaluate the performance of our algorithms via several well-known games from the literature and some games that are designed based on real world applications.
The IMS–CUBoulder System for the SIGMORPHON 2020 Shared Task on Unsupervised Morphological Paradigm Completion

In this paper, we present the systems of the University of Stuttgart IMS and the University of Colorado Boulder (IMS--CUBoulder) for SIGMORPHON 2020 Task 2 on unsupervised morphological paradigm completion (Kann et al., 2020). The task consists of generating the morphological paradigms of a set of lemmas, given only the lemmas themselves and unlabeled text. Our proposed system is a modified version of the baseline introduced together with the task. In particular, we experiment with substituting the inflection generation component with an LSTM sequence-to-sequence model and an LSTM pointer-generator network. Our pointer-generator system obtains the best score of all seven submitted systems on average over all languages, and outperforms the official baseline, which was best overall, on Bulgarian and Kannada.
Constrained Nonlinear Output Regulation Using Model Predictive Control

We present a model predictive control (MPC) framework to solve the constrained nonlinear output regulation problem. The main feature of the proposed framework is that the application does not require the solution to classical regulator (Francis–Byrnes–Isidori) equations or any other offline design procedure. In particular, the proposed formulation simply minimizes the predicted output error, possibly with some input regularization. Instead of using terminal cost/sets or a positive-definite stage cost as is standard in MPC theory, we build on the theoretical results by Grimm et al. using a detectability notion. The proposed formulation is applicable if the constrained nonlinear regulation problem is (strictly) feasible; the plant is incrementally stabilizable and incrementally input–output to state stable (i-IOSS, detectable). We show that for minimum phase systems, such a design ensures exponential stability of the regulator manifold. We also provide a design procedure in case of unstable zero dynamics using an incremental input regularization and a nonresonance condition. The theoretical results are illustrated with an example involving offset-free tracking.
Sharks caught in the protective gill nets off Natal, South Africa. 4. The bull shark Carcharhinus leucas Valenciennes

A total of 772 bull sharks Carcharhinus leucas was caught in Natal's protective "shark nets" between 1978 and 1990. Confusion in distinguishing C. leucas from C. amboinensis resulted in their catch data being combined from 1966, when data collection began, to 1977. The catch rate of the species pair declined until 1977, recovered until the mid 1980s, but subsequently declined again. The trend in catch rate of C. leucas alone for the period 1978–1990 was similar, with minima of 0,70 sharks·km-net−1·year−1 in 1978 and 0,95 in 1990, and a maximum of 2,08 in 1986. Recaptures of six tagged sharks suggest that the species is not highly migratory. Catches, particularly of immature sharks, were highest at the northernmost beaches. Most bull sharks were caught in summer and in turbid water (mean water clarity 2,0 m). The sex ratio of the catch was 1 male to 1,3 females. Sizes ranged from 74 to 213 cm precaudal length, with modes of 141–145 cm (males) and 171–175 cm (females). Size at maturity for both sexes was be.
Is diffuse intracluster light a good tracer of the galaxy cluster matter distribution?

We explore the relation between diffuse intracluster light (central galaxy included) and the galaxy cluster (baryonic and dark) matter distribution using a sample of 528 clusters at $0.2\leq z \leq 0.35$ found in the Dark Energy Survey (DES) Year 1 data. The surface brightness of the diffuse light shows an increasing dependence on cluster total mass at larger radius, and appears to be self-similar with a universal radial dependence after scaling by cluster radius.We also compare the diffuse light radial profiles to the cluster (baryonic and dark) matter distribution measured through weak lensing and find them to be comparable. The IllustrisTNG galaxy formation simulation offers further insight into the connection between diffuse stellar mass and cluster matter distributions -- the simulation radial profile of the diffuse stellar component does not have a similar slope with the total cluster matter content, although that of the cluster satellite galaxies does. Regardless of the radial trends, the amount of diffuse stellar mass has a low-scatter scaling relation with cluster's total mass in the simulation, out-performing the total stellar mass of cluster satellite galaxies. We conclude that there is no consistent evidence on whether or not diffuse light is a faithful radial tracer of the cluster matter distribution. Nevertheless, both observational and simulation results reveal that diffuse light is an excellent indicator of the cluster's total mass.
A Quantum Annealing Approach for Dynamic Multi-Depot Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem

Quantum annealing (QA) is a quantum computing algorithm that works on the principle of Adiabatic Quantum Computation (AQC), and it has shown significant computational advantages in solving combinatorial optimization problems such as vehicle routing problems (VRP) when compared to classical algorithms. This paper presents a QA approach for solving a variant VRP known as multi-depot capacitated vehicle routing problem (MDCVRP). This is an NP-hard optimization problem with real-world applications in the fields of transportation, logistics, and supply chain management. We consider heterogeneous depots and vehicles with different capacities. Given a set of heterogeneous depots, the number of vehicles in each depot, heterogeneous depot/vehicle capacities, and a set of spatially distributed customer locations, the MDCVRP attempts to identify routes of various vehicles satisfying the capacity constraints such as that all the customers are served. We model MDCVRP as a quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) problem, which minimizes the overall distance traveled by all the vehicles across all depots given the capacity constraints. Furthermore, we formulate a QUBO model for dynamic version of MDCVRP known as D-MDCVRP, which involves dynamic rerouting of vehicles to real-time customer requests. We discuss the problem complexity and a solution approach to solving MDCVRP and D-MDCVRP on quantum annealing hardware from D-Wave.
The population dynamics of pathogens that control insect outbreaks

Abstract The population dynamics of an insect pathogen with a free-living infectious stage are considered. Most of the time, the insect host is regulated at an equilibrium density below that at which the pathogen can maintain itself. At regular or irregular intervals, the host escapes its normal regulatory agencies resulting in an outbreak that is eventually brought under control by the pathogen. Models are developed to explore the factors that influence the persistence of the pathogen in such an interaction. If all outbreaks are assumed to be of identical form, and if the occurrence of outbreaks is controlled by a Poisson process, analytical estimates of the mean and variance of the persistence time can be obtained. Such estimates provide good approximations to the numerical predictions of more realistic models in which the dynamics during an outbreak are represented explicitly so that outbreaks vary in size. In the latter models, outbreak size is predicted to be linearly related to the time since the last outbreak. It is argued that the type of model developed here may describe many naturally occurring insect-pathogen interactions, and that it can assist in the choice of pathogens for use in biological control and in the design of genetically manipulated pathogens.
Exploring Optimal DNN Architecture for End-to-End Beamformers Based on Time-frequency References

Acoustic beamformers have been widely used to enhance audio signals. Currently, the best methods are the deep neural network (DNN)-powered variants of the generalized eigenvalue and minimum-variance distortionless response beamformers and the DNN-based filter-estimation methods that are used to directly compute beamforming filters. Both approaches are effective; however, they have blind spots in their generalizability. Therefore, we propose a novel approach for combining these two methods into a single framework that attempts to exploit the best features of both. The resulting model, called the W-Net beamformer, includes two components; the first computes time-frequency references that the second uses to estimate beamforming filters. The results on data that include a wide variety of room and noise conditions, including static and mobile noise sources, show that the proposed beamformer outperforms other methods on all tested evaluation metrics, which signifies that the proposed architecture allows for effective computation of the beamforming filters.
Discovery of a Young Stellar Snake with Two Dissolving Cores in the Solar Neighborhood

We report the discovery of a young (only 30–40 Myr) snake-like structure (dubbed a stellar snake) in the solar neighborhood from Gaia DR2. The average distance of this structure is about 310 pc from us. Both the length and width are over 200 pc, but the thickness is only about 80 pc. The snake has one tail and two dissolving cores, which can be clearly distinguished in the 6D phase space. The whole structure includes thousands of members with a total mass of larger than 2000 M ⊙ in a uniform population. The population is so young that it cannot be well explained with the classical theory of tidal tails. We therefore suspect that the snake is hierarchically primordial, rather than the result of dynamically tidal stripping, even if the snake is probably expanding. The coherent 5D phase information and the ages suggest that the snake was probably born in the same environment as the filamentary structure of Beccari et al. If so, the snake could extend the sky region of the Vela OB2 association by a factor of ∼2 and supplement the census of its coeval structures. This finding is useful to understanding the history of the formation and evolution of the Vela OB2 complex. The age of the snake well matches with that of the Gould Belt. In the sky region of our interest, we detect one new open cluster, which is named Tian 1 in this work.
Multi-Staged Cross-Lingual Acoustic Model Adaption for Robust Speech Recognition in Real-World Applications - A Case Study on German Oral History Interviews

While recent automatic speech recognition systems achieve remarkable performance when large amounts of adequate, high quality annotated speech data is used for training, the same systems often only achieve an unsatisfactory result for tasks in domains that greatly deviate from the conditions represented by the training data. For many real-world applications, there is a lack of sufficient data that can be directly used for training robust speech recognition systems. To address this issue, we propose and investigate an approach that performs a robust acoustic model adaption to a target domain in a cross-lingual, multi-staged manner. Our approach enables the exploitation of large-scale training data from other domains in both the same and other languages. We evaluate our approach using the challenging task of German oral history interviews, where we achieve a relative reduction of the word error rate by more than 30% compared to a model trained from scratch only on the target domain, and 6-7% relative compared to a model trained robustly on 1000 hours of same-language out-of-domain training data.
Highly accurate special quadrature methods for Stokesian particle suspensions in confined geometries

Boundary integral methods are highly suited for problems with complicated geometries, but require special quadrature methods to accurately compute the singular and nearly singular layer potentials that appear in them. This article presents a boundary integral method that can be used to study the motion of rigid particles in three‐dimensional periodic Stokes flow with confining walls. A centerpiece of our method is the highly accurate special quadrature method, which is based on a combination of upsampled quadrature and quadrature by expansion, accelerated using a precomputation scheme. The method is demonstrated for rodlike and spheroidal particles, with the confining geometry given by a pipe or a pair of flat walls. A parameter selection strategy for the special quadrature method is presented and tested. Periodic interactions are computed using the spectral Ewald fast summation method, which allows our method to run in O(nlogn) time for n grid points in the primary cell, assuming the number of geometrical objects grows while the grid point concentration is kept fixed.
Better Late than Never; Scaling Computation in Blockchains by Delaying Execution

Proof-of-Work~(PoW) based blockchains typically allocate only a tiny fraction (e.g., less than 1% for Ethereum) of the average interarrival time~($\mathbb{I}$) between blocks for validating transactions. A trivial increase in validation time~($\tau$) introduces the popularly known Verifier's Dilemma, and as we demonstrate, causes more forking and increases unfairness. Large $\tau$ also reduces the tolerance for safety against a Byzantine adversary. Solutions that offload validation to a set of non-chain nodes (a.k.a. off-chain approaches) suffer from trust issues that are non-trivial to resolve. In this paper, we present Tuxedo, the first on-chain protocol to theoretically scale $\tau/\mathbb{I} \approx 1$ in PoW blockchains. The key innovation in Tuxedo is to separate the consensus on the ordering of transactions from their execution. We achieve this by allowing miners to delay validation of transactions in a block by up to $\zeta$ blocks, where $\zeta$ is a system parameter. We perform security analysis of Tuxedo considering all possible adversarial strategies in a synchronous network with end-to-end delay $\Delta$ and demonstrate that Tuxedo achieves security equivalent to known results for longest chain PoW Nakamoto consensus. Additionally, we also suggest a principled approach for practical choices of parameter $\zeta$ as per the application requirement. Our prototype implementation of Tuxedo atop Ethereum demonstrates that it can scale $\tau$ without suffering the harmful effects of naive scaling in existing blockchains.
Visual Interest Prediction with Attentive Multi-Task Transfer Learning

Visual interest & affect prediction is a very interesting area of research in the area of computer vision. In this paper, we propose a transfer learning and attention mechanism based neural network model to predict visual interest & affective dimensions in digital photos. Learning the multi-dimensional affects is addressed through a multi-task learning framework. With various experiments we show the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Evaluation of our model on the benchmark dataset shows large improvement over current state-of-the-art systems.
Survey: Machine Learning in Production Rendering

In the past few years, machine learning-based approaches have had some great success for rendering animated feature films. This survey summarizes several of the most dramatic improvements in using deep neural networks over traditional rendering methods, such as better image quality and lower computational overhead. More specifically, this survey covers the fundamental principles of machine learning and its applications, such as denoising, path guiding, rendering participating media, and other notoriously difficult light transport situations. Some of these techniques have already been used in the latest released animations while others are still in the continuing development by researchers in both academia and movie studios. Although learning-based rendering methods still have some open issues, they have already demonstrated promising performance in multiple parts of the rendering pipeline, and people are continuously making new attempts.
BHN: A Brain-like Heterogeneous Network

The human brain works in an unsupervised way, and more than one brain region is essential for lighting up intelligence. Inspired by this, we propose a brain-like heterogeneous network (BHN), which can cooperatively learn a lot of distributed representations and one global attention representation. By optimizing distributed, self-supervised, and gradient-isolated objective functions in a minimax fashion, our model improves its representations, which are generated from patches of pictures or frames of videos in experiments.
Rigid local systems and the multiplicative eigenvalue problem

We give a construction which produces irreducible complex rigid local systems on $\Bbb{P}_{\Bbb{C}}^1-\{p_1,\dots,p_s\}$ via quantum Schubert calculus and strange duality. These local systems are unitary and arise from a study of vertices in the polytopes controlling the multiplicative eigenvalue problem for the special unitary groups $\operatorname{SU}(n)$ (i.e., determination of the possible eigenvalues of a product of unitary matrices given the eigenvalues of the matrices). Roughly speaking, we show that the strange duals of the simplest vertices of these polytopes give (all) possible unitary irreducible rigid local systems. As a consequence we obtain that the ranks of unitary irreducible rigid local systems (including those with finite global monodromy) on $\Bbb{P}^1-S$ are bounded above if we fix the cardinality of the set $S=\{p_1,\dots,p_s\}$ and require that the local monodromies have orders which divide $n$, for a fixed $n$. Answering a question of N. Katz, we show that there are no irreducible rigid local systems of rank greater than one, with finite global monodromy, all of whose local monodromies have orders dividing $n$, when $n$ is a prime number. We also show that all unitary irreducible rigid local systems on $\Bbb{P}^1_{\Bbb{C}} -S$ with finite local monodromies arise as solutions to the Knizhnik-Zamalodchikov equations on conformal blocks for the special linear group. Along the way, generalising previous works of the author and J. Kiers, we give an inductive mechanism for determining all vertices in the multiplicative eigenvalue problem for $\operatorname{SU}(n)$.