Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
ARDIE: AR, Dialogue, and Eye Gaze Policies for Human-Robot Collaboration

Human-robot collaboration (HRC) has become increasingly relevant in industrial, household, and commercial settings. However, the effectiveness of such collaborations is highly dependent on the human and robots' situational awareness of the environment. Improving this awareness includes not only aligning perceptions in a shared workspace, but also bidirectionally communicating intent and visualizing different states of the environment to enhance scene understanding. In this paper, we propose ARDIE (Augmented Reality with Dialogue and Eye Gaze), a novel intelligent agent that leverages multi-modal feedback cues to enhance HRC. Our system utilizes a decision theoretic framework to formulate a joint policy that incorporates interactive augmented reality (AR), natural language, and eye gaze to portray current and future states of the environment. Through object-specific AR renders, the human can visualize future object interactions to make adjustments as needed, ultimately providing an interactive and efficient collaboration between humans and robots.
Physics-based network fine-tuning for robust quantitative susceptibility mapping from high-pass filtered phase

Purpose: To improve the generalization ability of convolutional neural network (CNN) based prediction of quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM) from high-pass filtered phase (HPFP) image. Methods: The proposed network addresses two common generalization issues that arise when using a pre-trained network to predict QSM from HPFP: a) data with unseen voxel sizes, and b) data with unknown high-pass filter parameters. A network fine-tuning step based on a high-pass filtering dipole convolution forward model is proposed to reduce the generalization error of the pre-trained network. A progressive Unet architecture is proposed to improve prediction accuracy without increasing fine-tuning computational cost. Results: In retrospective studies using RMSE, PSNR, SSIM and HFEN as quality metrics, the performance of both Unet and progressive Unet was improved after physics-based fine-tuning at all voxel sizes and most high-pass filtering cutoff frequencies tested in the experiment. Progressive Unet slightly outperformed Unet both before and after fine-tuning. In a prospective study, image sharpness was improved after physics-based fine-tuning for both Unet and progressive Unet. Compared to Unet, progressive Unet had better agreement of regional susceptibility values with reference QSM. Conclusion: The proposed method shows improved robustness compared to the pre-trained network without fine-tuning when the test dataset deviates from training. Our code is available at https://github.com/Jinwei1209/SWI_to_QSM/
SDSS-IV MaNGA:The Incidence of Major Mergers in type I and II AGN Host Galaxies in the DR15 sample.

We present a study on the incidence of major mergers and their impact on the triggering of nuclear activity in 47 type I and 236 type II optically-selected AGN from the MaNGA DR15 sample. From an estimate of non-parametric image predictors (Gini, M20, concentration (C), asymmetry (A), clumpiness (S), SÃ©rsic index (n), and shape asymmetry(AS)) using the SDSS images, in combination with a Linear Discriminant Analysis Method, we identified major mergers and merger stages. We reinforced our results by looking for bright tidal features in our post-processed SDSS and DESI legacy images. We find a statistically significant higher incidence of major mergers of 29% ± 3% in our type I+II AGN sample compared to 22% ± 0.8% for a non-AGN sample matched in redshift, stellar mass, color and morphological type, finding also a prevalence of post-coalescence (51% ± 5%) over pre-coalescence (23% ± 6%) merger stages. The levels of AGN activity among our massive major mergers are similar to those reported in other works using [O iii] tracers. However, similar levels are produced by our AGN-galaxies hosting stellar bars, suggesting that major mergers are important promoters of nuclear activity but are not the main nor the only mechanism behind the AGN triggering. The tidal strength parameter Q was considered at various scales looking for environmental differences that could affect our results on the merger incidence, finding non-significant differences. Finally, the H-Hβ diagram could be used as an empirical predictor for the flux coming from an AGN source, useful to correct photometric quantities in large AGN samples emerging from surveys.
Etude comparative du positionnement du fuseau mitotique dans les espèces de C.elegans et C. briggsae

La division cellulaire asymetrique est un mecanisme fondamental qui assure la diversite cellulaire, le renouvellement des cellules souches et le maintien de l’identite cellulaire. Elle depend du bon positionnement du fuseau mitotique car il dicte le plan de division des cellules. La premiere division des embryons de C. elegans, est asymetrique et genere deux cellules fille de taille et devenir differents. Elle consiste en deux etapes : la centration des pronoyaux en prophase puis le deplacement posterieur du fuseau mitotique en anaphase. Lors de l'anaphase le fuseau subit des oscillations transverses plus marquees au pole posterieur qu’au pole anterieur. Ces mouvements sont controles par des forces de traction agissant sur les microtubules astraux. Les generateurs de force ont ete moleculairement identifies et sont evolutivement tres conserves. Un complexe compose de proteines Gα, liees a GPR (proteine a domaine GoLoco, homologue de LGN/Pins), a LIN-5 (proteine a domaine super-enroule, homologue de NuMA/Mud) et a la dyneine serait ancre au cortex et active en debut de mitose pour tirer le fuseau. En analysant la premiere division d’une espece proche de C. elegans : C. briggsae, on observe des variations de trajectoire du fuseau. Les embryons de C. briggsae presentent un decalage anterieur des noyaux en prophase et les oscillations du fuseau sont reduites en anaphase. La combinaison de perturbations physiques et l'analyse de mutants dans ces especes, ont montre que ces differences s’expliquent par des changements dans la regulation du complexe ternaire. Mais, nous avons decouvert que dans les deux especes 1) un switch positionnel conserve controle le demarrage des oscillations du fuseau, 2) la localisation posterieure de GPR determine ce switch positionnel, et 3) l'amplitude maximum des oscillations est determinee en partie par le temps passe dans la phase oscillatoire. Nous avons utilises ces variants pour correler les phenotypes, la localisation de GPR et la divergence de sequence entre especes afin d’identifier les elements de regulation de cette proteine. Nous avons alors echange les proteines et construits des proteines chimeres entre les deux especes. Enfin, par optogenetique, nous avons essaye de controler la localisation temporelle de GPR et analyser les consequences sur les mouvements des noyaux et du fuseau. En etudiant la microevolution d'un processus sous-cellulaire, nous avons identifie de nouveaux mecanismes qui contribuent a la comprehension du positionnement du fuseau.
Weighted Point Cloud Normal Estimation

Existing normal estimation methods for point clouds are often less robust to severe noise and complex geometric structures. Also, they usually ignore the contributions of different neighbouring points during normal estimation, which leads to less accurate results. In this paper, we introduce a weighted normal estimation method for 3D point cloud data. We innovate in two key points: 1) we develop a novel weighted normal regression technique that predicts point-wise weights from local point patches and use them for robust, feature-preserving normal regression; 2) we propose to conduct contrastive learning between point patches and the corresponding ground-truth normals of the patches’ central points as a pre-training process to facilitate normal regression. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our method can robustly handle noisy and complex point clouds, achieving state-of-the-art performance on both synthetic and real-world datasets.
LPS-Type Ramanujan Graphs from Definite Quaternion Algebras over $\mathbb Q$ of Class Number One

In this paper we construct explicit LPS-type Ramanujan graphs from each definite quaternion algebra over $\mathbb Q$ of class number 1, extending the constructions of Lubotzky, Phillips, Sarnak, and later Chiu, and answering in the affirmative a question raised by Jo and Yamasaki. We do this by showing that for each definite quaternion algebra $\mathcal H$ over $\mathbb Q$ of class number 1 with maximal order $\mathcal O$, if $G = \mathcal H^\times/Z(\mathcal H^\times)$ and $p$ is prime such that $G(\mathbb Q_p) \cong PGL_2(\mathbb Q_p)$, then there exists a congruence $p$-arithmetic subgroup of $G$ which acts simply transitively on the Bruhat-Tits tree of $G(\mathbb Q_p)$.
Generalizability of PRS313 for breast cancer risk amongst non-Europeans in a Los Angeles biobank

Polygenic risk scores (PRS) summarize the combined effect of common risk variants and are associated with breast cancer risk in patients without identifiable monogenic risk factors. One of the most well-validated PRSs in breast cancer to date is PRS313, which was developed from a Northern European biobank but has shown attenuated performance in non-European ancestries. We further investigate the generalizability of the PRS313 for American women of European (EA), African (AFR), Asian (EAA), and Latinx (HL) ancestry within one institution with a singular EHR system, genotyping platform, and quality control process. We found that the PRS313 achieved overlapping Areas under the ROC Curve (AUCs) in females of Lantix (AUC, 0.68; 95 CI, 0.65-0.71) and European ancestry (AUC, 0.70; 95 CI, 0.69-0.71) but lower AUCs for the AFR and EAA populations (AFR: AUC, 0.61; 95 CI, 0.56-0.65; EAA: AUC, 0.64; 95 CI, 0.60-0.680). While PRS313 is associated with Hormone Positive (HR+) disease in European Americans (OR, 1.42; 95 CI, 1.16-1.64), for Latinx females, it may be instead associated with Human Epidermal Growth Factor Receptor 2 (HER2+) disease (OR, 2.52; 95 CI, 1.35-4.70) although due to small numbers, additional studies are needed. In summary, we found that PRS313 was significantly associated with breast cancer but with attenuated accuracy in women of African and Asian descent within a singular health system in Los Angeles. Our work further highlights the need for additional validation in diverse cohorts prior to clinical implementation of polygenic risk scores.
Bias or Diversity? Unraveling Fine-Grained Thematic Discrepancy in U.S. News Headlines

There is a broad consensus that news media outlets incorporate ideological biases in their news articles. However, prior studies on measuring the discrepancies among media outlets and further dissecting the origins of thematic differences suffer from small sample sizes and limited scope and granularity. In this study, we use a large dataset of 1.8 million news headlines from major U.S. media outlets spanning from 2014 to 2022 to thoroughly track and dissect the fine-grained thematic discrepancy in U.S. news media. We employ multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) to quantify the fine-grained thematic discrepancy related to four prominent topics - domestic politics, economic issues, social issues, and foreign affairs in order to derive a more holistic analysis. Additionally, we compare the most frequent $n$-grams in media headlines to provide further qualitative insights into our analysis. Our findings indicate that on domestic politics and social issues, the discrepancy can be attributed to a certain degree of media bias. Meanwhile, the discrepancy in reporting foreign affairs is largely attributed to the diversity in individual journalistic styles. Finally, U.S. media outlets show consistency and high similarity in their coverage of economic issues.
Towards Self-adaptive Mutation in Evolutionary Multi-Objective Algorithms

Parameter control has succeeded in accelerating the convergence process of evolutionary algorithms. While empirical and theoretical studies have shed light on the behavior of algorithms for single-objective optimization, little is known about how self-adaptation influences multi-objective evolutionary algorithms. In this work, we contribute (1) extensive experimental analysis of the Global Simple Evolutionary Multi-objective Algorithm (GSEMO) variants on classic problems, such as OneMinMax, LOTZ, COCZ, and (2) a novel version of GSEMO with self-adaptive mutation. To enable self-adaptation in GSEMO, we explore three self-adaptive mutation techniques from single-objective optimization and use various performance metrics, such as hypervolume and inverted generational distance, to guide the adaptation. Our experiments show that adapting the mutation rate based on single-objective optimization and hypervolume can speed up the convergence of GSEMO. Moreover, we propose a GSEMO with self-adaptive mutation, which considers optimizing for single objectives and adjusts the mutation rate for each solution individually. Our results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the GSEMO with static mutation rates across all the tested problems. This work provides a comprehensive benchmarking study for MOEAs and complements existing theoretical runtime analysis. Our proposed algorithm addresses interesting issues for designing MOEAs for future practical applications.
A Bayesian adaptive design for dual‐agent phase I–II oncology trials integrating efficacy data across stages

Combination of several anticancer treatments has typically been presumed to have enhanced drug activity. Motivated by a real clinical trial, this paper considers phase I–II dose finding designs for dual‐agent combinations, where one main objective is to characterize both the toxicity and efficacy profiles. We propose a two‐stage Bayesian adaptive design that accommodates a change of patient population in‐between. In stage I, we estimate a maximum tolerated dose combination using the escalation with overdose control (EWOC) principle. This is followed by a stage II, conducted in a new yet relevant patient population, to find the most efficacious dose combination. We implement a robust Bayesian hierarchical random‐effects model to allow sharing of information on the efficacy across stages, assuming that the related parameters are either exchangeable or nonexchangeable. Under the assumption of exchangeability, a random‐effects distribution is specified for the main effects parameters to capture uncertainty about the between‐stage differences. The inclusion of nonexchangeability assumption further enables that the stage‐specific efficacy parameters have their own priors. The proposed methodology is assessed with an extensive simulation study. Our results suggest a general improvement of the operating characteristics for the efficacy assessment, under a conservative assumption about the exchangeability of the parameters a priori.
BLAFS: A Bloat Aware File System

While there has been exponential improvements in hardware performance over the years, software performance has lagged behind. The performance-gap is caused by software inefficiencies, many of which are caused by software bloat. Software bloat occurs due to the ever increasing, mostly unused, features and dependencies in a software. Bloat exists in all layers of software, from the operating system, to the application, resulting in computing resource wastage. The problem is exacerbated in both cloud and edge setting as the number of applications running increase. To remove software bloat, multiple debloating tools have been proposed in the literature. However, these tools do not provide safety guarantees on the debloated software, with some files needed during run-time removed. In this paper, We introduce BLAFS, a BLoat-Aware-file system for containers. BLAFS guarantees debloating safety for both cloud and edge systems. BLAFS is implemented on top of the Overlay file-system, allowing for file-system layer sharing across the containers. We compare BLAFS to two state-of-the-art debloating tools (Cimplifier and Dockerslim), and two state-of-the-art lazy-loading container snap-shotters for edge systems (Starlight and eStargz). Our evaluation of real-world containers shows BLAFS reduces container sizes by up to 97% of the original size, while maintaining the safety of the containers when other debloating tools fail. We also evaluate BLAFS's performance in edge settings. It can reduce the container provisioning time by up to 90% providing comparable bandwidth reductions to lazy-loading snap-shotters, while removing 97% of the vulnerabilities, and up to 97% less space on the edge.
Serum endocan levels in patients with habitual abortion

The aim of this study was to investigate whether there is a new factor in the etiology of recurrent loss of pregnancy. For this purpose, serum malondialdehyde (MDA) and nitric oxide (NO) levels as indicators of oxidative stress, and endocan levels, a marker of vascular dysfunction, were investigated in patients diagnosed with habitual abortion.
High‐affinity amide‐lanthanide adsorption to gram‐positive soil bacteria

Abstract The gram‐positive soil bacterium, Arthrobacter nicotianae, uses multiple organic acid functional groups to adsorb lanthanides onto its cell surface. At relevant soil pH conditions of 4.0–6.0, many of these functional groups are de‐protonated and available for cation sorption and metal immobilization. However, among the plethora of naturally occurring site types, A. nicotianae is shown to possess high‐affinity amide and phosphate sites that disproportionately affect lanthanide adsorption to the cell wall. We quantify neodymium (Nd)‐selective site types, reporting an amide‐Nd stability constant of log10 K = 6.41 ± 0.23 that is comparable to sorption via phosphate‐based moieties. These sites are two to three orders of magnitude more selective for Nd than the adsorption of divalent metals to ubiquitous carboxyl‐based moieties. This implies the importance of lanthanide biosorption in the context of metal transport in subsurface systems despite trace concentrations of lanthanides found in the natural environment.
Changes in a Neotropical insectivorous bat community associated with artificial clearing of the forest in a geothermal project

Summary The energy needs of the human population inevitably affect natural environments, but the effects on wildlife of human modifications of habitat specifically for geothermal projects are scarcely known. Through acoustic monitoring, we quantified at Proyecto Geotérmico Las Pailas II, Guanacaste, Costa Rica, the impact of forest openings on the diversity and community composition of aerial insectivorous bats. Our data revealed that artificial clearing causes a border effect, an environment where the diversity of species and activity levels of insectivorous bats increase with respect to other habitats analysed. We discuss that, due to the combination of environmental properties and resource availability variables of the border habitats, in addition to the acoustic abilities of the bat species detected, borders represent transitional spaces where species adapted to uncluttered and background-cluttered spaces can easily commute and forage. The artificial clearings created by the geothermal project had a positive effect on aerial insectivorous bat species; however, this pattern cannot be assumed for other organisms within the area. Therefore, we highlight the importance of quantifying the influence of energy-extracting projects on biodiversity metrics and the use of this information to make informed decisions regarding managing and conserving natural resources.
Embedding Motion in Model-Based

Particle filtering is now established as one of the most popular methods for visual tracking. Within this framework, there are two important considerations. The first one refers to the generic assumption that the observations are temporally independent given the sequence of object states. The second consideration, often made in the literature, uses the transition prior as the proposal distribution. Thus, the current observations are not taken into account, requiring the noise process of this prior to be large enough to handle abrupt trajectory changes. As a result, many particles are either wasted in low likelihood regions of the state space, resulting in low sampling efficiency, or more importantly, propagated to distractor regions of the image, resulting in tracking failures. In this paper, we propose to handle both considerations using motion. We first argue that, in general, observations are conditionally correlated, and propose a new model to account for this correlation, allowing for the natural introduction of implicit and/or explicit motion measurements in the likelihood term. Second, explicit motion measurements are used to drive the sampling process towards the most likely regions of the state space. Overall, the proposed model handles abrupt motion changes and filters out visual distractors, when tracking objects with generic models based on shape or color distribution. Results were obtained on head tracking experiments using several sequences with moving camera involving large dynamics. When compared against the Condensation Algorithm, they have demon- strated the superior tracking performance of our approach.
Generation for Flexible Real-Time Control Systems

Temporal correctness is crucial for the dependability of real-time control systems. A problem with testing such systems is the dependency on the execution orders of tasks. Mutation-based testing criteria have been proposed to determine which execution orders need to be exercised to verify that real-time systems are timely. For flexible control systems, timeliness in itselfmay only be relevantfor a sub-set of tasks, whereas maintained control performance in the presence of worst-case jitter and disturbances is essential. This paper presents an extension to the co-simulator tool TrueTime, to support mutation-based testing of control performance and timeliness. Further, an approach for automatic generation of test cases using genetic algorithms is presented. A conclusion is that testing criteria for timeliness can be used to increase confidence in the dependability offlexible control systems.
An Investigation into the Nature of Verbal Alternations and their Use in the Creation of Bilingual Valency Entries

In this paper we investigate the properties of Japanese and English transitiveintransitive alternations.For Japanese alternations,we show that the selectional restrictions of alternating arguments are more similar than those for non-alternating arguments.Across languages we show that there are four major strategies for translating alternating verbs.Finally,we present a method that uses alternation data to add new entries to an existing bilingual valency lexicon.If the existing lexicon has only one half of the alternation,then our method constructs the other half.The new entries have detailed information about argument structure and selectional restrictions.In this paper we focus on one class of alternations,but our method is applicable to any alternation.We were able to increase the coverage of the causative alternation to 85.4%,and the new entries gave an overall improvement in translation quality of 32%.