IS-DARTS: Stabilizing DARTS through Precise Measurement on Candidate Importance

Among existing Neural Architecture Search methods, DARTS is known for its efficiency and simplicity. This approach applies continuous relaxation of network representation to construct a weight-sharing supernet and enables the identification of excellent subnets in just a few GPU days. However, performance collapse in DARTS results in deteriorating architectures filled with parameter-free operations and remains a great challenge to the robustness. To resolve this problem, we reveal that the fundamental reason is the biased estimation of the candidate importance in the search space through theoretical and experimental analysis, and more precisely select operations via information-based measurements. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the excessive concern over the supernet and inefficient utilization of data in bi-level optimization also account for suboptimal results. We adopt a more realistic objective focusing on the performance of subnets and simplify it with the help of the information-based measurements. Finally, we explain theoretically why progressively shrinking the width of the supernet is necessary and reduce the approximation error of optimal weights in DARTS. Our proposed method, named IS-DARTS, comprehensively improves DARTS and resolves the aforementioned problems. Extensive experiments on NAS-Bench-201 and DARTS-based search space demonstrate the effectiveness of IS-DARTS.Comment: accepted by AAAI2024, paper + supplementary, 11 page

Chinese interpretation of European Neuroendocrine Tumour Society 2023 guidance for nonfunctioning pancreatic neuroendocrine tumours

This ENETS guidance for well-differentiated nonfunctioning pancreatic neuroendocrine tumours (NF-Pan-NET), which published on Journal of Neuroendocrinology (2023), has been developed by a multidisciplinary working group, and provides up-to-date and practical advice on the management of these tumours. In this guideline, the authors discussed 10 troublesome questions about clinical practice, and summarized the extensive experience of their centers treating patients with NF-Pan-NET, and suggested that multidisciplinary participation is an essential part of NF-Pan-NET diagnosis and treatment. This paper aims to interpret the key contents of the guidelines in order to provide standardized clinical diagnosis and treatment procedures in NF-Pan-NET

Impacts of Land Use and Salinization on Soil Inorganic and Organic Carbon in the Middle-lower Yellow River Delta

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This study was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 41877028 and 41205104). This work also contributes to the activities of N-Circle projects, a UK-China Virtual Joint Centre on Nitrogen, funded by the Newton Fund via Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) (No. BB/N013484/1Peer reviewedPostprin

The impact of filaments on dwarf galaxy properties in the Auriga simulations

With a hydrodynamical simulation using a simple galaxy formation model without taking into account feedback, our previous work has shown that dense and massive filaments at high redshift can provide potential wells to trap and compress gas, and hence affect galaxy formation in their resident low-mass haloes. In this paper, we make use of the Auriga simulations, a suite of high-resolution zoom-in hydrodynamical simulations of Milky Way-like galaxies, to study whether the conclusion still holds in the simulations with a sophisticated galaxy formation model. In agreement with the results of our previous work, we find that, compared to their counterparts with similar halo masses in the field, dwarf galaxies residing in filaments tend to have higher baryonic and stellar fractions. At the fixed parent halo mass, the filament dwarfs tend to have slightly higher star formation rates than those of field ones. But overall we do not find a clear difference in galaxy g - r colours between the filament and field populations. We also show that at high redshifts, the gas components in dwarf galaxies tend to have their spins aligned with the filaments in which they reside. Our results support a picture in which massive filaments at high redshift assist gas accretion and enhance star formation in their resident dwarf-sized dark matter haloes.Peer reviewe

The abundance of dark matter haloes down to Earth mass

We use the Voids-within-Voids-within-Voids (VVV) simulations, a suite of successive nested N-body simulations with extremely high resolution (denoted, from low to high resolution, by L0 to L7), to test the Press-Schechter (PS), Sheth-Tormen (ST), and extended Press-Schechter (EPS) formulae for the halo abundance over the entire mass range, from mini-haloes of $10^{-6}\ \mathrm{M_\odot}$, to rich cluster haloes of$10^{15}\ \mathrm{M_\odot}$, at different redshifts, from$z=30$to the present. We find that at$z=0$and$z=2$, ST gives the best prediction for the results of L0, which has the mean cosmic density (i.e. overdensity$\delta=0$), at$10^{11-15} ~\mathrm{M_\odot}$. The higher resolution levels (L1-L7) are biased regions at various underdensities ($\delta<-0.6$). The EPS formalism takes this into account since it gives the mass function of a region conditioned, in this case, on having a given underdensity. The EPS gives good predictions for these higher levels, with deviations$\lesssim 20\%$, at$10^{-6-12.5} ~\mathrm{M_\odot}$. At$z \sim 7-15$, the ST predictions for L0 and the EPS predictions for L1-L7 show somewhat larger deviations from the simulation results. However, at even higher redshifts,$z \sim 30$, the EPS prediction fits the simulations well again. We further confirm our results by picking more subvolumes from the full L0 simulation, finding that our conclusions depend only weakly on the size and overdensity of the chosen region. Since at mean density the EPS reduces to the PS mass function, its good agreement with the higher-level simulations implies that the PS (or, even better, the ST) formula gives an accurate description of the total halo mass function in representative regions of the universe.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures (additional 2 figures in the appendix

The mass accretion history of dark matter haloes down to Earth mass

We take advantage of the unprecedented dynamical range provided by the "Cosmic-Zoom" project to study the mass accretion history (MAH) of present-day dark matter haloes over the entire mass range present in the $\Lambda$CDM paradigm when the dark matter is made of weakly interacting massive particles of mass $100\ \mathrm{GeV}$. In particular, we complement previous studies by exploring the MAHs of haloes with mass from $10^8\ h^{-1}\mathrm{M_{\odot}}$ down to Earth mass, $10^{-6}\ h^{-1}\mathrm{M_{\odot}}$. The formation redshift of low-mass haloes anti-correlates weakly with mass, peaking at $z=3$ for haloes of mass $10^{-4}\ h^{-1}\mathrm{M_{\odot}}$. Even lower masses are affected by the free-streaming cutoff in the primordial spectrum of density fluctuations and form at lower redshift. We compare MAHs in our simulations with predictions from two analytical models based on the extended Press-Schechter theory (EPS), and three empirical models derived by fitting and extrapolating either results from cosmological $N$-body simulations or Monte Carlo realizations of halo growth. All models fit our simulations reasonably well over the mass range for which they were calibrated. While the empirical models match better for more massive haloes, $M>10^{10}\ h^{-1}\mathrm{M_{\odot}}$, the analytical models do better when extrapolated down to Earth mass. At the higher masses, we explore the correlation between local environment density and MAH, finding that biases are relatively weak, with typical MAHs for haloes in extremely low-density and in typical regions differing by less than$20$ percent at high redshift. We conclude that EPS theory predicts the hierarchical build-up of dark matter haloes quite well over the entire mass range

Direct-Current Generator Based on Dynamic Water-Semiconductor Junction with Polarized Water as Moving Dielectric Medium

There is a rising prospective in harvesting energy from water droplets, as microscale energy is required for the distributed sensors in the interconnected human society. However, achieving a sustainable direct-current generating device from water flow is rarely reported, and the quantum polarization principle of the water molecular remains uncovered. Herein, we propose a dynamic water-semiconductor junction with moving water sandwiched between two semiconductors as a moving dielectric medium, which outputs a sustainable direct-current voltage of 0.3 V and current of 0.64 uA with low internal resistance of 390 kilohm. The sustainable direct-current electricity is originating from the dynamic water polarization process in water-semiconductor junction, in which water molecules are continuously polarized and depolarized driven by the mechanical force and Fermi level difference, during the movement of the water on silicon. We further demonstrated an encapsulated portable power-generating device with simple structure and continuous direct-current voltage, which exhibits its promising potential application in the field of wearable electronic generators