87 research outputs found
TACO: Temporal Latent Action-Driven Contrastive Loss for Visual Reinforcement Learning
Despite recent progress in reinforcement learning (RL) from raw pixel data,
sample inefficiency continues to present a substantial obstacle. Prior works
have attempted to address this challenge by creating self-supervised auxiliary
tasks, aiming to enrich the agent's learned representations with
control-relevant information for future state prediction. However, these
objectives are often insufficient to learn representations that can represent
the optimal policy or value function, and they often consider tasks with small,
abstract discrete action spaces and thus overlook the importance of action
representation learning in continuous control. In this paper, we introduce
TACO: Temporal Action-driven Contrastive Learning, a simple yet powerful
temporal contrastive learning approach that facilitates the concurrent
acquisition of latent state and action representations for agents. TACO
simultaneously learns a state and an action representation by optimizing the
mutual information between representations of current states paired with action
sequences and representations of the corresponding future states.
Theoretically, TACO can be shown to learn state and action representations that
encompass sufficient information for control, thereby improving sample
efficiency. For online RL, TACO achieves 40% performance boost after one
million environment interaction steps on average across nine challenging visual
continuous control tasks from Deepmind Control Suite. In addition, we show that
TACO can also serve as a plug-and-play module adding to existing offline visual
RL methods to establish the new state-of-the-art performance for offline visual
RL across offline datasets with varying quality
SciBench: Evaluating College-Level Scientific Problem-Solving Abilities of Large Language Models
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated notable
progress on many mathematical benchmarks. However, most of these benchmarks
only feature problems grounded in junior and senior high school subjects,
contain only multiple-choice questions, and are confined to a limited scope of
elementary arithmetic operations. To address these issues, this paper
introduces an expansive benchmark suite SciBench that aims to systematically
examine the reasoning capabilities required for complex scientific problem
solving. SciBench contains two carefully curated datasets: an open set
featuring a range of collegiate-level scientific problems drawn from
mathematics, chemistry, and physics textbooks, and a closed set comprising
problems from undergraduate-level exams in computer science and mathematics.
Based on the two datasets, we conduct an in-depth benchmark study of two
representative LLMs with various prompting strategies. The results reveal that
current LLMs fall short of delivering satisfactory performance, with an overall
score of merely 35.80%. Furthermore, through a detailed user study, we
categorize the errors made by LLMs into ten problem-solving abilities. Our
analysis indicates that no single prompting strategy significantly outperforms
others and some strategies that demonstrate improvements in certain
problem-solving skills result in declines in other skills. We envision that
SciBench will catalyze further developments in the reasoning abilities of LLMs,
thereby ultimately contributing to scientific research and discovery.Comment: Work in progress, 18 page
Trans-lymphatic Contrast-Enhanced Ultrasound in Combination with Blue Dye Injection is Feasible for Detection and Biopsy of Sentinel Lymph Nodes in Breast Cancer
Objective: The best method for sentinel lymph node biopsy (SLNB) in early-staged breast cancer (EBC) remains controversial. This study aimed to evaluate a novel method by combining trans-lymphatic contrast-enhanced ultrasound (TLCEUS) with blue dye injection as a guidance of SLNB.
Methods: TLCEUS was performed in 88 patients with newly diagnosed EBC. Methylene blue dye was percutaneously injected into enhanced sentinel lymph nodes (SLNs) under ultrasound guidance, followed by standard SLNB and axillary lymph node dissection. Enhancement patterns and the arriving time (AT) of contrast agent within SLNs were evaluated. Histopathological examination of dissected nodes was performed to confirm metastasis.
Results: A total of 95 enhanced SLNs were identified and biopsied in 86 of 88 patients with identification rate of 97.7%. The specificity was 75.0%, sensitivity was 83.3%, and false-negative rate was 16.7%. Contrast-enhanced SLNs with type I, type II, and type III patterns had a metastatic positive rate of 11.4% (5/44), 57.1% (12/21) and 80.0% (24/30), respectively. Metastatic positive SLNs showed a mean AT of 61.6 ± 58.7 s while metastatic negative SLNs showed a mean AT of 41.3 ± 19.9 s, which was statistically significantly different.
Conclusion: The TLCEUS/blue dye method can be used as an alternative to the radioisotope/blue dye method for its feasibility and accuracy
Global research status and frontiers on microvascular invasion of hepatocellular carcinoma: A bibliometric and visualized analysis
IntroductionOver the past decade, several studies on the microvascular invasion (MVI) of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) have been published. However, they have not quantitatively analyzed the remarkable impact of MVI. Therefore, a more comprehensive understanding of the field is now needed. This study aims to analyze the evolution of HCC-MVI research and to systematically evaluate the scientific outputs using bibliometric citation analysis.MethodsA systematic search was conducted on the Web of Science Core Collection on 2 May 2022 to retrieve studies on HCC-MVI published between 2013 and 2022. Then, a bibliometric analysis of the publications was performed using CiteSpace, VOSviewer, and other visualization tools.ResultsA total of 1,208 articles on HCC MVI were identified. Of these, China (n = 518) was the most prolific country, and Fudan University (n = 90) was the most notable institution. Furthermore, we observed that Lau Wan Yee participated in most studies (n = 26), and Frontiers in Oncology (IF2020:6.24) published the highest number of documents (n = 49) on this subject, with 138 publications. The paper “Bray F, 2018, CA-CANCER J CLIN, V68, P394” has the highest number of co-cited references, with 119 citations. In addition, the top three keywords were “survival”, “recurrence”, and “microvascular invasion”. Moreover, the research hot spots and frontiers of HCC-MVI for the last 3 years included imaging characteristics and transarterial chemoembolization (TACE) therapy studies.ConclusionsThis study comprehensively summarized the most significant HCC-MVI documents from past literature and highlighted key contributions made to the advancement of this subject and the advancement of this field over the past decade. The trend of MVI research will gradually shift from risk factors and prognosis studies to imaging characteristics and TACE therapy studies
Cytomegalovirus Infection May Trigger Adult-Onset Still's Disease Onset or Relapses
Previous studies have revealed that several micro-organisms, especially DNA viruses, have been associated with adult-onset Still's disease (AOSD). However, there are no studies on the relationship between the presence of viral infections in AOSD patients with disease occurrence and reactivation. In the present study, we aimed to investigate the presence of antibodies against virus, virus DNA load and nucleic acid sensors in AOSD patients. Anti-viral antibodies were measured by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) in plasma samples from 100 AOSD patients and 70 healthy controls (HCs). The copy number of cytomegalovirus (CMV) DNA in 100 AOSD patients was detected by PCR. The expression levels of nucleic acid sensors interferon gamma-inducible protein 16 (IFI16) and absent in melanoma 2 (AIM2) in peripheral blood mononuclear cell (PBMC) and skin from AOSD patients and HCs were analyzed by PCR and immunohistochemistry. The levels of antibodies against CMV were significantly higher in AOSD patients compared to HCs. Moreover, the level of anti-CMV IgM antibody was significantly increased in patients with fever, sore throat, arthralgia and rash. CMV DNA was found in plasma of AOSD patients with disease new-onset and relapse. Furthermore, the copy number of CMV DNA significantly increased in patients with fever, sore throat, arthralgia and rash. And the significant associations of the CMV DNA level with the levels of leukocytes, erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR), C-reactive protein (CRP) and tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α) were observed. Moreover, we found an upregulation of cytoplasmic DNA-sensing receptor IFI16 and AIM2 in PBMC and skin from AOSD patients. In conclusion, our results showed that CMV infection may play a role in the initiation or amplification of inflammatory responses in AOSD
Gender and Work in Contemporary China
This bibliography includes journal articles, books, and reports, both in English and Chinese, examining the processes of transformation of gender and work in both urban and rural China. Topics include urban laid-off workers, service workers, sex workers, white-collar professionals, and rural-to-urban migrants, as well as women’s work in rural China
Existence of psychological inertia in mode shift behavior: New evidence from a comparison study
This paper conducted a comparison study of mode shift behavior based on computer-aided SP surveys trying to distinguish the differences in conceptions of preference and inertia. The results show that same respondents have remarkably different choice behavior in mode shift context and another mode choice scenarios. The results indicate that there exists obvious inertia in mode shift from car to public transit besides preference for car. The inertia in mode shift should be modeled as an inherently independent component in utility function rather than interpreted as the effects of past travel experience on mode preference. It is found that same respondents have different values of travel time in different mode choice contexts. The results are beneficial for accurate modeling of inertia in mode shift behaviors
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