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Brazilian Adaptations of Baroque and Classical Elements in the Piano Sonata in F Minor, Op. 9, by Alberto Nepomuceno (1864–1920)
Alberto Nepomuceno was one of the leading figures in developing Brazilian art music at the turn of the twentieth century. He became widely known for his Brazilian art songs and kept promoting Brazilian music and the use of Portuguese as an "art language" throughout his life. Nepomuceno has widely been seen as a nationalist composer, yet some of his works adopt a more European style. In this study, I argue that Nepomuceno incorporates European musical languages in his Piano Sonata in F Minor, Op. 9. I display the rich interaction of Brazilian national identity and European influence within Nepomuceno's musical life. I also provide a thorough formal analysis of this piano sonata to argue that in some of his music he adopted a distinctively European musical language, including baroque and classical elements. In addition to analyzing the sonata-form and rondo-form elements, this dissertation discusses the use of several important topics in the work, including the Siciliano rhythm, contrapuntal writing, pedal points with organ effects, and impact of Brahms on Nepomuceno's piano writing. Moreover, I analyze how Nepomuceno assimilated European musical styles as the basis for his own compositions, as well as the innovations with which he augmented those styles. An analysis of this sonata can enhance our understandings of how musical training in Europe shaped the production of Latin American composers
Federated Generalization via Information-Theoretic Distribution Diversification
Federated Learning (FL) has surged in prominence due to its capability of
collaborative model training without direct data sharing. However, the vast
disparity in local data distributions among clients, often termed the
non-Independent Identically Distributed (non-IID) challenge, poses a
significant hurdle to FL's generalization efficacy. The scenario becomes even
more complex when not all clients participate in the training process, a common
occurrence due to unstable network connections or limited computational
capacities. This can greatly complicate the assessment of the trained models'
generalization abilities. While a plethora of recent studies has centered on
the generalization gap pertaining to unseen data from participating clients
with diverse distributions, the divergence between the training distributions
of participating clients and the testing distributions of non-participating
ones has been largely overlooked. In response, our paper unveils an
information-theoretic generalization framework for FL. Specifically, it
quantifies generalization errors by evaluating the information entropy of local
distributions and discerning discrepancies across these distributions. Inspired
by our deduced generalization bounds, we introduce a weighted aggregation
approach and a duo of client selection strategies. These innovations aim to
bolster FL's generalization prowess by encompassing a more varied set of client
data distributions. Our extensive empirical evaluations reaffirm the potency of
our proposed methods, aligning seamlessly with our theoretical construct
Structure and Color Gradients of Ultra-diffuse Galaxies in Distant Massive Galaxy Clusters
We have measured structural parameters and radial color profiles of 108
ultra-diffuse galaxies (UDGs), carefully selected from six distant massive
galaxy clusters in the Hubble Frontier Fields (HFF) in redshift range from
0.308 to 0.545. Our best-fitting GALFIT models show that the HFF UDGs have a
median S\'ersic index of 1.09, which is close to 0.86 for local UDGs in the
Coma cluster. The median axis-ratio value is 0.68 for HFF UDGs and 0.74 for
Coma UDGs, respectively. The structural similarity between HFF and Coma UDGs
suggests that they are the same kind of galaxies seen at different times and
the structures of UDGs do not change at least for several billion years. By
checking the distribution of HFF UDGs in the rest-frame and
diagrams, we find a large fraction of them are star-forming. Furthermore, a
majority of HFF UDGs show small color gradients within
\,1\,*\, region, the fluctuation of the median radial color profile
of HFF UDGs is smaller than 0.1\,mag, which is compatible to Coma UDGs. Our
results indicate that cluster UDGs may fade or quench in a self-similar way,
irrespective of the radial distance, in less than 4 Gyrs.Comment: 17 pages, 8 figures, accepted for publication in Ap
Visually-Prompted Language Model for Fine-Grained Scene Graph Generation in an Open World
Scene Graph Generation (SGG) aims to extract
relationships in images for vision understanding. Although recent works have
made steady progress on SGG, they still suffer long-tail distribution issues
that tail-predicates are more costly to train and hard to distinguish due to a
small amount of annotated data compared to frequent predicates. Existing
re-balancing strategies try to handle it via prior rules but are still confined
to pre-defined conditions, which are not scalable for various models and
datasets. In this paper, we propose a Cross-modal prediCate boosting (CaCao)
framework, where a visually-prompted language model is learned to generate
diverse fine-grained predicates in a low-resource way. The proposed CaCao can
be applied in a plug-and-play fashion and automatically strengthen existing SGG
to tackle the long-tailed problem. Based on that, we further introduce a novel
Entangled cross-modal prompt approach for open-world predicate scene graph
generation (Epic), where models can generalize to unseen predicates in a
zero-shot manner. Comprehensive experiments on three benchmark datasets show
that CaCao consistently boosts the performance of multiple scene graph
generation models in a model-agnostic way. Moreover, our Epic achieves
competitive performance on open-world predicate prediction. The data and code
for this paper are publicly available.Comment: Accepted by ICCV 202
MiniDisc: Minimal Distillation Schedule for Language Model Compression
Recent studies have uncovered that language model distillation is less
effective when facing a large capacity gap between the teacher and the student,
and introduced teacher assistant-based distillation to bridge the gap. As a
connection, the scale and the performance of the teacher assistant is of vital
importance to bring the knowledge from the teacher to the student. However,
existing teacher assistant-based methods require maximally many trials before
scheduling an optimal teacher assistant. To this end, we propose a minimal
distillation schedule (MiniDisc) for scheduling the optimal teacher assistant
in minimally one trial. In particular, motivated by the finding that the
performance of the student is positively correlated to the scale-performance
tradeoff of the teacher assistant, MiniDisc is designed with a
-tradeoff to measure the optimality of the teacher assistant without
trial distillation to the student. MiniDisc then can schedule the optimal
teacher assistant with the best -tradeoff in a sandwich framework.
MiniDisc is evaluated with an extensive set of experiments on GLUE.
Experimental results demonstrate the improved efficiency our MiniDisc compared
to several state-of-the-art baselines. We further apply MiniDisc to a language
model with billions of parameters and show its scalability.Comment: Accepted to EACL 2024. Code is available at
https://github.com/GeneZC/MiniDis
Curcumin inhibits gastric cancer growth via downregulation of zinc finger protein, ZNF139
Purpose: To investigate the effect of curcumin on gastric cancer cell proliferation and the mechanism of action involved.
Methods: Viability of gastric cells following curcumin treatment was determined by 3 (4,5 dimethyl thiazol 2 yl) 2,5 diphenyl 2H tetrazolium bromide (MTT) assay. Flow cytometry was used for the assessment of apoptosis induction in SGC 7901 cells. Reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) and western blotting assay were used for the analysis of Znf139, survivin and Bcl 2 protein expressions.
Results: The results showed that curcumin treatment reduced the viability of gastric cancer cell line SGC 7901 cells at 30 µM concentration to 29.67 % after 48 h compared to 99.78 % for control culture. Apoptotic cell population increased significantly (p < 0.05) following treatment with curcumin. Zinc finger protein-139 mRNA and protein expression decreased significantly (p < 0.05) on treatment with curcumin. Furthermore, curcumin suppressed the levels of B cell lymphoma 2 (Bcl 2) and survivin protein. In the mice model of gastric cancer, treatment with 50 mg/kg dose of curcumin inhibited tumor growth and development significantly, compared to the untreated group (p < 0.05).
Conclusion: The results demonstrate that curcumin treatment inhibits gastric cancer cell proliferation via down-regulation of zinc finger protein-139. It also suppresses tumor growth in mice. Therefore, curcumin is a promising gastric cancer inhibitor and should be further investigated for the management of gastric cancer
Kick Bad Guys Out! Zero-Knowledge-Proof-Based Anomaly Detection in Federated Learning
Federated learning (FL) systems are vulnerable to malicious clients that
submit poisoned local models to achieve their adversarial goals, such as
preventing the convergence of the global model or inducing the global model to
misclassify some data. Many existing defense mechanisms are impractical in
real-world FL systems, as they require prior knowledge of the number of
malicious clients or rely on re-weighting or modifying submissions. This is
because adversaries typically do not announce their intentions before
attacking, and re-weighting might change aggregation results even in the
absence of attacks. To address these challenges in real FL systems, this paper
introduces a cutting-edge anomaly detection approach with the following
features: i) Detecting the occurrence of attacks and performing defense
operations only when attacks happen; ii) Upon the occurrence of an attack,
further detecting the malicious client models and eliminating them without
harming the benign ones; iii) Ensuring honest execution of defense mechanisms
at the server by leveraging a zero-knowledge proof mechanism. We validate the
superior performance of the proposed approach with extensive experiments
XPrompt: Exploring the Extreme of Prompt Tuning
Prompt tuning learns soft prompts to condition frozen Pre-trained Language
Models (PLMs) for performing downstream tasks in a parameter-efficient manner.
While prompt tuning has gradually reached the performance level of fine-tuning
as the model scale increases, there is still a large performance gap between
prompt tuning and fine-tuning for models of moderate and small scales
(typically less than 11B parameters). In this paper, we empirically show that
the trained prompt tokens can have a negative impact on a downstream task and
thus degrade its performance. To bridge the gap, we propose a novel Prompt
tuning model with an eXtremely small scale (XPrompt) under the regime of
lottery tickets hypothesis. Specifically, XPrompt eliminates the negative
prompt tokens at different granularity levels through a hierarchical structured
pruning, yielding a more parameter-efficient prompt yet with a competitive
performance. Comprehensive experiments are carried out on SuperGLUE tasks, and
the extensive results indicate that XPrompt is able to close the performance
gap at smaller model scales.Comment: 15 pages, accepted to EMNLP 2022 main conferenc
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