Root transcriptome reveals responses to plastic film mulching and grass cover in wine grape 'Cabernet Sauvignon' root and berry

This study was designed to investigate the influence of grass and film mulching on grape (V. vinifera) fruit quality and root transcriptome. The groundcovers (plastic film and seeds of herba portulacae and E. humifusa Willd) were set or sawn on the ground under wine grape plants ('Cabernet Sauvignon'). Test plots in the control group were treated with clean tillage. Properties of plant biochemicals under covers and grape berry quality were determined after two years. RNA-seq was analyzed for grape roots under different treatments. E. humifusa Willd cover increased plant total N and P; and film mulching increased plant total P and decreased plant total K. Herba portulacae cover decreased berry tannin and increased anthocyanin, soluble solid and titratable acid; E. humifusa Willd cover increased anthocyanin, soluble solid and titratable acid. Film mulching increased the contents of berry total phenols, soluble solid, and decreased titratable acid significantly in comparison with clean tillage. Root RNA-seq showed that there were 1, 0, and 42 differently expressed genes (DEGs) in Herba portulacae, E. humifusa Willd and film cover, compared with clean tillage, respectively. Film mulching increased the expression of root high-affinity nitrate transporter 2.1 (NRT2.1), NRT2.4 and glutamine synthetase, which associated with 'Nitrogen metabolism', and decreased the expression of root small class I/II heat shock proteins. Plastic film mulching increased grapple quality properties via activating N metabolism. Film mulching was a more excellent mulching for improving grape quality than grass cover in Ningxia, China

MCC-KD: Multi-CoT Consistent Knowledge Distillation

Large language models (LLMs) have showcased remarkable capabilities in complex reasoning through chain of thought (CoT) prompting. Recently, there has been a growing interest in transferring these reasoning abilities from LLMs to smaller models. However, achieving both the diversity and consistency in rationales presents a challenge. In this paper, we focus on enhancing these two aspects and propose Multi-CoT Consistent Knowledge Distillation (MCC-KD) to efficiently distill the reasoning capabilities. In MCC-KD, we generate multiple rationales for each question and enforce consistency among the corresponding predictions by minimizing the bidirectional KL-divergence between the answer distributions. We investigate the effectiveness of MCC-KD with different model architectures (LLaMA/FlanT5) and various model scales (3B/7B/11B/13B) on both mathematical reasoning and commonsense reasoning benchmarks. The empirical results not only confirm MCC-KD's superior performance on in-distribution datasets but also highlight its robust generalization ability on out-of-distribution datasets.Comment: Accepted to ENMLP 202

Revisiting the Bottom Quark Forward-Backward Asymmetry AFBA_{\rm {FB}} in Electron-Positron Collisions

The bottom quark forward-backward asymmetry $A_{\rm{FB}}$ is a key observable in electron-positron collisions at the $Z^{0}$ peak. In this paper, we employ the Principle of Maximum Conformality (PMC) to fix the $\alpha_s$-running behavior of the next-to-next-to-leading order QCD corrections to $A_{\rm{FB}}$. The resulting PMC scale for this $A_{\rm{FB}}$ is an order of magnitude smaller than the conventional choice $\mu_r=M_Z$. This scale has the physically reasonable behavior and reflects the virtuality of its QCD dynamics, which is independent to the choice of renormalization scale. Our analyses show that the effective momentum flow for the bottom quark forward-backward asymmetry should be $\mu_r\ll M_Z$ other than the conventionally suggested $\mu_r=M_Z$. Moreover, the convergence of perturbative QCD series for $A_{\rm{FB}}$ is greatly improved using the PMC. Our prediction for the bare bottom quark forward-backward asymmetry is refined to be $A^{0,b}_{\rm FB}=0.1004\pm0.0016$, which diminishes the well known tension between the experimental determination for this (pseudo) observable and the respective Standard Model fit to $2.1\sigma$.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures, published versio

Tension estimation of hangers with shock absorber in suspension bridge using finite element method

Accurate and efficient estimation of tension in hangers is very important since hangers are the vital component of suspension bridges. But for hangers with shock absorber, the existing tension estimation methods are not suitable because they are based on a single cable model and cannot consider the effect of shock absorbers. To this end, the effect of the shock absorber is taken into account by using the degree-of-freedom condensation method, and a finite element method for tension estimation of hangers with shock absorber is proposed in this paper. Finally, the proposed method is applied in the Aizhai Bridge and Huangpu Pearl River Bridge to estimate the tension of hangers with shock absorber, the tested results show that as compared with other methods, the proposed method is a more accurate and convenient method for engineering application