Thread of Thought Unraveling Chaotic Contexts

Large Language Models (LLMs) have ushered in a transformative era in the field of natural language processing, excelling in tasks related to text comprehension and generation. Nevertheless, they encounter difficulties when confronted with chaotic contexts (e.g., distractors rather than long irrelevant context), leading to the inadvertent omission of certain details within the chaotic context. In response to these challenges, we introduce the "Thread of Thought" (ThoT) strategy, which draws inspiration from human cognitive processes. ThoT systematically segments and analyzes extended contexts while adeptly selecting pertinent information. This strategy serves as a versatile "plug-and-play" module, seamlessly integrating with various LLMs and prompting techniques. In the experiments, we utilize the PopQA and EntityQ datasets, as well as a Multi-Turn Conversation Response dataset (MTCR) we collected, to illustrate that ThoT significantly improves reasoning performance compared to other prompting techniques.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures, 5 table

LexMAE: Lexicon-Bottlenecked Pretraining for Large-Scale Retrieval

In large-scale retrieval, the lexicon-weighting paradigm, learning weighted sparse representations in vocabulary space, has shown promising results with high quality and low latency. Despite it deeply exploiting the lexicon-representing capability of pre-trained language models, a crucial gap remains between language modeling and lexicon-weighting retrieval -- the former preferring certain or low-entropy words whereas the latter favoring pivot or high-entropy words -- becoming the main barrier to lexicon-weighting performance for large-scale retrieval. To bridge this gap, we propose a brand-new pre-training framework, lexicon-bottlenecked masked autoencoder (LexMAE), to learn importance-aware lexicon representations. Essentially, we present a lexicon-bottlenecked module between a normal language modeling encoder and a weakened decoder, where a continuous bag-of-words bottleneck is constructed to learn a lexicon-importance distribution in an unsupervised fashion. The pre-trained LexMAE is readily transferred to the lexicon-weighting retrieval via fine-tuning. On the ad-hoc retrieval benchmark, MS-Marco, it achieves 42.6% MRR@10 with 45.8 QPS for the passage dataset and 44.4% MRR@100 with 134.8 QPS for the document dataset, by a CPU machine. And LexMAE shows state-of-the-art zero-shot transfer capability on BEIR benchmark with 12 datasets.Comment: Appeared at ICLR 202

Investigating Dynamic Molecular Events in Melanoma Cell Nucleus During Photodynamic Therapy by SERS

Photodynamic therapy (PDT) involves the uptake of photosensitizers by cancer cells and the irradiation of a light with a specific wavelength to trigger a series of photochemical reactions based on the generation of reactive oxygen, leading to cancer cell death. PDT has been widely used in various fields of biomedicine. However, the molecular events of the cancer cell nucleus during the PDT process are still unclear. In this work, a nuclear-targeted gold nanorod Raman nanoprobe combined with surface-enhanced Raman scattering spectroscopy (SERS) was exploited to investigate the dynamic intranuclear molecular changes of B16 cells (a murine melanoma cell line) treated with a photosensitizer (Chlorin e6) and the specific light (650 nm). The SERS spectra of the cell nucleus during the PDT treatment were recorded in situ and the spectroscopic analysis of the dynamics of the nucleus uncovered two main events in the therapeutic process: the protein degradation and the DNA fragmentation. We expect that these findings are of vital significance in having a better understanding of the PDT mechanism acting on the cancer cell nucleus and can further help us to design and develop more effective therapeutic platforms and methods

Editorial: Advances in Pollutant Transport in Critical Zone Environments

One major environmental challenge facing humankind is the constantly increasing pollution of water and soil resources on a global scale. The substances that cause such pollution arise primarily from human-made wastes, including agricultural and industrial wastes, household garbage, oil spills, and other toxic materials. The spatiotemporal distribution of these polluting substances in soil and water systems is determined by an interplay of many factors such as physicochemical properties of pollutants, soil grain properties and structure, fluid flow chemistry and velocity, biological activity, and other environmental factors (temperature, precipitation). In this issue, we have collected a series of articles that advance our fundamental understanding of the transport of solute and colloidal pollutants, their spread in Critical Zone environments, and recent monitoring and control efforts. These articles address the issue from various perspectives, spanning pore-scale, continuum-scale, and field studies in saturated groundwater and vadose zones. Water and soil resources are valuable but finite. Their loss and degradation may not be recoverable within a human lifetime, especially when pollutants do not breakdown and tend to be persistent in the environment. As revealed in a case study from a historical fire training site in New South Wales, Australia (Bekele et al.), despite that the source of contaminants (e.g., aqueous film forming foam for firefighting) was stopped about 20 years ago, the contaminants themselves (i.e., PFAS—perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances) can remain in and around the site with considerably high concentration, posting as ongoing sources for contamination to groundwater systems for years to come. The fate and transport of PFAS are found to correlate greatly with soil geochemical properties (e.g., soil type, pH) as they migrate in the vadose zone toward the groundwater table. As these synthetic PFAS have been widely used in many industries (including coating, food packaging, cleaning products, fire-fighting foams), the threat these materials pose to the environment and humans cannot be exaggerated

Analysis of the migration of crust material using gravity anomaly and space-time variation of the gravity field: A case study of the eastern Qinghai-Tibet Plateau

1479-1488The current study analyzed a deep environment of material flow of the lower crust and the tectonic movement caused by the flow, taking the eastern Qinghai-Tibet Plateau as an example. The depth of Moho varies from more than 70 km beneath the eastern Yushu-Qiangtang block to approximately 35 km below the Sichuan Basin. There are clear regional differences in the balanced state. Region around the Sichuan Basin is quite balanced (coefficient correlation, -1–-0.8), whereas the boundary of the Sichuan-Yunnan rhombic block is relative unbalanced (-0.5) or extremely unbalanced (-0.4–0). Space-time variation of the gravity field, which uses the Jinsha River suture zone as its boundary, shows positive and negative difference characteristics from east to west. Using the Wenchuan earthquake as the time node, two stages are present: 1998–2007 and 1998-2010. The space-time variation is between -7–7×10-8 ms-2. These results provide an important basis for the background of lower crust material flow and the tectonic activities caused by the flow in the eastern Qinghai-Tibet Plateau

Simulation of co-seismic gravity change and deformation of Wenchuan Ms8. 0 earthquake

Abstract:Surface co-seismic gravity changes and displacements caused by the Wenchuan Ms8. 0 earthquake are calculated on the basis of the half-space dislocation theory and two fault models inversed, respectively, by Institute of Geophysics, CEA and USGS. The results show that 1) the dislocation consists of dip slip and right-lateral strike slip; 2) the co-seismic gravity change shows a four-quadrant pattern, which is greatly controlled by the distribution of the vertical displacements, especially in the near-filed; 3) the gravity change is generally less than 10 × 10−8 ms−2 in the far-field, but as high as several 100 × 10−8 ms−2in the near-filed. These results basically agree with observational results

Surface volume and gravity changes due to significant earthquakes occurred in central Italy from 2009 to 2016

We have modelled the surface volume and gravity changes caused by four seismic events: three mainshocks (moment magnitude Mw 6.0, 5.9, 6.5) occurred during the last seismic period started on 2016, August 24 in central Italy, and the 2009, April 6 L’Aquila Earthquake (Mw 6.3). Our calculations start from the source parameters estimated by the inversion of the largest dataset of Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) and global positioning system observations ever managed in Italy after earthquake occurrences, based on the half-space elastic dislocation theory. The vertical displacements modelled after the 2016 events allow to infer a substantial unbalance between the subsided and uplifted volumes. In particular, we detected ~ 106 × 106 m3 of hangingwall subsidence against ~ 37 × 106 m3 of footwall uplift, that accounts for ~ 74% of the total volume mobilization. From the ratio between the footwall and total deformed volumes, we have computed an average fault dip of ~ 47°, in line with the values retrieved by seismological methods. The total gravity variations which affected the study area are of the order of ~ 1 μGal (1 μGal = 10−8 ms−2) in the far field, and ~ 170 μGal in the near field. The area affected within a gravity change of 1 μGal is ~ 140 km long and ~ 57 km wide, parallel to the Apennines mountain chain. The larger contribution is given by positive variations which account for the tensional style of deformation and larger subsided area. The significant gravity variations modelled from the coseismic deformations point out the need to update our knowledge about the absolute gravity field in Italy carrying out extensive measurements, and to align Italy to the recent international standards about national gravity and height networks (International Association of Geodesy, IAG Report, Commission 2— gravity field,Published2047–20562T. Deformazione crostale attivaJCR Journa