354 research outputs found
The Impact of Social Movement on Racial Diversification Initiatives: Evidence From the Movie Industry
The movie industry is facing rising advocacy for racially inclusive casting. However, it remains an open question whether the promised benefits of racial diversification will materialize. Using data from 540 movies nested in 258 sequels released from 2008 to 2021, we find that, on average, increasing the number of racial minority actors in the main cast depresses movie evaluations. More importantly, the negative effect of racial diversification attenuates after Black Lives Matter (#BLM), a new media enabled social movement. Further, incorporating insights from tokenism and discrimination theories, we probe the heterogeneity in the bias mitigation effects of #BLM and find movie type and the core production team’s credentials as important boundary conditions. The present research shows that a social movement that seeks to address racial inequality can, indeed, lead to meaningful changes in public opinions toward racial inclusive initiatives. It also provides perspectives for thinking about the mechanisms underlying such changes
Optimal Spatial-Temporal Triangulation for Bearing-Only Cooperative Motion Estimation
Vision-based cooperative motion estimation is an important problem for many
multi-robot systems such as cooperative aerial target pursuit. This problem can
be formulated as bearing-only cooperative motion estimation, where the visual
measurement is modeled as a bearing vector pointing from the camera to the
target. The conventional approaches for bearing-only cooperative estimation are
mainly based on the framework distributed Kalman filtering (DKF). In this
paper, we propose a new optimal bearing-only cooperative estimation algorithm,
named spatial-temporal triangulation, based on the method of distributed
recursive least squares, which provides a more flexible framework for designing
distributed estimators than DKF. The design of the algorithm fully incorporates
all the available information and the specific triangulation geometric
constraint. As a result, the algorithm has superior estimation performance than
the state-of-the-art DKF algorithms in terms of both accuracy and convergence
speed as verified by numerical simulation. We rigorously prove the exponential
convergence of the proposed algorithm. Moreover, to verify the effectiveness of
the proposed algorithm under practical challenging conditions, we develop a
vision-based cooperative aerial target pursuit system, which is the first of
such fully autonomous systems so far to the best of our knowledge
Predictive Models for Disaggregate Stock Market Volatility
This paper incorporates the macroeconomic determinants into the forecasting model of industry-level stock return volatility in order to detect whether different macroeconomic factors can forecast the volatility of various industries. To explain different fluctuation characteristics among industries, we identified a set of macroeconomic determinants to examine their effects. The Clark and West (2007) test is employed to verify whether the new forecasting models, which vary among industries based on the in-sample results, can have better predictions than the two benchmark models. Our results show that default return and default yield have significant impacts on stock return volatility
Harnessing the Spatial-Temporal Attention of Diffusion Models for High-Fidelity Text-to-Image Synthesis
Diffusion-based models have achieved state-of-the-art performance on
text-to-image synthesis tasks. However, one critical limitation of these models
is the low fidelity of generated images with respect to the text description,
such as missing objects, mismatched attributes, and mislocated objects. One key
reason for such inconsistencies is the inaccurate cross-attention to text in
both the spatial dimension, which controls at what pixel region an object
should appear, and the temporal dimension, which controls how different levels
of details are added through the denoising steps. In this paper, we propose a
new text-to-image algorithm that adds explicit control over spatial-temporal
cross-attention in diffusion models. We first utilize a layout predictor to
predict the pixel regions for objects mentioned in the text. We then impose
spatial attention control by combining the attention over the entire text
description and that over the local description of the particular object in the
corresponding pixel region of that object. The temporal attention control is
further added by allowing the combination weights to change at each denoising
step, and the combination weights are optimized to ensure high fidelity between
the image and the text. Experiments show that our method generates images with
higher fidelity compared to diffusion-model-based baselines without fine-tuning
the diffusion model. Our code is publicly available at
https://github.com/UCSB-NLP-Chang/Diffusion-SpaceTime-Attn.Comment: 20 pages, 16 figure
ReFlow-TTS: A Rectified Flow Model for High-fidelity Text-to-Speech
The diffusion models including Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models
(DDPM) and score-based generative models have demonstrated excellent
performance in speech synthesis tasks. However, its effectiveness comes at the
cost of numerous sampling steps, resulting in prolonged sampling time required
to synthesize high-quality speech. This drawback hinders its practical
applicability in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we introduce ReFlow-TTS,
a novel rectified flow based method for speech synthesis with high-fidelity.
Specifically, our ReFlow-TTS is simply an Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE)
model that transports Gaussian distribution to the ground-truth Mel-spectrogram
distribution by straight line paths as much as possible. Furthermore, our
proposed approach enables high-quality speech synthesis with a single sampling
step and eliminates the need for training a teacher model. Our experiments on
LJSpeech Dataset show that our ReFlow-TTS method achieves the best performance
compared with other diffusion based models. And the ReFlow-TTS with one step
sampling achieves competitive performance compared with existing one-step TTS
models.Comment: Accepted at ICASSP202
Polydatin up-regulates clara cell secretory protein to suppress phospholipase A2 of lung induced by LPS in vivo and in vitro
<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Lung injury induced by lipopolysaccharide (LPS) remains one of the leading causes of morbidity and mortality in children. The damage to membrane phospholipids leads to the collapse of the bronchial alveolar epithelial barrier during acute lung injury (ALI)/acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). Phospholipase A<sub>2 </sub>(PLA<sub>2</sub>), a key enzyme in the hydrolysis of membrane phospholipids, plays an important traumatic role in pulmonary inflammation, and Clara cell secretory protein (CCSP) is an endogenous inhibitor of PLA<sub>2</sub>. Our previous study showed that polydatin (PD), a monocrystalline extracted from a traditional Chinese medicinal herb (Polygonum cuspidatum Sieb, et Zucc), reduced PLA<sub>2 </sub>activity and sPLA<sub>2</sub>-IIA mRNA expression and mitigated LPS-induced lung injury. However, the potential mechanism for these effects has not been well defined. We have continued to investigate the effect of PD on LPS-induced expression of CCSP mRNA and protein in vivo and in vitro.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Our results suggested that the CCSP mRNA level was consistent with its protein expression. CCSP expression was decreased in lung after LPS challenge. In contrast, PD markedly increased CCSP expression in a concentration-dependent manner. In particular, CCSP expression in PD-pretreated rat lung was higher than in rats receiving only PD treatment.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>These results indicated that up-regulation of CCSP expression causing inhibition of PLA<sub>2 </sub>activation may be one of the crucial protective mechanisms of PD in LPS-induced lung injury.</p
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