Game Solving with Online Fine-Tuning

Game solving is a similar, yet more difficult task than mastering a game. Solving a game typically means to find the game-theoretic value (outcome given optimal play), and optionally a full strategy to follow in order to achieve that outcome. The AlphaZero algorithm has demonstrated super-human level play, and its powerful policy and value predictions have also served as heuristics in game solving. However, to solve a game and obtain a full strategy, a winning response must be found for all possible moves by the losing player. This includes very poor lines of play from the losing side, for which the AlphaZero self-play process will not encounter. AlphaZero-based heuristics can be highly inaccurate when evaluating these out-of-distribution positions, which occur throughout the entire search. To address this issue, this paper investigates applying online fine-tuning while searching and proposes two methods to learn tailor-designed heuristics for game solving. Our experiments show that using online fine-tuning can solve a series of challenging 7x7 Killall-Go problems, using only 23.54% of computation time compared to the baseline without online fine-tuning. Results suggest that the savings scale with problem size. Our method can further be extended to any tree search algorithm for problem solving. Our code is available at https://rlg.iis.sinica.edu.tw/papers/neurips2023-online-fine-tuning-solver.Comment: Accepted by the 37th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2023

A 64-week, multicenter, open-label study of aripiprazole effectiveness in the management of patients with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder in a general psychiatric outpatient setting

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Objective</p> <p>To evaluate the overall long-term effectiveness of aripiprazole in patients with schizophrenia in a general psychiatric practice setting in Taiwan.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>This was a prospective, open-label, multicenter, post-market surveillance study in Taiwanese patients with a Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition (DSM-IV) diagnosis of schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder requiring a switch in antipsychotic medication because current medication was not well tolerated and/or clinical symptoms were not well controlled. Eligible patients were titrated to aripiprazole (5-30 mg/day) over a 12-week switching phase, during which their previous medication was discontinued. Patients could then enter a 52-week, long-term treatment phase. Aripiprazole was flexibly dosed (5-30 mg/day) at the discretion of the treating physicians. Efficacy was assessed using the Clinical Global Impression scale Improvement (CGI-I) score, the Clinical Global Impression scale Severity (CGI-S) score, The Brief Psychiatry Rating Scale (BPRS), and the Quality of Life (QOL) scale, as well as Preference of Medicine (POM) ratings by patients and caregivers. Safety and tolerability were also assessed.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>A total of 245 patients were enrolled and switched from their prior antipsychotic medications, and 153 patients entered the 52-week extension phase. In all, 79 patients (32.2%) completed the study. At week 64, the mean CGI-I score was 3.10 and 64.6% of patients who showed response. Compared to baseline, scores of CGI-S, QOL, and BPRS after 64 weeks of treatment also showed significant improvements. At week 12, 65.4% of subjects and 58.9% of caregivers rated aripiprazole as better than the prestudy medication on the POM. The most frequently reported adverse events (AEs) were headache, auditory hallucinations and insomnia. A total of 13 patients (5.3%) discontinued treatment due to AEs. No statistically significant changes were noted with respect to fasting plasma glucose, lipid profile, body weight, and body mass index after long-term treatment with aripiprazole.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Although the discontinuation rate was high, aripiprazole was found to be effective, safe and well tolerated in the long-term treatment of Taiwanese patients with schizophrenia who continued to receive treatment for 64 weeks.</p

Metronomic chemotherapy prevents therapy-induced stromal activation and induction of tumor-initiating cells

Although traditional chemotherapy kills a fraction of tumor cells, it also activates the stroma and can promote the growth and survival of residual cancer cells to foster tumor recurrence and metastasis. Accordingly, overcoming the host response induced by chemotherapy could substantially improve therapeutic outcome and patient survival. In this study, resistance to treatment and metastasis has been attributed to expansion of stem-like tumor-initiating cells (TICs). Molecular analysis of the tumor stroma in neoadjuvant chemotherapy–treated human desmoplastic cancers and orthotopic tumor xenografts revealed that traditional maximum-tolerated dose chemotherapy, regardless of the agents used, induces persistent STAT-1 and NF-κB activity in carcinoma-associated fibroblasts. This induction results in the expression and secretion of ELR motif–positive (ELR(+)) chemokines, which signal through CXCR-2 on carcinoma cells to trigger their phenotypic conversion into TICs and promote their invasive behaviors, leading to paradoxical tumor aggression after therapy. In contrast, the same overall dose administered as a low-dose metronomic chemotherapy regimen largely prevented therapy-induced stromal ELR(+) chemokine paracrine signaling, thus enhancing treatment response and extending survival of mice carrying desmoplastic cancers. These experiments illustrate the importance of stroma in cancer therapy and how its impact on treatment resistance could be tempered by altering the dosing schedule of systemic chemotherapy

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Study of the B decays B-&gt;ppK/πand Search for B-&gt;πll decay

B+-&gt;p¯pK+ and B+-&gt;p¯pπ+e study the characteristics of the low mass p¯p enhancement near threshold in the baryonic B decays: B+-&gt;p¯pK+ and B+-&gt;p¯pπ+. We observe that the proton polar angle distributions in the p¯p helicity frame in the two decaysave the opposite polarity, and measure the forward-backward asymmetries as a function of the p¯p mass for the p¯pK+ mode. We also search for the intermediate two-body decays, B+-&gt;¯p ++ and B+-&gt;p¯ 0, and set upper limits on their branching fractions: B(B+-&gt;¯p ++) &lt; 0.14 × 10^-6 and(B+-&gt;p¯ 0) &lt; 1.38×10^-6. These results are obtained from a data sample of 449 million BB pairs collected near the Upsilon(4S) resonance with the Belle detector at KEKB.+-&gt;p¯Λγ, p¯Λπ0 and B0-&gt;p¯Λπ−o further understand the mechanism in the low p¯p mass for baryonic B decays. We review the study of B+-&gt;p¯Λγ, p¯Λπ0 and B0-&gt;p¯Λπ− done by Y.-J. Lee (NTUHEP group) in 2006. The branching fractions and angular distributions of the three decays are remeasured with the same data sample, and the results are consistent with Lee’s study. In adition, we also measure the anisotropy parameter ¯α of the secondary proton from decays. The results are ¯α(B+-&gt;p¯Λγ) = −0.57 ± 0.33(stat) ± 0.10(syst), ¯α(B+-&gt;p¯Λπ0) = −0.27 ± 0.33(stat) ± 0.10(syst), and ¯α(B+-&gt;p¯Λπ−) = −0.28 ± 0.21(stat) ± 0.10(syst).-&gt;πℓ+ℓ−e also present a search for the B+-&gt;π+ℓ+ℓ− and B0-&gt;π0ℓ+ℓ− decays, with a data sample of 657 million BB pairs. By performing maximum likelihood fits to the reconstructed candidates, no significant signal is observed and we set the upper limit on the isospin-averaged branching fraction(B-&gt;πℓ+ℓ−) &lt; 6.2 × 10^-8 at the 90% confidence level.1 Introduction 1.1 Particle Physics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2 The Standard Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2.1 CKM matrix . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2.2 CP violation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3 Motivation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.3.1 B meson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.3.2 Baryonic B decays . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.3.3 Leptonic B decays . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 KEK B-Factory 9.1 KEKB Accelerator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.2 Belle Detector . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10.2.1 Beam Pipe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12.2.2 Silicon Vertex Detector (SVD) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13.2.3 Extreme Forward Calorimeter (EFC) . . . . . . . . . . 14.2.4 Central Drift Chamber (CDC) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16.2.5 Aerogel Cherenkov counter system (ACC) . . . . . . . 18.2.6 Time-of-Flight Counters (TOF) . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19.2.7 Electromagnetic Calorimeter (ECL) . . . . . . . . . . . 22.2.8 KL and Muon Detector (KLM) . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 Analysis Method 27.1 Analysis Tools . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27.1.1 BASF . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27.1.2 EvtGen and GSIM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27.1.3 PAW, Mn Fit and MINUIT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29.2 B Meson Reconstruction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30.3 Background Suppression . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32.3.1 Event shape variables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33.3.2 Fisher discriminant . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35.3.3 KSFW and BB suppression . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36.3.4 Peaking background veto . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39.4 Figure of Merit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40.5 Extraction of Signals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43.6 Systematic Study . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47 Physics Results 51.1 p¯pK+ and p¯pπ+ Study . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51.1.1 BF Measurement and Mp¯p Distribution . . . . . . . . . 53.1.2 Angular Distribution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53.1.3 Search for Two-body B Decays . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57.1.4 CP Violation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58.2 B-&gt;p¯Λγ, p¯Λπ0 and p¯Λπ− Checks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59.2.1 Anisotropy parameter ¯α . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59.3 Search for B-&gt;πℓ+ℓ− . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63.4 Discussion and Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65.4.1 Baryonic B decays . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65.4.2 Search for B-&gt;πℓ+ℓ− decay . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 Published Papers 7

Predicting the Protective Behavioral Intentions for Parents with Young Children Living in Taipei City and New Taipei City Using the Theory of Planned Behavior for Air Polluted with PM2.5

While studies on the damaging effects of PM2.5 air pollution are abundant, studies seeking to understand the factors that influence human behaviors for the avoidance of exposure to PM2.5 are lacking. Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) can be used to investigate the effects of Attitudes (AT), Subjective Norms (SN), and Perceived Behavioral Controls (PBC) in the Behavioral Intentions (BI) of parents with young children against exposure to PM2.5. Questionnaires, based on the TPB used to predict BI, were distributed to 610 parents in Taipei City and New Taipei City. Our results revealed that the AT of both groups had a significant positive predictive effect on their PBC and BI. While the SN of the Taipei group affected BI directly, there was no significant effect on the BI from the SN of the New Taipei group. Using path analysis, Taipei City and New Taipei City groups had different BI paths: All five hypotheses are statistically significant and form four paths in the Taipei City group. While only four hypotheses in the New Taipei City group formed three paths and no path for SN-BI. Both groups formed behaviors that were based on the SN/PBC around them, which ultimately contributed to the BI of their protective behaviors

Molecular Epidemiological and Serological Studies of Bovine Leukemia Virus in Taiwan Dairy Cattle

Bovine leukemia virus (BLV) infection results in a decrease in milk yield and quality, a compromise in immunity, and shortening in the longevity of cows. The current status of BLV infection of dairy cattle in Taiwan remains unclear. To evaluate BLV infection, anti-BLV gp51 antibody and proviral DNA were detected. Surprisingly, the seroprevalence of BLV at the animal and herd level was as high as 81.8% (540/660 cattle) and 99.1% (109/110 herds), respectively. Among 152 blood samples analyzed, 132 (86.8%) were detected as positive for BLV-proviral DNA. When the complete blood count (CBC) was taken into account, the white blood cell (WBC) number appears to be the factor with the highest predicted potential for BLV infection. Moreover, based on receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis, the sensitivity and specificity are 72.0 and 75.0%, respectively, when the cut-off value of the WBC was set at 10.215 K/μL. Despite the co-circulation of genotype 1 and 3 in Taiwan, genotype 1 was much more prevalent (29/30). Taken together, due to the high prevalence of BLV, the identification of risk factors for interrupting the routes of transmission of BLV are critical for the control and prevention of further BLV infection