MCP: Self-supervised Pre-training for Personalized Chatbots with Multi-level Contrastive Sampling

Personalized chatbots focus on endowing the chatbots with a consistent personality to behave like real users and further act as personal assistants. Previous studies have explored generating implicit user profiles from the user's dialogue history for building personalized chatbots. However, these studies only use the response generation loss to train the entire model, thus it is prone to suffer from the problem of data sparsity. Besides, they overemphasize the final generated response's quality while ignoring the correlations and fusions between the user's dialogue history, leading to rough data representations and performance degradation. To tackle these problems, we propose a self-supervised learning framework MCP for capturing better representations from users' dialogue history for personalized chatbots. Specifically, we apply contrastive sampling methods to leverage the supervised signals hidden in user dialog history, and generate the pre-training samples for enhancing the model. We design three pre-training tasks based on three types of contrastive pairs from user dialogue history, namely response pairs, sequence augmentation pairs, and user pairs. We pre-train the utterance encoder and the history encoder towards the contrastive objectives and use these pre-trained encoders for generating user profiles while personalized response generation. Experimental results on two real-world datasets show a significant improvement in our proposed model MCP compared with the existing methods

Two Piggybacking Codes with Flexible Sub-Packetization to Achieve Lower Repair Bandwidth

As a special class of array codes, $(n,k,m)$ piggybacking codes are MDS codes (i.e., any $k$ out of $n$ nodes can retrieve all data symbols) that can achieve low repair bandwidth for single-node failure with low sub-packetization $m$. In this paper, we propose two new piggybacking codes that have lower repair bandwidth than the existing piggybacking codes given the same parameters. Our first piggybacking codes can support flexible sub-packetization $m$ with $2\leq m\leq n-k$, where $n - k > 3$. We show that our first piggybacking codes have lower repair bandwidth for any single-node failure than the existing piggybacking codes when $n - k = 8,9$, $m = 6$ and $30\leq k \leq 100$. Moreover, we propose second piggybacking codes such that the sub-packetization is a multiple of the number of parity nodes (i.e., $(n-k)|m$), by jointly designing the piggyback function for data node repair and transformation function for parity node repair. We show that the proposed second piggybacking codes have lowest repair bandwidth for any single-node failure among all the existing piggybacking codes for the evaluated parameters $k/n = 0.75, 0.8, 0.9$ and $n-k\geq 4$

Development of European Power Grid and Its Compatibility with Global Energy Interconnection

The Global Energy Interconnection (GEI) vision is to enhance the deployment of renewable energy generation on a global scale by building intercontinental power transmission corridors, thereby promoting global decarbonization. Under the premise of a unified electrical market, this paper discusses the compatibility of current development plans of European power grid, proposed by European Network of Transmission System Operators (ENTSO-E), with the long-term GEI scenarios in 2030 and 2050. To fully consider the environmental, social, and political elements in the network expansion, a novel methodological approach is proposed, which combines the techno-economic models with socio-economic decision-making support tools, as the multi-criteria analysis. By this method, the paper computes the optimal power flows in the European network model in the GEI scenarios of 2030 and 2050. The study shows that, at the high load level projected in the GEI scenario, a widely distributed congestion between the Scandinavia area and the European continent would appear, limiting the dispatch of transmission corridors from the Arctic area. The results demonstrate that the planning of GEI will require close coordination and management between transmission system operators (TSO) and institutions in various regions

Generalized Simple Regenerating Codes: Trading Sub-packetization and Fault Tolerance

Maximum distance separable (MDS) codes have the optimal trade-off between storage efficiency and fault tolerance, which are widely used in distributed storage systems. As typical non-MDS codes, simple regenerating codes (SRCs) can achieve both smaller repair bandwidth and smaller repair locality than traditional MDS codes in repairing single-node erasure. In this paper, we propose {\em generalized simple regenerating codes} (GSRCs) that can support much more parameters than that of SRCs. We show that there is a trade-off between sub-packetization and fault tolerance in our GSRCs, and SRCs achieve a special point of the trade-off of GSRCs. We show that the fault tolerance of our GSRCs increases when the sub-packetization increases linearly. We also show that our GSRCs can locally repair any singe-symbol erasure and any single-node erasure, and the repair bandwidth of our GSRCs is smaller than that of the existing related codes

Antioxidant and Preventive Effects of Extract from Nymphaea candida Flower on In Vitro Immunological Liver Injury of Rat Primary Hepatocyte Cultures

Nymphaea candida is traditional Uighur medicine that is commonly used to treat head pains, cough, hepatitis and hypertension in Xinjiang of China. In this article, the extract of N. candida was measured for antioxidant activity, using 1,1-diphenyl-2-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) radicals scavenging assay and reducing power determination, and compared with those of the positive controls of butylated hydroxytoluene (BHT) and gallic acid (GA). The active extract was further purified by liquid-liquid partition to afford four fractions, of which the ethyl acetate-soluble (EA) fraction (NCE) exhibited the strongest antioxidant capacity with IC50 value of 12.6 μg/mL for DPPH. Thirteen phenolic compounds were isolated from this fraction, and they all showed significant antioxidant activities in DPPH model system. Furthermore, NCE showed potent antioxidant capacity with IC50 value of 59.32 μg/mL, 24.48 μg/mL and 86.85 μg/mL, for O2−, ·OH and H2O2 radicals, respectively. Moreover, NCE on BCG plus LPS-induced immunological liver injury was evaluated using primary cultured rat hepatocytes. NCE produced significant hepatoprotective effects as evidenced by decreased supernatant enzyme activities (AST—aspartate transaminase, P <  .01; ALT—alanine transferase, P <  .01) and nitric oxide (NO, P <  .01) production. These results revealed the in vitro antioxidant and hepatoprotective activities of NCE against immunological liver injury. Further investigations are necessary to verify these activities in vivo

A study of the tribological behaviour of TiO2 nano-additive water-based lubricants

A ball-on-disk tribometer was employed to evaluate the lubrication performance and mechanisms of innovative TiO2 nano-additive water-based lubricants. Two experimental methods were applied to determine the optimal mass fraction of TiO2. In the method I, lubricants were added onto the worn disk tracks at a predetermined time interval. In the method II, the disks were immersed in the lubricants continuously during the whole process of tribological tests. The results both indicate that the water-based lubricants can significantly reduce the coefficient of friction (COF). The 0.8 wt% TiO2 lubricant demonstrates excellent tribological properties including the lowest COF and the strongest wear resistance under all lubrication conditions. The lubrication mechanisms are attributed to the rolling and mending effects of the TiO2 nanoparticles

Finding of widespread viral and bacterial revolution dsDNA translocation motors distinct from rotation motors by channel chirality and size

BACKGROUND: Double-stranded DNA translocation is ubiquitous in living systems. Cell mitosis, bacterial binary fission, DNA replication or repair, homologous recombination, Holliday junction resolution, viral genome packaging and cell entry all involve biomotor-driven dsDNA translocation. Previously, biomotors have been primarily classified into linear and rotational motors. We recently discovered a third class of dsDNA translocation motors in Phi29 utilizing revolution mechanism without rotation. Analogically, the Earth rotates around its own axis every 24 hours, but revolves around the Sun every 365 days. RESULTS: Single-channel DNA translocation conductance assay combined with structure inspections of motor channels on bacteriophages P22, SPP1, HK97, T7, T4, Phi29, and other dsDNA translocation motors such as bacterial FtsK and eukaryotic mimiviruses or vaccinia viruses showed that revolution motor is widespread. The force generation mechanism for revolution motors is elucidated. Revolution motors can be differentiated from rotation motors by their channel size and chirality. Crystal structure inspection revealed that revolution motors commonly exhibit channel diameters larger than 3 nm, while rotation motors that rotate around one of the two separated DNA strands feature a diameter smaller than 2 nm. Phi29 revolution motor translocated double- and tetra-stranded DNA that occupied 32% and 64% of the narrowest channel cross-section, respectively, evidencing that revolution motors exhibit channel diameters significantly wider than the dsDNA. Left-handed oriented channels found in revolution motors drive the right-handed dsDNA via anti-chiral interaction, while right-handed channels observed in rotation motors drive the right-handed dsDNA via parallel threads. Tethering both the motor and the dsDNA distal-end of the revolution motor does not block DNA packaging, indicating that no rotation is required for motors of dsDNA phages, while a small-angle left-handed twist of dsDNA that is aligned with the channel could occur due to the conformational change of the phage motor channels from a left-handed configuration for DNA entry to a right-handed configuration for DNA ejection for host cell infection. CONCLUSIONS: The revolution motor is widespread among biological systems, and can be distinguished from rotation motors by channel size and chirality. The revolution mechanism renders dsDNA void of coiling and torque during translocation of the lengthy helical chromosome, thus resulting in more efficient motor energy conversion

Eight RGS and RGS-like Proteins Orchestrate Growth, Differentiation, and Pathogenicity of Magnaporthe oryzae

A previous study identified MoRgs1 as an RGS protein that negative regulates G-protein signaling to control developmental processes such as conidiation and appressorium formation in Magnaporthe oryzae. Here, we characterized additional seven RGS and RGS-like proteins (MoRgs2 through MoRgs8). We found that MoRgs1 and MoRgs4 positively regulate surface hydrophobicity, conidiation, and mating. Indifference to MoRgs1, MoRgs4 has a role in regulating laccase and peroxidase activities. MoRgs1, MoRgs2, MoRgs3, MoRgs4, MoRgs6, and MoRgs7 are important for germ tube growth and appressorium formation. Interestingly, MoRgs7 and MoRgs8 exhibit a unique domain structure in which the RGS domain is linked to a seven-transmembrane motif, a hallmark of G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs). We have also shown that MoRgs1 regulates mating through negative regulation of Gα MoMagB and is involved in the maintenance of cell wall integrity. While all proteins appear to be involved in the control of intracellular cAMP levels, only MoRgs1, MoRgs3, MoRgs4, and MoRgs7 are required for full virulence. Taking together, in addition to MoRgs1 functions as a prominent RGS protein in M. oryzae, MoRgs4 and other RGS and RGS-like proteins are also involved in a complex process governing asexual/sexual development, appressorium formation, and pathogenicity