Velocity and Virtuosity: An Empirical Investigation of Basic Tempo in Contemporary Performances of Two Large-scale Works of Chopin and Liszt

Past research suggests that exceptional speed is a salient feature in virtuoso performance. However, this claim has not yet been tested by empirical studies. This article sets out to investigate in what ways contemporary piano virtuosos play fast in their performances and how they manifest the concept of virtuosity through tempo. It achieves these goals by analyzing a set of recordings of Chopin's First Ballade and Liszt's Sonata with a view to examining the tendency of basic tempo in the performances of two pianists who are most often considered as virtuosos of our time by music critics of English-speaking countries – Kissin and Lisitsa. The results show that they do not always play faster than other selected pianists do. Rather, they tend to play with extreme tempo at the sectional level – playing exceptionally fast in fast sections and exceptionally slow in slow ones. Their performances create dramatic contrast in expression between fast and slow sections, manifesting the concept of virtuosity in both the broader sense – dazzling the audience through broadened expressive power – as well as the narrower sense – displaying of exceptional technical skills through speed, agility and accuracy. The findings provide new, albeit preliminary, insight into the performance practice of modern piano virtuosos and how performers may manifest the concept of virtuosity in their performances

FedFA: Federated Learning with Feature Anchors to Align Features and Classifiers for Heterogeneous Data

Federated learning allows multiple clients to collaboratively train a model without exchanging their data, thus preserving data privacy. Unfortunately, it suffers significant performance degradation due to heterogeneous data at clients. Common solutions involve designing an auxiliary loss to regularize weight divergence or feature inconsistency during local training. However, we discover that these approaches fall short of the expected performance because they ignore the existence of a vicious cycle between feature inconsistency and classifier divergence across clients. This vicious cycle causes client models to be updated in inconsistent feature spaces with more diverged classifiers. To break the vicious cycle, we propose a novel framework named Federated learning with Feature Anchors (FedFA). FedFA utilizes feature anchors to align features and calibrate classifiers across clients simultaneously. This enables client models to be updated in a shared feature space with consistent classifiers during local training. Theoretically, we analyze the non-convex convergence rate of FedFA. We also demonstrate that the integration of feature alignment and classifier calibration in FedFA brings a virtuous cycle between feature and classifier updates, which breaks the vicious cycle existing in current approaches. Extensive experiments show that FedFA significantly outperforms existing approaches on various classification datasets under label distribution skew and feature distribution skew.Comment: Accepted by IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computin

Gravitational waves from first-order phase transitions in Majoron models of neutrino mass

We show how the generation of right-handed neutrino masses in Majoron models may be associated with a first-order phase transition and accompanied by the production of a stochastic background of gravitational waves (GWs). We explore different energy scales with only renormalizable operators in the effective potential. If the phase transition occurs above the electroweak scale, the signal can be tested by future interferometers. We consider two possible energy scales for phase transitions below the electroweak scale. If the phase transition occurs at a GeV, the signal can be tested at LISA and provide a complementary cosmological probe to right-handed neutrino searches at the FASER detector. If the phase transition occurs below 100 keV, we find that the peak of the GW spectrum is two or more orders of magnitude below the putative NANOGrav GW signal at low frequencies, but well within reach of the SKA and THEIA experiments. We show how searches of very low frequency GWs are motivated by solutions to the Hubble tension in which ordinary neutrinos interact with the dark sector. We also present general calculations of the phase transition temperature and Euclidean action that apply beyond Majoron models.Comment: 37 pages, 8 figures, 5 tables. Version to appear in JHE

Acceleration of Solvation Free Energy Calculation via Thermodynamic Integration Coupled with Gaussian Process Regression and Improved Gelman-Rubin Convergence Diagnostics

The determination of the solvation free energy of ions and molecules holds profound importance across a spectrum of applications spanning chemistry, biology, energy storage, and the environment. Molecular dynamics simulations are a powerful tool for computing this critical parameter. Nevertheless, the accurate and efficient calculation of solvation free energy becomes a formidable endeavor when dealing with complex systems characterized by potent Coulombic interactions and sluggish ion dynamics and, consequently, slow transition across various metastable states. In the present study, we expose limitations stemming from the conventional calculation of the statistical inefficiency g in the thermodynamic integration method, a factor that can hinder the determination of convergence of the solvation free energy and its associated uncertainty. Instead, we propose a robust scheme based on Gelman-Rubin convergence diagnostics. We leverage this improved estimation of uncertainties to introduce an innovative accelerated thermodynamic integration method based on Gaussian Process regression. This methodology is applied to the calculation of the solvation free energy of trivalent rare earth elements immersed in ionic liquids, a scenario where the aforementioned challenges render standard approaches ineffective. The proposed method proves effective in computing solvation free energy in situations where traditional thermodynamic integration methods fall short.Comment: Main text: 24 pages, 8 figures; Supporting information: 8 pages, 9 figures, 2 table

Federated Prompt-based Decision Transformer for Customized VR Services in Mobile Edge Computing System

This paper investigates resource allocation to provide heterogeneous users with customized virtual reality (VR) services in a mobile edge computing (MEC) system. We first introduce a quality of experience (QoE) metric to measure user experience, which considers the MEC system's latency, user attention levels, and preferred resolutions. Then, a QoE maximization problem is formulated for resource allocation to ensure the highest possible user experience,which is cast as a reinforcement learning problem, aiming to learn a generalized policy applicable across diverse user environments for all MEC servers. To learn the generalized policy, we propose a framework that employs federated learning (FL) and prompt-based sequence modeling to pre-train a common decision model across MEC servers, which is named FedPromptDT. Using FL solves the problem of insufficient local MEC data while protecting user privacy during offline training. The design of prompts integrating user-environment cues and user-preferred allocation improves the model's adaptability to various user environments during online execution

Velocity and Virtuosity: An Empirical Investigation of Basic Tempo in Contemporary Performances of Two Large-scale Works of Chopin and Liszt

Past research suggests that exceptional speed is a salient feature in virtuoso performance. However, this claim has not yet been tested by empirical studies. This article sets out to investigate in what ways contemporary piano virtuosos play fast in their performances and how they manifest the concept of virtuosity through tempo. It achieves these goals by analyzing a set of recordings of Chopin's First Ballade and Liszt's Sonata with a view to examining the tendency of basic tempo in the performances of two pianists who are most often considered as virtuosos of our time by music critics of English-speaking countries – Kissin and Lisitsa. The results show that they do not always play faster than other selected pianists do. Rather, they tend to play with extreme tempo at the sectional level – playing exceptionally fast in fast sections and exceptionally slow in slow ones. Their performances create dramatic contrast in expression between fast and slow sections, manifesting the concept of virtuosity in both the broader sense – dazzling the audience through broadened expressive power – as well as the narrower sense – displaying of exceptional technical skills through speed, agility and accuracy. The findings provide new, albeit preliminary, insight into the performance practice of modern piano virtuosos and how performers may manifest the concept of virtuosity in their performances

Transposon-mediated generation of targeting vectors for the production of gene knockouts

Vectors used for gene targeting experiments usually consist of a selectable marker flanked by two regions of homology to the targeted gene. In a homologous recombination event, the selectable marker replaces an essential element of the target gene rendering it inactive. Other applications of gene targeting technology include gene replacement (knockins) and conditional vectors which allow for the generation of inducible or tissue-specific gene-targeting events. The assembly of gene-targeting vectors is generally a laborious process requiring considerable technical skill. The procedures presented here report the application of transposons as tools for the construction of targeting vectors. Two mini-Mu transposons were sequentially inserted by in vitro transposition at each side of the region targeted for deletion. One such transposon carries an antibiotic resistance marker suitable for selection in mammalian cells. A deletion is then generated between the two transposons either by LoxP-induced recombination or by restriction digestion followed by ligation. This deletion removes part of both transposons plus the targeted region in between, leaving a transposon carrying the selectable marker flanked by two arms which are homologous to the targeted gene. Targeting vectors constructed using these transposons were electroporated into embryonic stem cells and shown to be effective in gene-targeting events