Global Progress Toward Implementing the United Nations Fish Stocks Agreement

This brief examines the progress made in implementing the Fish Stocks Agreement, based on a review of the status of certain highly migratory stocks and the effectiveness of regional fishery management organization (RFMO) measures in meeting specific mandates. It also looks at whether recommendations made in prior reviews have been implemented

Kolmogorov Complexity, Circuits, and the Strength of Formal Theories of Arithmetic

Can complexity classes be characterized in terms of efficient reducibility to the (undecidable) set of Kolmogorov-random strings? Although this might seem improbable, a series of papers has recently provided evidence that this may be the case. In particular, it is known that there is a class of problems C defined in terms of polynomial-time truth-table reducibility to RK (the set of Kolmogorov-random strings) that lies between BPP and PSPACE [4, 3]. In this paper, we investigate improving this upper bound from PSPACE to PSPACE ∩ P/poly. More precisely, we present a collection of true statements in the language of arithmetic, (each provable in ZF) and show that if these statements can be proved in certain extensions of Peano arithmetic, then BPP ⊆C⊆PSPACE ∩ P/poly. We conjecture that C is equal to P, and discuss the possibility this might be an avenue for trying to prove the equality of BPP and P

Leveraging Large Language Models in Conversational Recommender Systems

A Conversational Recommender System (CRS) offers increased transparency and control to users by enabling them to engage with the system through a real-time multi-turn dialogue. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited an unprecedented ability to converse naturally and incorporate world knowledge and common-sense reasoning into language understanding, unlocking the potential of this paradigm. However, effectively leveraging LLMs within a CRS introduces new technical challenges, including properly understanding and controlling a complex conversation and retrieving from external sources of information. These issues are exacerbated by a large, evolving item corpus and a lack of conversational data for training. In this paper, we provide a roadmap for building an end-to-end large-scale CRS using LLMs. In particular, we propose new implementations for user preference understanding, flexible dialogue management and explainable recommendations as part of an integrated architecture powered by LLMs. For improved personalization, we describe how an LLM can consume interpretable natural language user profiles and use them to modulate session-level context. To overcome conversational data limitations in the absence of an existing production CRS, we propose techniques for building a controllable LLM-based user simulator to generate synthetic conversations. As a proof of concept we introduce RecLLM, a large-scale CRS for YouTube videos built on LaMDA, and demonstrate its fluency and diverse functionality through some illustrative example conversations

Can grapheme-color synesthesia be induced by hypnosis?

Grapheme-color synesthesia is a perceptual experience where graphemes, letters or words evoke a specific color, which are experienced either as spatially coincident with the grapheme inducer (projector sub-type) or elsewhere, perhaps without a definite spatial location (associator sub-type). Here, we address the question of whether synesthesia can be rapidly produced using a hypnotic color suggestion to examine the possibility of “hypnotic synesthesia”, i.e., subjectively experienced color hallucinations similar to those experienced by projector synesthetes. We assess the efficacy of this intervention using an “embedded figures” test, in which participants are required to detect a shape (e.g., a square) composed of local graphemic elements. For grapheme-color synesthetes, better performance on the task has been linked to a higher proportion of graphemes perceived as colored.We found no performance benefits on this test when using a hypnotic suggestion, as compared to a no-suggestion control condition. The same result was found when participants were separated according to the degree to which they were susceptible to the suggestion (number of colored trials perceived). However, we found a relationship between accuracy and subjective reports of color in those participants who reported a large proportion of colored trials: trials in which the embedded figure was accurately recognized (relative to trials in which it was not) were associated with reports of more intense colors occupying a greater spatial extent. Collectively, this implies that hypnotic color was only perceived after shape detection rather than aiding in shape detection via color-based perceptual grouping. The results suggest that hypnotically induced colors are not directly comparable to synesthetic ones

Is It Time for Synthetic Biodiversity Conservation?

Evidence indicates that, despite some critical successes, current conservation approaches are not slowing the overall rate of biodiversity loss. The field of synthetic biology, which is capable of altering natural genomes with extremely precise editing, might offer the potential to resolve some intractable conservation problems (e.g., invasive species or pathogens). However, it is our opinion that there has been insufficient engagement by the conservation community with practitioners of synthetic biology. We contend that rapid, large-scale engagement of these two communities is urgently needed to avoid unintended and deleterious ecological consequences. To this point we describe case studies where synthetic biology is currently being applied to conservation, and we highlight the benefits to conservation biologists from engaging with this emerging technology

The effectiveness of early lens extraction with intraocular lens implantation for the treatment of primary angle-closure glaucoma (EAGLE) : study protocol for a randomized controlled trial

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

VideoGLUE: Video General Understanding Evaluation of Foundation Models

We evaluate existing foundation models video understanding capabilities using a carefully designed experiment protocol consisting of three hallmark tasks (action recognition, temporal localization, and spatiotemporal localization), eight datasets well received by the community, and four adaptation methods tailoring a foundation model (FM) for a downstream task. Moreover, we propose a scalar VideoGLUE score (VGS) to measure an FMs efficacy and efficiency when adapting to general video understanding tasks. Our main findings are as follows. First, task-specialized models significantly outperform the six FMs studied in this work, in sharp contrast to what FMs have achieved in natural language and image understanding. Second,video-native FMs, whose pretraining data contains the video modality, are generally better than image-native FMs in classifying motion-rich videos, localizing actions in time, and understanding a video of more than one action. Third, the video-native FMs can perform well on video tasks under light adaptations to downstream tasks(e.g., freezing the FM backbones), while image-native FMs win in full end-to-end finetuning. The first two observations reveal the need and tremendous opportunities to conduct research on video-focused FMs, and the last confirms that both tasks and adaptation methods matter when it comes to the evaluation of FMs

Two Rounds of Whole Genome Duplication in the Ancestral Vertebrate

The hypothesis that the relatively large and complex vertebrate genome was created by two ancient, whole genome duplications has been hotly debated, but remains unresolved. We reconstructed the evolutionary relationships of all gene families from the complete gene sets of a tunicate, fish, mouse, and human, and then determined when each gene duplicated relative to the evolutionary tree of the organisms. We confirmed the results of earlier studies that there remains little signal of these events in numbers of duplicated genes, gene tree topology, or the number of genes per multigene family. However, when we plotted the genomic map positions of only the subset of paralogous genes that were duplicated prior to the fish–tetrapod split, their global physical organization provides unmistakable evidence of two distinct genome duplication events early in vertebrate evolution indicated by clear patterns of four-way paralogous regions covering a large part of the human genome. Our results highlight the potential for these large-scale genomic events to have driven the evolutionary success of the vertebrate lineage