137 research outputs found
Alternative Energy
In this report, we will take a closer look at different energy sources from fossil fuel to renewable energy. We will evaluate their strength and weakness in economic, productivity and environmental perspective. In the report, we will also address some of the energy challenges we are facing and some possible solutions. We will also make a prediction of the future of energy base on our observation
AdaCat: Adaptive Categorical Discretization for Autoregressive Models
Autoregressive generative models can estimate complex continuous data
distributions, like trajectory rollouts in an RL environment, image
intensities, and audio. Most state-of-the-art models discretize continuous data
into several bins and use categorical distributions over the bins to
approximate the continuous data distribution. The advantage is that the
categorical distribution can easily express multiple modes and are
straightforward to optimize. However, such approximation cannot express sharp
changes in density without using significantly more bins, making it parameter
inefficient. We propose an efficient, expressive, multimodal parameterization
called Adaptive Categorical Discretization (AdaCat). AdaCat discretizes each
dimension of an autoregressive model adaptively, which allows the model to
allocate density to fine intervals of interest, improving parameter efficiency.
AdaCat generalizes both categoricals and quantile-based regression. AdaCat is a
simple add-on to any discretization-based distribution estimator. In
experiments, AdaCat improves density estimation for real-world tabular data,
images, audio, and trajectories, and improves planning in model-based offline
RL.Comment: Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI) 2022 13 pages, 4 figure
TimbreTron: A WaveNet(CycleGAN(CQT(Audio))) Pipeline for Musical Timbre Transfer
In this work, we address the problem of musical timbre transfer, where the
goal is to manipulate the timbre of a sound sample from one instrument to match
another instrument while preserving other musical content, such as pitch,
rhythm, and loudness. In principle, one could apply image-based style transfer
techniques to a time-frequency representation of an audio signal, but this
depends on having a representation that allows independent manipulation of
timbre as well as high-quality waveform generation. We introduce TimbreTron, a
method for musical timbre transfer which applies "image" domain style transfer
to a time-frequency representation of the audio signal, and then produces a
high-quality waveform using a conditional WaveNet synthesizer. We show that the
Constant Q Transform (CQT) representation is particularly well-suited to
convolutional architectures due to its approximate pitch equivariance. Based on
human perceptual evaluations, we confirmed that TimbreTron recognizably
transferred the timbre while otherwise preserving the musical content, for both
monophonic and polyphonic samples.Comment: 17 pages, published as a conference paper at ICLR 201
Understanding the Complexity Gains of Single-Task RL with a Curriculum
Reinforcement learning (RL) problems can be challenging without well-shaped
rewards. Prior work on provably efficient RL methods generally proposes to
address this issue with dedicated exploration strategies. However, another way
to tackle this challenge is to reformulate it as a multi-task RL problem, where
the task space contains not only the challenging task of interest but also
easier tasks that implicitly function as a curriculum. Such a reformulation
opens up the possibility of running existing multi-task RL methods as a more
efficient alternative to solving a single challenging task from scratch. In
this work, we provide a theoretical framework that reformulates a single-task
RL problem as a multi-task RL problem defined by a curriculum. Under mild
regularity conditions on the curriculum, we show that sequentially solving each
task in the multi-task RL problem is more computationally efficient than
solving the original single-task problem, without any explicit exploration
bonuses or other exploration strategies. We also show that our theoretical
insights can be translated into an effective practical learning algorithm that
can accelerate curriculum learning on simulated robotic tasks
Biological Activities of Chinese Propolis and Brazilian Propolis on Streptozotocin-Induced Type 1 Diabetes Mellitus in Rats
Propolis is a bee-collected natural product and has been proven to have various bioactivities. This study tested the effects of Chinese propolis and Brazilian propolis on streptozotocin-induced type 1 diabetes mellitus in Sprague-Dawley rats. The results showed that Chinese propolis and Brazilian propolis significantly inhibited body weight loss and blood glucose increase in diabetic rats. In addition, Chinese propolis-treated rats showed an 8.4% reduction of glycated hemoglobin levels compared with untreated diabetic rats. Measurement of blood lipid metabolism showed dyslipidemia in diabetic rats and Chinese propolis helped to reduce total cholesterol level by 16.6%. Moreover, oxidative stress in blood, liver and kidney was improved to various degrees by both Chinese propolis and Brazilian propolis. An apparent reduction in levels of alanine transaminase, aspartate transaminase, blood urea nitrogen and urine microalbuminuria-excretion rate demonstrated the beneficial effects of propolis in hepatorenal function. All these results suggested that Chinese propolis and Brazilian propolis can alleviate symptoms of diabetes mellitus in rats and these effects may partially be due to their antioxidant ability
Integration of Metabolomics and Transcriptomics Reveals the Therapeutic Mechanism Underlying Paeoniflorin for the Treatment of Allergic Asthma
Objectives: Asthma is a chronic airway inflammatory disease, which is characterized by airway remodeling, hyperreactivity and shortness of breath. Paeoniflorin is one of the major active ingredients in Chinese peony, which exerts anti-inflammatory and immune-regulatory effects in multiple diseases. However, it remains unclear whether paeoniflorin treatment can suppress allergic asthma.Methods: In this study, we evaluated the effect of paeoniflorin on lung function and airway inflammation in asthmatic mice. These asthmatic Balb/c mice were first sensitized and constructed through ovalbumin (OVA) motivation. Subsequently, we determined the mechanism of action of paeoniflorin in treating allergic asthma through integrated transcriptomic and metabolomic data sets.Results: Our results demonstrated that many genes and metabolites were regulated in the paeoniflorin-treated mice. Moreover, the potential target proteins of paeoniflorin played important roles in fatty acid metabolism, inflammatory response, oxidative stress and local adhesion.Conclusion: Paeoniflorin has a beneficial effect on asthma, which may be achieved through regulating fatty acid metabolism, inflammatory response and the adhesion pathway at system level
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