Advice Conformance Verification by Reinforcement Learning agents for Human-in-the-Loop

Human-in-the-loop (HiL) reinforcement learning is gaining traction in domains with large action and state spaces, and sparse rewards by allowing the agent to take advice from HiL. Beyond advice accommodation, a sequential decision-making agent must be able to express the extent to which it was able to utilize the human advice. Subsequently, the agent should provide a means for the HiL to inspect parts of advice that it had to reject in favor of the overall environment objective. We introduce the problem of Advice-Conformance Verification which requires reinforcement learning (RL) agents to provide assurances to the human in the loop regarding how much of their advice is being conformed to. We then propose a Tree-based lingua-franca to support this communication, called a Preference Tree. We study two cases of good and bad advice scenarios in MuJoCo's Humanoid environment. Through our experiments, we show that our method can provide an interpretable means of solving the Advice-Conformance Verification problem by conveying whether or not the agent is using the human's advice. Finally, we present a human-user study with 20 participants that validates our method.Comment: Accepted at IROS-RLCONFORM 202

ENHANCEMENT OF VOLTAGE PROFILE IN TRANSMISSION LINE USING DSTATCOM AND DVR

In this paper, a STATCOM and DVR  are used to mitigate power quality issues in power system (Transmission Line), STATCOM and DVR  both are used in transmission line simultaneously for enhancement of  Voltage quality in Transmission Line Voltage related issues sags and swells are the by-products of symmetrical as well as unsymmetrical faults of the electrical power system(Transmission Line ). The excessive reactive power demand in the line degrades the voltage magnitude from its specified limit.  Power quality has become a crucial factor today due to the wide application of power electronics-based equipment. Day by day, power electronics-based devices are widely used in industries and distribution areas and create more power quality problems. The quality of the power is defective for certain reasons. This power quality improvement is seen, e.g., as sag, swell, overvoltages, Undervoltage, and harmonics. Conventional equipment for enhancement of power quality is becoming inadequate

A Brief Description of Different Types of Cancers and Role of Some Herbs & Bioactive Compounds in Lung Cancer Management

Cancer immunotherapy has considerably raised patient survival rates and significantly improved patients\u27 quality of life in comparison to the gold standard of care, which includes chemotherapy, radiation therapy, and surgery. Immunotherapy has firmly established itself as a novel pillar of cancer care across the board, from the metastatic stage all the way through adjuvant and neoadjuvant treatment in a wide variety of cancer types. In this overview, the primary emphasis will be placed on the seminal moments in the history of cancer immunotherapy that prepared the way for the cutting-edge treatments that are available today. Cancer treatment that makes use of medicinal herbs and the phytocompounds that can be obtained from those herbs is becoming an increasingly attractive option. It has been demonstrated in a number of clinical studies that the use of herbal medicines in conjunction with conventional therapy can increase survival rates, immunological modulation, and quality of life (QOL) in patients who have cancer. In addition to this, we highlight the challenges and restrictions currently faced by cancer checkpoint immunotherapy as well as the cutting-edge research being conducted in the fields of individualized cancer vaccines, autoimmunity, the microbiome, the microenvironment of tumors, and metabolomics to find solutions to these problems. For hundreds of years, practitioners of traditional medicine have depended on treatments derived from plants. Many studies on their use have been carried out all over the world, and some of the findings have led to the development of medicines that are derived from plants. The global market for medicinal plant products is estimated to be worth more than one hundred billion dollars each year. This research investigates the role, contributions, and utility of medicinal plants in the context of the current strategic methods to disease prevention, notably lung cancer, which is a public health concern. The focus of this research is on the current strategic approaches to disease prevention

Diabetes-Driven Dilemma: Tackling The Rise of Melioidosis in India

Melioidosis is a potentially fatal infectious disease that requires an extended period of treatment for complete resolution of the infection. It can lead to chronic and severe infections, and it is more common in diabetic patients. Melioidosis is also a significant concern in India primarily because its chronic nature, potential for dissemination, extended treatment requirements, and the risk of relapse lead to its resemblance to tuberculosis. This case series included osteomyelitis patient presented in emergency with sepsis MODS, disseminated melioidosis patient with systemic involvement including spleen, kidney and lungs, skin abscess at more than one site, urosepsis, splenic abscess, Melioidotic arthritis. Many of these patients had altered blood sugar levels, and in 3 cases, individuals were even diagnosed with diabetes during their episode of melioidosis the treatment duration generally involved an 8-week course of intravenous antibiotics. However, oral medications may need to be continued for several months if necessary for complete recovery. &nbsp

SARC: Soft Actor Retrospective Critic

The two-time scale nature of SAC, which is an actor-critic algorithm, is characterised by the fact that the critic estimate has not converged for the actor at any given time, but since the critic learns faster than the actor, it ensures eventual consistency between the two. Various strategies have been introduced in literature to learn better gradient estimates to help achieve better convergence. Since gradient estimates depend upon the critic, we posit that improving the critic can provide a better gradient estimate for the actor at each time. Utilizing this, we propose Soft Actor Retrospective Critic (SARC), where we augment the SAC critic loss with another loss term - retrospective loss - leading to faster critic convergence and consequently, better policy gradient estimates for the actor. An existing implementation of SAC can be easily adapted to SARC with minimal modifications. Through extensive experimentation and analysis, we show that SARC provides consistent improvement over SAC on benchmark environments. We plan to open-source the code and all experiment data at: https://github.com/sukritiverma1996/SARC.Comment: Accepted at RLDM 202

Characterization of Sorghum germplasm for various qualitative traits

Present study was performed to characterize 750 germplasm lines with 4 checks namely CSV17, CSV20, CSV27 and CSV21F for various qualitative traits of Sorghum. These 754 genotypes were sown in augmented RBD with 30 replications during Kharif 2014 at Instructional Farm, Rajasthan College of Agriculture, Udaipur. Majority of the accessions showed poor early plant vigour (40.2 %), dark green leaf (88.6 %), non- tan leaf sheath pigmentation (60 %), drooping leaves (100 %), white midrib colour (51.6 %), senescence (60 %), loose panicle density (31.5 %), elliptical panicle shape (66.5 %), straw glume colour (48.2 %), 3/4 glume coverage (42.9 %), absence of awns (59.5 %), creamy straw seed (39.9 %), oval grain shape (48.8 %), medium seed size (43.7 %), non-lustrous seed (62.0 %), intermediate endosperm texture (50.3 %) and bicolor race (49.6 %). Very good early plant vigour, tan type leaf sheath pigmentation, drooping leaf orientation, straw glume colour, ½ glume covering, oval grain shape, intermediate endosperm texture appeared in all the 4 check. The results of this study indicated that considerable genetic diversity exists among the sorghum accessions

Surface-structure-regulated cell-membrane penetration by monolayer-protected nanoparticles

Nanoscale objects are typically internalized by cells into membrane-bounded endosomes and fail to access the cytosolic cell machinery. Whereas some biomacromolecules may penetrate or fuse with cell membranes without overt membrane disruption, no synthetic material of comparable size has shown this property yet. Cationic nano-objects pass through cell membranes by generating transient holes, a process associated with cytotoxicity. Studies aimed at generating cell-penetrating nanomaterials have focused on the effect of size, shape and composition. Here, we compare membrane penetration by two nanoparticle 'isomers' with similar composition (same hydrophobic content), one coated with subnanometre striations of alternating anionic and hydrophobic groups, and the other coated with the same moieties but in a random distribution. We show that the former particles penetrate the plasma membrane without bilayer disruption, whereas the latter are mostly trapped in endosomes. Our results offer a paradigm for analysing the fundamental problem of cell-membrane-penetrating bio- and macro-molecules

Molecular Basis of Plant Adaptation against Aridity

Environment fluctuations have become the greatest threat to global food security. Of various abiotic stress factors, aridity hampers the most yield contributing attributes. In the context of agriculture, term “aridity” refers to a protracted period of insufficient precipitation, having detrimental influence on crop development and overall biological output. A sustained drought has considerable negative effects on crops and livestock, including the reduced production, destruction of property, and livestock sell-offs. Consequently, plants themself exert various kinds of defensive mechanisms to combat the ill effects of climate change. For example, plants with small leaves, benefit from aridity as part of their strategy for modifying the soil to water shortages and nutrient restrictions. Furthermore, low genetic diversity among significant crop species, together with ecological productivity limits, must be addressed in order to adapt crops to episodic drought spells in the coming days. A deeper understanding of the molecular and genetic underpinnings of the most important intrinsic adaptation responses to drought stress seems to be beneficial for gene engineering as well as gene-based expression investigations in plant systems under hostile environment. Recently, molecular markers and “omics” have opened a huge opportunity to identify and develop specific gene constructs governing plant adaptation to environmental stress