Best possible self (BPS) is a positive psychological intervention shown to enhance well-being which involves writing a description of an ideal future scenario. This paper presents a comparison of psychophysiological effects of a BPS activity that has been adapted for classroom settings and a time-matched control activity (NA). Thirty-three undergraduate students participated in the study that assessed state anxiety (State-Trait Anxiety Inventory, STAI), affect (Affective Slider, AS), and cardiac vagal activity (heart-rate variability, HRV) as an indicator of self-regulatory resource usage, at three time periods (PRE, DURING, POST). Results show that BPS led to a significantly greater increase in positive valence (DURING) and overall higher levels of cardiac vagal activity (HRV) compared to NA. These findings suggest that BPS has promising characteristics as a self-regulatory technique aimed at fostering positive affect and positively impacting self-regulatory resources. As BPS does not require expert knowledge nor specialized technology to administer, it may be a suitable activity for educators to use when teaching and having students practice self-regulation. This study presents evidence collected in a replicable multimodal approach of the self-regulatory effects of a brief BPS activity on undergraduate students.
Unsupervised question answering is a promising yet challenging task, which alleviates the burden of building large-scale annotated data in a new domain. It motivates us to study the unsupervised multiple-choice question answering (MCQA) problem. In this paper, we propose a novel framework designed to generate synthetic MCQA data barely based on contexts from the universal domain without relying on any form of manual annotation. Possible answers are extracted and used to produce related questions, then we leverage both named entities (NE) and knowledge graphs to discover plausible distractors to form complete synthetic samples. Experiments on multiple MCQA datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
Advances in AI invite the misuse of language models as stand-ins for human minds or participants, which fundamentally mischaracterizes these statistical algorithms. We argue that language models should be embraced as flexible simulation tools, able to mimic a wide range of behaviors, perspectives, and psychological attributes evident in human language data, but the models themselves should not be equated to or anthropomorphized as human minds.
Principal component analysis (PCA) is a longstanding and well-studied approach for dimension reduction. It rests upon the assumption that the underlying signal in the data has low rank, and thus can be well-summarized using a small number of dimensions. The output of PCA is typically represented using a scree plot, which displays the proportion of variance explained (PVE) by each principal component. While the PVE is extensively reported in routine data analyses, to the best of our knowledge the notion of inference on the PVE remains unexplored. In this paper, we consider inference on the PVE. We first introduce a new population quantity for the PVE with respect to an unknown matrix mean. Critically, our interest lies in the PVE of the sample principal components (as opposed to unobserved population principal components); thus, the population PVE that we introduce is defined conditional on the sample singular vectors. We show that it is possible to conduct inference, in the sense of confidence intervals, p-values, and point estimates, on this population quantity. Furthermore, we can conduct valid inference on the PVE of a subset of the principal components, even when the subset is selected using a data-driven approach such as the elbow rule. We demonstrate the proposed approach in simulation and in an application to a gene expression dataset.
The Laplace eigenvalue problem on circular sectors has eigenfunctions with corner singularities. Standard methods may produce suboptimal approximation results. To address this issue, a novel numerical algorithm that enhances standard isogeometric analysis is proposed in this paper by using a single-patch graded mesh refinement scheme. Numerical tests demonstrate optimal convergence rates for both the eigenvalues and eigenfunctions. Furthermore, the results show that smooth splines possess a superior approximation constant compared to their $C^0$-continuous counterparts for the lower part of the Laplace spectrum. This is an extension of previous findings about excellent spectral approximation properties of smooth splines on rectangular domains to circular sectors. In addition, graded meshes prove to be particularly advantageous for an accurate approximation of a limited number of eigenvalues. The novel algorithm applied here has a drawback in the singularity of the isogeometric parameterization. It results in some basis functions not belonging to the solution space of the corresponding weak problem, which is considered a variational crime. However, the approach proves to be robust. Finally, a hierarchical mesh structure is presented to avoid anisotropic elements, omit redundant degrees of freedom and keep the number of basis functions contributing to the variational crime constant, independent of the mesh size. Numerical results validate the effectiveness of hierarchical mesh grading for the simulation of eigenfunctions with and without corner singularities.
Testing for independence between two random vectors is a fundamental problem in statistics. It is observed from empirical studies that many existing omnibus consistent tests may not work well for some strongly nonmonotonic and nonlinear relationships. To explore the reasons behind this issue, we novelly transform the multivariate independence testing problem equivalently into checking the equality of two bivariate means. An important observation we made is that the power loss is mainly due to cancellation of positive and negative terms in dependence metrics, making them very close to zero. Motivated by this observation, we propose a class of consistent metrics with a positive integer $\gamma$ that exactly characterize independence. Theoretically, we show that the metrics with even and infinity $\gamma$ can effectively avoid the cancellation, and have high powers under the alternatives that two mean differences offset each other. Since we target at a wide range of dependence scenarios in practice, we further suggest to combine the p-values of test statistics with different $\gamma$'s through the Fisher's method. We illustrate the advantages of our proposed tests through extensive numerical studies.
Some mechanical systems, that are modeled to have inelastic collisions, nonetheless possess energy-conserving intermittent-contact solutions, known as collisionless solutions. Such a solution, representing a persistent hopping or walking across a level ground, may be important for understanding animal locomotion or for designing efficient walking machines. So far, collisionless motion has been analytically studied in simple two degrees of freedom (DOF) systems, or in a system that decouples into 2-DOF subsystems in the harmonic approximation. In this paper we extend the consideration to a N-DOF system, recovering the known solutions as a special N = 2 case of the general formulation. We show that in the harmonic approximation the collisionless solution is determined by the spectrum of the system. We formulate a solution existence condition, which requires the presence of at least one oscillating normal mode in the most constrained phase of the motion. An application of the developed general framework is illustrated by finding a collisionless solution for a rocking motion of a biped with an armed standing torso.
This essay provides a comprehensive analysis of the optimization and performance evaluation of various routing algorithms within the context of computer networks. Routing algorithms are critical for determining the most efficient path for data transmission between nodes in a network. The efficiency, reliability, and scalability of a network heavily rely on the choice and optimization of its routing algorithm. This paper begins with an overview of fundamental routing strategies, including shortest path, flooding, distance vector, and link state algorithms, and extends to more sophisticated techniques.
Living organisms interact with their surroundings in a closed-loop fashion, where sensory inputs dictate the initiation and termination of behaviours. Even simple animals are able to develop and execute complex plans, which has not yet been replicated in robotics using pure closed-loop input control. We propose a solution to this problem by defining a set of discrete and temporary closed-loop controllers, called "tasks", each representing a closed-loop behaviour. We further introduce a supervisory module which has an innate understanding of physics and causality, through which it can simulate the execution of task sequences over time and store the results in a model of the environment. On the basis of this model, plans can be made by chaining temporary closed-loop controllers. The proposed framework was implemented for a real robot and tested in two scenarios as proof of concept.
We propose a novel algorithm for the support estimation of partially known Gaussian graphical models that incorporates prior information about the underlying graph. In contrast to classical approaches that provide a point estimate based on a maximum likelihood or a maximum a posteriori criterion using (simple) priors on the precision matrix, we consider a prior on the graph and rely on annealed Langevin diffusion to generate samples from the posterior distribution. Since the Langevin sampler requires access to the score function of the underlying graph prior, we use graph neural networks to effectively estimate the score from a graph dataset (either available beforehand or generated from a known distribution). Numerical experiments demonstrate the benefits of our approach.
The Knowledge Till rho CONGEST model is a variant of the classical CONGEST model of distributed computing in which each vertex v has initial knowledge of the radius-rho ball centered at v. The most commonly studied variants of the CONGEST model are KT0 CONGEST in which nodes initially know nothing about their neighbors and KT1 CONGEST in which nodes initially know the IDs of all their neighbors. It has been shown that having access to neighbors' IDs (as in the KT1 CONGEST model) can substantially reduce the message complexity of algorithms for fundamental problems such as BROADCAST and MST. For example, King, Kutten, and Thorup (PODC 2015) show how to construct an MST using just Otilde(n) messages in the KT1 CONGEST model, whereas there is an Omega(m) message lower bound for MST in the KT0 CONGEST model. Building on this result, Gmyr and Pandurangen (DISC 2018) present a family of distributed randomized algorithms for various global problems that exhibit a trade-off between message and round complexity. These algorithms are based on constructing a sparse, spanning subgraph called a danner. Specifically, given a graph G and any delta in [0,1], their algorithm constructs (with high probability) a danner that has diameter Otilde(D + n^{1-delta}) and Otilde(min{m,n^{1+delta}}) edges in Otilde(n^{1-delta}) rounds while using Otilde(min{m,n^{1+\delta}}) messages, where n, m, and D are the number of nodes, edges, and the diameter of G, respectively. In the main result of this paper, we show that if we assume the KT2 CONGEST model, it is possible to substantially improve the time-message trade-off in constructing a danner. Specifically, we show in the KT2 CONGEST model, how to construct a danner that has diameter Otilde(D + n^{1-2delta}) and Otilde(min{m,n^{1+delta}}) edges in Otilde(n^{1-2delta}) rounds while using Otilde(min{m,n^{1+\delta}}) messages for any delta in [0,1/2].