Binjie Guo, Hanyu Zheng, Guowei Su, Ru Zhang, Haohan Jiang, Xurong Lin, Hongyan Wei, Aisheng Mo, Jie Li, Zhiyuan Qian, Zhuhao Zhang, Xiaoyuan Cheng <<<

Recent years have witnessed significant progress in reinforcement learning,especially with Zero-like paradigms, which have greatly boosted thegeneralization and reasoning abilities of large-scale language models.Nevertheless, existing frameworks are often plagued by high implementationcomplexity and poor reproducibility. To tackle these challenges, we presentAlphaZero-Edu, a lightweight, education-focused implementation built upon themathematical framework of AlphaZero. It boasts a modular architecture thatdisentangles key components, enabling transparent visualization of thealgorithmic processes. Additionally, it is optimized for resource-efficienttraining on a single NVIDIA RTX 3090 GPU and features highly parallelizedself-play data generation, achieving a 3.2-fold speedup with 8 processes. InGomoku matches, the framework has demonstrated exceptional performance,achieving a consistently high win rate against human opponents. AlphaZero-Eduhas been open-sourced at https://github.com/StarLight1212/AlphaZero_Edu,providing an accessible and practical benchmark for both academic research andindustrial applications. <<<

Progressive age-induced deterioration in the structure and function of the cardiovascular system involves cardiac hypertrophy, diastolic dysfunction, myocardial fibrosis, arterial stiffness, and endothelial dysfunction. These changes are driven by complex processes that are interconnected, such as oxidative stress, mitochondrial dysfunction, autophagy, inflammation, fibrosis, and telomere dysfunction. In recent years, the advances in research of cardiovascular aging, including the wide use of animal models of cardiovascular aging, elucidated an abundance of cell signaling pathways involved in these processes and brought into sight possible interventions, which span from pharmacological agents, such as metformin, sodium-glucose cotransporter 2-inhibitors, rapamycin, dasatinib and quercetin, to lifestyle changes. <<<

AbstractDirectional tongue movements are crucial for feeding and speech, ensuring proper food positioning for chewing and swallowing, as well as accurate sound production. While directional tuning in the arm region of the sensorimotor cortex during reaching tasks is well-studied, little is known about how 3D tongue direction is encoded in the orofacial sensorimotor cortex (OSMCx) during natural behaviors. Understanding this neural representation has important implications for rehabilitating individuals with orolingual dysfunctions. This study examines the directional tuning and population dynamics in OSMCx during naturalistic feeding and drinking, and how these are affected by sensory loss. Using biplanar videoradiography, we tracked implanted tongue markers in behaving rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) and simultaneously recorded 3D positional data with spiking activity from chronically implanted microelectrode arrays in primary motor (MIo) and somatosensory (SIo) areas of the orofacial cortex. In some sessions, tasks were preceded by bilateral nerve block injections to the sensory branches of the trigeminal nerve. Modulation to 3D tongue direction during feeding and drinking was found in most MIo and SIo neurons. Directional information in both individual- and population-level was higher in feeding and was more robust in MIo. Following sensory loss, alterations in tongue kinematics were accompanied by changes in directional information in MIo and SIo, manifesting as modifications in both individual neuron tuning characteristics and the broader dynamics of population-level neural activity. Overall, this study advances our understanding of how OSMCx contributes to complex, coordinated control of naturalistic tongue movements. It expands our current knowledge of orofacial control to three dimensions and demonstrates the specificity and adaptability of population activity in MIo and SIo in response to different behavioral contexts. <<<