MindDial: Belief Dynamics Tracking with Theory-of-Mind Modeling for Situated Neural Dialogue Generation

Humans talk in free-form while negotiating the expressed meanings or common ground. Despite the impressive conversational abilities of the large generative language models, they do not consider the individual differences in contextual understanding in a shared situated environment. In this work, we propose MindDial, a novel conversational framework that can generate situated free-form responses to negotiate common ground. We design an explicit mind module that can track three-level beliefs -- the speaker's belief, the speaker's prediction of the listener's belief, and the common belief based on the gap between the first two. Then the speaking act classification head will decide to continue to talk, end this turn, or take task-related action. We augment a common ground alignment dataset MutualFriend with belief dynamics annotation, of which the goal is to find a single mutual friend based on the free chat between two agents. Experiments show that our model with mental state modeling can resemble human responses when aligning common ground meanwhile mimic the natural human conversation flow. The ablation study further validates the third-level common belief can aggregate information of the first and second-order beliefs and align common ground more efficiently

Vortex-induced Shear Polaritons

Hyperbolic shear polaritons (HShPs) emerge with widespread attention as a new class of polariton modes with broken symmetry due to shear lattices. In this letter, we find a new mechanism of generating HShPs. When utilizing vortex waves as excitation sources of hyperbolic materials without off-diagonal elements, HShPs will appear. In addition, this asymmetric HShPs can be recovered as symmetric modes away from the source, with a critical transition mode between the left-skewed and right-skewed HShPs, via tuning the magnitude of the off-diagonal imaginary component and controlling the topological charge of vortex source. It is worth mentioning that we explore the influence of parity of topological charges on the field distribution and demonstrate these exotic phenomena from numerical and analytical perspectives. Our results will promote new opportunities for both HShPs and vortex waves, widening the horizon for various hyperbolic materials based on vortex sources and offering a new degree of freedom to control various kinds of polaritons

Shenhua Tablet inhibits mesangial cell proliferation in rats with chronic anti-Thy-1 nephritis

BACKGROUND: In China, mesangial proliferative glomerulonephritis (MsPGN) is one of the most common kidney diseases. In this study, we treated a rat model of chronic anti-Thy-1 MsPGN with Shenhua Tablet and evaluated whether the tablet was able to protect the kidney function. Thirty-six Wistar rats were randomly divided into six groups: (1) Sham surgery (Sham); (2) anti-Thy-1 nephritis model (Thy-1); (3) anti-Thy-1 nephritis model + irbesartan-treated (Irb); (4) anti-Thy-1 nephritis model + low-dose of Shenhua Tablet (SHL); (5) anti-Thy-1 nephritis model + medium-dose of Shenhua Tablet (SHM); (6) anti-Thy-1 nephritis model + high-dose of Shenhua Tablet (SHH). RESULTS: Thirteen weeks after drug treatment, urinary proteins were quantified and renal pathological changes were thoroughly examined at the time point of 24 h. Meanwhile, the expression levels of p-Erk1/2, cyclin D1 and p21 at the renal cortex were also tested. The levels of urinary proteins and total cholesterol in the blood were significantly reduced in rats treated with any drug tested in this study. The level of triglyceride was significantly reduced in all three Shenhua Tablet-treated groups. Renal pathomorphological scores were significantly improved in groups of Irb, SHM and SHH. Mesangial cell proliferation was significantly inhibited in any drug-treated group. p-Erk1/2 and cyclin D1 were downregulated whereas p21 was upregulated in the renal cortex. CONCLUSIONS: Our study indicated that Shenhua Tablet is able to inhibit the abnormal proliferation of mesangial cells and to prevent kidney damage, which is likely associated with downregulation of p-Erk1/2 and reduced activity of its downstream target-cyclin D1

Sex Differences in Quality of Life and their Explanatory Variables in Patients with Non-Valvular Atrial Fibrillation

Background: Women with atrial fibrillation (AF) have poorer quality of life (QoL) than men; however, the factors contributing to the poorer QoL in women is unclear. Methods: We analyzed data for 3562 patients with non-valvular AF enrolled in the China Registry of Atrial Fibrillation. The Medical Outcomes Study 36-item Short-Form Health Survey (SF-36) was used to evaluate QoL, which was compared between women and men. A multivariate logistic regression analysis model was used to explore factors potentially explaining the sex difference in QoL. Results: Overall, 43.3% of the cohort comprised women (n=1541) who were older than their male counterparts (72 ± 9.8 vs. 68 ± 11.9 years, P<0.001). Compared with men, women were more likely to have more symptoms, hypertension, diabetes mellitus, and heart failure. Women were less likely than men to receive catheter ablation (4.5% vs. 6.1%, P=0.044). Women also had lower physical component summary (PCS) scores (48 ± 9 vs. 51 ± 9, P<0.001) and mental component summary (MCS) scores (49 ± 10 vs. 51 ± 10, P<0.001) than men. In the multivariable analysis of the poorer PCS scores in women, patient age explained 32.9%, low socioeconomic status explained 20.0%, lifestyle explained 14.3%, cardiovascular comorbidities explained 15.7%, the presence of more symptoms explained 5.7%, and less catheter ablation explained 1.4%. These factors also explained similar proportions of the sex difference in MCS scores. Together, these factors explained 54.3% of the poorer physical function status and 46.8% of the poorer mental function status in women than men. Conclusions: Women with AF had poorer QoL than men. The following factors partly explained the poorer QoL in women: older age, low level of socioeconomic status, more cardiovascular comorbidities, less smoking and drinking, more symptoms, and less catheter ablation