Pretraining Frame Preservation for Lightweight Autoregressive Video History Embedding
Lvmin Zhang, Shengqu Cai, Muyang Li
et al.
Autoregressive video generation relies on history context for content consistency and storytelling. As video histories grow longer, efficiently encoding them remains an open problem - particularly for personal users and local workflows where compute and memory budgets are limited. We present a lightweight history encoder that maps long video histories into short-length embeddings, pretrained with a frame query objective that learns to attend to content features at arbitrary temporal positions. The pretraining stage provides the encoder with dense history coverage on large-scale video data; the subsequent finetuning stage adapts the pretrained encoder under an autoregressive video generation objective to establish content-level consistency. In this way, the lightweight embeddings achieve comparable performance to heavier alternatives. We evaluate the framework with ablative settings and discuss the architecture designs.
“An alliance between Austria, Germany, Russia and Turkey is required”: About Prince V.P. Meshchersky’s Articles in the Austrian Press on the Eve of the First World War
Ivanov Andrei A., Kotov Boris S.
The article is devoted to the foreign policy views of Prince Vladimir P. Meshchersky (1839–1914), a famous Russian conservative political writer. Three articles by Meshchersky are introduced into scientific circulation. They were published on the eve of the First World War in the Vienna newspaper Neue Freie Presse and aimed at changing public opinion in Austria-Hungary regarding the foreign policy of the Russian emperor. Wishing to prevent the impending military conflict with Germany and Austria-Hungary, the prince sought to convince readers of the influential Vienna newspaper of the indifference of a significant part of Russian society to the Balkan issue, the absence of Germanophobia among most representatives of the Russian elite, and peacefulness of the tsar and the Russian Foreign Ministry. Laying the main blame for the aggravation of Russo-German relations on the nationalist-minded press, which formed the public opinion of European countries, as well as on the adventurism of Balkan politicians, Meshchersky called on Vienna and Berlin to be reasonable, convincing them that an alliance between Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary and Turkey should be the guarantor of European peace and the pacification of the Balkans. It is shown that the series of articles by Meshchersky, published in German a few months before the outbreak of World War I, largely coincided with the theses of the famous P. Durnovo Memorandum as well as with the views of a significant part of the Russian right-wingers of the early 20th century who opposed the aggravation of relations with Germany and Austria-Hungary over the Balkan issue and preferred good-neighborly relations with these countries. Meshchersky’s articles are also of undoubted interest as one of the latest attempts by the Russian conservative camp to change the foreign policy course taken by St Petersburg, Berlin, and Vienna. Meshchersky’s publications in the Austrian press are interesting for many valuable observations and are a vivid illustration of the pre-war sentiments of the part of Russian society that made desperate attempts to prevent Russia from being drawn into conflict with continental European monarchies on the eve of the war.
History of Civilization, History (General) and history of Europe
Editorial
Kristīne Beķere
The studies published in the first issue of 2024 focus on particular aspects of military conflicts: they reflect the experiences of civilians, as they face the horrors of war and repressions in their everyday lives, describe the efforts of aid organisations to alleviate the situation of war victims, analyse the challenge of providing the necessary armaments for combat, and portray the specific perspectives of the diplomatic community on international conflicts. Three of the articles in the current journal are dedicated to the experiences of Latvia and Lithuania during the final stages of the First World War and the War of Independence, while one article and a source publication focus on the Second World War.
Traditionally, we offer our readers one article in each issue of the journal, which is based on a recently defended master’s thesis. In this issue, it is the research by Laura Kļaviņa on the culmination of the repressive policy exerted by Iskolat regime in Vidzeme – the arrests and deportation of civilians to Moscow and Ekaterinburg in February 1918. The author traces the processes of arrest and relocation of the deported inhabitants of Smiltene area, describes the conditions in deportation and, ultimately, their liberation and return to their homeland.
Lithuanian researcher Kestutis Kilinskas examines the processes of the Lithuanian War of Independence from a specific perspective, tracing the attempts of the newly founded Republic of Lithuania in 1919 to provide its army with weapons and ammunition, clothing and food, requesting and receiving these materials from both belligerents – Germany and the Entente countries. This study perfectly illustrates the direct link between arms supplies and changes in the foreign policy interests of the supplying countries, a trend that we once again observe today in the case of arms supplies to Ukraine.
We are publishing the extensive study dedicated to the activities of Lady Muriel Paget’s mission in Daugavpils from 1920 to 1922, implemented by Professor Emeritus Geoffrey Swain of the University of Glasgow – this material is released in two sequels. The current issue contains the first part of the study, which concerns the establishment of the mission in Daugavpils and reflects Lady Muriel’s efforts to find the most effective way to help the Latvian society, which had suffered severely during the long war, especially seeking to aid the most vulnerable part of the society – the children. In the second and final part, which will be published in the next issue of the journal at the end of 2024, the author details the complex relationship between the mission and its main financial supporter, the international Save the Children Fund, and the perceptions of the nature of aid work, which differed between the two parties.
The Romanian researcher Bogdan Alexander Schipor offers an interesting and, for Latvian readers, unusual perspective on the events at the beginning of the Second World War in Latvia, depicting them through the prism of Romanian diplomat Grigore Niculescu-Buzešti, who resided in Riga at the time.
In his telegrams sent to Bucharest, which are analysed in the article, the Romanian diplomat reveals both the prevailing mood in Latvian society at the end of 1939 and in 1940, as well as the annexation course of the Baltic states by the Soviet Union.
A special, and in its apparent simplicity extremely appealing historical source published in this issue is the report of the head priest of the Latvian Orthodox parish of Ērgļi Jānis Plaudis to the Riga Eparchy Administration, wherein the author describes the situation in Ērgļi and its surroundings after the intense fighting in this region in August 1944. The report was prepared for publication by Baiba Pazāne, a doctoral student at the Faculty of History and Philosophy, University of Latvia. In the historical document, J. Plaudis vividly depicts the sudden intrusion of active warfare into the everyday lives of civilians, the associated emotional turmoil, loss of life, material damage and – most vividly – chaos, insecurity and fear created by the war.
The journal concludes with reviews of three recently published, very different studies – a textbook on security aspects of Latvian history by academician Guntis Zemītis, a study of Latvian traditional outfits by clothing history researchers Aija Jansone and Inga Vīksna, and a book by Polish researcher Wojciech Materski on the border issue between Latvia and Russia in historical context, published in Poland.
Kristīne Beķere
History (General) and history of Europe, Slavic languages. Baltic languages. Albanian languages
Forecasting Live Chat Intent from Browsing History
Se-eun Yoon, Ahmad Bin Rabiah, Zaid Alibadi
et al.
Customers reach out to online live chat agents with various intents, such as asking about product details or requesting a return. In this paper, we propose the problem of predicting user intent from browsing history and address it through a two-stage approach. The first stage classifies a user's browsing history into high-level intent categories. Here, we represent each browsing history as a text sequence of page attributes and use the ground-truth class labels to fine-tune pretrained Transformers. The second stage provides a large language model (LLM) with the browsing history and predicted intent class to generate fine-grained intents. For automatic evaluation, we use a separate LLM to judge the similarity between generated and ground-truth intents, which closely aligns with human judgments. Our two-stage approach yields significant performance gains compared to generating intents without the classification stage.
Toward global citizenship? People (de)bordering their lives during COVID-19 in Latin America and Europe
Isabella M. Radhuber, Amelia Fiske, Ilaria Galasso
et al.
ABSTRACTThe COVID-19 pandemic highlighted global interdependencies, accompanied by widespread calls for worldwide cooperation against a virus that knows no borders, but responses were led largely separately by national governments. In this tension between aspiration and reality, people began to grapple with how their own lives were affected by the global nature of the pandemic. In this article, based on 493 qualitative interviews conducted between 2020 and 2021, we explore how people in Argentina, Austria, Bolivia, Ecuador, Ireland, Italy and Mexico experienced, coped with and navigated the global nature of the pandemic. In dialogue with debates about the parameters of the ‘global’ in global health, we focus on what we call people's everyday (de)bordering practices to examine how they negotiated (dis)connections between ‘us’ and ‘them’ during the pandemic. Our interviewees’ reactions moved from national containment to an increasing focus on people's unequal socio-spatial situatedness. Eventually, they began to (de)border their lives beyond national lines of division and to describe a new normal: a growing awareness of global connectedness and a desire for global citizenship. This newfound sense of global interrelatedness could signal support for and encourage transnational political action in times of crises.
Public aspects of medicine
Sports Injuries While Wingfoiling
Gangl T, Balke M, Ayhan G
et al.
Thomas Gangl,1,2 Maurice Balke,2– 4 Gulen Ayhan,5 Kirsten Thuenemann1,2 1Department of Trauma and Orthopedic Surgery, Sports Traumatology, Friedrich-Ebert-Krankenhaus Neumuenster, Neumuenster, Schleswig Holstein, Germany; 2Surfmedizin e.V., Neumuenster, Germany; 3Sportsclinic Cologne, Cologne, Germany; 4Department of Trauma and Orthopedic Surgery, Cologne Merheim Medical Center, University of Witten/Herdecke, Cologne, Germany; 5Centre Hospitalier Universitaire (CHU) de Guadeloupe, Univ Antilles, Pointe-à-Pitre, Inserm, Ecole des hautes études en santé publique, IRSET, Rennes, UMR_S 1085 FranceCorrespondence: Thomas Gangl, Department of Trauma and Orthopedic Surgery, Sports Traumatology, Friedrich-Ebert-Krankenhaus Neumuenster, Neumuenster, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, Tel +49 4321 405 2011, Fax +49 4321 405 2019, Email thomas.gangl@fek.dePurpose: Wingfoiling is a new popular water sport. Data on the risk of injury or overuse injuries are not yet available. The aim of the study was to analyze the incidence, mechanisms and risk factors for wingfoiling related injuries and the acceptance of safety equipment.Patients and Methods: Data for this retrospective study were collected through an online standardized questionnaire. It was accessible from January 2022 to June 2022. Information on demographics, injury history, overuse complaints, use of (safety)equipment and fitness routines over the past 12 months were asked.Results: A total of 415 completed the questionnaire in full and could be included in the study. Fourteen percent (n = 59) were female, 86% (n = 356) were male. The average age was 43.5 years. Fourteen percent (n = 59) participated in competitions. Thirty-one percent (n = 129) of all participants suffered at least one injury in the past 12 months out of a total of 356 injuries. This corresponds to an injury incidence of 5.7/1000h. Typical mechanism of injury was contact with the own sports equipment. The most frequent cause was individual riding errors due to fatigue with 77.5% (n = 276). The most common acute injury types were contusions, strains, cuts and abrasions of the lower extremities. In the case of chronic complaints (n = 173), the shoulder and knee joint were mainly affected. Seventy-three percent (n = 304) of the participants regularly used a protective equipment, such as a helmet or impactvest.Conclusion: The injury rate of wingfoiling is comparable to windsurfing and kitesurfing. The majority of injuries are minor injuries to the lower extremities. In case of serious injuries, it is mainly the bony thorax that is affected. Most participants already use protective equipment. Overuse complaints mostly affect the large joints.Keywords: water sports, injury, training, epidemiology
The Talk about the History of the Treuhandanstalt. Interview with Markus Böick. Part 1
M. Böick, O. Nymoen
The readers are presented with the first part of the translation of an interview that was taken in October 2020 from the German historian Dr. Markus Böick. The interview is devoted to the history of such an organization as Treuhandanstalt, through which the privatization of East German enterprises was carried out after the liquidation of the GDR as a state structure. The first part of the interview talks about what Treuhandanstalt was originally created for, what it later turned into, as well as what problems East Germans faced in the new united Germany.
Philosophy (General), Sociology (General)
Cathédrale des ondes ou éléphant blanc ?
Volker Ziegler
The Europe 1 transmitter center in Berus-Überherrn is a site of memory that carries the history of Saarland, a region that is semi-autonomous since the end of World War II and where Franco-German relations are deeply engrained. Installed in 1954-55, only a few meters away from the French border so as to bypass the public broadcasting laws in France, which did not allow private radio and television stations, it was part of the so-called “peripheral” radios whose main market was France. To ensure their market share, these private radios had to equip their stations with the most advanced transmission technologies. The eventful history of the construction of the transmission structure, with its huge roof made of a thin concrete veil, is associated with Bernard Laffaille, René Sarger and Eugène Freyssinet, three famous French engineers, with the later addition of Pierre Xercavins who consolidated the construction in the early 1980s. The symbiosis between the modern transmission technique and avant-garde construction, make this “cathedral of waves” a key work in post-war Europe and a unique landmark on the border’s landscape. The transmitter is one of the significant historical monuments of the 20th century in Saarland since as early as 1999, but it is unused since 2015. The sustainable preservation of this exceptional building, which will be designated as a "landmark of engineering in Germany" in 2021, is being heralded as a political objective on all levels.
Newspaper ‘Gazavat’ and Issue of North Caucasus in Nazi Germany’s Propaganda in 1943-1944
A. A. Tatarov
The newspaper ‘Gazavat’ is considered in the article as a source of printed propaganda by Nazi Germany among the mountain peoples of the North Caucasus in the national formations of the Wehrmacht. In Russian and foreign historiography, the materials of ‘Gazavat’ have been poorly studied and insufficiently introduced into scientific circulation. The aim of the article is to analyze the articles of ‘Gazavat’ for 1943–1944 in order to identify the content of Germany’s specialized propaganda aimed at the peoples of the North Caucasus. Based on content analysis and thematic analysis methods, the author identifies four thematic blocks: national history, political future, fighting spirit, and religion. The conducted research showed that Germany used well-thought-out political technologies to manipulate the real costs of integrating the North Caucasus into the Russian Empire and the USSR. The release of the newspaper ‘Gazavat’ for North Caucasus units of the Wehrmacht was significantly delayed. The specialized propaganda was aimed at converting traditional institutions, national hopes, and historical traumas of the mountain peoples into a call for retribution against the Soviet regime. At the same time, a combination of the potential and expert knowledge of mountain emigrants, German political and military actors was implemented.
Slavic languages. Baltic languages. Albanian languages
Efficient OCR for Building a Diverse Digital History
Jacob Carlson, Tom Bryan, Melissa Dell
Thousands of users consult digital archives daily, but the information they can access is unrepresentative of the diversity of documentary history. The sequence-to-sequence architecture typically used for optical character recognition (OCR) - which jointly learns a vision and language model - is poorly extensible to low-resource document collections, as learning a language-vision model requires extensive labeled sequences and compute. This study models OCR as a character level image retrieval problem, using a contrastively trained vision encoder. Because the model only learns characters' visual features, it is more sample efficient and extensible than existing architectures, enabling accurate OCR in settings where existing solutions fail. Crucially, the model opens new avenues for community engagement in making digital history more representative of documentary history.
Impact of the primordial fluctuation power spectrum on the reionization history
Teppei Minoda, Shintaro Yoshiura, Tomo Takahashi
We argue that observations of the reionization history can be used as a probe of primordial density fluctuations, particularly on small scales. Although the primordial curvature perturbations are well constrained from measurements of cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies and large-scale structure, these observational data probe the curvature perturbations only on large scales, and hence its information on smaller scales will give us further insight on primordial fluctuations. Since the formation of early galaxies is sensitive to the amplitude of small-scale perturbations, and then, in turn, gives an impact on the reionization history, one can probe the primordial power spectrum on small scales through observations of reionization. In this work, we focus on the running spectral indices of the primordial power spectrum to characterize the small-scale perturbations, and investigate their impact on the reionization history using the numerical code \texttt{21cmFAST}, which adopts a simple but commonly used reionization model. We also derive the constraints on the running spectral indices from observations of the reionization history indicated by the luminosity function of the Lyman-$α$ emitters. We show that the reionization history, in combination with large-scale observations such as CMB, would be a useful tool to investigate primordial density fluctuations.
en
astro-ph.CO, astro-ph.GA
Understanding disease symptoms and impacts and producing qualitatively-derived severity stages for MPS IIIA: a mixed methods approach
Sally Lanar, Samantha Parker, Cara O’Neill
et al.
Abstract Background MPS IIIA is a rare, degenerative pediatric genetic disease characterized by symptoms impacting cognition, mobility and behavior; the mean age of death is around 15 years of age. Currently, there are no approved therapies for MPS IIIA. Methods A two-year, multi-center, prospective, descriptive cohort study was conducted to document the natural history course of MPS IIIA. In the context of this study, semi-structured interviews were performed with parents of children at study entry and one year later. Interview transcripts were analyzed using thematic analysis methods to identity concepts of interest to children and parents, identify what factors impacted parents’ burden the most, and develop qualitatively-derived disease severity stages. Children were sorted into these stages according to the symptoms their parents described at the entry interview. This sorting was compared quantitatively to the sorting of children at baseline according to the child’s calendar age and their BSID development quotient (DQ). Results 22 parents in France, Germany, the Netherlands and the UK were interviewed. Children ranged in age from 28 to 105 months (mean 61.4 months). The conceptual models for children’s symptoms and impacts and parents’ impacts provided a detailed and comprehensive picture of what it is like for children of various ages and their parents to live with MPS IIIA. Four factors were identified as mediating the burden perceived by parents: state support, family support, time since diagnosis, and parent coping strategy. Four disease stages were developed, accounting for both the presence and the severity of MPS IIIA symptoms. The comparison of children’s sorting into these stages with the BSID DQ and the child’s calendar age showed strong statistical associations. Conclusions The findings of this qualitative research embedded in a natural history study add to the current understanding of MPS IIIA as a complex disease that impacts every aspect of the lives of children and their families. This study demonstrates the unique potential of mixed methods research in rare diseases to address some of the current limitations of more traditional quantitative approaches by providing an individualized, detailed understanding of the patient experience.
Less is More: Learning to Refine Dialogue History for Personalized Dialogue Generation
Hanxun Zhong, Zhicheng Dou, Yutao Zhu
et al.
Personalized dialogue systems explore the problem of generating responses that are consistent with the user's personality, which has raised much attention in recent years. Existing personalized dialogue systems have tried to extract user profiles from dialogue history to guide personalized response generation. Since the dialogue history is usually long and noisy, most existing methods truncate the dialogue history to model the user's personality. Such methods can generate some personalized responses, but a large part of dialogue history is wasted, leading to sub-optimal performance of personalized response generation. In this work, we propose to refine the user dialogue history on a large scale, based on which we can handle more dialogue history and obtain more abundant and accurate persona information. Specifically, we design an MSP model which consists of three personal information refiners and a personalized response generator. With these multi-level refiners, we can sparsely extract the most valuable information (tokens) from the dialogue history and leverage other similar users' data to enhance personalization. Experimental results on two real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our model in generating more informative and personalized responses.
CoHS-CQG: Context and History Selection for Conversational Question Generation
Xuan Long Do, Bowei Zou, Liangming Pan
et al.
Conversational question generation (CQG) serves as a vital task for machines to assist humans, such as interactive reading comprehension, through conversations. Compared to traditional single-turn question generation (SQG), CQG is more challenging in the sense that the generated question is required not only to be meaningful, but also to align with the occurred conversation history. While previous studies mainly focus on how to model the flow and alignment of the conversation, there has been no thorough study to date on which parts of the context and history are necessary for the model. We argue that shortening the context and history is crucial as it can help the model to optimise more on the conversational alignment property. To this end, we propose CoHS-CQG, a two-stage CQG framework, which adopts a CoHS module to shorten the context and history of the input. In particular, CoHS selects contiguous sentences and history turns according to their relevance scores by a top-p strategy. Our model achieves state-of-the-art performances on CoQA in both the answer-aware and answer-unaware settings.
Anatomy of the Nasal and Auditory Regions of the Fossil Lagomorph Palaeolagus haydeni: Systematic and Evolutionary Implications
Irina Ruf, Jin Meng, Łucja Fostowicz-Frelik
et al.
Palaeolagus, a late Eocene to early Miocene North American lagomorph genus, represented by numerous and well-preserved specimens, has been long considered a basal leporid, although it is currently understood as a stem lagomorph. Based on micro-computed tomography (μCT) data and 3D reconstructions, here we present the first description of intracranial structures of the nasal and auditory regions of a complete skull of Palaeolagus haydeni from the early Oligocene of Nebraska. Although Palaeolagus haydeni shows a puzzling mixture of extant leporid and ochotonid characters, it helps to polarize and re-evaluate already known lagomorph intracranial characters based on outgroup comparison with Rodentia and Scandentia. Common derived features of Palaeolagus haydeni and extant Lagomorpha are the dendritic maxilloturbinal and the excavated nasoturbinal that contacts the lamina semicircularis. Generally, Palaeolagus haydeni and Leporidae have several characters in common, some of which are certainly plesiomorphic (e.g., thin wall of bulla tympani and flat conic cochlea). Palaeolagus haydeni resembles Leporidae in having an interturbinal between the two frontoturbinals, and three ethmoturbinals plus one interturbinal between ethmoturbinal I and II. Now, this should also be regarded as a plesiomorphic grundplan pattern for Leporidae whereas ochotonids are derived from the lagomorph grundplan as concerns the number of frontoturbinals. Concerning the middle ear, Palaeolagus haydeni significantly contributes to the polarization of the anterior anchoring of the malleus in extant lagomorphs. Palaeolagus haydeni resembles the pattern observed in early ontogenetic stages of Ochotonidae, i.e., the attachment of the malleus to the ectotympanic via a short processus anterior. The patterns in adult ochotonids and leporids now can be regarded as two different and apomorphic character states. Autapomorphic characters of Palaeolagus haydeni are the reduced frontoturbinal 2 and the additional anterolaterally oriented process of the lamina semicircularis. Interestingly, among the investigated intracranial structures the loss of the secondary crus commune is the only apomorphic grundplan character of crown Lagomorpha.
The Use of Quantile Methods in Economic History
Damian Clarke, Manuel Llorca Jaña, Daniel Pailañir
Quantile regression and quantile treatment effect methods are powerful econometric tools for considering economic impacts of events or variables of interest beyond the mean. The use of quantile methods allows for an examination of impacts of some independent variable over the entire distribution of continuous dependent variables. Measurement in many quantative settings in economic history have as a key input continuous outcome variables of interest. Among many other cases, human height and demographics, economic growth, earnings and wages, and crop production are generally recorded as continuous measures, and are collected and studied by economic historians. In this paper we describe and discuss the broad utility of quantile regression for use in research in economic history, review recent quantitive literature in the field, and provide an illustrative example of the use of these methods based on 20,000 records of human height measured across 50-plus years in the 19th and 20th centuries. We suggest that there is considerably more room in the literature on economic history to convincingly and productively apply quantile regression methods.
VERITAS contributions to the 37th International Cosmic Ray Conference
C. B. Adams, A. Archer, W. Benbow
et al.
Compilation of papers presented by the VERITAS Collaboration at the 37th International Cosmic Ray Conference (ICRC), held July 12 through July 23, 2021 (online) in Berlin, Germany.
Semi-analytic integration for a parallel space-time boundary element method modeling the heat equation
Jan Zapletal, Raphael Watschinger, Günther Of
et al.
The presented paper concentrates on the boundary element method (BEM) for the heat equation in three spatial dimensions. In particular, we deal with tensor product space-time meshes allowing for quadrature schemes analytic in time and numerical in space. The spatial integrals can be treated by standard BEM techniques known from three dimensional stationary problems. The contribution of the paper is twofold. First, we provide temporal antiderivatives of the heat kernel necessary for the assembly of BEM matrices and the evaluation of the representation formula. Secondly, the presented approach has been implemented in a publicly available library besthea allowing researchers to reuse the formulae and BEM routines straightaway. The results are validated by numerical experiments in an HPC environment.
Competence in educational theory and practice: a critical discussion
Judith Glaesser
ABSTRACT This paper first provides a brief overview of the history and current usage of the concept of competence in academic research, and then undertakes a critical discussion of how the term is currently used in educational policy. The running example used throughout the paper is competence in foreign language learning. The PISA study is discussed to demonstrate how the concept of competence has come to prominence in the international discourse on education in recent years. Following this, particular attention is given to the situation in Germany where there has been a shift towards competence as an aim of teaching in recent years, coupled with an increased focus on standards and accountability. The relationship between competence and standards is examined critically, since some authors appear to use the two interchangeably whether or not this is justified. Finally, the Common European Framework for Languages (CEFR) and a German curriculum document are examined critically with regard to their use of the concept of competence.
Cryptic diversity and mtDNA phylogeography of the invasive demon shrimp, Dikerogammarus haemobaphes (Eichwald, 1841), in Europe
Anna Maria Jażdżewska, Tomasz Rewicz, Tomasz Mamos
et al.
The regions of the Black, Caspian, and Azov seas are known for being both (i) the place of extensive crustacean radiation dated to the times of Paratethys and Sarmatian basins, and (ii) present donors of alien and invasive taxa to many areas worldwide. One amphipod morphospecies, Dikerogammarus haemobaphes, is known both as native to rivers draining to the Black and Caspian seas as well as a successful invader (nicknamed demon shrimp) in Central and Western European rivers. Based on mitochondrial (COI and 16S) and nuclear (28S) datasets and 41 sampling sites, representing both the native (19) and the invaded (22) range, we assessed cryptic diversity, phylogeography and population genetics of this taxon. First, we revealed the presence of two divergent lineages supported by all markers and all species delimitation methods. The divergence between the lineages was high (18.3% Kimura 2-parameter distance for COI) and old (ca. 5.1 Ma), suggesting the presence of two cryptic species within D. haemobaphes. Lineage A was found only in a few localities in the native range, while lineage B was widespread both in the native and in the invaded range. Although genetic divergence within lineage B was shallow, geographic distribution of 16S and COI haplotypes was highly heterogeneous, leading us to the definition of four Geo-Demographic Units (GDUs). Two GDUs were restricted to the native range: GDU-B1 was endemic for the Durugöl (aka Duruşu) Liman in Turkey, whereas GDU-B2 occurred only in the Dniester River. GDU-B3 was both present in several localities in the native range in the Black Sea drainage area and widespread in Central and Western Europe. The GDU-B4 was found exclusively in the Moskva River in Russia. Extended Bayesian Skyline Plot indicated steady growth of GDU-B3 population size since 30 ka, pointing to the rather old history of its expansion, first in the late Pleistocene in the native range and nowadays in Central and Western Europe. The analysis of haplotype distribution across the present distribution range clearly showed two invasion routes to Central and Western Europe. The first one, originating from the lower Dnieper, allowed the demon shrimp to colonize Polish rivers and the Mittellandkanal in Germany. The second one, originating from the Danube delta, allowed to colonize the water bodies in the upper Danube basin. The UK population has originated from the Central Corridor, as only a haplotype found exclusively along this route was recorded in the UK. Population genetics analysis showed that the invasion of the demon shrimp along the Central Corridor was not associated with the loss of genetic diversity, which might contribute to the success of this invader in the newly colonized areas.