Chenxiao Yu, Bowen Yi, Farzan Karimi-Malekabadi
et al.
Large language models (LLMs) often produce human-like moral judgments, but it is unclear whether this reflects an internal conceptual structure or superficial ``moral mimicry.'' Using Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) as an analytic framework, we study how moral foundations are encoded, organized, and expressed within two instruction-tuned LLMs: Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct and Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct. We employ a multi-level approach combining (i) layer-wise analysis of MFT concept representations and their alignment with human moral perceptions, (ii) pretrained sparse autoencoders (SAEs) over the residual stream to identify sparse features that support moral concepts, and (iii) causal steering interventions using dense MFT vectors and sparse SAE features. We find that both models represent and distinguish moral foundations in a structured, layer-dependent way that aligns with human judgments. At a finer scale, SAE features show clear semantic links to specific foundations, suggesting partially disentangled mechanisms within shared representations. Finally, steering along either dense vectors or sparse features produces predictable shifts in foundation-relevant behavior, demonstrating a causal connection between internal representations and moral outputs. Together, our results provide mechanistic evidence that moral concepts in LLMs are distributed, layered, and partly disentangled, suggesting that pluralistic moral structure can emerge as a latent pattern from the statistical regularities of language alone.
Stated preference elicitation methods collect data on consumers by "just asking" about tastes, perceptions, valuations, attitudes, motivations, life satisfactions, and/or intended choices. Choice-Based Conjoint (CBC) analysis asks subjects to make choices from hypothetical menus in experiments that are designed to mimic market experiences. Stated preference methods are controversial in economics, particularly for valuation of non-market goods, but CBC analysis is accepted and used widely in marketing and policy analysis. The promise of stated preference experiments is that they can provide deeper and broader data on the structure of consumer preferences than is obtainable from revealed market observations, with experimental control of the choice environment that circumvents the feedback found in real market equilibria. The risk is that they give pictures of consumers that do not predict real market behavior. It is important for both economists and non-economists to learn about the performance of stated preference elicitations and the conditions under which they can contribute to understanding consumer behavior and forecasting market demand. This monograph re-examines the discrete choice methods and stated preference elicitation procedures that are commonly used in CBC, and provides a guide to techniques for CBC data collection, model specification, estimation, and policy analysis. The aim is to clarify the domain of applicability and delineate the circumstances under which stated preference elicitations can provide reliable information on preferences.
Accurate earthwork quantity estimation is essential for effective project planning and cost management in the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industry. Traditional methods for quantity takeoff are often time-consuming and susceptible to human error, particularly when working with unstructured datasets such as CAD drawings. This study introduces the Earthwork Network Architecture (ENA), a novel deep learning framework that incorporates Large Language Models (LLMs), Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks, and Transformers to automate and enhance the accuracy of earthwork quantity estimation. We assume that if LLMs can be trained effectively using such unstructured construction dataset, the effects such as improved accuracy and the challenges of LLMs can be clearly examined. Among the architectures tested, the LLM-based ENA demonstrated superior performance, achieving faster convergence, greater loss reduction, and higher classification accuracy, with a Quantity Takeoff Classification accuracy of 97.17%. However, the LLMs required significantly more computational resources compared with other models. These findings suggest that LLMs, typically used in natural language processing, can be effectively adapted for complex AEC datasets. This study lays the groundwork for future AI-driven solutions in the AEC industry, underscoring the potential of LLMs and Transformers to automate the quantity takeoff process and manage multimodal data in construction projects.
Due to its longevity and enormous information density, DNA is an attractive medium for archival data storage. Natural DNA more than 700.000 years old has been recovered, and about 5 grams of DNA can in principle hold a Zetabyte of digital information, orders of magnitude more than what is achieved on conventional storage media. Thanks to rapid technological advances, DNA storage is becoming practically feasible, as demonstrated by a number of experimental storage systems, making it a promising solution for our society’s increasing need of data storage. While in living things, DNA molecules can consist of millions of nucleotides, due to technological constraints, in practice, data is stored on many short DNA molecules, which are preserved in a DNA pool and cannot be spatially ordered. Moreover, imperfections in sequencing, synthesis, and handling, as well as DNA decay during storage, introduce random noise into the system, making the task of reliably storing and retrieving information in DNA challenging. This unique setup raises a natural information-theoretic question: how much information can be reliably stored on and reconstructed from millions of short noisy sequences? The goal of this monograph is to address this question by discussing the fundamental limits of storing information on DNA. Motivated by current technological constraints on DNA synthesis and sequencing, we propose a probabilistic channel model that captures three key distinctive aspects of the DNA storage systems: (1) the data is written onto many short DNA molecules that are stored in an unordered fashion; (2) the molecules are corrupted by noise and (3) the data is read by randomly sampling from the DNA pool. Our goal is to investigate the impact of each of these key aspects on the capacity of the DNA storage system. Rather than focusing on coding-theoretic considerations and computationally efficient encoding and decoding, we aim to build an information-theoretic foundation for the analysis of these channels, developing tools for achievability and converse arguments. This is a preprint of the following publication: Ilan Shomorony and Reinhard Heckel (2022),“Information-Theoretic Foundations of DNA Data Storage”, Foundations and Trends in Communications and Information Theory: Vol. 19, No. 1, pp 1-106. DOI: 10.1561/0100000117. ar X iv :2 21 1. 05 55 2v 1 [ cs .I T ] 1 0 N ov 2 02 2
Matthew Baker, Oliver Lorscheid, Zach Walsh
et al.
We show that, under suitable hypotheses, the foundation of a generalized parallel connection of matroids is the relative tensor product of the foundations. Using this result, we show that the foundation of a 2-sum of matroids is the absolute tensor product of the foundations, and that the foundation of a matroid is invariant under segment-cosegment exchange.
The change in the stress-strain state is analyzed on the example of a complex underground part of silo "loess soil base – foundation strip – undersilo tunnel gallery – compacted soil base – bottom silo slab" system as an indicator for assessing the serviceability of this type of industrial structure. Based on the analysis of existing design documentation and field surveys, the main stages of the structure's operation during its construction and subsequent operation have been identified. Finite element analysis was performed to evaluate the current technical condition of the system of bases and foundations. At the same time, the results of geodetic measurements over time were additionally used to obtain the actual stress-strain mode of the system according to the deformed scheme. The paper focuses on the nature of the mutual influence of individual elements of the complex foundation system. The study highlights the characteristic changes in the structural scheme and the peculiarities of stress redistribution within the system at different stages of operation. Has been taken into account local soaking of the loess soil with a thickness of up to 7.2 m that was typical for the full-scale experimental object. Particularly, the forces in the reinforced concrete members of the underground tunnel gallery of the silo have been determined. The influence of changes in the stress-strain mode of the foundation system on their operation under variable loads and impacts has been taken into account. It has been established that the design of such complex systems still requires further research on the design schemes and situations. When designing complex foundation systems of silo, a common mistake is to incorrectly take into account the stiffness of the underground tunnel gallery, backfill under the bottom slab, and locally locked loess soils under the foundation strip. These factors have a significant impact on the overall level of reliability and faultless operation of the industrial structure as a whole. It is also shown that it is necessary to take into account the influence of adjacent silos and the factor of asymmetry of the foundation along and across the underground gallery.
The review provides a pedagogical but comprehensive introduction to the foundations of a recently proposed statistical mechanics (μNEQT) of a stable nonequilibrium thermodynamic body, which may be either isolated or interacting. It is an extension of the well-established equilibrium statistical mechanics by considering microstates mk in an extended state space in which macrostates (obtained by ensemble averaging A^) are uniquely specified so they share many properties of stable equilibrium macrostates. The extension requires an appropriate extended state space, three distinct infinitessimals dα=(d,de,di) operating on various quantities q during a process, and the concept of reduction. The mechanical process quantities (no stochasticity) like macrowork are given by A^dαq, but the stochastic quantities C^αq like macroheat emerge from the commutator C^α of dα and A^. Under the very common assumptions of quasi-additivity and quasi-independence, exchange microquantities deqk such as exchange microwork and microheat become nonfluctuating over mk as will be explained, a fact that does not seem to have been appreciated so far in diverse branches of modern statistical thermodynamics (fluctuation theorems, quantum thermodynamics, stochastic thermodynamics, etc.) that all use exchange quantities. In contrast, dqk and diqk are always fluctuating. There is no analog of the first law for a microstate as the latter is a purely mechanical construct. The second law emerges as a consequence of the stability of the system, and cannot be violated unless stability is abandoned. There is also an important thermodynamic identity diQ≡diW≥0 with important physical implications as it generalizes the well-known result of Count Rumford and the Gouy-Stodola theorem of classical thermodynamics. The μNEQT has far-reaching consequences with new results, and presents a new understanding of thermodynamics even of an isolated system at the microstate level, which has been an unsolved problem. We end the review by applying it to three different problems of fundamental interest.
The subject of fractional calculus addresses the research of asserted fractional derivatives and integrations over complex domains and their utilization [...]
Hong Zhang, Quoc-Nam Nguyen, Prasanta Bhattacharya
et al.
This study enhances stance detection on social media by incorporating deeper psychological attributes, specifically individuals' moral foundations. These theoretically-derived dimensions aim to provide a comprehensive profile of an individual's moral concerns which, in recent work, has been linked to behaviour in a range of domains, including society, politics, health, and the environment. In this paper, we investigate how moral foundation dimensions can contribute to predicting an individual's stance on a given target. Specifically we incorporate moral foundation features extracted from text, along with message semantic features, to classify stances at both message- and user-levels using both traditional machine learning models and large language models. Our preliminary results suggest that encoding moral foundations can enhance the performance of stance detection tasks and help illuminate the associations between specific moral foundations and online stances on target topics. The results highlight the importance of considering deeper psychological attributes in stance analysis and underscores the role of moral foundations in guiding online social behavior.
In this sequel to "Foundations of matroids - Part 1", we establish several presentations of the foundation of a matroid in terms of small building blocks. For example, we show that the foundation of a matroid M is the colimit of the foundations of all embedded minors of M isomorphic to one of the matroids $U^2_4$, $U^2_5$, $U^3_5$, $C_5$, $C_5^\ast$, $U^2_4\oplus U^1_2$, $F_7$, $F_7^\ast$, and we show that this list is minimal. We establish similar minimal lists of building blocks for the classes of 2-connected and 3-connected matroids. We also establish a presentation for the foundation of a matroid in terms of its lattice of flats. Each of these presentations provides a useful method to compute the foundation of certain matroids, as we illustrate with a number of concrete examples. Combining these techniques with other results in the literature, we are able to compute the foundations of several interesting classes of matroids, including whirls, rank-2 uniform matroids, and projective geometries. In an appendix, we catalogue various 'small' pastures which occur as foundations of matroids, most of which were found with the assistance of a computer, and we discuss some of their interesting properties.
<p>Phase correlation (PC) is a well-known method for estimating cloud motion vectors (CMVs) from infrared and visible spectrum images. Commonly, phase shift is computed in the small blocks of the images using the fast Fourier transform. In this study, we investigate the performance and the stability of the blockwise PC method by changing the block size, the frame interval, and combinations of red, green, and blue (RGB) channels from the total sky imager (TSI) at the United States Atmospheric Radiation Measurement user facility's Southern Great Plains site. We find that shorter frame intervals, followed by larger block sizes, are responsible for stable estimates of the CMV, as suggested by the higher autocorrelations. The choice of RGB channels has a limited effect on the quality of CMVs, and the red and the grayscale images are marginally more reliable than the other combinations during rapidly evolving low-level clouds. The stability of CMVs was tested at different image resolutions with an implementation of the optimized algorithm on the Sage cyberinfrastructure test bed. We find that doubling the frame rate outperforms quadrupling the image resolution in achieving CMV stability. The correlations of CMVs with the wind data are significant in the range of 0.38–0.59 with a 95 % confidence interval, despite the uncertainties and limitations of both datasets. A comparison of the PC method with constructed data and the optical flow method suggests that the post-processing of the vector field has a significant effect on the quality of the CMV. The raindrop-contaminated images can be identified by the rotation of the TSI mirror in the motion field. The results of this study are critical to optimizing algorithms for edge-computing sensor systems.</p>
Foundations published its inaugural issue in 2021, establishing itself as a new international open access, peer-reviewed, multidisciplinary journal of science and techonology, covering mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, earth sciences, materials, information sciences, and medical sciences [...]
A rational constructive-technological decision to arrange a fence of a deeper pit for a new building than the depth of laying strip foundations of the surrounding buildings has been substantiated and tested in practice. The decision to arrange the fence was tested based on the results of complex experimental and theoretical studies under the conditions of a wet loess massif. At same time, regulatory restrictions on additional subsidence of these buildings foundations are provided. It has been proven that the additional subsidence of existing objects did not exceed the permissible values according to the norms. This happened due to the arrangement of the pit fence, the phasing of soil extraction in the initial stages under of the soil berm protection. The technology provided for the construction of a pit fence with sheet piling (I-beam No. 30) with a step of 1 m, with timber lagging between them. Then they installed the capping beam, struts, rakers and gradually raised the floor and outer wall of the parking lot of the new building. The results of long-term geodetic observations of the foundations deformations of buildings located in the zone of the pit influence of the new building at various construction stages of its enclosure are described. Sufficient convergence of the simulation results in the plane condition using the FEM and field studies was determined (the relative error did not exceed 20%). An elastic-plastic soil model of the "basement - foundations of an existing building - pit enclosure" system was used for modeling. The article describes examples of the results of FEM modeling of soil massif deformations at various stages of pit fence construction. It was determined that during construction the largest horizontal movements of the pit fence vary from 8 to 23 mm in the area of existing buildings.The maximum vertical movements of the bases foundations of these buildings amounted to 10 mm, which does not exceed the permissible values according to the norms. Prospects for further research on assessing the level of reliability of the pit enclosure by determining the variability parameters of the components of the system "foundation - foundation of the existing building - pit enclosure" have been determined.
The study of the possibility of calculating foundations for stability against displacement along the sole and overturning under significant horizontal loads was carried out by the LIRA-SAPR computer software complex. The study was carried out by analyzing the amount of horizontal (sliding) and vertical (overturning) displacement of the foundation under the shunting winch under two variants of the engineering and geological conditions of the construction site. Through "manual" calculation, it was found that the stability of the foundation is ensured in the first variant of geological conditions, but not in the second one. Therefore, such geological conditions are illustrative for the study of calculation possibilities using the software complex. The foundation with width b=1.8 m, length l=4.2 m and height h=2.35 m is modeled by volume finite elements. The bottom layer, which is in contact with the soil base, is modeled by quadrilateral finite elements of the slab (slab on an elastic base). Friction under the footing is modeled by finite stiffness links (single-node finite elements) that are added at each node of the slab that models the bottom layer of the foundation. The stiffness of such finite elements in the direction of the global axis X and axis Y is determined automatically in the "GRUNT" system according to the methodology of SNiP 2.02.05-87. Summarizing the conducted research, we can say that the advanced capabilities of the LIRA-SAPR PC, in particular, the implementation of the algorithm for determining the stiffness coefficients of the base according to the SNiP 2.02.05-87 method, allow calculating foundations for resistance against displacement along the sole and overturning by numerical methods. This allows, firstly, to completely automate the calculation of the foundations, and secondly, during the automated calculation, the negative influence of the neighboring foundations is additionally taken into account, which is relevant, since the foundations for machines and mechanisms are mainly subjected to significant horizontal loads. In addition, the conducted research revealed the absence of a kinematic criterion for assessing the stability of the foundation. In manual calculation, the criterion for ensuring the stability of the foundation against displacement is the condition of static equilibrium. When calculating by the method of finite elements, implemented in PC "LIRA" and similar, displacements are decisive, so it is considered promising to study the issue of the criterion of stability of the foundation by displacements.