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We present a novel instruction tuning recipe to improve the zero-shot task generalization of multimodal large language models. In contrast to existing instruction tuning mechanisms that heavily rely on visual instructions, our approach focuses on language-based instruction tuning, offering a distinct and more training efficient path for multimodal instruction tuning. We evaluate the performance of the proposed approach on 9 unseen datasets across both language and vision modalities. Our results show that our language-only instruction tuning is able to significantly improve the performance of two pretrained multimodal models based on Llama 2 and Vicuna on those unseen datasets. Interestingly, the language instruction following ability also helps unlock the models to follow vision instructions without explicit training. Compared to the state of the art multimodal instruction tuning approaches that are mainly based on visual instructions, our language-based method not only achieves superior performance but also significantly enhances training efficiency. For instance, the language-only instruction tuning produces competitive average performance across the evaluated datasets (with even better performance on language datasets) with significant training efficiency improvements (on average 4x), thanks to the striking reduction in the need for vision data. With a small number of visual instructions, this emerging language instruction following ability transfers well to the unseen vision datasets, outperforming the state of the art with greater training efficiency.

We investigate perturbations in a rotational and incompressible fluid flow. Interested in the phenomenon analogous to the black hole ergoregion instability, we verify the influence of the vorticity in the instability associated with this fluid system, in the presence of a region in which the fluid flow velocity is greater than the speed of the perturbation. With this aim, we compute the quasinormal modes of the system, using two different numerical methods, obtaining an excellent numerical agreement between them. We find that the vorticity tends to diminish the ergoregion instability of the system., Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures and 2 tables

This report summarizes the outcomes of the ICPR 2024 Competition on Multiple Sclerosis Lesion Segmentation (MSLesSeg). The competition aimed to develop methods capable of automatically segmenting multiple sclerosis lesions in MRI scans. Participants were provided with a novel annotated dataset comprising a heterogeneous cohort of MS patients, featuring both baseline and follow-up MRI scans acquired at different hospitals. MSLesSeg focuses on developing algorithms that can independently segment multiple sclerosis lesions of an unexamined cohort of patients. This segmentation approach aims to overcome current benchmarks by eliminating user interaction and ensuring robust lesion detection at different timepoints, encouraging innovation and promoting methodological advances.

Developing new methods for predicting electromagnetic instabilities in cardiac activity is of primary importance. However, we still need a comprehensive view of the heart's magnetic activity at the tissue scale. To fill this gap, we present a model of soft active matter, including thermo-electric coupling, suitably modified to reproduce cardiac magnetic field. Our theoretical framework shows that periodic stimulations of cardiac cells create an external magnetic field evidencing restitution features of nonlinear cardiac dynamics and magnetic restitution curves better discriminate instabilities and bifurcations in cardiac activity. This new framework lays the foundation for innovative, non-invasive diagnostic tools for cardiac arrhythmias.

MSmix is a recently developed R package implementing maximum likelihood estimation of finite mixtures of Mallows models with Spearman distance for full and partial rankings. The package is designed to implement computationally tractable estimation routines of the model parameters, with the ability to handle arbitrary forms of partial rankings and sequences of a large number of items. The frequentist estimation task is accomplished via EM algorithms, integrating data augmentation strategies to recover the unobserved heterogeneity and the missing ranks. The package also provides functionalities for uncertainty quantification of the estimated parameters, via diverse bootstrap methods and asymptotic confidence intervals. Generic methods for S3 class objects are constructed for more effectively managing the output of the main routines. The usefulness of the package and its computational performance compared with competing software is illustrated via applications to both simulated and original real ranking datasets., Comment: 29 pages, 7 figures, 3 tables

We analyze the scalar radiation emitted by a source interacting with a nonminimally coupled scalar field in four-dimensional Schwarzschild--de Sitter spacetime. We obtain the emission probability using quantum field theory in curved spacetimes at tree level. We find that the source emits synchrotron-type radiation for orbits near the photon sphere for all allowed values of the parameters. We also find that the emitted power strongly depends on the coupling to the curvature scalar. In particular, the previously observed enhancement in the contribution of lower multipoles to the emitted power in this spacetime with minimal coupling is absent when conformal coupling is considered., Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures, published version

We investigate the static boson star solutions in the so-called Einstein-Friedberg-Lee-Sirlin (E-FLS) theory, performing a complete analysis of the solution space in this model. We study the phenomenological aspects of E-FLS stars, for instance, by investigating the timelike and null geodesics with an emphasis on the analysis of circular timelike orbits and light rings. In order to study the astrophysical signatures of such stars, their images were obtained considering them surrounded by a geometrically thin accretion disk. Our results comprise two different models of accretion disks, namely the optically thin and thick disk models. We present a selection of our findings for the astrophysical images of E-FLS stars and discuss their relevance as a possible black hole mimicker., Comment: 16 pages, 13 figures

A semiclassical investigation of the electromagnetic radiation emitted by a charged particle in a radially freely falling motion in Schwarzschild spacetime is carried out. We use quantum field theory at tree level to obtain the one-particle-emission amplitudes. We analyze and compare the energy spectrum and total energy released, which are calculated from these amplitudes, for particles with varying initial positions and for particles originating from infinity with varying kinetic energy. We also compare the results with those due to a falling charged "string" extended in the radial direction., Comment: 17 pages, 15 figures, published version

Ultracompact objects (UCOs) are horizonless compact objects that present light rings (LRs) - circular photon orbits. As a result, they could be black hole mimickers. Some years ago, Cunha et al. established a theorem stating that, under general assumptions, UCOs formed from smooth, quasi-Minkowski initial data, must have at least a pair of LRs, one of which must be stable. These stable LRs are supposed to trigger a non-linear instability in spacetime, potentially weakening UCOs' ability to replicate black hole phenomenology. However, this LR theorem does not extend to wormholes, which represent topologically nontrivial spacetimes. We address the wormhole case by proving the following theorem: a stationary, axisymmetric, asymptotically flat, traversable wormhole in 1+3 dimensions, connecting two different asymptotic regions, has at least one standard LR for each rotation sense. Thus, any (such) wormhole is an UCO. By filling this gap, our results not only broaden the horizon of knowledge on UCOs but also highlight their potential to closely mimic black hole phenomenology., Comment: 9 pages, 3 figures

We show that a charged, massive scalar field in the vicinity of an electrically-charged Ay\'on-Beato-Garc\'ia (ABG) regular black hole has a spectrum of quasibound states that (in a certain parameter regime) grow exponentially with time, due to black hole superradiance. Superradiant quasibound states are made possible by the enhancement of the electrostatic potential at the horizon in nonlinear electrodynamics; in contrast, the Reissner-Nordstr\"om black hole does not possess such superradiant quasibound states. Here we compute the spectrum for a range of multipoles $\ell$ across the parameter space, and we find the fastest growth rate in the monopole mode. We find that a regular black hole with a small charge can still trigger a significant superradiant instability if the charge-to-mass ratio of the field is compensatingly large. We estimate the amount of black hole mass that can be deposited in the scalar field, finding an upper bound of circa $20\%$ in the extreme charge scenario. Finally, we consider the stationary bound states at the superradiant threshold, and we conjecture that, due to this instability, the ABG black hole will evolve towards a configuration with charged scalar hair., Comment: 13 pages, 13 figures. Version accepted by PRD

We show that the absence of unbounded algebraic curvature invariants constructed from polynomials of the Riemann tensor cannot guarantee the absence of strong singularities. As a consequence, it is not sufficient to rely solely on the analysis of such scalars to assess the regularity of a given space-time. This conclusion follows from the analysis of incomplete geodesics within the internal region of asymmetric wormholes supported by scalar matter which arise in two distinct metric-affine gravity theories. These wormholes have bounded algebraic curvature scalars everywhere, which highlights that their finiteness does not prevent the emergence of pathologies (singularities) in the geodesic structure of space-time. By analyzing the tidal forces in the internal wormhole region, we find that the angular components are unbounded along incomplete radial time-like geodesics. The strength of the singularity is determined by the evolution of Jacobi fields along such geodesics, finding that it is of strong type, as volume elements are torn apart as the singularity is approached. Lastly, and for completeness, we consider the wormhole of the quadratic Palatini theory and present an analysis of the tidal forces in the entire space-time., Comment: 15 pages, 5 figures

Using the Ernst formalism, a novel solution of vacuum General Relativity was recently obtained [1], describing a Schwarzschild black hole (BH) immersed in a non-asymptotically flat rotating background, dubbed swirling universe, with the peculiar property that north and south hemispheres spin in opposite directions. We investigate the null geodesic flow and, in particular, the existence of light rings in this vacuum geometry. By evaluating the total topological charge $w$, we show that there exists one unstable light ring ($w=-1$) for each rotation sense of the background. We observe that the swirling background drives the Schwarzschild BH light rings outside the equatorial plane, displaying counter-rotating motion with respect to each other, while (both) co-rotating with respect to the swirling universe. Using backwards ray-tracing, we obtain the shadow and gravitational lensing effects, revealing a novel feature for observers on the equatorial plane: the BH shadow displays an odd $\mathbb{Z}_2$ (north-south) symmetry, inherited from the same type of symmetry of the spacetime itself: a twisted shadow., Comment: 21 pages, 14 figures

Regular black holes (RBHs) -- geometries free from curvature singularities -- arise naturally in theories of non linear electrodynamics. Here we study the absorption, and superradiant amplification, of a monochromatic planar wave in a charged, massive scalar field impinging on the electrically-charged Ay\'on-Beato-Garc\'ia (ABG) RBH. Comparisons are drawn with absorption and superradiance for the Reissner-Nordstr\"om (RN) black hole in linear electrodynamics. We find that, in a certain parameter regime, the ABG absorption cross section is negative, due to superradiance, and moreover it is unbounded from below as the momentum of the wave approaches zero; this phenomenon of ``unbounded superradiance'' is absent in the RN case. We show how the parameter space can be divided into regions, using the bounded/unbounded and absorption/amplification boundaries. After introducing a high-frequency approximation based on particle trajectories, we calculate the absorption cross section numerically, via the partial-wave expansion, as function of wave frequency, and we present a gallery of results. The cross section of the ABG RBH is found to be larger (smaller) than in the RN case when the field charge has the same (opposite) sign as the black hole charge. We show that it is possible to find ``mimics'': situations in which the cross sections of both black holes are very similar. We conclude with a discussion of unbounded superradiance, and superradiant instabilities., Comment: 15 pages, 20 figures

We define a general strategy for finding new heavy-fermionic materials without rare-earth elements: doping a Hund metal with pronounced orbital-selective correlations towards half-filling. We argue that in general band structures a possible orbital-selective Mott transition is frustrated by inter-orbital hopping into heavy-fermion behaviour - where d-orbitals provide both the heavy and the light electrons - which is enhanced when approaching half-filling. This phase ultimately disappears due to magnetic correlations, as in a standard Doniach diagram. Experimentally we have further hole doped CsFe$_2$As$_2$, a Hund metal with 0.5 electrons/Fe away from half-filling, and obtained a heavy fermionic state with the highest Sommerfeld coefficient for Fe-pnictides to date (270 mJ/mol K$^2$), before signatures of an antiferromagnetic phase set in., Comment: 16 pages, 8 figures

We study the scattering of axially incident massless scalar waves by a charged and rotating black hole solution from heterotic string theory called the Kerr-Sen black hole. We compute the scattering cross section using the partial wave approach, for arbitrary incident wavelengths. We compare our results with those of the general relativistic version of a charged and rotating black hole, namely the Kerr-Newman black hole. We present a selection of numerical results showing that these compact objects have similar scattering properties., Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures

The electromagnetic radiation emitted by an accelerated charged particle can be described theoretically as the interaction of the charge with the so-called Fulling-Davies-Unruh thermal bath in the coordinate frame co-accelerated with the charge. We present a similar analysis on the gravitational radiation from a classical point mass uniformly accelerated, being pulled by a string satisfying the weak energy condition. In particular, we derive the interaction rate (with fixed transverse momentum) of this system of the point mass and string in the Fulling-Davies-Unruh thermal bath in the co-accelerated frame and show that it equals the graviton emission rate calculated in the standard method in Minkowski spacetime., Comment: 14 pages, 1 figure, published version

We construct a general class of modified Ellis wormholes, where one asymptotic Minkowski region is replaced by a bounded 2-sphere core, characterized by asymptotic finite areal radius. We pursue an in-depth analysis of the resulting geometry, outlining that geodesic completeness is guaranteed also when the radial function asymptotically shrinks to zero. Then, we study the evolution of scalar perturbations, bringing out how these geometric configurations can in principle affect the time-domain profiles of quasinormal modes, pointing out the distinctive features with respect to other black holes or wormholes geometries.

We introduce a method to improve the zero-shot reasoning abilities of large language models on general language understanding tasks. Specifically, we build an autonomous agent to instruct the reasoning process of large language models. We show this approach further unleashes the zero-shot reasoning abilities of large language models to more tasks. We study the performance of our method on a wide set of datasets spanning generation, classification, and reasoning. We show that our method generalizes to most tasks and obtains state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on 20 of the 29 datasets that we evaluate. For instance, our method boosts the performance of state-of-the-art large language models by a large margin, including Vicuna-13b (13.3%), Llama-2-70b-chat (23.2%), and GPT-3.5 Turbo (17.0%). Compared to zero-shot chain of thought, our improvement in reasoning is striking, with an average increase of 10.5%. With our method, Llama-2-70b-chat outperforms zero-shot GPT-3.5 Turbo by 10.2%., Comment: Accepted to ICML 2024

Within nonlinear electrodynamics (NED), photons follow null geodesics of an effective geometry, which is different from the geometry of the spacetime itself. Over the last years, several works were dedicated to investigate the motion of photons in the effective geometry of NED-based magnetically charged regular black hole (RBH) solutions. However, there are few works considering electrically charged RBHs. We study the light rings, shadows, and gravitational lensing of the electrically charged RBH solution proposed by Irina Dymnikova (ID), which is a static and spherically symmetric spacetime with a NED source. We show that the shadow associated to the effective geometry can be almost 10% bigger that the one associated to the standard geometry. We also find that the ID solution may mimic the shadow properties of the Reissner-Nordstr\"om (RN) BH, for low-to-extreme values of the electric charge. Besides that, by using the backwards ray-tracing technique, we obtain that ID and RN BH solutions can have a very similar gravitational lensing, for some values of the correspondent electric charges. We also show that the motion of photons in the effective geometry can be interpreted as a non-geodesic curve submitted to a 4-force term, from the perspective of an observer in the standard geometry., Comment: 16 pages, 13 figures

We study the scattering of light-like geodesics and massless scalar waves by a static Konoplya-Zhidenko black hole, considering the case that the parametrized black hole solution contains a single deformation parameter. By performing a geodesic analysis, we compute the classical differential scattering cross section and probe the influence of the deformation parameter on null trajectories. Moreover, we investigate the propagation of a massless scalar field in the vicinity of the static Konoplya-Zhidenko black hole and use the plane waves formalism to compute the differential scattering cross section. We confront our numerical results in the backward direction with the glory approximation, finding excellent agreement. We compare the results for the deformed black hole with the Schwarzschild case, finding that the additional parameter has an important role in the behavior of the scattering process for moderate-to-high scattering angles., Comment: 6 pages, 7 figures

Magnetic resonance imaging is a fundamental tool to reach a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis and monitoring its progression. Although several attempts have been made to segment multiple sclerosis lesions using artificial intelligence, fully automated analysis is not yet available. State-of-the-art methods rely on slight variations in segmentation architectures (e.g. U-Net, etc.). However, recent research has demonstrated how exploiting temporal-aware features and attention mechanisms can provide a significant boost to traditional architectures. This paper proposes a framework that exploits an augmented U-Net architecture with a convolutional long short-term memory layer and attention mechanism which is able to segment and quantify multiple sclerosis lesions detected in magnetic resonance images. Quantitative and qualitative evaluation on challenging examples demonstrated how the method outperforms previous state-of-the-art approaches, reporting an overall Dice score of 89% and also demonstrating robustness and generalization ability on never seen new test samples of a new dedicated under construction dataset.

We investigate the shadow of an exact black hole solution of Einstein's equations recently proposed by Cardoso et al., to describe a supermassive black hole immersed in a dark matter halo. We analyze and discuss the light rings and the gravitational lensing of this spacetime comparing them with an isolated Schwarzschild black hole. Using backward ray-tracing techniques, we study the shadows cast by such black hole when illuminated by a celestial sphere that emits radiation isotropically. We find that when the dark matter distribution concentrates near the event horizon of the black hole, multiple light rings emerge. In this high compactness regime, the shadows and gravitational lensing are significantly different from the Schwarzschild one. We also use the M87* and SgrA* shadow data, obtained by the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration, to constrain the parameters of the dark matter halo., Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures

We investigate the absorption properties of reflection-asymmetric wormholes constructed via the thin-shell formalism in Palatini $f({\cal R})$ gravity. Such wormholes come from the matching of two Reissner-Nordstr\"om spacetimes at a time-like hypersurface (shell), which, according to the junction conditions in Palatini $f({\cal R})$ gravity, can have positive or negative energy density. Using numerical methods we investigate several configurations that satisfy the junction conditions, and analyze how the parameters of the system affect the absorption spectra. We confirm that the absorption cross section of wormholes at low frequencies significantly departs from that of black holes, and observe that in configurations made out of two naked singularities, the absorption spectra exhibit new features due to the effective light ring associated to the wormhole throat. The possibility of observing the presence of resonances at high frequencies is also discussed., Comment: 18 pages, 13 figures, revtex4-2 style

We analyze the quasinormal modes (QNMs) of a recently obtained solution of a Schwarzschild black hole (BH) with corrections motivated by Loop Quantum Gravity (LQG). This spacetime is regular everywhere and presents the global structure of a wormhole, with a minimal surface whose radius depends on a LQG parameter. We focus on the investigation of massless scalar field perturbations over the spacetime. We compute the QNMs with the WKB approximation, as well as the continued fraction method. The QNM frequency orbits, for $l=0$ and $n>0$, where $l$ and $n$ are the multipole and overtone numbers, respectively, are self-intersecting, spiraling curves in the complex plane. These orbits accumulate to a fixed complex value corresponding to the QNMs of the extremal case. We obtain that, for small values of the LQG parameter, the overall damping decreases as we increase the LQG parameter. Moreover the spectrum of the quantum corrected black hole exhibits an oscillatory pattern, which might imply in the existence of QNMs with vanishing real part. This pattern suggests that the limit $n\rightarrow \infty$ for the real part of the QNMs is not well-defined, what differs from Schwarzschild's case. We also analyze the time-domain profiles for the scalar perturbations, showing that the LQG correction does not alter the Schwarzschild power-law tail. We compute the fundamental mode from the time profile by means of the Prony method, obtaining excellent agreement with the two previously mentioned methods., Comment: 12 pages, 7 figures

We introduce the generalization of the Slave-Spin Mean-Field method to broken-symmetry phases. Through a variational approach we derive the single-particle energy shift in the mean-field equations which generates the appropriate self-consistent field responsible for the stabilization of the broken symmetry. With this correction the different flavours of the slave-spin mean-field are actually the same method and they give identical results to Kotliar-Ruckenstein slave-bosons and to the Gutzwiller approximation. We apply our formalism to the N\'eel antiferromagnetic state and study it in multi-orbital models as a function of the number of orbitals and Hund's coupling strength, providing phase diagrams in the interaction-doping plane. We show that the doped antiferromagnet in proximity of half-filling is typically unstable towards insulator-metal and magnetic-non magnetic phase separation. Hund's coupling extends the range of this antiferromagnet, and favors its phase separation., Comment: 15 pages, 10 figures

We study the scattering of monochromatic planar scalar waves in a geometry that interpolates between the Schwarzschild solution, regular black holes and traversable wormhole spacetimes. We employ the partial waves approach to compute the differential scattering cross section of the regular black hole, as well as of the wormhole solutions. We compare our full numerical results with the classical geodesic scattering and the glory approximation, obtaining excellent agreement in the appropriate regime of validity of such approximations. We obtain that the differential scattering cross section for the regular black hole case is similar to the Schwarzschild result. Notwithstanding, the results for wormholes can be very distinctive from the black hole ones. In particular, we show that the differential scattering cross section for wormholes considerably decreases at large scattering angles for resonant frequencies.

The Mallows model occupies a central role in parametric modelling of ranking data to learn preferences of a population of judges. Despite the wide range of metrics for rankings that can be considered in the model specification, the choice is typically limited to the Kendall, Cayley or Hamming distances, due to the closed-form expression of the related model normalizing constant. This work instead focuses on the Mallows model with Spearman distance. An efficient and accurate EM algorithm for estimating finite mixtures of Mallows models with Spearman distance is developed, by relying on a twofold data augmentation strategy aimed at i) enlarging the applicability of Mallows models to samples drawn from heterogeneous populations; ii) dealing with partial rankings affected by diverse forms of censoring. Additionally, a novel approximation of the model normalizing constant is introduced to support the challenging model-based clustering of rankings with a large number of items. The inferential ability of the EM scheme and the effectiveness of the approximation are assessed by extensive simulation studies. Finally, we show that the application to three real-world datasets endorses our proposals also in the comparison with competing mixtures of ranking models., Comment: 20 pages, 6 Figures, 11 Tables

We investigate the scattering properties of a massless scalar field in the background of a charged Ay\'on-Beato-Garc\'ia regular black hole solution. Using a numerical approach, we compute the differential scattering cross section for arbitrary values of the scattering angle and of the incident wave frequency. We compare our results with those obtained via the classical geodesic scattering of massless particles, as well as with the semiclassical glory approximation, and show that they present an excellent agreement in the corresponding limits. We also show that Ay\'on-Beato-Garc\'ia and Reissner-Nordstr\"om black hole solutions present similar scattering properties, for low-to-moderate values of the black hole electric charge, for any value of the scattering angle., Comment: 11 pages, 14 figures, published in European Physical Journal Plus

Black holes can be inserted in very rich astrophysical environments, such as accretion disks. Although isolated black holes are simple objects in general relativity, their accretion disks may significantly enrich the field configurations of their surroundings. Alternative theories of gravity can lead to novel black hole solutions, which can be represented by small deviations in the metric due to an effective stress-energy tensor. Among the key aspects of the interaction of black holes with their surroundings, stand tidal forces phenomena. We study the tidal forces of spherically symmetric black holes in the presence of effective matter fields, dubbed as dirty black holes. These effective fields can generically represent usual or exotic matter associated to a variety of gravity theories. We show that this dirtiness leads to characteristic imprints in the tidal forces, which are absent in the case of a black hole surrounded by vacuum. We apply our results to particular cases, such as black holes coupled to linear and nonlinear electrodynamics theories and a Schwarzschild black hole surrounded by a spherical shell., Comment: Published in The European Physical Journal C