Search for: All records

The species historically referred to as Buellia stillingiana, and more recently proposed to be a synonym of B. erubescens, is very common and widespread in eastern North America. While studying material to determine the application of these names, we repeatedly encountered a lichenicolous coelomycete parasitizing thalli of this lichen. The lichenicolous fungus appears to belong to the genus Minutophoma, differing from M. chrysophthalmae in its larger pycnidia, larger conidia, and occurrence on Buellia rather than Chrysothrix. It is here described as M. buelliarum. After studying more than one thousand specimens of Buellia stillingiana, M. buelliarum was found, albeit rarely, throughout the range of this lichen from the island of Newfoundland in eastern Canada south throughout the Coastal Plain and west to the edge of the Great Plains. It was also found to occur on other morphologically similar sympatric Buellia species producing norstictic acid: B. curtisii, B. imshaugiana, and an unidentified Buellia species similar to B. stillingiana. 

Modern transformer architectures achieve remarkable performance across tasks and domains but remain rigid in how they allocate computation at inference time. Real-world deployment often requires models to adapt to diverse hardware and latency constraints, yet most approaches to dynamic computation focus on a single axis --- such as reducing the number of tokens.We present a novel capability: AdaPerceiver, the first transformer architecture with unified adaptivity across depth, width, and tokens within a single model.We propose an architecture that supports adaptivity along these axes.We couple this with an efficient joint training regime that ensures the model maintains performance across its various configurations.We evaluate AdaPerceiver on image classification, semantic segmentation, and depth estimation tasks.On image classification, AdaPerceiver expands the accuracy-throughput Pareto front.It achieves 85.4% accuracy while yielding 36% higher throughput than FlexiViT-L.On dense prediction, AdaPerceiver matches ViT-H14 while having ~26x fewer encoder FLOPs (floating-point operations) on semantic segmentation and depth estimation.Finally, we show how AdaPerceiver equipped with a policy can maintain ImageNet1K accuracy (0.1 percentage points) while reducing FLOPs by 24-33%. 

Diffusion models are state-of-the-art generative models, yet their samples often fail to satisfy application objectives such as safety constraints or domain-specific validity. Existing techniques for alignment require gradients, internal model access, or large computational budgets --- resulting in high compute demands, or lack of support for certain objectives. In response, we introduce an inference-time alignment framework based on evolutionary algorithms. We treat diffusion models as black-boxes and search their latent space to maximize alignment objectives. Given equal or less running time, our method achieves 3-35% higher ImageReward scores than gradient-free and gradient-based methods. On the Open Image Preferences dataset, our methods achieve competitive results across four popular alignment objectives. In terms of computational efficiency, we require 55% to 76% less GPU memory and are 72% to 80% faster than gradient-based methods. 

Thelenella vezdae is reported for the first time from North America based on collections from Indiana, U.S.A. The species was found on small dead branches and stems of a variety of trees and shrubs. 

The burgeoning field of phylogenetic paleoecology combines paleoecological data with hypotheses of phylogenetic relationships to tease apart the roles that ecology and relatedness both play in the evolution and function of an organism. The purpose of this review is to make phylogenetic paleontology more accessible to a wider array of scientists and attract new researchers to the discipline. Herein, we use recently published analyses of a diverse array of fossil animals (e.g., arthropods, echinoderms, and carnivorans) to better illustrate the breadth of research questions that can be studied using phylogenetic paleoecology. Phylogenetic paleoecology has been used to discern drivers of morphological change and variations in evolutionary rates, along with the relationship between phylogeny, biogeography, and ecology. Additional avenues of research could focus on modularity and mosaicism in evolution, as well as the impact of mass extinctions and adaptive radiations. By encouraging a greater diversity of scientific backgrounds and plurality of thought, and by incorporating new perspectives from different areas of both geology and biology, the field of phylogenetic paleoecology will lead to the consideration of new questions, avenues, and possibilities that would otherwise go unexplored.