Sharif Digital Repository

Sample efficiency and systematic generalization are two long-standing challenges in sequential decision-making problems, especially, in reinforcement learning settings. It is hypothesized that involving natural language in conjunction with other observation modalities in decision-making environments can improve generalization due to its compositional and open-ended nature, and sample efficiency due to the concise information summarized in relatively short linguistic units. By exploiting this information and the compositional structure of the language, one can achieve an abstract and factored understanding of the environment and the task at hand. To do so, it is necessary to find the proper... 

Polypropylene (PP) is a fast growing polymer, particularly in automotive industry, where PP compounds have replaced many different parts made of conventional materials. In the first step, PP-g-MA, as compatibilizer, was synthesized. Two kinds of polypropylenes including a homo- and a block co-polymer were incorporated for this goal. Characterizations via titration and FTIR tests revealed higher degree of grafting reaction when homo-polymer was used for synthesizing PP-g-MA. In the next step, nanocomposites containing 3 wt% nanoclay with three different PP-g-MA/nanoclay ratios of 1:1, 2:1 and 3:1were made using a co-rotating twin screw extruder. Tensile, impact and XRD tests were performed to... 

GPUs are used today to accelerate a wide range of general-purpose applications (e.g., regular stencil applications and irregular graph processing applications). Due to the significant growth of the Thread Level Parallelism (TLP) in GPGPU applications, the need for data sharing between different threads has become more apparent. There are a variety of solutions for reusing data in the GPU (e.g., on-chip caches and shuffle instructions), each with its own drawbacks and reduced comprehensiveness (e.g., limiting shared memory to a thread block and shuffle instructions to a warp). Among the standard general-purpose applications, L1 data cache is a major GPU solution for reusing data among... 

Expert finding in bibliographic networks has received increasing attention in recent years. This task concerns with finding relevant researchers for a given topic. In this thesis, we propose a model to determine authority of authors who have participated in the Communities. This model has a little improvement over community based baseline model. However, due to the low performance of community based models, the proposed authority based model cannot improve the document based baseline models either. Therefore, we try to improve document based models, instead of community based models and have proposed two other models which are based on authors’ topic dominance for expert finding. Document...