@inproceedings{14171,
  abstract     = {This paper demonstrates how to recover causal graphs from the score of the
data distribution in non-linear additive (Gaussian) noise models. Using score
matching algorithms as a building block, we show how to design a new generation
of scalable causal discovery methods. To showcase our approach, we also propose
a new efficient method for approximating the score's Jacobian, enabling to
recover the causal graph. Empirically, we find that the new algorithm, called
SCORE, is competitive with state-of-the-art causal discovery methods while
being significantly faster.},
  author       = {Rolland, Paul and Cevher, Volkan and Kleindessner, Matthäus and Russel, Chris and Schölkopf, Bernhard and Janzing, Dominik and Locatello, Francesco},
  booktitle    = {Proceedings of the 39th International Conference on Machine Learning},
  location     = {Baltimore, MD, United States},
  pages        = {18741--18753},
  publisher    = {ML Research Press},
  title        = {{Score matching enables causal discovery of nonlinear additive noise  models}},
  volume       = {162},
  year         = {2022},
}

@inproceedings{14172,
  abstract     = {An important component for generalization in machine learning is to uncover underlying latent factors of variation as well as the mechanism through which each factor acts in the world. In this paper, we test whether 17 unsupervised, weakly supervised, and fully supervised representation learning approaches correctly infer the generative factors of variation in simple datasets (dSprites, Shapes3D, MPI3D) from controlled environments, and on our contributed CelebGlow dataset. In contrast to prior robustness work that introduces novel factors of variation during test time, such as blur or other (un)structured noise, we here recompose, interpolate, or extrapolate only existing factors of variation from the training data set (e.g., small and medium-sized objects during training and large objects during testing). Models
that learn the correct mechanism should be able to generalize to this benchmark. In total, we train and test 2000+ models and observe that all of them struggle to learn the underlying mechanism regardless of supervision signal and architectural bias. Moreover, the generalization capabilities of all tested models drop significantly as we move from artificial datasets towards
more realistic real-world datasets. Despite their inability to identify the correct mechanism, the models are quite modular as their ability to infer other in-distribution factors remains fairly stable, providing only a single factoris out-of-distribution. These results point to an important yet understudied problem of learning mechanistic models of observations that can facilitate
generalization.},
  author       = {Schott, Lukas and Kügelgen, Julius von and Träuble, Frederik and Gehler, Peter and Russell, Chris and Bethge, Matthias and Schölkopf, Bernhard and Locatello, Francesco and Brendel, Wieland},
  booktitle    = {10th International Conference on Learning Representations},
  location     = {Virtual},
  title        = {{Visual representation learning does not generalize strongly within the  same domain}},
  year         = {2022},
}

@inproceedings{14173,
  abstract     = {Since out-of-distribution generalization is a generally ill-posed problem, various proxy targets (e.g., calibration, adversarial robustness, algorithmic corruptions, invariance across shifts) were studied across different research programs resulting in different recommendations. While sharing the same aspirational goal, these approaches have never been tested under the same
experimental conditions on real data. In this paper, we take a unified view of previous work, highlighting message discrepancies that we address empirically, and providing recommendations on how to measure the robustness of a model and how to improve it. To this end, we collect 172 publicly available dataset pairs for training and out-of-distribution evaluation of accuracy, calibration error, adversarial attacks, environment invariance, and synthetic corruptions. We fine-tune over 31k networks, from nine different architectures in the many- and
few-shot setting. Our findings confirm that in- and out-of-distribution accuracies tend to increase jointly, but show that their relation is largely dataset-dependent, and in general more nuanced and more complex than posited by previous, smaller scale studies.},
  author       = {Wenzel, Florian and Dittadi, Andrea and Gehler, Peter Vincent and Carl-Johann Simon-Gabriel, Carl-Johann Simon-Gabriel and Horn, Max and Zietlow, Dominik and Kernert, David and Russell, Chris and Brox, Thomas and Schiele, Bernt and Schölkopf, Bernhard and Locatello, Francesco},
  booktitle    = {36th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems},
  isbn         = {9781713871088},
  location     = {New Orleans, LA, United States},
  pages        = {7181--7198},
  publisher    = {Neural Information Processing Systems Foundation},
  title        = {{Assaying out-of-distribution generalization in transfer learning}},
  volume       = {35},
  year         = {2022},
}

@inproceedings{14174,
  abstract     = {Building sample-efficient agents that generalize out-of-distribution (OOD) in real-world settings remains a fundamental unsolved problem on the path towards achieving higher-level cognition. One particularly promising approach is to begin with low-dimensional, pretrained representations of our world, which should facilitate efficient downstream learning and generalization. By training 240 representations and over 10,000 reinforcement learning (RL) policies on a simulated robotic setup, we evaluate to what extent different properties of
pretrained VAE-based representations affect the OOD generalization of downstream agents. We observe that many agents are surprisingly robust to realistic distribution shifts, including the challenging sim-to-real case. In addition, we find that the generalization performance of a simple downstream proxy task reliably predicts the generalization performance of our RL agents
under a wide range of OOD settings. Such proxy tasks can thus be used to select pretrained representations that will lead to agents that generalize.},
  author       = {Dittadi, Andrea and Träuble, Frederik and Wüthrich, Manuel and Widmaier, Felix and Gehler, Peter and Winther, Ole and Locatello, Francesco and Bachem, Olivier and Schölkopf, Bernhard and Bauer, Stefan},
  booktitle    = {10th International Conference on Learning Representations},
  location     = {Virtual},
  title        = {{The role of pretrained representations for the OOD generalization of  reinforcement learning agents}},
  year         = {2022},
}

@inproceedings{14175,
  abstract     = {Predicting the future trajectory of a moving agent can be easy when the past trajectory continues smoothly but is challenging when complex interactions with other agents are involved. Recent deep learning approaches for trajectory prediction show promising performance and partially attribute this to successful reasoning about agent-agent interactions. However, it remains unclear which features such black-box models actually learn to use for making predictions. This paper proposes a procedure that quantifies the contributions
of different cues to model performance based on a variant of Shapley values. Applying this procedure to state-of-the-art trajectory prediction methods on standard benchmark datasets shows that they are, in fact, unable to reason about interactions. Instead, the past trajectory of the target is the only feature used for predicting its future. For a task with richer social
interaction patterns, on the other hand, the tested models do pick up such interactions to a certain extent, as quantified by our feature attribution method. We discuss the limits of the proposed method and its links to causality.},
  author       = {Makansi, Osama and Kügelgen, Julius von and Locatello, Francesco and Gehler, Peter and Janzing, Dominik and Brox, Thomas and Schölkopf, Bernhard},
  booktitle    = {10th International Conference on Learning Representations},
  location     = {Virtual},
  title        = {{You mostly walk alone: Analyzing feature attribution in trajectory prediction}},
  year         = {2022},
}

@inproceedings{14215,
  abstract     = {Geospatial Information Systems are used by researchers and Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Response (HADR) practitioners to support a wide variety of important applications. However, collaboration between these actors is difficult due to the heterogeneous nature of geospatial data modalities (e.g., multi-spectral images of various resolutions, timeseries, weather data) and diversity of tasks (e.g., regression of human activity indicators or detecting forest fires). In this work, we present a roadmap towards the construction of a general-purpose neural architecture (GPNA) with a geospatial inductive bias, pre-trained on large amounts of unlabelled earth observation data in a self-supervised manner. We envision how such a model may facilitate cooperation between members of the community. We show preliminary results on the first step of the roadmap, where we instantiate an architecture that can process a wide variety of geospatial data modalities and demonstrate that it can achieve competitive performance with domain-specific architectures on tasks relating to the U.N.'s Sustainable Development Goals.},
  author       = {Rahaman, Nasim and Weiss, Martin and Träuble, Frederik and Locatello, Francesco and Lacoste, Alexandre and Bengio, Yoshua and Pal, Chris and Li, Li Erran and Schölkopf, Bernhard},
  booktitle    = {36th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems},
  location     = {New Orleans, LA, United States},
  title        = {{A general purpose neural architecture for geospatial systems}},
  year         = {2022},
}

@unpublished{14220,
  abstract     = {Although reinforcement learning has seen remarkable progress over the last years, solving robust dexterous object-manipulation tasks in multi-object settings remains a challenge. In this paper, we focus on models that can learn manipulation tasks in fixed multi-object settings and extrapolate this skill zero-shot without any drop in performance when the number of objects changes. We consider the generic task of bringing a specific cube out of a set to a goal position. We find that previous approaches, which primarily leverage attention and graph neural network-based architectures, do not generalize their skills when the number of input objects changes while scaling as K2. We propose an alternative plug-and-play module based on relational inductive biases to overcome these limitations. Besides exceeding performances in their training environment, we show that our approach, which scales linearly in K, allows agents to extrapolate and generalize zero-shot to any new object number.},
  author       = {Mambelli, Davide and Träuble, Frederik and Bauer, Stefan and Schölkopf, Bernhard and Locatello, Francesco},
  booktitle    = {arXiv},
  title        = {{Compositional multi-object reinforcement learning with linear relation networks}},
  doi          = {10.48550/arXiv.2201.13388},
  year         = {2022},
}

@article{14381,
  abstract     = {Expander graphs (sparse but highly connected graphs) have, since their inception, been the source of deep links between Mathematics and Computer Science as well as applications to other areas. In recent years, a fascinating theory of high-dimensional expanders has begun to emerge, which is still in a formative stage but has nonetheless already lead to a number of striking results. Unlike for graphs, in higher dimensions there is a rich array of non-equivalent notions of expansion (coboundary expansion, cosystolic expansion, topological expansion, spectral expansion, etc.), with differents strengths and applications. In this talk, we will survey this landscape of high-dimensional expansion, with a focus on two main results. First, we will present Gromov’s Topological Overlap Theorem, which asserts that coboundary expansion (a quantitative version of vanishing mod 2 cohomology) implies topological expansion (roughly, the property that for every map from a simplicial complex to a manifold of the same dimension, the images of a positive fraction of the simplices have a point in common). Second, we will outline a construction of bounded degree 2-dimensional topological expanders, due to Kaufman, Kazhdan, and Lubotzky.},
  author       = {Wagner, Uli},
  issn         = {2102-622X},
  journal      = {Bulletin de la Societe Mathematique de France},
  pages        = {281--294},
  publisher    = {Societe Mathematique de France},
  title        = {{High-dimensional expanders (after Gromov, Kaufman, Kazhdan, Lubotzky, and others)}},
  doi          = {10.24033/ast.1188},
  volume       = {438},
  year         = {2022},
}

@article{14437,
  abstract     = {Future LEDs could be based on lead halide perovskites. A breakthrough in preparing device-compatible solids composed of nanoscale perovskite crystals overcomes a long-standing hurdle in making blue perovskite LEDs.},
  author       = {Utzat, Hendrik and Ibáñez, Maria},
  issn         = {1476-4687},
  journal      = {Nature},
  keywords     = {Multidisciplinary},
  number       = {7941},
  pages        = {638--639},
  publisher    = {Springer Nature},
  title        = {{Molecular engineering enables bright blue LEDs}},
  doi          = {10.1038/d41586-022-04447-0},
  volume       = {612},
  year         = {2022},
}

@misc{14520,
  abstract     = {This dataset comprises all data shown in the figures of the submitted article "Compact vacuum gap transmon qubits: Selective and sensitive probes for superconductor surface losses" at arxiv.org/abs/2206.14104. Additional raw data are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.},
  author       = {Zemlicka, Martin and Redchenko, Elena and Peruzzo, Matilda and Hassani, Farid and Trioni, Andrea and Barzanjeh, Shabir and Fink, Johannes M},
  publisher    = {Zenodo},
  title        = {{Compact vacuum gap transmon qubits: Selective and sensitive probes for superconductor surface losses}},
  doi          = {10.5281/ZENODO.8408897},
  year         = {2022},
}

@unpublished{14600,
  abstract     = {We study the problem of learning controllers for discrete-time non-linear stochastic dynamical systems with formal reach-avoid guarantees. This work presents the first method for providing formal reach-avoid guarantees, which combine and generalize stability and safety guarantees, with a tolerable probability threshold $p\in[0,1]$ over the infinite time horizon. Our method leverages advances in machine learning literature and it represents formal certificates as neural networks. In particular, we learn a certificate in the form of a reach-avoid supermartingale (RASM), a novel notion that we introduce in this work. Our RASMs provide reachability and avoidance guarantees by imposing constraints on what can be viewed as a stochastic extension of level sets of Lyapunov functions for deterministic systems. Our approach solves several important problems -- it can be used to learn a control policy from scratch, to verify a reach-avoid specification for a fixed control policy, or to fine-tune a pre-trained policy if it does not satisfy the reach-avoid specification. We validate our approach on $3$ stochastic non-linear reinforcement learning tasks.},
  author       = {Zikelic, Dorde and Lechner, Mathias and Henzinger, Thomas A and Chatterjee, Krishnendu},
  booktitle    = {arXiv},
  title        = {{Learning control policies for stochastic systems with reach-avoid guarantees}},
  doi          = {10.48550/ARXIV.2210.05308},
  year         = {2022},
}

@unpublished{14601,
  abstract     = {In this work, we address the problem of learning provably stable neural
network policies for stochastic control systems. While recent work has
demonstrated the feasibility of certifying given policies using martingale
theory, the problem of how to learn such policies is little explored. Here, we
study the effectiveness of jointly learning a policy together with a martingale
certificate that proves its stability using a single learning algorithm. We
observe that the joint optimization problem becomes easily stuck in local
minima when starting from a randomly initialized policy. Our results suggest
that some form of pre-training of the policy is required for the joint
optimization to repair and verify the policy successfully.},
  author       = {Zikelic, Dorde and Lechner, Mathias and Chatterjee, Krishnendu and Henzinger, Thomas A},
  booktitle    = {arXiv},
  title        = {{Learning stabilizing policies in stochastic control systems}},
  doi          = {10.48550/arXiv.2205.11991},
  year         = {2022},
}

@unpublished{15090,
  abstract     = {Given a locally finite set A⊆Rd and a coloring χ:A→{0,1,…,s}, we introduce the chromatic Delaunay mosaic of χ, which is a Delaunay mosaic in Rs+d that represents how points of different colors mingle. Our main results are bounds on the size of the chromatic Delaunay mosaic, in which we assume that d and s are constants. For example, if A is finite with n=#A, and the coloring is random, then the chromatic Delaunay mosaic has O(n⌈d/2⌉) cells in expectation. In contrast, for Delone sets and Poisson point processes in Rd, the expected number of cells within a closed ball is only a constant times the number of points in this ball. Furthermore, in R2 all colorings of a dense set of n points have chromatic Delaunay mosaics of size O(n). This encourages the use of chromatic Delaunay mosaics in applications.},
  author       = {Biswas, Ranita and Cultrera di Montesano, Sebastiano and Draganov, Ondrej and Edelsbrunner, Herbert and Saghafian, Morteza},
  booktitle    = {arXiv},
  title        = {{On the size of chromatic Delaunay mosaics}},
  year         = {2022},
}

@article{15268,
  abstract     = {Apolipoprotein A‐I (apoA‐I) has a key function in the reverse cholesterol transport. However, aggregation of apoA‐I single point mutants can lead to hereditary amyloid pathology. Although several studies have tackled the biophysical and structural consequences introduced by these mutations, there is little information addressing the relationship between the evolutionary and structural features that contribute to the amyloid behavior of apoA‐I. We combined evolutionary studies, in silico mutagenesis and molecular dynamics (MD) simulations to provide a comprehensive analysis of the conservation and pathogenic role of the aggregation‐prone regions (APRs) present in apoA‐I. Sequence analysis demonstrated that among the four amyloidogenic regions described for human apoA‐I, only two (APR1 and APR4) are evolutionary conserved across different species of Sarcopterygii. Moreover, stability analysis carried out with the FoldX engine showed that APR1 contributes to the marginal stability of apoA‐I. Structural properties of full‐length apoA‐I models suggest that aggregation is avoided by placing APRs into highly packed and rigid portions of its native fold. Compared to silent variants extracted from the gnomAD database, the thermodynamic and pathogenic impact of amyloid mutations showed evidence of a higher destabilizing effect. MD simulations of the amyloid variant G26R evidenced the partial unfolding of the alpha‐helix bundle with the concomitant exposure of APR1 to the solvent, suggesting an insight into the early steps involved in its aggregation. Our findings highlight APR1 as a relevant component for apoA‐I structural integrity and emphasize a destabilizing effect of amyloid variants that leads to the exposure of this region.},
  author       = {Gisonno, Romina A. and Masson, Tomas and Ramella, Nahuel A. and Barrera, Exequiel E. and Romanowski, Víctor and Tricerri, M. Alejandra},
  issn         = {1097-0134},
  journal      = {Proteins: Structure, Function, and Bioinformatics},
  keywords     = {Molecular Biology, Biochemistry, Structural Biology},
  number       = {1},
  pages        = {258--269},
  publisher    = {Wiley},
  title        = {{Evolutionary and structural constraints influencing apolipoprotein A‐I amyloid behavior}},
  doi          = {10.1002/prot.26217},
  volume       = {90},
  year         = {2022},
}

@misc{17057,
  abstract     = {Martin Loose studied chemistry at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. He then joined Petra Schwille's group at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden, where he obtained his PhD degree in 2010 for work on self-organization and pattern formation in the bacterial Min protein system. He then moved to Tim Mitchison's lab at Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA for his postdoc, funded by Human Frontier Science Program (HSFP) and European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) long-term fellowships; there, he discovered that the bacterial cell division proteins FtsA and FtsZ self-organize into dynamic cytoskeletal patterns. Martin established his independent research group at the Institute of Science and Technology (IST) Austria in 2015, supported by an European Research Council (ERC) starting grant and HFSP Young Investigator Grant. His lab studies the self-organization of bacterial cell division and small GTPase networks.},
  author       = {Loose, Martin},
  booktitle    = {Journal of Cell Science},
  issn         = {1477-9137},
  number       = {2},
  publisher    = {The Company of Biologists},
  title        = {{Cell scientist to watch – Martin Loose}},
  doi          = {10.1242/jcs.259715},
  volume       = {135},
  year         = {2022},
}

@inproceedings{17059,
  abstract     = {The recent focus on the efficiency of deep neural networks (DNNs) has led to significant work on model compression approaches, of which weight pruning is one of the most popular. At the same time, there is rapidly-growing computational support for efficiently executing the unstructured-sparse models obtained via pruning. Yet, most existing pruning methods minimize just the number of remaining weights, i.e. the size of the model, rather than optimizing for inference time. We address this gap by introducing SPDY, a new compression method which automatically determines layer-wise sparsity targets achieving a desired inference speedup on a given system, while minimizing accuracy loss. SPDY is the composition of two new techniques. The first is an efficient and general dynamic programming algorithm for solving constrained layer-wise compression problems, given a set of layer-wise error scores. The second technique is a local search procedure for automatically determining such scores in an accurate and robust manner. Experiments across popular vision and language models show that SPDY guarantees speedups while recovering higher accuracy relative to existing strategies, both for one-shot and gradual pruning scenarios, and is compatible with most existing pruning approaches. We also extend our approach to the recently-proposed task of pruning with very little data, where we achieve the best known accuracy recovery when pruning to the GPU-supported 2:4 sparsity pattern.},
  author       = {Frantar, Elias and Alistarh, Dan-Adrian},
  booktitle    = {39th International Conference on Machine Learning},
  location     = {Baltimore, MD, United States},
  pages        = {6726--6743},
  publisher    = {ML Research Press},
  title        = {{SPDY: Accurate pruning with speedup guarantees}},
  volume       = {162},
  year         = {2022},
}

@inproceedings{17060,
  abstract     = {Payment channel networks (PCNs) are one of the most prominent solutions to the limited transaction throughput of blockchains. Nevertheless, PCNs suffer themselves from a throughput limitation due to the capital constraints of their channels. A similar dependence on high capital is also found in inter-bank payment settlements, where the so-called netting technique is used to mitigate liquidity demands.
In this work, we alleviate this limitation by introducing the notion of transaction aggregation: instead of executing transactions sequentially through a PCN, we enable senders to aggregate multiple transactions and execute them simultaneously to benefit from several amounts that may "cancel out". Two direct advantages of our proposal is the decrease in intermediary fees paid by senders as well as the obfuscation of the transaction data from the intermediaries.
We formulate the transaction aggregation as a computational problem, a generalization of the Bank Clearing Problem. We present a generic framework for the transaction aggregation execution, and thereafter we propose Wiser as an implementation of this framework in a specific hub-based setting. To overcome the NP-hardness of the transaction aggregation problem, in Wiser we propose a fixed-parameter linear algorithm for a special case of transaction aggregation as well as the Bank Clearing Problem. Wiser can also be seen as a modern variant of the Hawala money transfer system, as well as a decentralized implementation of the overseas remittance service of Wise.},
  author       = {Tiwari, Samarth and Yeo, Michelle X and Avarikioti, Zeta and Salem, Iosif and Pietrzak, Krzysztof Z and Schmid, Stefan},
  booktitle    = {Proceedings of the 4th ACM Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies},
  isbn         = {9781450398619},
  location     = {Cambridge, MA, United States},
  pages        = {217--231},
  publisher    = {Association for Computing Machinery},
  title        = {{Wiser: Increasing throughput in payment channel networks with transaction aggregation}},
  doi          = {10.1145/3558535.3559775},
  year         = {2022},
}

@article{17061,
  abstract     = {Across many domains of interaction, both natural and artificial, individuals use past experience to shape future behaviors. The results of such learning processes depend on what individuals wish to maximize. A natural objective is one’s own success. However, when two such “selfish” learners interact with each other, the outcome can be detrimental to both, especially when there are conflicts of interest. Here, we explore how a learner can align incentives with a selfish opponent. Moreover, we consider the dynamics that arise when learning rules themselves are subject to evolutionary pressure. By combining extensive simulations and analytical techniques, we demonstrate that selfish learning is unstable in most classical two-player repeated games. If evolution operates on the level of long-run payoffs, selection instead favors learning rules that incorporate social (other-regarding) preferences. To further corroborate these results, we analyze data from a repeated prisoner’s dilemma experiment. We find that selfish learning is insufficient to explain human behavior when there is a trade-off between payoff maximization and fairness.},
  author       = {McAvoy, Alex and Kates-Harbeck, Julian and Chatterjee, Krishnendu and Hilbe, Christian},
  issn         = {2752-6542},
  journal      = {PNAS Nexus},
  number       = {4},
  publisher    = {Oxford University Press},
  title        = {{Evolutionary instability of selfish learning in repeated games}},
  doi          = {10.1093/pnasnexus/pgac141},
  volume       = {1},
  year         = {2022},
}

@article{17065,
  abstract     = {Past work on optimizing fabrication plans given a carpentry design can provide Pareto-optimal plans trading off between material waste, fabrication time, precision, and other considerations. However, when developing fabrication plans, experts rarely restrict to a single design, instead considering families of design variations, sometimes adjusting designs to simplify fabrication. Jointly exploring the design and fabrication plan spaces for each design is intractable using current techniques. We present a new approach to jointly optimize design and fabrication plans for carpentered objects. To make this bi-level optimization tractable, we adapt recent work from program synthesis based on equality graphs (e-graphs), which encode sets of equivalent programs. Our insight is that subproblems within our bi-level problem share significant substructures. By representing both designs and fabrication plans in a new bag of parts (BOP) e-graph, we amortize the cost of optimizing design components shared among multiple candidates. Even using BOP e-graphs, the optimization space grows quickly in practice. Hence, we also show how a feedback-guided search strategy dubbed Iterative Contraction and Expansion on E-graphs (ICEE) can keep the size of the e-graph manageable and direct the search towards promising candidates. We illustrate the advantages of our pipeline through examples from the carpentry domain.},
  author       = {Zhao, Haisen and Willsey, Max and Zhu, Amy and Nandi, Chandrakana and Tatlock, Zachary and Solomon, Justin and Schulz, Adriana},
  issn         = {1557-7368},
  journal      = {ACM Transactions on Graphics},
  number       = {3},
  publisher    = {Association for Computing Machinery},
  title        = {{Co-optimization of design and fabrication plans for carpentry}},
  doi          = {10.1145/3508499},
  volume       = {41},
  year         = {2022},
}

@article{17066,
  abstract     = {A cell’s size affects the likelihood that it will die. But how is cell size controlled in this context and how does cell size impact commitment to the cell death fate? We present evidence that the caspase CED-3 interacts with the RhoGEF ECT-2 in Caenorhabditis elegans neuroblasts that generate “unwanted” cells. We propose that this interaction promotes polar actomyosin contractility, which leads to unequal neuroblast division and the generation of a daughter cell that is below the critical “lethal” size threshold. Furthermore, we find that hyperactivation of ECT-2 RhoGEF reduces the sizes of unwanted cells. Importantly, this suppresses the “cell death abnormal” phenotype caused by the partial loss of ced-3 caspase and therefore increases the likelihood that unwanted cells die. A putative null mutation of ced-3 caspase, however, is not suppressed, which indicates that cell size affects CED-3 caspase activation and/or activity. Therefore, we have uncovered novel sequential and reciprocal interactions between the apoptosis pathway and cell size that impact a cell’s commitment to the cell death fate.},
  author       = {Sethi, Aditya and Wei, Hai and Mishra, Nikhil and Segos, Ioannis and Lambie, Eric J. and Zanin, Esther and Conradt, Barbara},
  issn         = {1545-7885},
  journal      = {PLOS Biology},
  number       = {10},
  publisher    = {Public Library of Science},
  title        = {{A caspase–RhoGEF axis contributes to the cell size threshold for apoptotic death in developing Caenorhabditis elegans}},
  doi          = {10.1371/journal.pbio.3001786},
  volume       = {20},
  year         = {2022},
}

