Cascading Alignment for Unsupervised Domain-Adaptive DETR with Improved DeNoising Anchor Boxes.

Transformer-based object detection has recently attracted increasing interest and shown promising results. As one of the DETR-like models, DETR with improved denoising anchor boxes (DINO) produced superior performance on COCO val2017 and achieved a new state of the art. However, it often encounters challenges when applied to new scenarios where no annotated data is available, and the imaging conditions differ significantly. To alleviate this problem of domain shift, in this paper, unsupervised domain adaptive DINO via cascading alignment (CA-DINO) was proposed, which consists of attention-enhanced double discriminators (AEDD) and weak-restraints on category-level token (WROT). Specifically, AEDD is used to aggregate and align the local-global context from the feature representations of both domains while reducing the domain discrepancy before entering the transformer encoder and decoder. WROT extends Deep CORAL loss to adapt class tokens after embedding, minimizing the difference in second-order statistics between the source and target domain. Our approach is trained end to end, and experiments on two challenging benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, which yields 41% relative improvement compared to baseline on the benchmark dataset Foggy Cityscapes, in particular.

A Dual-Population-Based NSGA-III for Constrained Many-Objective Optimization.

The main challenge for constrained many-objective optimization problems (CMaOPs) is how to achieve a balance between feasible and infeasible solutions. Most of the existing constrained many-objective evolutionary algorithms (CMaOEAs) are feasibility-driven, neglecting the maintenance of population convergence and diversity when dealing with conflicting objectives and constraints. This might lead to the population being stuck at some locally optimal or locally feasible regions. To alleviate the above challenges, we proposed a dual-population-based NSGA-III, named DP-NSGA-III, where the two populations exchange information through the offspring. The main population based on the NSGA-III solves CMaOPs and the auxiliary populations with different environment selection ignore the constraints. In addition, we designed an ε-constraint handling method in combination with NSGA-III, aiming to exploit the excellent infeasible solutions in the main population. The proposed DP-NSGA-III is compared with four state-of-the-art CMaOEAs on a series of benchmark problems. The experimental results show that the proposed evolutionary algorithm is highly competitive in solving CMaOPs.

Avicularin ameliorates human hepatocellular carcinoma via the regulation of NF­κB/COX­2/PPAR­Î³ activities.

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) has become a global public health problem. Therefore, the development of novel and effective therapeutic agents for the treatment of HCC is considered an emergency. Avicularin, a bio­active flavonoid from plants, has been reported to exhibit diverse pharmacological properties. The aim of the present study was to investigate the role of avicularin in HCC and the underlying mechanism of action. Huh7 cells were treated with avicularin in a concentration­dependent manner, and the cell proliferation was examined using a 3­(4, 5­dimethylthiazol­2­yl)­2, 5­diphenyltetrazolium bromide assay kit. The cell migration and invasion abilities were detected using wounding­healing assays and Transwell assays. Flow cytometric analysis was performed to investigate the cell cycle distribution and cell apoptosis. The activity of nuclear factor (NF)­κB (p65), cyclooxygenase­2 (COX­2) and peroxisome proliferator­activated receptor γ (PPAR­Î³) were measured by reverse transcription­quantitative polymerase chain reaction and western blot analyses, respectively. The results indicated that avicularin treatment markedly decreased cell proliferation concentration­dependently in HCC, and inhibited cell migration and invasion in Huh7 cells. It was also found that the treatment of avicularin markedly inhibited the G0/G1­phase cells and decreased the accumulation of S­phase cells in the cell cycle and induced cell apoptosis. In addition, it was confirmed that the anticancer efficacy of avicularin in HCC was dependent on the regulation of NF­κB (p65), COX­2 and PPAR­Î³ activities. In conclusion, the findings suggested that avicularin serves an antineoplastic role in HCC and may provide a potential therapeutic strategy for the treatment of HCC.

Comparative transcriptome analysis reveals early pregnancy-specific genes expressed in peripheral blood of pregnant sows.

Early and accurate diagnosis of pregnancy is important for effective management of an economical pig farm. Besides the currently available methods used in early diagnosis of sows, circulating nucleic acids in peripheral blood may contain some early pregnancy-specific molecular markers. For the first time, microarray analysis of peripheral blood from pregnant sows versus non-pregnant sows identified 127 up-regulated and 56 down-regulated genes at day 14 post-insemination. Gene Ontology annotation grouped the total differently expressed genes into 3 significantly enriched terms, cell surface receptor linked signal transduction, G-protein coupled receptor protein signaling pathway and regulation of vesicle-mediated transport. Signaling pathway analysis revealed the only one significantly changed pathway was arachidonic acid metabolism. Of the differently expressed genes, nine (including LPAR3, RXFP4, GALP, CBR1, CBR2, GPX6, USP18, LHB and NR5A1) were found to exert function related to early pregnancy processes. This study provides a clue that differentially abundant RNAs in maternal peripheral blood can help to identify the molecular markers of early pregnancy in pigs.

[Factors analysis and genetic parameter estimation of female reproductive traits in pigs].

Reproductive performance of stock sows is one of the important factors of economic impact in pig farms. In this study, 8491 litter records from 2699 sows of Yorkshire, Landrace, and Duroc were analyzed using fixed model to determine the effect of parity, mating season, and breed on total number born (TNB), number healthy birth (NHB), litter birth weight (LWB), number weak birth (NWB), stillbirth, mummy fetus, and deform fetus by the least square analysis. Genetic parameters of the above traits were estimated by restricted maximum likelihood (REML) procedure. In addition, the effectiveness of pure-breeding and cross-breeding on litter performance were compared. The results showed that, parity, mating season, and breed had significant effect on TNB, NHB, and LWB(P < 0.001).The effects of parity and breed were significant on NWB(P < 0.001), while mating season had non-significant effect on NWB. Parity showed significant effect on stillbirth, while the effect of mating season and breed was not significant. Parity, mating season, and breed had no significant effect on mummy fetus and deform fetus. Landrace♂×Large White♀ showed the best litter performance, including TNB, NHB, and LWB. Moreover, LWB of Landrace depicted the highest heritability, while other traits were all bellow 0.2. The genetic correlation between TNB and NHB, NHB and LWB were higher than 0.96 in the three breeds. These results provided reference data for minimizing low-reproductive performance caused by non-infectious factors and improving sow reproductive performance in pig farms.