Learning Visual Question Answering by Bootstrapping Hard Attention

Attention mechanisms in biological perception are thought to select subsets of perceptual information for more sophisticated processing which would be prohibitive to perform on all sensory inputs. In computer vision, however, there has been relatively little exploration of hard attention, where some information is selectively ignored, in spite of the success of soft attention, where information is re-weighted and aggregated, but never filtered out. Here, we introduce a new approach for hard attention and find it achieves very competitive performance on a recently-released visual question answering datasets, equalling and in some cases surpassing similar soft attention architectures while entirely ignoring some features. Even though the hard attention mechanism is thought to be non-differentiable, we found that the feature magnitudes correlate with semantic relevance, and provide a useful signal for our mechanism's attentional selection criterion. Because hard attention selects important features of the input information, it can also be more efficient than analogous soft attention mechanisms. This is especially important for recent approaches that use non-local pairwise operations, whereby computational and memory costs are quadratic in the size of the set of features.Comment: ECCV 201

Red or green : Overprinting of the climatic signal in Miocene sediments, South China Sea (IODP Expedition 368, Site U1502)

Funding Information: Support was provided by Chinese 111 (HW), ECORD (SS), Korean IODP (DC), National Science Foundation (ECF), Natural Environment Research Council (SAB) and U.S. Science Support Program, Lamont‐Doherty Earth Observatory (ECF, PP). Marco Maffione, an anonymous reviewer, the Associate Editor and Max Coleman are kindly acknowledged. Publisher Copyright: © 2023 The Authors. Terra Nova published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Batı Karadeniz Bölgesinde anormal servikal sitoloji risk faktörleri ve sağlık sigortasının önemi

Objective: To evaluate the prevalence of abnormal cervical cytological findings in the Western Black Sea Region and investigate an association between socio-demographic risk factors and the presence of cytological abnormalities. Material and Method: The reports of 11,539 cervical smears diagnosed according to Bethesda System 2001 version in the Pathology Department between January 2011 and December 2012 were reviewed retrospectively from the hospital records and cytopathology reports. Repeated smear results, unsatisfactory smear results, patients with known gynecologic malignancy history, smear results of patients with hysterectomy and smear results of patients whose socio-demographic information could not be obtained were excluded from the evaluation. The results of 7,740 patients who met the criteria for the study were evaluated. Results: The prevalence of cervical cytological abnormalities was 1.8 % in general. The prevalence rates for atypical squamous cells with undetermined significance (ASC-US), atypical squamous cells, cannot exclude a high-grade squamous intraepithelial lesion (ASC-H), low-grade squamous intraepithelial lesions (LSIL), high-grade squamous intraepithelial lesions (HSIL), and atypical glandular cells (AGC) were 1.16%, 0.11%, 0.29%, 0.15%, and 0.03% respectively. The prevalence of cytologically diagnosed cervical invasive neoplasia was 0.025%. Advanced age, low education level (primary school or less) and not having health insurance were found as to be risk factors for preinvasive and invasive lesions. Women who had a high school education and previously had a smear test had decreased risk for developing preinvasive and invasive lesions. Conclusion: This study shows prevalence of abnormal cervical cytology findings and associoted risk factors in the Western Black Sea Region of Turkey. The most important risk factor was identified as not having health insurance

Functional subdomains within scene-selective cortex: Parahippocampal place area, retrosplenial complex, and occipital place area

Functional MRI studies suggest that at least three brain regions in human visual cortex-the parahippocampal place area (PPA), retrosplenial complex (RSC), and occipital place area (OPA; often called the transverse occipital sulcus)-represent large-scale information in natural scenes. Tuning of voxels within each region is often assumed to be functionally homogeneous. To test this assumption, we recorded blood oxygenation level-dependent responses during passive viewing of complex natural movies. We then used a voxelwise modeling framework to estimate voxelwise category tuning profiles within each scene-selective region. In all three regions, cluster analysis of the voxelwise tuning profiles reveals two functional subdomains that differ primarily in their responses to animals, man-made objects, social communication, and movement. Thus, the conventional functional definitions of the PPA, RSC, and OPA appear to be too coarse. One attractive hypothesis is that this consistent functional subdivision of scene-selective regions is a reflection of an underlying anatomical organization into two separate processing streams, one selectively biased toward static stimuli and one biased toward dynamic stimuli. © 2016 the authors

Targeted vessel reconstruction in non-contrast-enhanced steady-state free precession angiography

Image quality in non-contrast-enhanced (NCE) angiograms is often limited by scan time constraints. An effective solution is to undersample angiographic acquisitions and to recover vessel images with penalized reconstructions. However, conventional methods leverage penalty terms with uniform spatial weighting, which typically yield insufficient suppression of aliasing interference and suboptimal blood/background contrast. Here we propose a two-stage strategy where a tractographic segmentation is employed to auto-extract vasculature maps from undersampled data. These maps are then used to incur spatially adaptive sparsity penalties on vascular and background regions. In vivo steady-state free precession angiograms were acquired in the hand, lower leg and foot. Compared with regular non-adaptive compressed sensing (CS) reconstructions (CSlow), the proposed strategy improves blood/background contrast by 71.3±28.9% in the hand (mean±s.d. across acceleration factors 1-8), 30.6±11.3% in the lower leg and 28.1±7.0% in the foot (signed-rank test, P< 0.05 at each acceleration). The proposed targeted reconstruction can relax trade-offs between image contrast, resolution and scan efficiency without compromising vessel depiction. © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

Voxel-Based State Space Modeling Recovers Task-Related Cognitive States in Naturalistic fMRI Experiments

Complex natural tasks likely recruit many different functional brain networks, but it is difficult to predict how such tasks will be represented across cortical areas and networks. Previous electrophysiology studies suggest that task variables are represented in a low-dimensional subspace within the activity space of neural populations. Here we develop a voxel-based state space modeling method for recovering task-related state spaces from human fMRI data. We apply this method to data acquired in a controlled visual attention task and a video game task. We find that each task induces distinct brain states that can be embedded in a low-dimensional state space that reflects task parameters, and that attention increases state separation in the task-related subspace. Our results demonstrate that the state space framework offers a powerful approach for modeling human brain activity elicited by complex natural tasks

Adaptive reconstruction for vessel preservation in unenhanced MR angiography [Kontrast Maddesiz Anjiyografide Damar Korunumu için Uyarlanmiş Geriçatim]

The image quality of unenhanced magnetic resonance angiography, which images blood vessels without contrast agents, is limited by constraints related to scan time. To address this problem, techniques that undersample angiographic data and then apply regularized reconstructions are used. Conventional reconstructions employ regularization terms with uniform spatial weighting. Thus, they can yield improper suppression of aliasing artifacts and poor blood/background contrast. In this study, a reconstruction strategy is evaluated that applies spatially-adaptive regularization based on vessel maps obtained via a tractographic segmentation. This strategy is compared with conventional methods in terms of peak signal to noise ratio, structural similarity and contrast. © 2016 IEEE

Breast carcinoma with three coexistant type of metaplasia: Sarcomatoid, giant cell and squamous differantiation

PubMed ID: 16465916We report on a women with metaplastic carcinoma of the right breast. After diagnosis she had a simple mastectomy operation. Pathological investigations were carried out on mastectomy material. Immunohistochemical analyses were performed. Bizarre, malignant giant cells and diffuse inflammatory reactions were predominantly noted. Sarcomatous metaplasia and rare squamous metaplasia were also seen. There was not any area of classic intraductal, invasive ductal, lobular or papillary carcinoma. The patient is still alive and well for more than five years. This uncommon case is described and discussed, and the related literature is reviewed

Fundamentalism as dogmatic belief, moral rigorism, and strong groupness across cultures: Dimensionality, underlying components, and related interreligious prejudice.

Is fundamentalism universal across religious cultures? We investigated this issue by focusing on 3 questions: (a) the dimensionality of fundamentalism, as measured by the Religious Fundamentalism Scale (Altemeyer & Hunsberger, 2004); (b) the very nature of fundamentalism as denoting dogmatic belief, moral rigorism, or strong groupness; and (c) interreligious prejudice as predicted uniquely, additively, or interactively by religiousness and sociocognitive rigidity. We collected data from 14 countries of Catholic, Protestant, Christian Orthodox, Buddhist, Jewish, and Muslim tradition, regrouped in 7 cultural-religious zones (N = 3,218 young adults). We measured fundamentalism, the 4 dimensions of religiousness (believing, bonding, behaving, and belonging), authoritarianism, existential quest, and interreligious prejudice—negative and discriminatory attitudes toward various religious outgroups and atheists. Across religious cultures, we found that: (a) the scale is unidimensional; (b) fundamentalism is best conceptualized as a combination of dogmatic belief (believing and low existential quest) and moral rigorism (behaving and authoritarianism) and occasionally as strong groupness (belonging and authoritarianism); (c) religious dimensions, additively to and interactively with, authoritarianism and low existential quest predict interreligious prejudice (in monotheistic cultures); and (d) anti-Muslim attitudes were the highest, but fundamentalism and religiousness related most strongly to antiatheist sentiments. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved) © 2020 American Psychological Associatio