Mathematical Challenges in Deep Learning

Deep models are dominating the artificial intelligence (AI) industry since the ImageNet challenge in 2012. The size of deep models is increasing ever since, which brings new challenges to this field with applications in cell phones, personal computers, autonomous cars, and wireless base stations. Here we list a set of problems, ranging from training, inference, generalization bound, and optimization with some formalism to communicate these challenges with mathematicians, statisticians, and theoretical computer scientists. This is a subjective view of the research questions in deep learning that benefits the tech industry in long run

Chlorogenic Acid Ameliorates Damage Induced by Fluorene-9-Bisphenol in Porcine Sertoli Cells

4,4′-(9-Fluorenylidene) diphenol (BPFL, also known as BHPF and fluorene-9-bisphenol) is a novel bisphenol A substitute that is used in the plastics industry as an organic synthesis intermediate and is a potential endocrine disruptor. However, the deleterious effects of BPFL on porcine Sertoli cells (SCs) and the possible underlying mechanisms are still unclear. Chlorogenic acid (CA) is a free radical scavenger in the cellular antioxidant system that prevents oxidative damage and apoptosis. In the present research, we found that BPFL induced impairments in porcine SCs in a dose-dependent manner and that CA protected porcine SCs against BPFL exposure-induced impairments. Cell viability, proliferation and apoptosis assay results revealed that BPFL exposure could inhibit porcine SC proliferation and induce apoptosis, while CA supplementation ameliorated the effects of BPFL. Further analysis revealed that BPFL exposure induced oxidative stress, mitochondrial membrane potential dysfunction and DNA damage accumulation. Transcriptome analysis and further real-time quantitative PCR and Western blot results showed that BPFL exposure induced endoplasmic reticulum stress and apoptosis. Supplementation with CA dramatically ameliorated these phenotypes in BPFL-exposed porcine SCs. Overall, the present research reveals the possible underlying mechanisms by which BPFL exposure induced impairments and CA supplementation protected against these impairments in porcine SCs

Effect of Functional Oligosaccharides and Ordinary Dietary Fiber on Intestinal Microbiota Diversity

Functional oligosaccharides, known as prebiotics, and ordinary dietary fiber have important roles in modulating the structure of intestinal microbiota. To investigate their effects on the intestinal microecosystem, three kinds of diets containing different prebiotics were used to feed mice for 3 weeks, as follows: GI (galacto-oligosaccharides and inulin), PF (polydextrose and insoluble dietary fiber from bran), and a GI/PF mixture (GI and PF, 1:1), 16S rRNA gene sequencing and metabolic analysis of mice feces were then conducted. Compared to the control group, the different prebiotics diets had varying effects on the structure and diversity of intestinal microbiota. GI and PF supplementation led to significant changes in intestinal microbiota, including an increase of Bacteroides and a decrease of Alloprevotella in the GI-fed, but those changes were opposite in PF fed group. Intriguing, in the GI/PF mixture-fed group, intestinal microbiota had the similar structure as the control groups, and flora diversity was upregulated. Fecal metabolic profiling showed that the diversity of intestinal microbiota was helpful in maintaining the stability of fecal metabolites. Our results showed that a single type of oligosaccharides or dietary fiber caused the reduction of bacteria species, and selectively promoted the growth of Bacteroides or Alloprevotella bacteria, resulting in an increase in diamine oxidase (DAO) and/or trimethylamine N-oxide (TMAO) values which was detrimental to health. However, the flora diversity was improved and the DAO values was significantly decreased when the addition of nutritionally balanced GI/PF mixture. Thus, we suggested that maintaining microbiota diversity and the abundance of dominant bacteria in the intestine is extremely important for the health, and that the addition of a combination of oligosaccharides and dietary fiber helps maintain the health of the intestinal microecosystem

The Gut Microbiome Signatures Discriminate Healthy From Pulmonary Tuberculosis Patients

Cross talk occurs between the human gut and the lung through a gut-lung axis involving the gut microbiota. However, the signatures of the human gut microbiota after active Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection have not been fully understood. Here, we investigated changes in the gut microbiota in tuberculosis (TB) patients by shotgun sequencing the gut microbiomes of 31 healthy controls and 46 patients. We observed a dramatic changes in gut microbiota in tuberculosis patients as reflected by significant decreases in species number and microbial diversity. The gut microbiota of TB patients were mostly featured by the striking decrease of short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs)-producingbacteria as well as associated metabolic pathways. A classification model based on the abundance of three species, Haemophilus parainfluenzae, Roseburia inulinivorans, and Roseburia hominis, performed well for discriminating between healthy and diseased patients. Additionally, the healthy and diseased states can be distinguished by SNPs in the species of B. vulgatus. We present a comprehensive profile of changes in the microbiota in clinical TB patients. Our findings will shed light on the design of future diagnoses and treatments for M. tuberculosis infections

Analysis of DNA Methylation in Various Swine Tissues

DNA methylation is known to play an important role in regulating gene expression during biological development and tissue differentiation in eukaryotes. In this study, we used the fluorescence-labeled methylation-sensitive amplified polymorphism (F-MSAP) method to assess the extent and pattern of cytosine methylation in muscle, heart, liver, spleen, lung, kidney and stomach from the swine strain Laiwu, and we also examined specific methylation patterns in the seven tissues. In total, 96,371 fragments, each representing a recognition site cleaved by either or both EcoRI + HpaII and EcoRI + MspI, the HpaII and MspI are isoschizomeric enzymes, were amplified using 16 pairs of selective primers. A total of 50,094 sites were found to be methylated at cytosines in seven tissues. The incidence of DNA methylation was approximately 53.99% in muscle, 51.24% in the heart, 50.18% in the liver, 53.31% in the spleen, 51.97% in the lung, 51.15% in the kidney and 53.39% in the stomach, as revealed by the incidence of differential digestion. Additionally, differences in DNA methylation levels imply that such variations may be related to specific gene expression during tissue differentiation, growth and development. Three types of bands were generated in the F-MSAP profile, the total numbers of these three types of bands in the seven tissues were 46,277, 24,801 and 25,293, respectively

Visual Agreement Regularized Training for Multi-Modal Machine Translation

Multi-modal machine translation aims at translating the source sentence into a different language in the presence of the paired image. Previous work suggests that additional visual information only provides dispensable help to translation, which is needed in several very special cases such as translating ambiguous words. To make better use of visual information, this work presents visual agreement regularized training. The proposed approach jointly trains the source-to-target and target-to-source translation models and encourages them to share the same focus on the visual information when generating semantically equivalent visual words (e.g. “ball” in English and “ballon” in French). Besides, a simple yet effective multi-head co-attention model is also introduced to capture interactions between visual and textual features. The results show that our approaches can outperform competitive baselines by a large margin on the Multi30k dataset. Further analysis demonstrates that the proposed regularized training can effectively improve the agreement of attention on the image, leading to better use of visual information

One-Pot Route towards Active TiO2 Doped Hierarchically Porous Cellulose: Highly Efficient Photocatalysts for Methylene Blue Degradation

In this study, novel photocatalyst monolith materials were successfully fabricated by a non-solvent induced phase separation (NIPS) technique. By adding a certain amount of ethyl acetate (as non-solvent) into a cellulose/LiCl/N,N-dimethylacetamide (DMAc) solution, and successively adding titanium dioxide (TiO2) nanoparticles (NPs), cellulose/TiO2 composite monoliths with hierarchically porous structures were easily formed. The obtained composite monoliths possessed mesopores, and two kinds of macropores. Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM), Energy Dispersive Spectroscopy (EDS), Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FT-IR), X-ray Diffraction (XRD), Brunauer-Emmett-Teller (BET), and Ultraviolet-visible Spectroscopy (UV-Vis) measurements were adopted to characterize the cellulose/TiO2 composite monolith. The cellulose/TiO2 composite monoliths showed high efficiency of photocatalytic activity in the decomposition of methylene blue dye, which was decomposed up to 99% within 60 min under UV light. Moreover, the composite monoliths could retain 90% of the photodegradation efficiency after 10 cycles. The novel NIPS technique has great potential for fabricating recyclable photocatalysts with highly efficiency

miR-375 down-regulation of the rearranged L-myc fusion and hypoxia-induced gene domain protein 1A genes and effects on Sertoli cell proliferation

Objective This study aimed to screen and identify the target genes of miR-375 in pig Sertoli (ST) cells and to elucidate the effect of miR-375 on the proliferation of ST cells. Methods In this study, bioinformatics software was used to predict and verify miR-375 target genes. Quantitative polymerase chain reaction (PCR) was used to detect the relationship between miR-375 and its target genes in ST cells. Enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) of rearranged L-myc fusion (RLF) and hypoxia-induced gene domain protein 1A (HIGD1A) was performed on porcine ST cells, which were transfected with a miR-375 mimics and inhibitor to verify the results. Dual luciferase reporter gene assays were performed to assess the interactions among miR-375, RLF, and HIGD1A. The effect of miR-375 on the proliferation of ST cells was analyzed by CellTiter 96 AQueous One Solution Cell Proliferation Assay (MTS). Results Five possible target genes of miR-375, including RLF, HIGD1A, colorectal cancer associated 2, POU class 3 homeobox 1, and WW domain binding protein 1 like, were found. The results of quantitative PCR suggested that mRNA expression of RLF and HIGD1A had a negative correlation with miR-375, indicating that RLF and HIGD1A are likely the target genes of miR-375. The ELISA results revealed that RLF and HIGD1A were negatively correlated with the miR-375 protein level. The luminescence results for the miR-375 group co-transfected with wild-type RLF and HIGD1A vector were significantly lower than those of the miR-375 group co-transfected with the blank vector or mutant RLF and HIGD1A vectors. The present findings suggest that RLF and HIGD1A are target genes of miR-375 and that miR-375 inhibits ST cell proliferation according to MTS analysis. Conclusion It was speculated that miR-375 affects cell proliferation through its target genes, which play an important role in the development of testicular tissue