Genome-wide analysis, molecular cloning and expression profiling reveal tissue-specifically expressed, feedback-regulated, stress-responsive and alternatively spliced novel genes involved in gibberellin metabolism in Salvia miltiorrhiza

Conserved domains of enzymes involved in gibberellin metabolism in S. miltiorrhiza. Conserved domains of enzymes involved in gibberellin metabolism in S. miltiorrhiza are shown. (DOC 183 kb

Exploiting Visual Semantic Reasoning for Video-Text Retrieval

Video retrieval is a challenging research topic bridging the vision and language areas and has attracted broad attention in recent years. Previous works have been devoted to representing videos by directly encoding from frame-level features. In fact, videos consist of various and abundant semantic relations to which existing methods pay less attention. To address this issue, we propose a Visual Semantic Enhanced Reasoning Network (ViSERN) to exploit reasoning between frame regions. Specifically, we consider frame regions as vertices and construct a fully-connected semantic correlation graph. Then, we perform reasoning by novel random walk rule-based graph convolutional networks to generate region features involved with semantic relations. With the benefit of reasoning, semantic interactions between regions are considered, while the impact of redundancy is suppressed. Finally, the region features are aggregated to form frame-level features for further encoding to measure video-text similarity. Extensive experiments on two public benchmark datasets validate the effectiveness of our method by achieving state-of-the-art performance due to the powerful semantic reasoning.Comment: Accepted by IJCAI 2020. SOLE copyright holder is IJCAI (International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence), all rights reserved. http://static.ijcai.org/2020-accepted_papers.htm

Preparation and electrical properties of Mn silicides by reaction of MnCl2 and Si powder

AbstractMn-silicides have been synthesized by reaction between Si powder and MnCl2 vapour. The growth temperature varied from 400 °C to 500 °C. The resultant silicides powders were characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD). By powder reaction, the silicidation temperature can be decreased to 400 °C. The dominant growth of HMS was obtained at the heating temperature of 500 °C for 36 h. The phase evolution was discussed and compared with bulk reaction. The electrical properties of Mn silicides tablets were measured

Boundary-Aware Proposal Generation Method for Temporal Action Localization

The goal of Temporal Action Localization (TAL) is to find the categories and temporal boundaries of actions in an untrimmed video. Most TAL methods rely heavily on action recognition models that are sensitive to action labels rather than temporal boundaries. More importantly, few works consider the background frames that are similar to action frames in pixels but dissimilar in semantics, which also leads to inaccurate temporal boundaries. To address the challenge above, we propose a Boundary-Aware Proposal Generation (BAPG) method with contrastive learning. Specifically, we define the above background frames as hard negative samples. Contrastive learning with hard negative mining is introduced to improve the discrimination of BAPG. BAPG is independent of the existing TAL network architecture, so it can be applied plug-and-play to mainstream TAL models. Extensive experimental results on THUMOS14 and ActivityNet-1.3 demonstrate that BAPG can significantly improve the performance of TAL

Protective Effects of Lycium barbarum

To observe the effects of Lycium barbarum polysaccharides (LBP) on testis spermatogenic injuries induced by Bisphenol A (BPA) in mice. BPA was subcutaneously injected into mice at a dose of 20 mg/kg body weight (BW) for 7 consecutive days. LBP was administered simultaneously with BPA by gavage daily at the dose of 50, 100, and 200 mg/kg BW for 7 days. After treatment, the weight and the histopathology changes of testis and epididymis were examined; the contents of T, LH, GnRH, antioxidant enzyme, and malondialdehyde (MDA) in serum were detected; proapoptotic protein Bax and antiapoptotic protein Bcl-2 were also detected by immunohistochemical method. Results showed that the weights of testis and epididymis were all increased after supplement with different dosages of LBP compared with BPA group, and the activities of SOD and GSH-Px were significantly increased in LBP groups, while MDA contents were gradually decreased. Moreover, the levels of T, LH, and GnRH were significantly elevated in serum treated with 100 mg/kg LBP. LBP also shows significant positive effects on the expression of Bcl-2/Bax in BPA treated mice. It is concluded that LBP may be one of the potential ingredients protecting the adult male animals from BPA induced reproductive damage

Unified Loss of Pair Similarity Optimization for Vision-Language Retrieval

There are two popular loss functions used for vision-language retrieval, i.e., triplet loss and contrastive learning loss, both of them essentially minimize the difference between the similarities of negative pairs and positive pairs. More specifically, Triplet loss with Hard Negative mining (Triplet-HN), which is widely used in existing retrieval models to improve the discriminative ability, is easy to fall into local minima in training. On the other hand, Vision-Language Contrastive learning loss (VLC), which is widely used in the vision-language pre-training, has been shown to achieve significant performance gains on vision-language retrieval, but the performance of fine-tuning with VLC on small datasets is not satisfactory. This paper proposes a unified loss of pair similarity optimization for vision-language retrieval, providing a powerful tool for understanding existing loss functions. Our unified loss includes the hard sample mining strategy of VLC and introduces the margin used by the triplet loss for better similarity separation. It is shown that both Triplet-HN and VLC are special forms of our unified loss. Compared with the Triplet-HN, our unified loss has a fast convergence speed. Compared with the VLC, our unified loss is more discriminative and can provide better generalization in downstream fine-tuning tasks. Experiments on image-text and video-text retrieval benchmarks show that our unified loss can significantly improve the performance of the state-of-the-art retrieval models.Comment: 16 pages, 5 figure

Effects of aluminum diffusion on the adhesive behavior of the Ni(111)/Cr2O3(0001) interface: First principle study

AbstractDensity functional theory was employed to investigate the structure and properties of Ni/Cr2O3 and Ni/Al2O3/Cr2O3. The O-terminated Ni(111)/Cr2O3(0001) interface was firstly found to be the most stable configuration. Based on this construction, the effects of the Al diffusion at the Ni/Cr2O3 interface were further studied. The results of total energies indicate that Al atoms originating from Ni slab prefer to diffuse into Cr2O3 slab through the interface, resulting in the formation of alumina at the Ni/Cr2O3 interface. Due to the presence of Al atoms, there was an amazing increase in the work of adhesion, whereas the Ni/Al2O3/Cr2O3 interface showed the strongest stability. Moreover, this calculated work well agrees with the reported experimental results