Joint Video and Text Parsing for Understanding Events and Answering Queries

We propose a framework for parsing video and text jointly for understanding events and answering user queries. Our framework produces a parse graph that represents the compositional structures of spatial information (objects and scenes), temporal information (actions and events) and causal information (causalities between events and fluents) in the video and text. The knowledge representation of our framework is based on a spatial-temporal-causal And-Or graph (S/T/C-AOG), which jointly models possible hierarchical compositions of objects, scenes and events as well as their interactions and mutual contexts, and specifies the prior probabilistic distribution of the parse graphs. We present a probabilistic generative model for joint parsing that captures the relations between the input video/text, their corresponding parse graphs and the joint parse graph. Based on the probabilistic model, we propose a joint parsing system consisting of three modules: video parsing, text parsing and joint inference. Video parsing and text parsing produce two parse graphs from the input video and text respectively. The joint inference module produces a joint parse graph by performing matching, deduction and revision on the video and text parse graphs. The proposed framework has the following objectives: Firstly, we aim at deep semantic parsing of video and text that goes beyond the traditional bag-of-words approaches; Secondly, we perform parsing and reasoning across the spatial, temporal and causal dimensions based on the joint S/T/C-AOG representation; Thirdly, we show that deep joint parsing facilitates subsequent applications such as generating narrative text descriptions and answering queries in the forms of who, what, when, where and why. We empirically evaluated our system based on comparison against ground-truth as well as accuracy of query answering and obtained satisfactory results

Visual Scene Description and Recall: On Differences between Korean and English Speakers

Scientific research into the relationship between language and thought has profound implications for the understanding of second language learners and their learning process. The present study focuses on the connections between verbalization patterns and perceptual orientations. Adult monolingual speakers of Korean and English were asked to describe a set of dynamic scenes at two different presentation durations, 1.5 and 3 seconds, and then recall the focal figures and backgrounds of the depicted situations. Participants utterances were counted for comparison with their performance on the subsequent recall test. The study found that Korean speakers (KSs) mentioned more specific subjects at longer durations whereas English speakers (ESs) choice of subject referents was not significantly influenced by time. Further, in contrast to previous research, ESs produced more background details than KSs and were inclined to add more descriptions about figures at longer durations while dismissing a commensurate amount of background information. In the recall test, KSs remembered background details more accurately than ESs. This asymmetry in linguistic encoding and recall in function of presentation durations suggests that the effect of a particular language on the language speakers attentional allocation and information storing is far more intricate than was reported in earlier works

Small Objects Matters in Weakly-supervised Semantic Segmentation

Weakly-supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) performs pixel-wise classification given only image-level labels for training. Despite the difficulty of this task, the research community has achieved promising results over the last five years. Still, current WSSS literature misses the detailed sense of how well the methods perform on different sizes of objects. Thus we propose a novel evaluation metric to provide a comprehensive assessment across different object sizes and collect a size-balanced evaluation set to complement PASCAL VOC. With these two gadgets, we reveal that the existing WSSS methods struggle in capturing small objects. Furthermore, we propose a size-balanced cross-entropy loss coupled with a proper training strategy. It generally improves existing WSSS methods as validated upon ten baselines on three different datasets.Comment: Accepted to WACV 202

Differential regulation by leukotrienes and calcium of Fcγ receptorâ induced phagocytosis and Syk activation in dendritic cells versus macrophages

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/141597/1/jlb1234.pd

Palm kernel expellers as an alternative ingredient in growing pig diets

This study evaluated the effects of palm kernel expellers in growing diets on growth performance, nutrient digestibility, and carcass and meat quality characteristics of growing-finishing pigs. A total of 88 growing pigs were randomly assigned to two dietary treatment groups. The control diet (CON) was a typical growing or finishing diet based on corn-soybean meal, and the treatment diet (PKE) was formulated by replacing CON with 20% palm kernel expellers. The PKE-CON group was fed the PKE diet during the growing period (six weeks) and the CON diet during the finishing period (12 weeks). The CON-CON group was fed the CON diets during both growing and finishing periods. The PKE-CON group showed significantly depressed growth performance and lower nutrient digestibility than the CON-CON group during the growing period. However, after feeding the typical finisher diets during the finishing period, the PKE-CON group showed no difference in growth performance in comparison with the CON-CON group during both the finishing and overall experimental periods. In addition, carcass and meat quality characteristics were not significantly different between the PKE-CON and the CON-CON groups. The results of this study imply that palm kernel expellers can be an alternative ingredient in the growing diets of growing-finishing pigs if the combined feeding strategy (PKE for the growing period and CON for the finishing period) is used.Keywords: Feed alternatives, growing pig diet, growth performance, meat quality traits, palm kernel expelle

Nanozyme Based on Porphyrinic Metal-Organic Framework for Electrocatalytic CO2 Reduction

Mimicry of natural enzyme systems is an important approach for catalyst design. To create an enzyme-inspired catalyst, it is essential to mimic both the active center and the second coordination sphere. Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), an emerging class of porous materials, are ideal candidates for heterogeneous catalysts because their versatile building blocks confer a high level of structural tunability, and the chemical environment surrounding the active center can be controlled at the molecular level. Herein, a new 2D porphyrinic MOF, PPF-100, constructed from a nonplanar saddle-distorted porphyrin linker and a Cu paddle-wheel metal node is reported. The strategic introduction of ethyl substituents allows not only to mimic the active center and second coordination sphere but also to increase the catalytic selectivity while completely inhibiting H-2 generation in the CO2 reduction reaction

Metabolic Alterations in Parkinson's Disease after Thalamotomy, as Revealed by 1H MR Spectroscopy

Objective: To determine, using proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy ( 1H MRS) whether thalamotomy in patients with Parkinson\u27s disease gives rise to significant changes in regional brain metabolism. Materials and Methods: Fifteen patients each underwent stereotactic thalamotomy for the control of medically refractory parkinsonian tremor. Single-voxel 1H MRS was performed on a 1.5T unit using a STEAM sequence (TR/TM/TE, 2000/14/20 msec), and spectra were obtained from substantia nigra, thalamus and putamen areas, with volumes of interest of 7-8ml, before and after thalamotomy. NAA/Cho, NAA/Cr and Cho/Cr metabolite ratios were calculated from relative peak area measurements, and any changes were recorded and assessed. Results: In the substantia nigra and thalamus, NAA/Cho ratios were generally low. In the substantia nigra of 80% of patients (12/15) who showed clinical improvement, decreased NAA/Cho ratios were observed in selected voxels after thalamic surgery (\u3c 0.05). In the thalamus of 67% of such patients (10/15), significant decreases were also noted (\u3c 0.05). Conclusion: Our results suggest that the NAA/Cho ratio may be a valuable criterion for the evaluation of Parkinson\u27s disease patients who show clinical improvement following surgery. By highlighting variations in this ratio, 1H MRS may help lead to a better understanding of the pathophysiologic processes occurring in those with Parkinson\u27s disease