Towards Accurate One-Stage Object Detection with AP-Loss

One-stage object detectors are trained by optimizing classification-loss and localization-loss simultaneously, with the former suffering much from extreme foreground-background class imbalance issue due to the large number of anchors. This paper alleviates this issue by proposing a novel framework to replace the classification task in one-stage detectors with a ranking task, and adopting the Average-Precision loss (AP-loss) for the ranking problem. Due to its non-differentiability and non-convexity, the AP-loss cannot be optimized directly. For this purpose, we develop a novel optimization algorithm, which seamlessly combines the error-driven update scheme in perceptron learning and backpropagation algorithm in deep networks. We verify good convergence property of the proposed algorithm theoretically and empirically. Experimental results demonstrate notable performance improvement in state-of-the-art one-stage detectors based on AP-loss over different kinds of classification-losses on various benchmarks, without changing the network architectures. Code is available at https://github.com/cccorn/AP-loss.Comment: 13 pages, 7 figures, 4 tables, main paper + supplementary material, accepted to CVPR 201

An ethnopharmacological review of Hyptis suaveolens (L.) Poit

This review aimed to provide a comprehensive overview of ethnobotanical uses, chemical constituents, posology, and toxicology of Hyptis  suaveolens, and to address the significant medicinal benefits in order to promote its application. An extensive and systematic review of the literature was undertaken and all relevant abstracts and full-text articles analyzed and included in the review. A wide range of traditional uses are cited in the literature, ranging from uses for malaria, constipation, stomach problems, renal inflammation to external uses in repelling insects and treating injuries such as lacerations and burnrelated damage to skin and tissues. To date, pharmacological studies have demonstrated the  significant activities of this plant that support uses such as antimicrobial, antidiabetic, antiulcer, and antiinflammatory. Numerous important phytochemicals, including 6 triterpenes, 8 diterpenes and 1 flavonoid have been isolated, identified and reported. The extracts and phytochemicals isolated from the plants show considerable potential for medicinal exploitation and utilization, including antimitotic, antiproliferative, cytotoxic, antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, antibacterial, antifungal, antiviral, anti-secretory, hepatoprotective, insecticidal, and acaricidal activities. As a medicinal plant, H. suaveolens is endowed with immense exploitation and utilization value and is widely used worldwide Therefore, further studies to fully elucidate its medicinal potential are warranted. Keywords: Hyptis suaveolens (L.) Poit, Ulcer Antimicrobial Inflammation, Diterpenes, Traditional medicine, Ethnopharmacology, Lamiacea

Expression, Purification and Activity Analysis of Proteus vulgaris Phage Lys66

Objective: The gene cloning, protein expression, purification and activity analysis of a new type of Proteus vulgaris bacteriophage lyase Lys66 were performed. Methods: The whole gene sequence of bacteriophage was compared in the Genbank database. The gene sequence of lysase was excavated and cloned. The protein was expressed in Escherichia coli and was further purified to explore its antibacterial effect. Results: A gene sequence with high similarity to lyase was discovered through comparison, with a size of 393 bp. By using ExPAsy Bioinformatics Resource Portal, the lyase was predicted that its molecular weight was 15.20 kDa, the isoelectric point was 9.40, and it was composed of 130 amino acids. The whole optimized synthetic gene was constructed onto vector pET-32α to obtain the recombinant plasmid pET-32α-Lys66. The recombinant plasmid was transferred into competent cells of E. coli BL21 (DE3) to induce its expression. After purification and validation, 1.86 mg/mL Lys66 protein was obtained. The diameter of the bacteriostatic ring of Lys66 lyase on the plate was 19.30 mm. Thirteen Gram-negative bacteria out of 15 tested strains treated with chloroform showed lytic activity, with a wide host spectrum. When Lys66 (1.89 mg/mL) was used in combination with ethylene diamine tetraacetic acid (1 mmol/L), the OD600 nm decreased by 0.61 after 2 h, indicating a good antibacterial effect. Conclusion: The recombinant lysase Lys66 expressed in this study had good antibacterial effects and could be used as a potential antibacterial agent

Hybrid Distillation: Connecting Masked Autoencoders with Contrastive Learners

Representation learning has been evolving from traditional supervised training to Contrastive Learning (CL) and Masked Image Modeling (MIM). Previous works have demonstrated their pros and cons in specific scenarios, i.e., CL and supervised pre-training excel at capturing longer-range global patterns and enabling better feature discrimination, while MIM can introduce more local and diverse attention across all transformer layers. In this paper, we explore how to obtain a model that combines their strengths. We start by examining previous feature distillation and mask feature reconstruction methods and identify their limitations. We find that their increasing diversity mainly derives from the asymmetric designs, but these designs may in turn compromise the discrimination ability. In order to better obtain both discrimination and diversity, we propose a simple but effective Hybrid Distillation strategy, which utilizes both the supervised/CL teacher and the MIM teacher to jointly guide the student model. Hybrid Distill imitates the token relations of the MIM teacher to alleviate attention collapse, as well as distills the feature maps of the supervised/CL teacher to enable discrimination. Furthermore, a progressive redundant token masking strategy is also utilized to reduce the distilling costs and avoid falling into local optima. Experiment results prove that Hybrid Distill can achieve superior performance on different benchmarks

Effect of bedtime administration of blood-pressure lowering agents on ambulatory blood pressure monitoring results: A meta-analysis

Background: Bedtime administration of antihypertensive drugs currently receives more at­tention, but no clear consensus has been reached on the blood pressure (BP)-lowering effect of this strategy. Methods: We systematically searched literature for clinical trials of ingestion time of anti­hypertensive drugs evaluated by ambulatory blood pressure monitoring (ABPM) to perform a meta-analysis which aimed at determining the difference in diurnal, nocturnal, and 24-h mean of systolic BP (SBP) and diastolic BP (DBP), absolute BP reduction from baseline between bedtime administration group (experimental group) and morning (awaking) administration group (control group). Results: The synthesis analysis showed that the level of BP in bedtime administration group was lower than the morning administration group, which reduced diurnal SBP/DBP by 1.67/1.13 mm Hg (p = 0.36/0.48), 24-h SBP/DBP by 2.78/0.36 mm Hg (p = 0.09/0.62), nocturnal SBP/DBP by 6.32/3.17 mm Hg (p = 0.03/0.007). Furthermore, there was lack of statistically significant differences in the diurnal mean of SBP/DBP reduction from baseline between the two groups (p = 0.94/0.85), but bedtime administration resulted in significant reduction from baseline in the nocturnal mean of SBP/DBP, by –4.72/–3.57 mm Hg (p = 0.01/0.05). Funnel plot demonstrated that there was no evidence of publication bias. Conclusions: Administration of ≥ 1 antihypertensive drugs at bedtime or evening results in a greater reduction of nocturnal hypertension than dosing in the morning without loss of efficacy of diurnal and 24 h mean BP reduction

Pose-Oriented Transformer with Uncertainty-Guided Refinement for 2D-to-3D Human Pose Estimation

There has been a recent surge of interest in introducing transformers to 3D human pose estimation (HPE) due to their powerful capabilities in modeling long-term dependencies. However, existing transformer-based methods treat body joints as equally important inputs and ignore the prior knowledge of human skeleton topology in the self-attention mechanism. To tackle this issue, in this paper, we propose a Pose-Oriented Transformer (POT) with uncertainty guided refinement for 3D HPE. Specifically, we first develop novel pose-oriented self-attention mechanism and distance-related position embedding for POT to explicitly exploit the human skeleton topology. The pose-oriented self-attention mechanism explicitly models the topological interactions between body joints, whereas the distance-related position embedding encodes the distance of joints to the root joint to distinguish groups of joints with different difficulties in regression. Furthermore, we present an Uncertainty-Guided Refinement Network (UGRN) to refine pose predictions from POT, especially for the difficult joints, by considering the estimated uncertainty of each joint with uncertainty-guided sampling strategy and self-attention mechanism. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods with reduced model parameters on 3D HPE benchmarks such as Human3.6M and MPI-INF-3DHPComment: accepted by AAAI202

A Fast Decline of Residual Renal Function in the First Year is a Predictor for Early Withdrawal from Peritoneal Dialysis in Non-Diabetic Patients

Background/Aims: Little is known about the relationship between residual renal function (RRF) decline in early period and survival in non-diabetic peritoneal dialysis (PD) patients. Methods: A total of 567 non-diabetic patients who began PD from January 1, 2005 to June 30, 2013 was investigated. The rate of RRF decline was determined by the “slope of the trend equation” of serial RRFs. A composite end-point of all-cause mortality and conversion to hemodialysis (HD) was used, survival status was censored on June 30, 2016. Results: The median of “the slope of RRF decline equation” was 0.308 (0.001-2.111) ml/min/1.73 m2/ month. In the median follow-up period of 43 months (range 12 to 120 months), 65 (11.5%) patients died, 90 (15.9%) patients converted to HD and 171 (30.2%) patients received kidney transplantation. Multivariate linear regression showed male, high baseline RRF, high baseline peritoneal Kt/V urea, low serum albumin and low uric acid were independently associated with the rate of RRF decline in the first year of PD. Multivariate Cox models revealed that RRF decline in the first year remained a predictor for composite end-point (HR, 2.74, 95% CI, 1.53 to 4.90, P=0.001). The patients were divided into high RRF decline group (> 0.308ml/ min/1.73m2/month) and low RRF decline group (≤0.308 ml/min/1.73m2/month). In the first three years of PD, the rate of end-point events was higher in high RRF decline group (23.2%) than that in low RRF decline group (11.0%) (P< 0.001). There were 189 patients in low RRF decline group and 171 patients in high RRF decline group maintaining PD for more than 3 years, in a median follow-up of 54 months (range 37 to 120 months), the survival rate was 30.9% in high RRF decline group and 46.4% in low RRF decline group (P=0.883). In high RRF decline group, there were 92 patients reaching composited end-point and 112 patients maintaining PD; multivariate Cox model showed high peritoneal Kt/V urea after 1 year of PD and high albumin level were protective factors (HR, 0.29, 95% CI, 0.13 to 0.61, P= 0.001; HR, 0.94, 95% CI, 0.90-0.99, P=0.022, respectively), while fast RRF decline remained risk factor for composite end-point (HR, 3.28, 95% CI,1.48-7.31, P=0.004). Conclusion: A faster RRF decline in the first year was a predictor for all-cause mortality and conversion to HD in non-diabetic PD patients, mainly in the first three year. For patients with faster RRF decline, increasing PD dose was effective to improve survival

Success Traps, Dynamic Capabilities and Firm Performance

Dynamic capabilities (DCs) are fundamental to the understanding of differential firm performance. However, the question remains why some firms are better at developing and applying DCs than others. In particular, successful firms have been warned against the tendency to fall into a success or competence trap, where success reinforces exploitation of existing competences and crowds out exploration of new competences, hindering the development of DCs. Therefore, this study examines the effects of success traps on DCs and consequently firm performance, taking into account firm strategy and market dynamism. To facilitate this, our study also identifies the commonalities of DCs across firms. Drawing on survey data from 113 UK high-tech small and medium-sized firms, we find that success traps have a significant, strong negative effect on DCs, which in turn have a weak positive effect on firm performance; DCs are manifested through absorptive and transformative capabilities as two common features across firms. We also find that the development and application of DCs is related to internal factors (such as success traps) rather than external factors (such as market dynamism)