Taking a look at small-scale pedestrians and occluded pedestrians

Small-scale pedestrian detection and occluded pedestrian detection are two challenging tasks. However, most state-of-the-art methods merely handle one single task each time, thus giving rise to relatively poor performance when the two tasks, in practice, are required simultaneously. In this paper, it is found that small-scale pedestrian detection and occluded pedestrian detection actually have a common problem, i.e., an inaccurate location problem. Therefore, solving this problem enables to improve the performance of both tasks. To this end, we pay more attention to the predicted bounding box with worse location precision and extract more contextual information around objects, where two modules (i.e., location bootstrap and semantic transition) are proposed. The location bootstrap is used to reweight regression loss, where the loss of the predicted bounding box far from the corresponding ground-truth is upweighted and the loss of the predicted bounding box near the corresponding ground-truth is downweighted. Additionally, the semantic transition adds more contextual information and relieves semantic inconsistency of the skip-layer fusion. Since the location bootstrap is not used at the test stage and the semantic transition is lightweight, the proposed method does not add many extra computational costs during inference. Experiments on the challenging CityPersons and Caltech datasets show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on the small-scale pedestrians and occluded pedestrians (e.g., 5.20% and 4.73% improvements on the Caltech)

Functional miR-142a-3p induces apoptosis and macrophage polarization by targeting tnfaip2 and glut3 in grass carp (Ctenopharyngodon idella)

In the process of microbial invasion, the inflammation reaction is induced to eliminate the pathogen. However, un-controlled or un-resolved inflammation can lead to tissue damage and death of the host. MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are the signaling regulators that prevent the uncontrolled progress of an inflammatory response. Our previous work strongly indicated that miR-142a-3p is related to the immune regulation in grass carp. In the present study, we found that the expression of miR-142a-3p was down-regulated after infection by Aeromonas hydrophila. tnfaip2 and glut3 were confirmed as be the target genes of miR-142a-3p, which were confirmed by expression correlation analysis, gene overexpression, and dual luciferase reporter assay. The miR-142a-3p can reduce cell viability and stimulate cell apoptosis by targeting tnfaip2 and glut3. In addition, miR-142a-3p also regulates macrophage polarization induced by A. hydrophila. Our results suggest that miR-142a-3p has multiple functions in host antibacterial immune response. Our research provides further understanding of the molecular mechanisms between miRNAs and their target genes, and provides a new insights for the development of pro-resolution strategies for the treatment of complex inflammatory diseases in fish.31802285, CARROS-45-03info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Testing the seesaw mechanisms via displaced right-handed neutrinos from a light scalar at the HL-LHC

We investigate the pair production of right-handed neutrinos from a light $B-L$ scalar decays based at the $U(1)_{B-L}$ model. The $B-L$ scalar mixes to the SM Higgs, and the physical scalar is required to be lighter than the observed Higgs. The pair-produced right-handed neutrinos are predicted to be long-lived by the type-I seesaw mechanism, and yield potential distinct signatures such as displaced vertex and time-delayed leptons at the CMS/ATLAS/LHCb, as well as signatures at the far detectors including the CODEX-b, FACET, FASER, MoEDAL-MAPP and MATHUSLA. We analyse the sensitivity reach at the HL-LHC for the RH neutrinos with masses from 2.5-30 GeV, showing that the active-sterile mixing to muons can be probed $V_{\mu N} \sim 10^{-5}$ at the CMS/ATLAS/LHCb, and one magnitude lower at the MATHUSLA, reaching the parameter space interesting for type-I seesaw mechanisms.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figure

Z' Mediated right-handed Neutrinos from Meson Decays at the FASER

We investigate the pair production of right-handed neutrinos mediated by a $Z^\prime$ from the meson decays at the FASER detector of the HL-LHC. The $Z^\prime$ can be either the additional gauge boson in the $U(1)_{B-L}$ or sterile $\nu$-specific $U(1)_s$ model. Taking the gauge coupling or the kinetic mixing at the current limits, we analyses the sensitivity to the masses of the heavy neutrinos, $m_N$, and active-sterile mixing, $V_{lN}^2$, of the FASER-2. In a background free scenario, FASER-2 is able to probe $V_{lN}^2 \approx 10^{-8}$ when $m_N \sim 0.2$ GeV, which is comparable to the current limits from the beam dump experiments for the right-handed neutrinos dominantly coupled to electron and muon flavours, and exceed three magnitude for tau. When comes to the $U(1)_s$ model, FASER-2 can probe $V_{lN}^2 \approx 10^{-10}$, which is better than the current limits in all three flavours. A proposed long-lived particle detector, FACET, is also studied, while no significant difference from FASER-2 is derived.Comment: 14 pages, 8 figure