Improving the Transferability of Adversarial Attacks on Face Recognition with Beneficial Perturbation Feature Augmentation

Face recognition (FR) models can be easily fooled by adversarial examples, which are crafted by adding imperceptible perturbations on benign face images. To improve the transferability of adversarial face examples, we propose a novel attack method called Beneficial Perturbation Feature Augmentation Attack (BPFA), which reduces the overfitting of adversarial examples to surrogate FR models by constantly generating new models that have the similar effect of hard samples to craft the adversarial examples. Specifically, in the backpropagation, BPFA records the gradients on pre-selected features and uses the gradient on the input image to craft the adversarial example. In the next forward propagation, BPFA leverages the recorded gradients to add perturbations (i.e., beneficial perturbations) that can be pitted against the adversarial example on their corresponding features. The optimization process of the adversarial example and the optimization process of the beneficial perturbations added on the features correspond to a minimax two-player game. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BPFA can significantly boost the transferability of adversarial attacks on FR

Improving Visual Quality and Transferability of Adversarial Attacks on Face Recognition Simultaneously with Adversarial Restoration

Adversarial face examples possess two critical properties: Visual Quality and Transferability. However, existing approaches rarely address these properties simultaneously, leading to subpar results. To address this issue, we propose a novel adversarial attack technique known as Adversarial Restoration (AdvRestore), which enhances both visual quality and transferability of adversarial face examples by leveraging a face restoration prior. In our approach, we initially train a Restoration Latent Diffusion Model (RLDM) designed for face restoration. Subsequently, we employ the inference process of RLDM to generate adversarial face examples. The adversarial perturbations are applied to the intermediate features of RLDM. Additionally, by treating RLDM face restoration as a sibling task, the transferability of the generated adversarial face examples is further improved. Our experimental results validate the effectiveness of the proposed attack method.Comment: \copyright 2023 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other work

A Facile Synthesis and Optical Properties of Bundle-Shaped TbPO 4

Bundle-shaped TbPO4·H2O nanorods have been prepared by a facile hydrothermal technique and characterized by XRD, SEM, TEM, UV-Vis diffuse reflectance spectrum (DRS), photoluminescence (PL) spectrum, and lifetime. The results indicate that the obtained sample has hexagonal structure of TbPO4·H2O and is composed of nanorods bundles which is assembled from many single crystalline nanorods with the diameter of around 45 nm and the length of 2.3 μm. The growth of the single crystalline nanorod is along the (001) plane direction. Under the UV light irradiation, TbPO4·H2O nanorods bundles exhibit bright green emission corresponding to the D54→F7J (J=6,5,4,3) transitions of the Tb3+ ions, and the lifetime is determined to be about 0.24 ms

Discovery and Identification of Pyrazolopyramidine Analogs as Novel Potent Androgen Receptor Antagonists

Androgen receptor (AR), an important target in the current androgen derivation therapy, plays a critical role in the development and progress of prostate cancer (PCa). Nonsteroidal antiandrogens, such as enzalutamide and bicalutamide, are commonly used in clinic to treat PCa. Though they are very effective at the beginning, drug resistance problem appears after about 18 months. One of the reasons is that these antiandrogens share similar structure skeleton. Therefore, it is urgent to discover novel antiandrogens with different skeletons for resistance problem. Herein, we combined structure- and ligand-based methodologies for virtual screening chemical databases to identify potent AR antagonists. Then the cytotoxic activities of the screened hit samples were evaluated by using LNCaP prostate cancer cells. Virtual screening and biological evaluation assay results suggest that several chemicals with novel pyrazolopyrimidine skeleton can inhibit the proliferation of prostate cancer cells with similar, or even higher, bioactivities to bicalutamide. AR reporter gene assay experiments proved that Compound III showed potential antagonistic effects. In addition, molecular dynamics simulations results proved that Compound III can properly bind to AR and prevent helix 12 (H12) from closing to distort the formation of activation function 2 (AF2) site, resulting in the invalid transcription. Hence, pyrazolopyrimidine was discovered as a novel, potent and promising antiandrogen skeleton deserved to be further studied

Universal Quantum Optimization with Cold Atoms in an Optical Cavity

Cold atoms in an optical cavity have been widely used for quantum simulations of many-body physics, where the quantum control capability has been advancing rapidly in recent years. Here, we show the atom cavity system is universal for quantum optimization with arbitrary connectivity. We consider a single-mode cavity and develop a Raman coupling scheme by which the engineered quantum Hamiltonian for atoms directly encodes number partition problems (NPPs). The programmability is introduced by placing the atoms at different positions in the cavity with optical tweezers. The NPP solution is encoded in the ground state of atomic qubits coupled through a photonic cavity mode, that can be reached by adiabatic quantum computing (AQC). We construct an explicit mapping for the 3-SAT and vertex cover problems to be efficiently encoded by the cavity system, which costs linear overhead in the number of atomic qubits. The atom cavity encoding is further extended to quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) problems. The encoding protocol is optimal in the cost of atom number scaling with the number of binary degrees of freedom of the computation problem. Our theory implies the atom cavity system is a promising quantum optimization platform searching for practical quantum advantage.Comment: 13 pages, 2 figure

Chromosome-level genome assembly of largemouth bass (Micropterus salmoides) using PacBio and Hi-C technologies

The largemouth bass (Micropterus salmoides) has become a cosmopolitan species due to its widespread introduction as game or domesticated fish. Here a high-quality chromosome-level reference genome of M. salmoides was produced by combining Illumina paired-end sequencing, PacBio single molecule sequencing technique (SMRT) and High-through chromosome conformation capture (Hi-C) technologies. Ultimately, the genome was assembled into 844.88 Mb with a contig N50 of 15.68 Mb and scaffold N50 length of 35.77 Mb. About 99.9% assembly genome sequences (844.00 Mb) could be anchored to 23 chromosomes, and 98.03% assembly genome sequences could be ordered and directed. The genome contained 38.19% repeat sequences and 2693 noncoding RNAs. A total of 26,370 protein-coding genes from 3415 gene families were predicted, of which 97.69% were functionally annotated. The high-quality genome assembly will be a fundamental resource to study and understand how M. salmoides adapt to novel and changing environments around the world, and also be expected to contribute to the genetic breeding and other research.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

The association of periodontal diseases and Sjogren’s syndrome: A systematic review and meta-analysis

BackgroundThe relationship between periodontal diseases and Sjogren’s syndrome were found inconsistent in current studies. Our objective is to clarify the relationship between periodontal diseases and Sjogren’s syndrome.MethodsA systematic review was performed and reported according to Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA). Electronic databases (EMBASE, PubMed, Web of Science, and Cochrane Library, from inceptions until 24 November 2021) were searched. The Newcastle-Ottawa Scale (NOS) and Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) were applied to evaluate the quality of studies. Quality assessment of the certainty of evidence was performed based on the Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development, and Evaluation (GRADE) guidelines. When the output is the ratio, Odds ratio (OR) of periodontal diseases with Sjogren’s syndrome were calculated. When the output is the mean, weighted mean difference (WMD) of periodontal diseases with Sjogren’s syndrome was calculated. We conducted meta-analysis and estimated the pool sensitivity. Begg’s test was used to test the possibility of publication bias. We also carried out meta-regression to clarify the source of heterogeneity (I2 > 50%). Finally, we performed a trial sequential analysis (TSA) to identify the false positive or false negative outcomes that might occur during repeated updates.Results21 studies were included in this systematic review, with a total of 11435 subjects. Meta-analysis of 5 studies showed that there is a positive correlation between periodontitis and Sjogren’s syndrome (OR = 2.12, 95% CI = 1.43–3.17; 5 studies, 6927 participants; low certainty of evidence). Meta-analysis of 16 studies showed that the periodontal condition of patients with Sjogren’s syndrome was worse compared with the control group, and the scores of clinical periodontal parameters were relatively high.ConclusionSjogren’s syndrome patients seem to be more likely to be diagnosed with periodontal diseases. However, our results should be interpreted with caution considering the high heterogeneity.Systematic review registration[https://www.crd.york.ac.uk/prospero/], identifier [CRD42021261322]

Flight training changes the brain functional pattern in cadets

IntroductionTo our knowledge, this is the first study to use MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) before and after an intensive flight training. This study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of flight training in civil flying cadets.MethodsThe civil flying cadets and controls completed two study visits. Visit 1 was performed in 2019, and high spatial resolution structural image and resting-state functional MRI data were collected. The second visit was completed in 2022. In addition to the MRI data mentioned above, participants completed the cognitive function assessment at the second visit.ResultsMixed-effect regression model analysis found that flight training enhanced the degree centrality (DC) values of the left middle frontal gyrus and left lingual gyrus. The subsequent correlation calculation analysis suggested a possible relationship between these alterations and cognitive function.DiscussionThese results suggest that flight training might promote the DC value of the prefrontal and occipital cortices and, in turn, enhance their executive function