Asynchronous Bidirectional Decoding for Neural Machine Translation

The dominant neural machine translation (NMT) models apply unified attentional encoder-decoder neural networks for translation. Traditionally, the NMT decoders adopt recurrent neural networks (RNNs) to perform translation in a left-toright manner, leaving the target-side contexts generated from right to left unexploited during translation. In this paper, we equip the conventional attentional encoder-decoder NMT framework with a backward decoder, in order to explore bidirectional decoding for NMT. Attending to the hidden state sequence produced by the encoder, our backward decoder first learns to generate the target-side hidden state sequence from right to left. Then, the forward decoder performs translation in the forward direction, while in each translation prediction timestep, it simultaneously applies two attention models to consider the source-side and reverse target-side hidden states, respectively. With this new architecture, our model is able to fully exploit source- and target-side contexts to improve translation quality altogether. Experimental results on NIST Chinese-English and WMT English-German translation tasks demonstrate that our model achieves substantial improvements over the conventional NMT by 3.14 and 1.38 BLEU points, respectively. The source code of this work can be obtained from https://github.com/DeepLearnXMU/ABDNMT.Comment: accepted by AAAI 1

Cloning and Characterization of a Pyrethroid Pesticide Decomposing Esterase Gene, \u3cem\u3eEst3385\u3c/em\u3e, from \u3cem\u3eRhodopseudomonas palustris\u3c/em\u3e PSB-S

Full length open reading frame of pyrethroid detoxification gene, Est3385, contains 963 nucleotides. This gene was identified and cloned based on the genome sequence of Rhodopseudomonas palustris PSB-S available at the GneBank. The predicted amino acid sequence of Est3385 shared moderate identities (30–46%) with the known homologous esterases. Phylogenetic analysis revealed that Est3385 was a member in the esterase family I. Recombinant Est3385 was heterologous expressed in E. coli, purified and characterized for its substrate specificity, kinetics and stability under various conditions. The optimal temperature and pH for Est3385 were 35 °C and 6.0, respectively. This enzyme could detoxify various pyrethroid pesticides and degrade the optimal substrate fenpropathrin with a Km and Vmax value of 0.734 ± 0.013 mmol·l−1 and 0.918 ± 0.025 U·µg−1, respectively. No cofactor was found to affect Est3385 activity but substantial reduction of enzymatic activity was observed when metal ions were applied. Taken together, a new pyrethroid degradation esterase was identified and characterized. Modification of Est3385 with protein engineering toolsets should enhance its potential for field application to reduce the pesticide residue from agroecosystems

Movement Patterns of Resident and Relocated Northern Bobwhites in East Texas

We compared home range sizes and movement patterns of resident and relocated northern bobwhites (Colinus virginianus) on an area managed specifically for the species in the Pineywoods of east Texas. During the winters of 1990–1992, 155 south Texas, 136 east Texas, and 139 resident bobwhites were radiomarked, released, and thereafter regularly located. Bird locations were plotted on a digitized map, and home range sizes and movement patterns of each group of birds were estimated. Resident bobwhites moved longer daily distances in March and had larger home ranges during the nesting season (May-Jul) than relocated birds (P0.05). Managers that elect to relocate northern bobwhites should consider doing so in the fall and only into habitats of ample size

Movement Patterns of Resident and Relocated Northern Bobwhites in East Texas

We compared home range sizes and movement patterns of resident and relocated northern bobwhites (Colinus virginianus) on an area managed specifically for the species in the Pineywoods of east Texas. During the winters of 1990–1992, 155 south Texas, 136 east Texas, and 139 resident bobwhites were radiomarked, released, and thereafter regularly located. Bird locations were plotted on a digitized map, and home range sizes and movement patterns of each group of birds were estimated. Resident bobwhites moved longer daily distances in March and had larger home ranges during the nesting season (May-Jul) than relocated birds (P \u3c= 0.05). Conversely, no differences were detected among groups in mean of daily distances moved in April or dispersal during the breeding season (Mar-Jun) (P 0.05). Annual dispersal distances (x¯ = 1.43 km) of birds that survived into November were similar among groups (P \u3e 0.05). Managers that elect to relocate northern bobwhites should consider doing so in the fall and only into habitats of ample size

Food Plot Use by Juvenile Northern Bobwhites in East Texas

We examined use of spring-summer (i.e., warm-season) food plots by northern bobwhites (Colinus virginianus) with broods using radio telemetry on a 563-ha study area in Trinity County, eastern Texas, where habitat was modified to enhance it for these birds. Bobwhites from South Texas and disjunct areas of East Texas were introduced to supplement a small, resident population. All relocated and most resident bobwhites were fitted with necklace-style transmitters. Bobwhites which produced chicks were intensively radiotracked (≥3 times/day) for ≥4 weeks or until the radio-marked parent was lost. Nine hens moved their broods to food plots within an average of 2.1 days after the eggs hatched; average distance moved was 217 m. Use of food plots by 12 broods was proportionally greater than that of native vegetation (P \u3c 0.001). Food plots had lower quail-level foliage density (P = 0.015) and more arthropods (P \u3c 0.001) than native vegetation. Our results demonstrate that warm-season food plots can potentially provide brood habitat for bobwhites in eastern Texas

ITportrait: Image-Text Coupled 3D Portrait Domain Adaptation

Domain adaptation of 3D portraits has gained more and more attention. However, the transfer mechanism of existing methods is mainly based on vision or language, which ignores the potential of vision-language combined guidance. In this paper, we propose a vision-language coupled 3D portraits domain adaptation framework, namely Image and Text portrait (ITportrait). ITportrait relies on a two-stage alternating training strategy. In the first stage, we employ a 3D Artistic Paired Transfer (APT) method for image-guided style transfer. APT constructs paired photo-realistic portraits to obtain accurate artistic poses, which helps ITportrait to achieve high-quality 3D style transfer. In the second stage, we propose a 3D Image-Text Embedding (ITE) approach in the CLIP space. ITE uses a threshold function to adaptively control the optimization direction of image or text in the CLIP space. Comprehensive quantitative and qualitative results show that our ITportrait achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) results and benefits downstream tasks. All source codes and pre-trained models will be released to the public