116 research outputs found
Enhancing Pedestrian-Autonomous Vehicle Safety in Low Visibility Scenarios: A Comprehensive Simulation Method
Self-driving cars raise safety concerns, particularly regarding pedestrian interactions. Current research lacks a systematic understanding of these interactions in diverse scenarios. Autonomous Vehicle (AV) performance can vary due to perception accuracy, algorithm reliability, and environmental dynamics. This study examines AV-pedestrian safety issues, focusing on low visibility conditions, using a co-simulation framework combining virtual reality and an autonomous driving simulator. 40 experiments were conducted, extracting surrogate safety measures (SSMs) from AV and pedestrian trajectories. The results indicate that low visibility can impair AV performance, increasing conflict risks for pedestrians. AV algorithms may require further enhancements and validations for consistent safety performance in low visibility scenarios
Efficient Stitchable Task Adaptation
The paradigm of pre-training and fine-tuning has laid the foundation for
deploying deep learning models. However, most fine-tuning methods are designed
to meet a specific resource budget. Recently, considering diverse deployment
scenarios with various resource budgets, stitchable neural network (SN-Net) is
introduced to quickly obtain numerous new networks (stitches) from the
pre-trained models (anchors) in a model family via model stitching. Although
promising, SN-Net confronts new challenges when adapting it to new target
domains, including huge memory and storage requirements and a long and
sub-optimal multistage adaptation process. In this work, we present a novel
framework, Efficient Stitchable Task Adaptation (ESTA), to efficiently produce
a palette of fine-tuned models that adhere to diverse resource constraints.
Specifically, we first tailor parameter-efficient fine-tuning to share low-rank
updates among the stitches while maintaining independent bias terms. In this
way, we largely reduce fine-tuning memory burdens and mitigate the interference
among stitches that arises in task adaptation. Furthermore, we streamline a
simple yet effective one-stage deployment pipeline, which estimates the
important stitches to deploy with training-time gradient statistics. By
assigning higher sampling probabilities to important stitches, we also get a
boosted Pareto frontier. Extensive experiments on 25 downstream visual
recognition tasks demonstrate that our ESTA is capable of generating stitches
with smooth accuracy-efficiency trade-offs and surpasses the direct SN-Net
adaptation by remarkable margins with significantly lower training time and
fewer trainable parameters. Furthermore, we demonstrate the flexibility and
scalability of our ESTA framework by stitching LLMs from LLaMA family,
obtaining chatbot stitches of assorted sizes.Comment: Source code will be released at
https://github.com/ziplab/Stitched_LLaM
Effective targeting of the survivin dimerization interface with small molecule inhibitors
Many oncoproteins are considered undruggable because they lack enzymatic activities. In this study, we present a small-molecule–based anticancer agent that acts by inhibiting dimerization of the oncoprotein survivin, thereby promoting its degradation along with spontaneous apoptosis in cancer cells. Through a combination of computational analysis of the dimerization interface and in silico screening, we identified one compound that induced proteasome-dependent survivin degradation. Analysis of a set of structural analogues led us to identify a lead compound (LQZ-7F), which was effective in blocking the survival of multiple cancer cell lines in a low micromolar concentration range. LQZ-7F induced proteasome-dependent survivin degradation, mitotic arrest, and apoptosis, and it blocked the growth of human tumors in mouse xenograft assays. In addition to providing preclinical proof of concept for a survivin-targeting anticancer agent, our work offers novel in silico screening strategies to therapeutically target homodimeric oncogenic proteins considered undruggable
A Small Molecule Compound Targeting STAT3 DNA-Binding Domain Inhibits Cancer Cell Proliferation, Migration, and Invasion
Signal transducer and activator of
transcription 3 (STAT3) plays
important roles in multiple aspects of cancer aggressiveness including
migration, invasion, survival, self-renewal, angiogenesis, and tumor
cell immune evasion by regulating the expression of multiple downstream
target genes. STAT3 is constitutively activated in many malignant
tumors and its activation is associated with high histological grade
and advanced cancer stages. Thus, inhibiting STAT3 promises an attracting
strategy for treatment of advanced and metastatic cancers. Herein,
we identified a STAT3 inhibitor, inS3-54, by targeting the DNA-binding
domain of STAT3 using an improved virtual screening strategy. InS3-54
preferentially suppresses proliferation of cancer over non-cancer
cells and inhibits migration and invasion of malignant cells. Biochemical
analyses show that inS3-54 selectively inhibits STAT3 binding to DNA
without affecting the activation and dimerization of STAT3. Furthermore,
inS3-54 inhibits expression of STAT3 downstream target genes and STAT3
binding to chromatin in situ. Thus, inS3-54 represents a novel probe
for development of specific inhibitors targeting the DNA-binding domain
of STAT3 and a potential therapeutic for cancer treatments
Dynamic Focus-aware Positional Queries for Semantic Segmentation
Most of the latest top semantic segmentation approaches are based on vision
Transformers, particularly DETR-like frameworks, which employ a set of queries
in the Transformer decoder. Each query is composed of a content query that
preserves semantic information and a positional query that provides positional
guidance for aggregating the query-specific context. However, the positional
queries in the Transformer decoder layers are typically represented as fixed
learnable weights, which often encode dataset statistics for segments and can
be inaccurate for individual samples. Therefore, in this paper, we propose to
generate positional queries dynamically conditioned on the cross-attention
scores and the localization information of the preceding layer. By doing so,
each query is aware of its previous focus, thus providing more accurate
positional guidance and encouraging the cross-attention consistency across the
decoder layers. In addition, we also propose an efficient way to deal with
high-resolution cross-attention by dynamically determining the contextual
tokens based on the low-resolution cross-attention maps to perform local
relation aggregation. Our overall framework termed FASeg (Focus-Aware semantic
Segmentation) provides a simple yet effective solution for semantic
segmentation. Extensive experiments on ADE20K and Cityscapes show that our
FASeg achieves state-of-the-art performance, e.g., obtaining 48.3% and 49.6%
mIoU respectively for single-scale inference on ADE20K validation set with
ResNet-50 and Swin-T backbones, and barely increases the computation
consumption from Mask2former. Source code will be made publicly available at
https://github.com/zip-group/FASeg.Comment: Tech repor
Noise-Aware Speech Separation with Contrastive Learning
Recently, speech separation (SS) task has achieved remarkable progress driven
by deep learning technique. However, it is still challenging to separate target
speech from noisy mixture, as the neural model is vulnerable to assign
background noise to each speaker. In this paper, we propose a noise-aware SS
(NASS) method, which aims to improve the speech quality for separated signals
under noisy conditions. Specifically, NASS views background noise as an
independent output and predicts it with other speakers in a mask-based manner.
Then we conduct patch-wise contrastive learning on feature level to minimize
the mutual information between the predicted noise output and other speakers,
which suppresses the noise information in separated signals, and vice versa.
Experimental results show that NASS could achieve competitive results on
different datasets, and significantly improve the noise-robustness for
different mask-based SS backbones with less than 0.1M parameter increase
- …