MangaGAN: Unpaired Photo-to-Manga Translation Based on The Methodology of Manga Drawing

Manga is a world popular comic form originated in Japan, which typically employs black-and-white stroke lines and geometric exaggeration to describe humans' appearances, poses, and actions. In this paper, we propose MangaGAN, the first method based on Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) for unpaired photo-to-manga translation. Inspired by how experienced manga artists draw manga, MangaGAN generates the geometric features of manga face by a designed GAN model and delicately translates each facial region into the manga domain by a tailored multi-GANs architecture. For training MangaGAN, we construct a new dataset collected from a popular manga work, containing manga facial features, landmarks, bodies, and so on. Moreover, to produce high-quality manga faces, we further propose a structural smoothing loss to smooth stroke-lines and avoid noisy pixels, and a similarity preserving module to improve the similarity between domains of photo and manga. Extensive experiments show that MangaGAN can produce high-quality manga faces which preserve both the facial similarity and a popular manga style, and outperforms other related state-of-the-art methods.Comment: 17 page

Response of miR156-SPL Module during the Red Peel Coloration of Bagging-Treated Chinese Sand Pear (Pyrus pyrifolia Nakai)

MicroRNA156 is an evolutionarily highly conserved plant micro-RNA (miRNA) that controls an age-dependent flowering pathway. miR156 and its target SQUAMOSA PROMOTER BINDING PROTEIN-LIKE (SPL) genes regulate anthocyanin accumulation in plants, but it is unknown whether this process is affected by light. Red Chinese sand pear (Pyrus pyrifolia) fruits exhibit a unique coloration pattern in response to bagging treatments, which makes them appropriate for studying the molecular mechanism underlying light-induced anthocyanin accumulation in fruit. Based on high-throughput miRNA and degradome sequencing data, we determined that miR156 was expressed in pear fruit peels, and targeted four SPL genes. Light-responsive elements were detected in the promoter regions of the miR156a and miR156ba precursors. We identified 19 SPL genes using the “Suli” pear (Pyrus pyrifolia Chinese White Pear Group) genome database, of which seven members were putative miR156 targets. The upregulated expression of anthocyanin biosynthetic and regulatory genes and downregulated expression of PpSPL2, PpSPL5, PpSPL7, PpSPL9, PpSPL10, PpSPL13, PpSPL16, PpSPL17, and PpSPL18 were observed in pear fruits after bags were removed from plants during the anthocyanin accumulation period. Additionally, miR156a/ba/g/s/sa abundance increased after bags were removed. Yeast two-hybrid results suggested that PpMYB10, PpbHLH, and PpWD40 could form a protein complex, probably involved in anthocyanin biosynthesis. Additionally, PpSPL10 and PpSPL13 interacted with PpMYB10. The results obtained in this study are helpful in understanding the possible role of miR156 and its target PpSPL genes in regulating light-induced red peel coloration and anthocyanin accumulation in pear

An NLR paralog Pit2 generated from tandem duplication of Pit1 fine-tunes Pit1 localization and function

NLR family proteins act as intracellular receptors. Gene duplication amplifies the number of NLR genes, and subsequent mutations occasionally provide modifications to the second gene that benefits immunity. However, evolutionary processes after gene duplication and functional relationships between duplicated NLRs remain largely unclear. Here, we report that the rice NLR protein Pit1 is associated with its paralogue Pit2. The two are required for the resistance to rice blast fungus but have different functions: Pit1 induces cell death, while Pit2 competitively suppresses Pit1-mediated cell death. During evolution, the suppression of Pit1 by Pit2 was probably generated through positive selection on two fate-determining residues in the NB-ARC domain of Pit2, which account for functional differences between Pit1 and Pit2. Consequently, Pit2 lost its plasma membrane localization but acquired a new function to interfere with Pit1 in the cytosol. These findings illuminate the evolutionary trajectory of tandemly duplicated NLR genes after gene duplication

Improved Resnet Model Based on Positive Traffic Flow for IoT Anomalous Traffic Detection

The Internet of Things (IoT) has been highly appreciated by several nations and societies as a worldwide strategic developing sector. However, IoT security is seriously threatened by anomalous traffic in the IoT. Therefore, creating a detection model that can recognize such aberrant traffic is essential to ensuring the overall security of the IoT. We outline the main approaches that are used today to detect anomalous network traffic and suggest a Resnet detection model based on fused one-dimensional convolution (Conv1D) for this purpose. Our method combines one-dimensional convolution and a Resnet network to create a new network model. This network model improves the residual block by including Conv1D and Conv2D layers for two-dimensional convolution. This change enhances the model’s ability to identify aberrant traffic by enabling the network to extract feature information from one-dimensional linearity and two-dimensional space. The CIC IoT Dataset from the Canadian Institute for Cybersecurity Research was used to assess the effectiveness of the proposed enhanced residual network technique. The outcomes demonstrate that the algorithm performs better at identifying aberrant traffic in the IoT than the original residual neural network. The accuracy achieved can be as high as 99.9%

The research progress in the alkali-free surfactant-polymer combination flooding technique

Alkali-free surfactant-polymer SP flooding can avoid scaling, strong emulsification and corrosion caused by alkali, thus reduce the investment and operating cost. It is a new chemical flooding technology for Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) with a promising application prospect. The main problems of SP flooding are as follows: shortage of industrialized surfactant product with high performance, weak theoretical research on oil displacing mechanisms and main influencing factors, unsound evaluation methods, lack of pilot tests, and high technical risk. The main factors that affect the oil displacement efficiency of SP flooding are displacing fluid viscosity, interfacial tension, and emulsification strength of SP system. The high viscosity of SP flooding formula system is an important guarantee of EOR process. The lower the interfacial tension, the higher the oil recovery degree is. The emulsify ability of SP system can significantly affect efficiency of oil displacing. SP flooding process has obtained certain effects in pilot tests but there are still some problems. The formula adaptability and quality stability of surfactant product should be improved, the injection program should be optimized, and the field monitoring and process tracking and regulation should be strengthened. Key words: chemical combination flooding, surfactant, oil displacement mechanism, pilot tes

Microstructure Modifications and Associated Corrosion Improvements in GH4169 Superalloy Treated by High Current Pulsed Electron Beam

The surface of the nickel-based superalloy GH4169 was subjected to high-current pulsed electron beam (HCPEB) treatment. The microstructural morphologies of the material were analysed by means of optical microscope (OP), scanning electron microscope (SEM), and transmission electron microscope (TEM). The results reveal that the irradiated surface was remelted and many craters were formed. The density of craters decreased with the increment of HCPEB pulses. After 20-pulsed HCPEB irradiation, nanostructures were formed in the melted region of the surface. Furthermore, slipping bands and high density of dislocations were also formed due to the severe plastic deformation. The selective purification effect, homogenized composition, nanostructures, and dislocation slips introduced by HCPEB irradiation bring a significant improvement of corrosion resistance of GH4169 superalloy