Robust Watermarking Using Inverse Gradient Attention

Watermarking is the procedure of encoding desired information into an image to resist potential noises while ensuring the embedded image has little perceptual perturbations from the original image. Recently, with the tremendous successes gained by deep neural networks in various fields, digital watermarking has attracted increasing number of attentions. The neglect of considering the pixel importance within the cover image of deep neural models will inevitably affect the model robustness for information hiding. Targeting at the problem, in this paper, we propose a novel deep watermarking scheme with Inverse Gradient Attention (IGA), combing the ideas of adversarial learning and attention mechanism to endow different importance to different pixels. With the proposed method, the model is able to spotlight pixels with more robustness for embedding data. Besides, from an orthogonal point of view, in order to increase the model embedding capacity, we propose a complementary message coding module. Empirically, extensive experiments show that the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on two prevalent datasets under multiple settings.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figure

Geometric Pseudospectral Method on SE(3) for Rigid-Body Dynamics with Application to Aircraft

General pseudospectral method is extended to the special Euclidean group SE(3) by virtue of equivariant map for rigid-body dynamics of the aircraft. On SE(3), a complete left invariant rigid-body dynamics model of the aircraft in body-fixed frame is established, including configuration model and velocity model. For the left invariance of the configuration model, equivalent Lie algebra equation corresponding to the configuration equation is derived based on the left-trivialized tangent of local coordinate map, and the top eight orders truncated Magnus series expansion with its coefficients of the solution of the equivalent Lie algebra equation are given. A numerical method called geometric pseudospectral method is developed, which, respectively, computes configurations and velocities at the collocation points and the endpoint based on two different collocation strategies. Through numerical tests on a free-floating rigid-body dynamics compared with several same order classical methods in Euclidean space and Lie group, it is found that the proposed method has higher accuracy, satisfying computational efficiency, stable Lie group structural conservativeness. Finally, how to apply the previous discretization scheme to rigid-body dynamics simulation and control of the aircraft is illustrated

Towards Disentangling Relevance and Bias in Unbiased Learning to Rank

Unbiased learning to rank (ULTR) studies the problem of mitigating various biases from implicit user feedback data such as clicks, and has been receiving considerable attention recently. A popular ULTR approach for real-world applications uses a two-tower architecture, where click modeling is factorized into a relevance tower with regular input features, and a bias tower with bias-relevant inputs such as the position of a document. A successful factorization will allow the relevance tower to be exempt from biases. In this work, we identify a critical issue that existing ULTR methods ignored - the bias tower can be confounded with the relevance tower via the underlying true relevance. In particular, the positions were determined by the logging policy, i.e., the previous production model, which would possess relevance information. We give both theoretical analysis and empirical results to show the negative effects on relevance tower due to such a correlation. We then propose three methods to mitigate the negative confounding effects by better disentangling relevance and bias. Empirical results on both controlled public datasets and a large-scale industry dataset show the effectiveness of the proposed approaches

Large Language Models are Effective Text Rankers with Pairwise Ranking Prompting

Ranking documents using Large Language Models (LLMs) by directly feeding the query and candidate documents into the prompt is an interesting and practical problem. However, researchers have found it difficult to outperform fine-tuned baseline rankers on benchmark datasets. We analyze pointwise and listwise ranking prompts used by existing methods and argue that off-the-shelf LLMs do not fully understand these challenging ranking formulations. In this paper, we propose to significantly reduce the burden on LLMs by using a new technique called Pairwise Ranking Prompting (PRP). Our results are the first in the literature to achieve state-of-the-art ranking performance on standard benchmarks using moderate-sized open-sourced LLMs. On TREC-DL 2019&2020, PRP based on the Flan-UL2 model with 20B parameters performs favorably with the previous best approach in the literature, which is based on the blackbox commercial GPT-4 that has 50x (estimated) model size, while outperforming other LLM-based solutions, such as InstructGPT which has 175B parameters, by over 10% for all ranking metrics. By using the same prompt template on seven BEIR tasks, PRP outperforms supervised baselines and outperforms the blackbox commercial ChatGPT solution by 4.2% and pointwise LLM-based solutions by more than 10% on average NDCG@10. Furthermore, we propose several variants of PRP to improve efficiency and show that it is possible to achieve competitive results even with linear complexity.Comment: Accepted to NAACL 2024. Corrected results of RankT5 on TREC-DL1

Integrative analysis of the role of BOLA2B in human pan-cancer

Objective:BOLA2B is a recently discovered protein-coding gene. Here, pan-cancer analysis was conducted to determine the expression patterns of BOLA2B and its impact on immune response, gene mutation, and possible molecular biological mechanisms in different tumors, together with investigating its potential usefulness for cancer prognosis.Methods: Data on BOLA2B expression and mutations were downloaded from TCGA and GTEx databases. Clinical survival data from TCGA were used to analyze the prognostic value of BOLA2B. TIMER and ESTIMATE algorithms were used to assess correlations between BOLA2B and tumor-infiltrating immune cells, immune cytokines, and immune scores.Results: BOLA2B was found to be highly expressed at both mRNA and protein levels in multiple tumors, where it was associated with worse overall survival (OS), disease-specific survival (DSS), and progression-free interval (PFI) in all cancers apart from ovarian cancer. BOLA2B was also found to be positively correlated with copy number variation (CNV), and mutations in TP53, TTN, and MUC16 were found to influence BOLA2B expression. Post-transcriptional modifications, including m5C, m1A, and m6A, were observed to regulate BOLA2B expression in all cancers. Functional analysis showed that BOLA2B was enriched in pathways associated with iron–sulfur cluster formation, mTOR-mediated autophagy, and cell cycle inhibition. Decreased BOLA2B expression induced the proliferation of breast cancer cells and G2/M cell cycle arrest.Conclusion:BOLA2B was found to be highly expressed in malignant tumors and could be used as a biomarker of poor prognosis in multiple cancers. Further investigation into BOLA2B’s role and molecular functions in cancer would provide new insights for cancer diagnosis and treatment

In Vitro and in Vivo Antioxidant Properties of the Plant-Based Supplement Greens+™

Dietary antioxidants play an important role against oxidation, an underlying mechanism in the incidence of chronic diseases. Greens+ is a commercially available preparation containing a variety of plant-derived ingredients. The aim of the current study was to evaluate the antioxidant potential of the methanolic extract of greens+ powder using in vitro and in vivo techniques. In vitro studies were conducted using a liposome model system to simulate biological cell membranes. Total antioxidant potential and polyphenol content of the herbal preparation was measured. For in vivo analysis, 10 healthy human subjects consumed either three or six teaspoons of greens+ per day for four weeks. Blood samples were analyzed at baseline and at the conclusion of the treatment period for total antioxidant capacity, polyphenol content, protein, lipid and LDL oxidation, and the level of glutathione peroxidase. Results showed that greens+ supplementation was well tolerated and increased serum antioxidant potential at higher levels of intake in a dose-dependent manner. HPLC analysis showed the presence of quercetin, apigenin, kaempferol and luteolin in the supplement. Plasma analysis indicated the presence of kaempferol only. A statistically significant (p < 0.05) reduction in protein and lipid oxidation was observed. Based on its antioxidant properties, the results suggest that greens+ might play a role in reducing the risk of chronic diseases involving a burden of oxidative damage

Genome-Wide Gene-Environment Study Identifies Glutamate Receptor Gene GRIN2A as a Parkinson's Disease Modifier Gene via Interaction with Coffee

Our aim was to identify genes that influence the inverse association of coffee with the risk of developing Parkinson's disease (PD). We used genome-wide genotype data and lifetime caffeinated-coffee-consumption data on 1,458 persons with PD and 931 without PD from the NeuroGenetics Research Consortium (NGRC), and we performed a genome-wide association and interaction study (GWAIS), testing each SNP's main-effect plus its interaction with coffee, adjusting for sex, age, and two principal components. We then stratified subjects as heavy or light coffee-drinkers and performed genome-wide association study (GWAS) in each group. We replicated the most significant SNP. Finally, we imputed the NGRC dataset, increasing genomic coverage to examine the region of interest in detail. The primary analyses (GWAIS, GWAS, Replication) were performed using genotyped data. In GWAIS, the most significant signal came from rs4998386 and the neighboring SNPs in GRIN2A. GRIN2A encodes an NMDA-glutamate-receptor subunit and regulates excitatory neurotransmission in the brain. Achieving P2df = 10−6, GRIN2A surpassed all known PD susceptibility genes in significance in the GWAIS. In stratified GWAS, the GRIN2A signal was present in heavy coffee-drinkers (OR = 0.43; P = 6×10−7) but not in light coffee-drinkers. The a priori Replication hypothesis that “Among heavy coffee-drinkers, rs4998386_T carriers have lower PD risk than rs4998386_CC carriers” was confirmed: ORReplication = 0.59, PReplication = 10−3; ORPooled = 0.51, PPooled = 7×10−8. Compared to light coffee-drinkers with rs4998386_CC genotype, heavy coffee-drinkers with rs4998386_CC genotype had 18% lower risk (P = 3×10−3), whereas heavy coffee-drinkers with rs4998386_TC genotype had 59% lower risk (P = 6×10−13). Imputation revealed a block of SNPs that achieved P2df<5×10−8 in GWAIS, and OR = 0.41, P = 3×10−8 in heavy coffee-drinkers. This study is proof of concept that inclusion of environmental factors can help identify genes that are missed in GWAS. Both adenosine antagonists (caffeine-like) and glutamate antagonists (GRIN2A-related) are being tested in clinical trials for treatment of PD. GRIN2A may be a useful pharmacogenetic marker for subdividing individuals in clinical trials to determine which medications might work best for which patients

Global, regional, and national under-5 mortality, adult mortality, age-specific mortality, and life expectancy, 1970–2016: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2016

BACKGROUND: Detailed assessments of mortality patterns, particularly age-specific mortality, represent a crucial input that enables health systems to target interventions to specific populations. Understanding how all-cause mortality has changed with respect to development status can identify exemplars for best practice. To accomplish this, the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study 2016 (GBD 2016) estimated age-specific and sex-specific all-cause mortality between 1970 and 2016 for 195 countries and territories and at the subnational level for the five countries with a population greater than 200 million in 2016. METHODS: We have evaluated how well civil registration systems captured deaths using a set of demographic methods called death distribution methods for adults and from consideration of survey and census data for children younger than 5 years. We generated an overall assessment of completeness of registration of deaths by dividing registered deaths in each location-year by our estimate of all-age deaths generated from our overall estimation process. For 163 locations, including subnational units in countries with a population greater than 200 million with complete vital registration (VR) systems, our estimates were largely driven by the observed data, with corrections for small fluctuations in numbers and estimation for recent years where there were lags in data reporting (lags were variable by location, generally between 1 year and 6 years). For other locations, we took advantage of different data sources available to measure under-5 mortality rates (U5MR) using complete birth histories, summary birth histories, and incomplete VR with adjustments; we measured adult mortality rate (the probability of death in individuals aged 15-60 years) using adjusted incomplete VR, sibling histories, and household death recall. We used the U5MR and adult mortality rate, together with crude death rate due to HIV in the GBD model life table system, to estimate age-specific and sex-specific death rates for each location-year. Using various international databases, we identified fatal discontinuities, which we defined as increases in the death rate of more than one death per million, resulting from conflict and terrorism, natural disasters, major transport or technological accidents, and a subset of epidemic infectious diseases; these were added to estimates in the relevant years. In 47 countries with an identified peak adult prevalence for HIV/AIDS of more than 0·5% and where VR systems were less than 65% complete, we informed our estimates of age-sex-specific mortality using the Estimation and Projection Package (EPP)-Spectrum model fitted to national HIV/AIDS prevalence surveys and antenatal clinic serosurveillance systems. We estimated stillbirths, early neonatal, late neonatal, and childhood mortality using both survey and VR data in spatiotemporal Gaussian process regression models. We estimated abridged life tables for all location-years using age-specific death rates. We grouped locations into development quintiles based on the Socio-demographic Index (SDI) and analysed mortality trends by quintile. Using spline regression, we estimated the expected mortality rate for each age-sex group as a function of SDI. We identified countries with higher life expectancy than expected by comparing observed life expectancy to anticipated life expectancy on the basis of development status alone. FINDINGS: Completeness in the registration of deaths increased from 28% in 1970 to a peak of 45% in 2013; completeness was lower after 2013 because of lags in reporting. Total deaths in children younger than 5 years decreased from 1970 to 2016, and slower decreases occurred at ages 5-24 years. By contrast, numbers of adult deaths increased in each 5-year age bracket above the age of 25 years. The distribution of annualised rates of change in age-specific mortality rate differed over the period 2000 to 2016 compared with earlier decades: increasing annualised rates of change were less frequent, although rising annualised rates of change still occurred in some locations, particularly for adolescent and younger adult age groups. Rates of stillbirths and under-5 mortality both decreased globally from 1970. Evidence for global convergence of death rates was mixed; although the absolute difference between age-standardised death rates narrowed between countries at the lowest and highest levels of SDI, the ratio of these death rates-a measure of relative inequality-increased slightly. There was a strong shift between 1970 and 2016 toward higher life expectancy, most noticeably at higher levels of SDI. Among countries with populations greater than 1 million in 2016, life expectancy at birth was highest for women in Japan, at 86·9 years (95% UI 86·7-87·2), and for men in Singapore, at 81·3 years (78·8-83·7) in 2016. Male life expectancy was generally lower than female life expectancy between 1970 and 2016, an