A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words: Principled Recaptioning Improves Image Generation

Text-to-image diffusion models achieved a remarkable leap in capabilities over the last few years, enabling high-quality and diverse synthesis of images from a textual prompt. However, even the most advanced models often struggle to precisely follow all of the directions in their prompts. The vast majority of these models are trained on datasets consisting of (image, caption) pairs where the images often come from the web, and the captions are their HTML alternate text. A notable example is the LAION dataset, used by Stable Diffusion and other models. In this work we observe that these captions are often of low quality, and argue that this significantly affects the model's capability to understand nuanced semantics in the textual prompts. We show that by relabeling the corpus with a specialized automatic captioning model and training a text-to-image model on the recaptioned dataset, the model benefits substantially across the board. First, in overall image quality: e.g. FID 14.84 vs. the baseline of 17.87, and 64.3% improvement in faithful image generation according to human evaluation. Second, in semantic alignment, e.g. semantic object accuracy 84.34 vs. 78.90, counting alignment errors 1.32 vs. 1.44 and positional alignment 62.42 vs. 57.60. We analyze various ways to relabel the corpus and provide evidence that this technique, which we call RECAP, both reduces the train-inference discrepancy and provides the model with more information per example, increasing sample efficiency and allowing the model to better understand the relations between captions and images

UniTune: Text-Driven Image Editing by Fine Tuning a Diffusion Model on a Single Image

Text-driven image generation methods have shown impressive results recently, allowing casual users to generate high quality images by providing textual descriptions. However, similar capabilities for editing existing images are still out of reach. Text-driven image editing methods usually need edit masks, struggle with edits that require significant visual changes and cannot easily keep specific details of the edited portion. In this paper we make the observation that image-generation models can be converted to image-editing models simply by fine-tuning them on a single image. We also show that initializing the stochastic sampler with a noised version of the base image before the sampling and interpolating relevant details from the base image after sampling further increase the quality of the edit operation. Combining these observations, we propose UniTune, a novel image editing method. UniTune gets as input an arbitrary image and a textual edit description, and carries out the edit while maintaining high fidelity to the input image. UniTune does not require additional inputs, like masks or sketches, and can perform multiple edits on the same image without retraining. We test our method using the Imagen model in a range of different use cases. We demonstrate that it is broadly applicable and can perform a surprisingly wide range of expressive editing operations, including those requiring significant visual changes that were previously impossible.Comment: SIGGRAPH 202

Programmed Cell Death-Related Proteases in Plants

From an ancient Greek term related to the “leavening of bread” (en, in; zyme, leaven), an enzyme can be defined as a substance showing the properties of a catalyst that is produced as a result of cellular activity. Every proteinaceous enzyme that performs hydrolysis of peptide bonds is appropriately termed “protease” (peptidase). All of them share aspects of catalytic strategy, but with some variation. As a result, the proteases are grouped into six different catalytic families: serine, threonine, cysteine, aspartic, glutamic and metallopeptidases (http://merops.sanger.ac.uk/). The larger families (cysteine, serine, aspartic and metallopeptidases) have a wide range of distribution on living organism groups, and are also present in the “controversial” viruses. As a well‐represented family, the cysteine proteases play important roles in events such as signalling pathways, programmed cell death (PCD), nutrient mobilization, protein maturing, hormone synthesis and degradation. In the past two decades, an increased interest was driven to the study of the programmed cell death (PCD), mainly after the discovery of caspase‐related proteins and caspase‐like activities in organisms not metazoan. Caspases are cysteine proteases that cleave their substrate after aspartate residues and are part of signalling cascades of the apoptotic PCD process (also in inflammatory process), unique of metazoan. The caspase‐related proteins are named paracaspases and metacaspases. Paracaspases are found on metazoan and Dictyostelium, whereas the metacaspases are present on plants, fungi and groups of protozoan. On plants, PCD has features that are distinct from that of animals and is an important pathway on developmental events, defensive and stress response (biotic and abiotic). All these events have their own particularities, but the participation of proteases seems to be universal with those responsible for caspase‐like activities and metacaspases having an increasing number of reports that put them as important for plant PCD. In this chapter, we tackle important aspects of the proteases, in special that involved in plant PDC, as well as their specific regulators. Aspects of function, catalytic mechanisms and interaction with ligands will be on focus

Radiologically isolated aquaporin-4 antibody neuromyelitis optica spectrum disorder

Aquaporin-4 antibody (AQP4-Ab) Neuromyelitis Optica Spectrum Disorder (NMOSD) is a rare neuroinflammatory syndrome presenting predominantly with optic neuritis and transverse myelitis. We report a case of radiologically isolated longitudinally extensive optic neuritis in an asymptomatic 12-year-old female with positive serum AQP4-Ab, with resolution of imaging changes after immune therapy. By contrast to patients with radiologically isolated syndrome, of which some will never convert to multiple sclerosis, the pathogenicity of AQP4-Ab in the context of sub-clinical disease, supported treatment in our patient. Given the severe morbidity in AQP4-Ab NMOSD, prognostic biomarkers for disease severity are required to guide optimal therapy for patients

Quality and Safety Aspects of Infant Nutrition

Quality and safety aspects of infant nutrition are of key importance for child health, but oftentimes they do not get much attention by health care professionals whose interest tends to focus on functional benefits of early nutrition. Unbalanced diets and harmful food components induce particularly high risks for untoward effects in infants because of their rapid growth, high nutrient needs, and their typical dependence on only one or few foods during the first months of life. The concepts, standards and practices that relate to infant food quality and safety were discussed at a scientific workshop organized by the Child Health Foundation and the Early Nutrition Academy jointly with the European Society for Paediatric Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition, and a summary is provided here. The participants reviewed past and current issues on quality and safety, the role of different stakeholders, and recommendations to avert future issues. It was concluded that a high level of quality and safety is currently achieved, but this is no reason for complacency. The food industry carries the primary responsibility for the safety and suitability of their products, including the quality of composition, raw materials and production processes. Introduction of new or modified products should be preceded by a thorough science based review of suitability and safety by an independent authority. Food safety events should be managed on an international basis. Global collaboration of food producers, food-safety authorities, paediatricians and scientists is needed to efficiently exchange information and to best protect public health. Copyright (C) 2012 S. Karger AG, Base

Neurological, Psychiatric, and Biochemical Aspects of Thiamine Deficiency in Children and Adults.

Thiamine (vitamin B1) is an essential nutrient that serves as a cofactor for a number of enzymes, mostly with mitochondrial localization. Some thiamine-dependent enzymes are involved in energy metabolism and biosynthesis of nucleic acids whereas others are part of the antioxidant machinery. The brain is highly vulnerable to thiamine deficiency due to its heavy reliance on mitochondrial ATP production. This is more evident during rapid growth (i.e., perinatal periods and children) in which thiamine deficiency is commonly associated with either malnutrition or genetic defects. Thiamine deficiency contributes to a number of conditions spanning from mild neurological and psychiatric symptoms (confusion, reduced memory, and sleep disturbances) to severe encephalopathy, ataxia, congestive heart failure, muscle atrophy, and even death. This review discusses the current knowledge on thiamine deficiency and associated morbidity of neurological and psychiatric disorders, with special emphasis on the pediatric population, as well as the putative beneficial effect of thiamine supplementation in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and other neurological conditions

Erythrocyte Transketolase Activity, Markers of Cardiac Dysfunction and the Diagnosis of Infantile Beriberi

Infantile beriberi, or clinical thiamin (vitamin B1) deficiency in infants, is a forgotten disease in Asia, where ∼100 years ago it was a major public health problem. Children aged ∼2–3 months present in cardiac failure but usually rapidly improve if given thiamin injections. It remains relatively common in Vientiane, Lao PDR (Laos) probably because of prolonged intra- and post-partum maternal food avoidance behaviours. There has been very little recent research on the best diagnostic techniques. We conducted a case control study of 47 infants with beriberi and age-matched afebrile and febrile controls in Vientiane. The conventional measures of thiamin deficiency, basal and activated erythrocyte transketolase activities (ETK) and activation (α) coefficients, were assayed along with three markers of cardiac dysfunction - plasma brain natriuretic peptide, N-terminal pro-brain natriuretic peptide, and troponin T. Basal ETK was a better biochemical marker of infantile beriberi than the activation coefficient. Raised plasma troponin T may be a useful indicator of infantile beriberi in babies at risk and in the absence of other evident causes

ACO2 homozygous missense mutation associated with complicated Hereditary spastic paraplegia

Objective: To identify the clinical characteristics and genetic etiology of a family affected with hereditary spastic paraplegia (HSP). Methods: Clinical, genetic, and functional analyses involving genome-wide linkage coupled to whole-exome sequencing in a consanguineous family with complicated HSP. Results: A homozygous missense mutation was identified in the ACO2 gene (c.1240T>G p.Phe414Val) that segregated with HSP complicated by intellectual disability and microcephaly. Lymphoblastoid cell lines of homozygous carrier patients revealed significantly decreased activity of the mitochondrial aconitase enzyme and defective mitochondrial respiration. ACO2 encodes mitochondrial aconitase, an essential enzyme in the Krebs cycle. Recessive mutations in this gene have been previously associated with cerebellar ataxia. Conclusions: Our findings nominate ACO2 as a disease-causing gene for autosomal recessive complicated HSP and provide further support for the central role of mitochondrial defects in the pathogenesis of HSP