(E)-Isopentyl 3-(3,4-dihy­droxy­phen­yl)­acrylate

The title compound, C14H18O4, a derivative of caffeic acid, has an E configuration about the C=C bond. The benzene ring is almost coplanar with the C=C—C(O)—O—C linker [maximum deviation = 0.050 (2) Å], making a dihedral angle of only 4.53 (2)°. In the mol­ecule, the adjacent hy­droxy groups form an O—H⋯O inter­action. In the crystal, mol­ecules are linked by O—H⋯O hydrogen bonds, generating a chain propagating in the [110] direction

FlattenQuant: Breaking Through the Inference Compute-bound for Large Language Models with Per-tensor Quantization

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated state-of-the-art performance across various tasks. However, the latency of inference and the large GPU memory consumption of LLMs restrict their deployment performance. Recently, there have been some efficient attempts to quantize LLMs, yet inference with large batch size or long sequence still has the issue of being compute-bound. Fine-grained quantization methods have showcased their proficiency in achieving low-bit quantization for LLMs, while requiring FP16 data type for linear layer computations, which is time-consuming when dealing with large batch size or long sequence. In this paper, we introduce a method called FlattenQuant, which significantly reduces the maximum value of the tensor by flattening the large channels in the tensor, to achieve low bit per-tensor quantization with minimal accuracy loss. Our experiments show that FlattenQuant can directly use 4 bits to achieve 48.29% of the linear layer calculation in LLMs, with the remaining layers using 8 bits. The 4-bit matrix multiplication introduced in the FlattenQuant method can effectively address the compute-bound caused by large matrix calculation. Our work achieves up to 2$\times$ speedup and 2.3$\times$ memory reduction for LLMs with negligible loss in accuracy

Robo-centric ESDF: A Fast and Accurate Whole-body Collision Evaluation Tool for Any-shape Robotic Planning

For letting mobile robots travel flexibly through complicated environments, increasing attention has been paid to the whole-body collision evaluation. Most existing works either opt for the conservative corridor-based methods that impose strict requirements on the corridor generation, or ESDF-based methods that suffer from high computational overhead. It is still a great challenge to achieve fast and accurate whole-body collision evaluation. In this paper, we propose a Robo-centric ESDF (RC-ESDF) that is pre-built in the robot body frame and is capable of seamlessly applied to any-shape mobile robots, even for those with non-convex shapes. RC-ESDF enjoys lazy collision evaluation, which retains only the minimum information sufficient for whole-body safety constraint and significantly speeds up trajectory optimization. Based on the analytical gradients provided by RC-ESDF, we optimize the position and rotation of robot jointly, with whole-body safety, smoothness, and dynamical feasibility taken into account. Extensive simulation and real-world experiments verified the reliability and generalizability of our method.Comment: Accepted at IROS 202

Activation of the Extracellular Signal-Regulated Kinase Signaling Is Critical for Human Umbilical Cord Mesenchymal Stem Cell Osteogenic Differentiation

Human umbilical cord mesenchymal stem cells (hUCMSCs) are recognized as candidate progenitor cells for bone regeneration. However, the mechanism of hUCMSC osteogenesis remains unclear. In this study, we revealed that mitogen-activated protein kinases (MAPKs) signaling is involved in hUCMSC osteogenic differentiation in vitro. Particularly, the activation of c-Jun N-terminal kinases (JNK) and p38 signaling pathways maintained a consistent level in hUCMSCs through the entire 21-day osteogenic differentiation period. At the same time, the activation of extracellular signal-regulated kinases (ERK) signaling significantly increased from day 5, peaked at day 9, and declined thereafter. Moreover, gene profiling of osteogenic markers, alkaline phosphatase (ALP) activity measurement, and alizarin red staining demonstrated that the application of U0126, a specific inhibitor for ERK activation, completely prohibited hUCMSC osteogenic differentiation. However, when U0126 was removed from the culture at day 9, ERK activation and osteogenic differentiation of hUCMSCs were partially recovered. Together, these findings demonstrate that the activation of ERK signaling is essential for hUCMSC osteogenic differentiation, which points out the significance of ERK signaling pathway to regulate the osteogenic differentiation of hUCMSCs as an alternative cell source for bone tissue engineering. Copyright © 2016 Chen-Shuang Li et al