SgVA-CLIP: Semantic-guided Visual Adapting of Vision-Language Models for Few-shot Image Classification

Although significant progress has been made in few-shot learning, most of existing few-shot image classification methods require supervised pre-training on a large amount of samples of base classes, which limits their generalization ability in real world application. Recently, large-scale Vision-Language Pre-trained models (VLPs) have been gaining increasing attention in few-shot learning because they can provide a new paradigm for transferable visual representation learning with easily available text on the Web. However, the VLPs may neglect detailed visual information that is difficult to describe by language sentences, but important for learning an effective classifier to distinguish different images. To address the above problem, we propose a new framework, named Semantic-guided Visual Adapting (SgVA), which can effectively extend vision-language pre-trained models to produce discriminative adapted visual features by comprehensively using an implicit knowledge distillation, a vision-specific contrastive loss, and a cross-modal contrastive loss. The implicit knowledge distillation is designed to transfer the fine-grained cross-modal knowledge to guide the updating of the vision adapter. State-of-the-art results on 13 datasets demonstrate that the adapted visual features can well complement the cross-modal features to improve few-shot image classification

The Effect of Safflower Yellow on Spinal Cord Ischemia Reperfusion Injury in Rabbits

Safflower yellow (SY) is the safflower extract and is the one of traditional Chinese medicine. The aim of the present work was to investigate the effect of SY on spinal cord ischemia reperfusion injury (SCIRI) in rabbits. The models of spinal cord ischemia reperfusion (SI/R) were constructed, and the degree of the post-ischemic injury was assessed by means of the neurological deficit scores and plasma levels of lipid peroxidation reactioin and neuronal morphologic changes. SCIRI remarkably affected the functional activities of the hind limbs and activated lipid peroxidation reaction. SY could attenuate apoptosis and SCIRI by enhancing Bcl-2 expression and inhibiting Bax and caspase-3 activation

CLIP-VG: Self-paced Curriculum Adapting of CLIP for Visual Grounding

Visual Grounding (VG) is a crucial topic in the field of vision and language, which involves locating a specific region described by expressions within an image. To reduce the reliance on manually labeled data, unsupervised methods have been developed to locate regions using pseudo-labels. However, the performance of existing unsupervised methods is highly dependent on the quality of pseudo-labels and these methods always encounter issues with limited diversity. In order to utilize vision and language pre-trained models to address the grounding problem, and reasonably take advantage of pseudo-labels, we propose CLIP-VG, a novel method that can conduct self-paced curriculum adapting of CLIP with pseudo-language labels. We propose a simple yet efficient end-to-end network architecture to realize the transfer of CLIP to the visual grounding. Based on the CLIP-based architecture, we further propose single-source and multi-source curriculum adapting algorithms, which can progressively find more reliable pseudo-labels to learn an optimal model, thereby achieving a balance between reliability and diversity for the pseudo-language labels. Our method outperforms the current state-of-the-art unsupervised method by a significant margin on RefCOCO/+/g datasets in both single-source and multi-source scenarios, with improvements ranging from 6.78% to 10.67% and 11.39% to 14.87%, respectively. Furthermore, our approach even outperforms existing weakly supervised methods. The code and models are available at https://github.com/linhuixiao/CLIP-VG.Comment: Accepted by IEEE Transaction on Multimedia (2023), Paper page: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10269126. Code will be released at https://github.com/linhuixiao/CLIP-V

Pharmacokinetics, tissue distribution, excretion, and metabolism of a novel antitumor agent, gambogenic acid, in rats

The plasma pharmacokinetics, tissue distribution, excretion, and metabolism of gambogenic acid (GNA), potential antitumor candidate, were investigated in rats. GNA showed linear pharmacokinetic characteristics in rats within the test dose (1, 2, and 4 mg/kg). The t1/2β was 40.38-41.16 min. GNA showed an extensive distribution into multiple tissues, and the bile excretion is the major pathway of excretion, accounting for 52.12 %. About 40 % of GNA might undergo metabolism in vivo and the main phase I metabolites of GNA may be 10-hydroxygambogenic acid and 9,10-epoxygambogenic acid.Colegio de Farmacéuticos de la Provincia de Buenos Aire

Debromination of Hexabromocyclododecane by Anaerobic Consortium and Characterization of Functional Bacteria

A microbial consortium which can efficiently remove hexabromocyclododecane (HBCD) under anaerobic condition have been successfully enriched over 300 days. Under the optimal conditions, the degradation efficiency was 92.4% removal after treatment of 12 days with original addition of 500 μg/L HBCD, yielding 321.7 μg/L bromide in total as well. A typical debromination product, dibromocyclododecadiene (DBCD), was detected during the degradation process. The debromination profiles of three main HBCD diastereomers fitted well with first-order model (R2: 0.96–0.99), with the rate constants ranging from 1.3 × 10-1 to 1.9 × 10-1. The microbial community analysis by high throughput sequencing showed that the composition of the microbial communities varied dynamically with time and the population of functional bacteria increase sharply after enrichment. The population of Bacteroidetes increased from 5 to 47%. And some bacteria which are relatively minority in population at the beginning, such as Azospira oryzae (OTU2), Microbacterium (OTU13), and Achromobacter insolitus (OTU39) increased more than 22 times after enrichment (from 0.5 to 13%, 12%, and 11%, respectively). However, no reported dehalogenating bacteria were found after enrichment. And the contribution for debromination may come from new dehalogenating bacteria. All in all, the present study provided in-depth information on anaerobic microbial communities for HBCD removal by debromination

Pharmacokinetics, tissue distribution, excretion, and metabolism of a novel antitumor agent, gambogenic acid, in rats

The plasma pharmacokinetics, tissue distribution, excretion, and metabolism of gambogenic acid (GNA), potential antitumor candidate, were investigated in rats. GNA showed linear pharmacokinetic characteristics in rats within the test dose (1, 2, and 4 mg/kg). The t1/2β was 40.38-41.16 min. GNA showed an extensive distribution into multiple tissues, and the bile excretion is the major pathway of excretion, accounting for 52.12 %. About 40 % of GNA might undergo metabolism in vivo and the main phase I metabolites of GNA may be 10-hydroxygambogenic acid and 9,10-epoxygambogenic acid.Colegio de Farmacéuticos de la Provincia de Buenos Aire

Structural, magnetic, and electronic transport properties of (Sr0.9Ca0.1)3Ru2O7 single crystal

We have studied the structural, magnetic, and electronic transport properties of (Sr0.9Ca0.1)3Ru2O7 using single crystals grown by a floating-zone technique. The structure analysis by Rietveld refinements reveals that the Ca substitution for Sr intensifies the structure distortion; the rotation angle of the RuO6 octahedron increases. This structure change tunes magnetic and transport properties dramatically. The magnetic ground state switches from an itinerant metamagnetic state for Sr3Ru2O7 to a nearly ferromagnetic state for (Sr0.9Ca0.1)3Ru2O7. The Fermi liquid behavior occurs in Sr3Ru2O7, but is suppressed in (Sr0.9Ca0.1)3Ru2O7. These results strongly suggest that lattice, spin, and charge degrees of freedom are strongly coupled in this system. The band width narrowing caused by the structure distortion should be responsible for the enhancement of ferromagnetic correlations and the change of transport propertie

Structural, magnetic, and electronic transport properties of (Sr0.9Ca0.1)3Ru2O7 single crystal

We have studied the structural, magnetic, and electronic transport properties of (Sr0.9Ca0.1)3Ru2O7 using single crystals grown by a floating-zone technique. The structure analysis by Rietveld refinements reveals that the Ca substitution for Sr intensifies the structure distortion; the rotation angle of the RuO6 octahedron increases. This structure change tunes magnetic and transport properties dramatically. The magnetic ground state switches from an itinerant metamagnetic state for Sr3Ru2O7 to a nearly ferromagnetic state for (Sr0.9Ca0.1)3Ru2O7. The Fermi liquid behavior occurs in Sr3Ru2O7, but is suppressed in (Sr0.9Ca0.1)3Ru2O7. These results strongly suggest that lattice, spin, and charge degrees of freedom are strongly coupled in this system. The band width narrowing caused by the structure distortion should be responsible for the enhancement of ferromagnetic correlations and the change of transport propertie

Interplay between the lattice and spin degrees of freedom in (Sr1−xCax)3Ru2O7

The Sr1−xCax3Ru2O7 solid solution series exhibits complex magnetic ground states, ranging from an itinerant metamagnetic state, to a quasi-two-dimensional 2D heavy-mass nearly ferromagneticFM state, and finally to a long-range antiferromagnetically ordered state Z. Qu et al. Phys. Rev. B. 78, R180407 2008. In this paper, we investigate the evolution of structural distortion and magnetic anisotropy with Ca content in this material system. Our results show that both the magnetic phase transitions and magnetic anistropy of this system couple with the evolution of structure distortion. The transformation from the itinerant metamagnetic to the nearly ferromagnetic state is accompanied by an increase in the rotation of the RuO6 octahedra while the transition from 2D nearly FM state to the antiferromagnetic state coincides with the onset of tilting of the RuO6 octahedra. Octahedral tilting also causes magnetic anistropy. These results demonstrate that the lattice and spin degrees of freedom are coupled in (Sr1−xCax)3Ru2O7