Towards Hard-pose Virtual Try-on via 3D-aware Global Correspondence Learning

In this paper, we target image-based person-to-person virtual try-on in the presence of diverse poses and large viewpoint variations. Existing methods are restricted in this setting as they estimate garment warping flows mainly based on 2D poses and appearance, which omits the geometric prior of the 3D human body shape. Moreover, current garment warping methods are confined to localized regions, which makes them ineffective in capturing long-range dependencies and results in inferior flows with artifacts. To tackle these issues, we present 3D-aware global correspondences, which are reliable flows that jointly encode global semantic correlations, local deformations, and geometric priors of 3D human bodies. Particularly, given an image pair depicting the source and target person, (a) we first obtain their pose-aware and high-level representations via two encoders, and introduce a coarse-to-fine decoder with multiple refinement modules to predict the pixel-wise global correspondence. (b) 3D parametric human models inferred from images are incorporated as priors to regularize the correspondence refinement process so that our flows can be 3D-aware and better handle variations of pose and viewpoint. (c) Finally, an adversarial generator takes the garment warped by the 3D-aware flow, and the image of the target person as inputs, to synthesize the photo-realistic try-on result. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks and our HardPose test set demonstrate the superiority of our method against the SOTA try-on approaches.Comment: 36th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2022

The intrinsic disorder related alloy scattering in ZrNiSn half-Heusler thermoelectric materials

The intrinsic structural disorder dramatically affects the thermal and electronic transport in semiconductors. Although normally considered an ordered compound, the half-Heusler ZrNiSn displays many transport characteristics of a disordered alloy. Similar to the (Zr,Hf)NiSn based solid solutions, the unsubstituted ZrNiSn compound also exhibits charge transport dominated by alloy scattering, as demonstrated in this work. The unexpected charge transport, even in ZrNiSn which is normally considered fully ordered, can be explained by the Ni partially filling interstitial sites in this half-Heusler system. The influence of the disordering and defects in crystal structure on the electron transport process has also been quantitatively analyzed in ZrNiSn1-xSbx with carrier concentration n_H ranging from 5.0×10^(19) to 2.3×10^(21) cm^(−3) by changing Sb dopant content. The optimized carrier concentration n_H ≈ 3–4×10^(20) cm^(−2) results in ZT ≈ 0.8 at 875K. This work suggests that MNiSn (M = Hf, Zr, Ti) and perhaps most other half-Heusler thermoelectric materials should be considered highly disordered especially when trying to understand the electronic and phonon structure and transport features

Electron and phonon transport in Co-doped FeV_(0.6)Nb_(0.4)Sb half-Heusler thermoelectric materials

The electron and phonon transport characteristics of n-type Fe_(1−x) Co_x V_(0.6)Nb_(0.4)Sb half-Heusler thermoelectric compounds is analyzed. The acoustic phonon scattering is dominant in the carrier transport. The deformation potential of E_(def) = 14.1 eV and the density of state effective mass m^* ≈ 2.0 m_e are derived under a single parabolic band assumption. The band gap is calculated to be ∼0.3 eV. Electron and phonon mean free paths are estimated based on the low and high temperature measurements. The electron mean free path is higher than the phonon one above room temperature, which is consistent with the experimental result that the electron mobility decreases more than the lattice thermal conductivity by grain refinement to enhance boundary scattering. A maximum ZT value of ∼0.33 is obtained at 650 K for x = 0.015, an increase by ∼60% compared with FeVSb. The optimal doping level is found to be ∼3.0 × 10^(20) cm^(−3) at 600 K

Simultaneous Epigenetic Perturbation and Genome Imaging Reveal Distinct Roles of H3K9me3 in Chromatin Architecture and Transcription [preprint]

Despite the long-observed correlation between H3K9me3, chromatin architecture and transcriptional repression, how H3K9me3 regulates genome higher-order organization and transcriptional activity in living cells remains unclear. Here we develop EpiGo (Epigenetic perturbation induced Genome organization)-KRAB to introduce H3K9me3 at hundreds of loci spanning megabases on human chromosome 19 and simultaneously track genome organization. EpiGo-KRAB is sufficient to induce de novo heterochromatin-like domain formation, which requires SETDB1, a methyltransferase of H3K9me3. Unexpectedly, EpiGo-KRAB induced heterochromatin-like domain does not result in widespread gene repression except a small set of genes with concurrent loss of H3K4me3 and H3K27ac. Ectopic H3K9me3 appears to spread in inactive regions but is largely restricted to transcriptional initiation sites in active regions. Finally, Hi-C analysis showed that EpiGo-KRAB induced to reshape existing compartments. These results reveal the role of H3K9me3 in genome organization could be partially separated from its function in gene repression

Simultaneous epigenetic perturbation and genome imaging reveal distinct roles of H3K9me3 in chromatin architecture and transcription

INTRODUCTION: Despite the long-observed correlation between H3K9me3, chromatin architecture, and transcriptional repression, how H3K9me3 regulates genome higher-order organization and transcriptional activity in living cells remains unclear. RESULT: Here, we develop EpiGo (Epigenetic perturbation induced Genome organization)-KRAB to introduce H3K9me3 at hundreds of loci spanning megabases on human chromosome 19 and simultaneously track genome organization. EpiGo-KRAB is sufficient to induce genomic clustering and de novo heterochromatin-like domain formation, which requires SETDB1, a methyltransferase of H3K9me3. Unexpectedly, EpiGo-KRAB-induced heterochromatin-like domain does not result in widespread gene repression except a small set of genes with concurrent loss of H3K4me3 and H3K27ac. Ectopic H3K9me3 appears to spread in inactive regions but is largely restricted from transcriptional initiation sites in active regions. Finally, Hi-C analysis showed that EpiGo-KRAB reshapes existing compartments mainly at compartment boundaries. CONCLUSIONS: These results reveal the role of H3K9me3 in genome organization could be partially separated from its function in gene repression

Investigating the Potential Roles of Human (Endothelin convert enzyme-1) ECE-1 in Congenital Heart Diseases Using a Humanized Yeast System of Apoptosis

CHDs (congenital heart diseases) are the most common birth defects that affects over 1% of new-borns and there are approximately 30-50% of mortality caused by birth defects is due to the occurrence of CHDs in the world, however, CHD is a complex disease, the prognosis of CHDs is not optimistic. Therefore, it is critical to explore the mechanism of CHDs and new strategy of treatment is urgently needed. ECE-1 (Endothelin convert enzyme-1) plays a significant role in cardiovascular development and cardiac defects. ECE-1 has four isoforms that are located at different position in the cell, however, the function of four isoforms remains unclear. Therefore, we are interested in studying whether the four isoforms have different function in inducing apoptosis through mitochondria due to the high correlation between CHDs and apoptosis. The B cell lymphoma 2 (Bcl-2) family consists of a number of pro-apoptotic members (e.g., Bax) and anti-apoptotic members (e.g., Bcl-xL), which regulate apoptosis by activating mitochondrial events. The heterologous expression of human Bax and Bcl-xL in budding yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) resulted in similar effects to those in mammalian cells. In this study, a humanized yeast system has been generated for mimicking human Bax-induced apoptosis and the heterologous expression of human ECE-1 isoforms was involved. Based on this system, the potential relationship between Bax-induced growth defect and several important mitochondrial genes was preliminarily investigated. Furthermore, the phenotypes of ECE-1 isoforms have been identified by analyzing the growth defect of yeast cells. ECE-1c was the most powerful enhancer for Bax-induced growth defect, the function of which is be able to affect the expression of mitochondrial genes related to outer membrane translocases. These findings indicated that ECE-1 might play an important role in inducing apoptosis and new perspectives for further clarifying the mechanism, prediction or therapy of CHDs.</p

Adaptive Recommender System for an Intelligent Classroom Teaching Model

The development of information technology has facilitated the use of the intelligent classroom model supported by information technology to improve the college students’ comprehensive quality and ability. However, the existing models are too sophisticated to be applied to the actual teaching process, and ignore the individualized teaching characteristics of students. Therefore, an intelligent classroom model with adaptive learning resource recommendation was proposed. First, the entire teaching process was divided into three stages which were used to combine teachers’ teaching and students’ learning. Then the key problems of the learning resources recommendation system was studied and a learning resource recommendation based on TR-LDA (Teaching Resources-Latent Dirichlet Allocation) was proposed and how to be achieved. Finally, the proposed intelligent classroom model was verified in practical teaching. Results show that the intelligent classroom model with adaptive learning resources recommendation can help to improve students’ learning efficiency. The relevant conclusions can be used as a reference for exploring the use of information technology to improve the quality of undergraduate professional course teaching

Adaptive Recommender System for an Intelligent Classroom Teaching Model

The development of information technology has facilitated the use of the intelligent classroom model supported by information technology to improve the college students’ comprehensive quality and ability. However, the existing models are too sophisticated to be applied to the actual teaching process, and ignore the individualized teaching characteristics of students. Therefore, an intelligent classroom model with adaptive learning resource recommendation was proposed. First, the entire teaching process was divided into three stages which were used to combine teachers’ teaching and students’ learning. Then the key problems of the learning resources recommendation system was studied and a learning resource recommendation based on TR-LDA (Teaching Resources-Latent Dirichlet Allocation) was proposed and how to be achieved. Finally, the proposed intelligent classroom model was verified in practical teaching. Results show that the intelligent classroom model with adaptive learning resources recommendation can help to improve students’ learning efficiency. The relevant conclusions can be used as a reference for exploring the use of information technology to improve the quality of undergraduate professional course teaching