RobustFair: Adversarial Evaluation through Fairness Confusion Directed Gradient Search

The trustworthiness of DNNs is often challenged by their vulnerability to minor adversarial perturbations, which may not only undermine prediction accuracy (robustness) but also cause biased predictions for similar inputs (individual fairness). Accurate fairness has been recently proposed to enforce a harmonic balance between accuracy and individual fairness. It induces the notion of fairness confusion matrix to categorize predictions as true fair, true biased, false fair, and false biased. This paper proposes a harmonic evaluation approach, RobustFair, for the accurate fairness of DNNs, using adversarial perturbations crafted through fairness confusion directed gradient search. By using Taylor expansions to approximate the ground truths of adversarial instances, RobustFair can particularly identify the robustness defects entangled for spurious fairness, which are often elusive in robustness evaluation, and missing in individual fairness evaluation. RobustFair can boost robustness and individual fairness evaluations by identifying robustness or fairness defects simultaneously. Empirical case studies on fairness benchmark datasets show that, compared with the state-of-the-art white-box robustness and individual fairness testing approaches, RobustFair detects significantly 1.77-11.87 times adversarial perturbations, yielding 1.83-13.12 times biased and 1.53-8.22 times false instances. The adversarial instances can then be effectively exploited to improve the accurate fairness (and hence accuracy and individual fairness) of the original deep neural network through retraining. The empirical case studies further show that the adversarial instances identified by RobustFair outperform those identified by the other testing approaches, in promoting 21% accurate fairness and 19% individual fairness on multiple sensitive attributes, without losing accuracy at all or even promoting it by up to 4%

Tryptophan can alleviate the inhibition in growth and immunity of tilapia (GIFT Oreochromis spp.) induced by high dietary soybean meal level

A 85-day feeding trial was designed to verify the effects of soybean meal on growth, feed utilization, antioxidants, and immune response of tilapia (GIFT Oreochromis spp.), and evaluated the effects of dietary tryptophan on alleviating the negative responses induced by high inclusion of soybean meal. Five experimental diets, two of which substituted 15 % and 45 % of the fish meal with soybean meal, the others supplemented with 0.2 %, 0.4 % and 0.6 % L-tryptophan on the basis of 45 % soybean meal, respectively, were fed 400 juvenile fish (initial weight: 2.98 ± 0.04 g). The results showed that the crude ash content, red blood cell count (RBC), lipase (LPS) and glutathione peroxidase (GSH-Px) activities of tilapia significantly decreased when the soybean meal replaced fish meal by 45 % (p  0.05). However, supplementation with tryptophan in the high soybean meal replacement groups significantly improved the final weight, weight gain rate (WGR), specific growth rate (SGR), phagocytosis index (PI), RBC, trypsin (TPS), LPS and GSH-Px activities of tilapia (p < 0.05), and the apparent digestibility and feed coefficient of tilapia were significantly decreased (p < 0.05). Taken together, these results suggested that excessive soybean meal inhibited the feed utilization and immunity of tilapia to a certain extent, while the inclusion of 0.2 %−0.4 % tryptophan in the diet could alleviate the negative effects of high soybean meal diet in tilapia. This study will provide ideas and a theoretical basis for further expanding the application of soybean meal in tilapia feed

De Novo Design of Spiro-Type Hole-Transporting Material: Anisotropic Regulation Toward Efficient and Stable Perovskite Solar Cells.

2,2,7,7-Tetrakis(N,N-di-p-methoxyphenyl)-amine-9,9-spirobifluorene (Spiro-OMeTAD) represents the state-of-the-art hole-transporting material (HTM) in n-i-p perovskite solar cells (PSCs). However, its susceptibility to stability issues has been a long-standing concern. In this study, we embark on a comprehensive exploration of the untapped potential within the family of spiro-type HTMs using an innovative anisotropic regulation strategy. Diverging from conventional approaches that can only modify spirobifluorene with single functional group, this approach allows us to independently tailor the two orthogonal components of the spiro-skeleton at the molecular level. The newly designed HTM, SF-MPA-MCz, features enhanced thermal stability, precise energy level alignment, superior film morphology, and optimized interfacial properties when compared to Spiro-OMeTAD, which contribute to a remarkable power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 24.53% for PSCs employing SF-MPA-MCz with substantially improved thermal stability and operational stability. Note that the optimal concentration for SF-MPA-MCz solution is only 30&nbsp;mg/ml, significantly lower than Spiro-OMeTAD (&gt;70&nbsp;mg/ml), which could remarkably reduce the cost especially for large-area processing in future commercialization. This work presents a promising avenue for the versatile design of multifunctional HTMs, offering a blueprint for achieving efficient and stable PSCs

Distribution of Plasmids in Distinct <i>Leptospira</i> Pathogenic Species

<div><p>Leptospirosis, caused by pathogenic <i>Leptospira</i>, is a worldwide zoonotic infection. The genus <i>Leptospira</i> includes at least 21 species clustered into three groups—pathogens, non-pathogens, and intermediates—based on 16S rRNA phylogeny. Research on <i>Leptospira</i> is difficult due to slow growth and poor transformability of the pathogens. Recent identification of extrachromosomal elements besides the two chromosomes in <i>L</i>. <i>interrogans</i> has provided new insight into genome complexity of the genus <i>Leptospira</i>. The large size, low copy number, and high similarity of the sequence of these extrachromosomal elements with the chromosomes present challenges in isolating and detecting them without careful genome assembly. In this study, two extrachromosomal elements were identified in <i>L</i>. <i>borgpetersenii</i> serovar Ballum strain 56604 through whole genome assembly combined with S1 nuclease digestion following pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (S1-PFGE) analysis. Further, extrachromosomal elements in additional 15 Chinese epidemic strains of <i>Leptospira</i>, comprising <i>L</i>. <i>borgpetersenii</i>, <i>L</i>. <i>weilii</i>, and <i>L</i>. <i>interrogans</i>, were successfully separated and identified, independent of genome sequence data. Southern blot hybridization with extrachromosomal element-specific probes, designated as lcp1, lcp2 and lcp3-<i>rep</i>, further confirmed their occurrences as extrachromosomal elements. In total, 24 plasmids were detected in 13 out of 15 tested strains, among which 11 can hybridize with the lcp1-<i>rep</i> probe and 11 with the lcp2-<i>rep</i> probe, whereas two can hybridize with the lcp3-<i>rep</i> probe. None of them are likely to be species-specific. Blastp search of the lcp1, lcp2, and lcp3-<i>rep</i> genes with a nonredundant protein database of <i>Leptospira</i> species genomes showed that their homologous sequences are widely distributed among clades of pathogens but not non-pathogens or intermediates. These results suggest that the plasmids are widely distributed in <i>Leptospira</i> species, and further elucidation of their biological significance might contribute to our understanding of biology and infectivity of pathogenic spirochetes.</p></div

The distribution of lcp1-<i>rep</i>, lcp2-<i>rep</i> and lcp3-<i>rep</i> in sequenced <i>Leptospira</i> strains.

<p>“-” represents zero.</p><p>The distribution of lcp1-<i>rep</i>, lcp2-<i>rep</i> and lcp3-<i>rep</i> in sequenced <i>Leptospira</i> strains.</p