On the Trend-corrected Variant of Adaptive Stochastic Optimization Methods

Adam-type optimizers, as a class of adaptive moment estimation methods with the exponential moving average scheme, have been successfully used in many applications of deep learning. Such methods are appealing due to the capability on large-scale sparse datasets with high computational efficiency. In this paper, we present a new framework for Adam-type methods with the trend information when updating the parameters with the adaptive step size and gradients. The additional terms in the algorithm promise an efficient movement on the complex cost surface, and thus the loss would converge more rapidly. We show empirically the importance of adding the trend component, where our framework outperforms the conventional Adam and AMSGrad methods constantly on the classical models with several real-world datasets.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures, 2 tables, IJCNN202

An Unstructured Phylogeographic Pattern with Extensive Gene Flow in an Endemic Bird of South China: Collared Finchbill (Spizixos semitorques)

Recent phylogeographical studies indicated that glacial oscillations played a key role on the phylogeographic pattern of extant species. As most studies have previously been carried out on heavily ice-covered regions, such as in European and North American regions, potential effects of climatic oscillations on species that are distributed on ice-free regions are less known. To address this, we investigated the phylogeographic pattern of an avian species endemic to South China, which was not glaciated during the Pleistocene glaciations. By using 2142 bp mitochondrial DNA, we identified 89 haplotypes defined by 39 polymorphic sites. A combination of high haplotype diversity (0.786–1.00) and low nucleotide diversity (0.00132–0.00252) was detected among geographic populations. Explicit genetic divergence was observed between S. s. semitorques and S. s. cinereicapillus but not detected among geographic populations of S. s. semitorques. Divergence time of the two subspecies was dated back to 87 Kyr which is congruent with the interglacial MIS 5. A weak phylogeographic structure due to strong gene flow among geographic populations was identified in this species, suggesting complex topography of South China has not formed barriers for this species

An injectable, self-healing and MMP-inhibiting hyaluronic acid gel via iron coordination

Regulating the activity of matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) is a potential strategy for osteoarthritis (OA) therapy, although delivering this effect in a spatially and temporally localised fashion remains a challenge. Here, we report an injectable and self-healing hydrogel enabling factor-free MMP regulation and biomechanical competence in situ. The hydrogel is realised within one minute upon room temperature coordination between hyaluronic acid (HA) and a cell-friendly iron-glutathione complex in aqueous environment. The resultant gel displayed up to 300% in shear strain and tolerance towards ATDC 5 chondrocytes, in line with 21 the elasticity and biocompatibility requirements for connective tissue application. Significantly enhanced inhibition of MMP-13 activity was achieved after 12 hours in vitro, compared with a commercial HA injection (OSTENIL® PLUS). Noteworthy, 24-hour incubation of a clinical synovial fluid sample collected from a late-stage OA patient with the reported hydrogel was still shown to downregulate synovial fluid MMP activity (100.0±17.6 % à 81.0±7.5 %), with at least comparable extent to the case of the OSTENIL® PLUS-treated SF group (100.0±17.6 % à 92.3±27.3 %). These results therefore open up new possibilities in the use of HA as both mechanically-competent hydrogel as well as a mediator of MMP regulation for OA therapy