All in One: Exploring Unified Vision-Language Tracking with Multi-Modal Alignment

Current mainstream vision-language (VL) tracking framework consists of three parts, \ie a visual feature extractor, a language feature extractor, and a fusion model. To pursue better performance, a natural modus operandi for VL tracking is employing customized and heavier unimodal encoders, and multi-modal fusion models. Albeit effective, existing VL trackers separate feature extraction and feature integration, resulting in extracted features that lack semantic guidance and have limited target-aware capability in complex scenarios, \eg similar distractors and extreme illumination. In this work, inspired by the recent success of exploring foundation models with unified architecture for both natural language and computer vision tasks, we propose an All-in-One framework, which learns joint feature extraction and interaction by adopting a unified transformer backbone. Specifically, we mix raw vision and language signals to generate language-injected vision tokens, which we then concatenate before feeding into the unified backbone architecture. This approach achieves feature integration in a unified backbone, removing the need for carefully-designed fusion modules and resulting in a more effective and efficient VL tracking framework. To further improve the learning efficiency, we introduce a multi-modal alignment module based on cross-modal and intra-modal contrastive objectives, providing more reasonable representations for the unified All-in-One transformer backbone. Extensive experiments on five benchmarks, \ie OTB99-L, TNL2K, LaSOT, LaSOT$_{\rm Ext}$ and WebUAV-3M, demonstrate the superiority of the proposed tracker against existing state-of-the-arts on VL tracking. Codes will be made publicly available.Comment: Work in progres

Pregnancy Loss and Risk of All-Cause Mortality in Chinese Women: Findings From the China Kadoorie Biobank

Objectives: Pregnancy loss is a common obstetric complication that may be associated with maternal mortality. However, evidence is sparse and inconsistent. This study aims to investigate the association between pregnancy loss with the risk of all-cause mortality among Chinese women.Methods: Data on 299,582 women aged 30–79 years old from the China Kadoorie Biobank were used. Cox proportional hazard regression was conducted to investigate the association between the occurrence of pregnancy loss and all-cause mortality.Results: Two or more pregnancy losses was associated with long-term all-cause mortality (adjusted hazard ratio (aHR) of 1.10, 95% CI: 1.03–1.18). Specifically, more than one spontaneous abortion or stillbirth was associated with long-term all-cause mortality (aHR 1.10, 95% CI: 1.01–1.21 and 1.14, 95% CI: 1.04–1.25, respectively). When stratified by the presence of cardiovascular disease or diabetes, as well as age at baseline, two or more pregnancy losses in women aged ≥50 diagnosed with cardiovascular disease (aHR 1.32, 95% CI: 1.18–1.48) or diabetes (aHR 1.30, 95% CI: 1.06–1.60) was associated with all-cause mortality.Conclusion: Recurrent pregnancy loss, in particular two or more spontaneous abortions and stillbirths were associated with increased risk of all-cause mortality. The associations between recurrent pregnancy losses and all-cause mortality were more pronounced in women aged ≥50 with cardiovascular disease or diabetes at baseline

A novel IgE epitope-specific antibodies-based sandwich ELISA for sensitive measurement of immunoreactivity changes of peanut allergen Ara h 2 in processed foods

BackgroundPeanut is an important source of dietary protein for human beings, but it is also recognized as one of the eight major food allergens. Binding of IgE antibodies to specific epitopes in peanut allergens plays important roles in initiating peanut-allergic reactions, and Ara h 2 is widely considered as the most potent peanut allergen and the best predictor of peanut allergy. Therefore, Ara h 2 IgE epitopes can serve as useful biomarkers for prediction of IgE-binding variations of Ara h 2 and peanut in foods. This study aimed to develop and validate an IgE epitope-specific antibodies (IgE-EsAbs)-based sandwich ELISA (sELISA) for detection of Ara h 2 and measurement of Ara h 2 IgE-immunoreactivity changes in foods.MethodsDEAE-Sepharose Fast Flow anion-exchange chromatography combining with SDS-PAGE gel extraction were applied to purify Ara h 2 from raw peanut. Hybridoma and epitope vaccine techniques were employed to generate a monoclonal antibody against a major IgE epitope of Ara h 2 and a polyclonal antibody against 12 IgE epitopes of Ara h 2, respectively. ELISA was carried out to evaluate the target binding and specificity of the generated IgE-EsAbs. Subsequently, IgE-EsAbs-based sELISA was developed to detect Ara h 2 and its allergenic residues in food samples. The IgE-binding capacity of Ara h 2 and peanut in foods was determined by competitive ELISA. The dose-effect relationship between the Ara h 2 IgE epitope content and Ara h 2 (or peanut) IgE-binding ability was further established to validate the reliability of the developed sELISA in measuring IgE-binding variations of Ara h 2 and peanut in foods.ResultsThe obtained Ara h 2 had a purity of 94.44%. Antibody characterization revealed that the IgE-EsAbs recognized the target IgE epitope(s) of Ara h 2 and exhibited high specificity. Accordingly, an IgE-EsAbs-based sELISA using these antibodies was able to detect Ara h 2 and its allergenic residues in food samples, with high sensitivity (a limit of detection of 0.98 ng/mL), accuracy (a mean bias of 0.88%), precision (relative standard deviation < 16.50%), specificity, and recovery (an average recovery of 98.28%). Moreover, the developed sELISA could predict IgE-binding variations of Ara h 2 and peanut in foods, as verified by using sera IgE derived from peanut-allergic individuals.ConclusionThis novel immunoassay could be a user-friendly method to monitor low level of Ara h 2 and to preliminary predict in vitro potential allergenicity of Ara h 2 and peanut in processed foods

A tau fragment links depressive-like behaviors and cognitive declines in Alzheimer’s disease mouse models through attenuating mitochondrial function

IntroductionAlzheimer’s disease (AD) is the most prevalent neurodegenerative disease characterized by extracellular senile plaques including amyloid-β peptides and intracellular neurofibrillary tangles consisting of abnormal Tau. Depression is one of the most common neuropsychiatric symptoms in AD, and clinical evidence demonstrates that depressive symptoms accelerate the cognitive deficit of AD patients. However, the underlying molecular mechanisms of depressive symptoms present in the process of AD remain unclear.MethodsDepressive-like behaviors and cognitive decline in hTau mice were induced by chronic restraint stress (CRS). Computational prediction and molecular experiments supported that an asparagine endopeptidase (AEP)-derived Tau fragment, Tau N368 interacts with peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor delta (PPAR-δ). Further behavioral studies investigated the role of Tau N368-PPAR-δ interaction in depressive-like behaviors and cognitive declines of AD models exposed to CRS.ResultsWe found that mitochondrial dysfunction was positively associated with depressive-like behaviors and cognitive deficits in hTau mice. Chronic stress increased Tau N368 and promoted the interaction of Tau N368 with PPAR-δ, repressing PPAR-δ–mediated transactivation in the hippocampus of mice. Then we predicted and identified the binding sites of PPAR-δ. Finally, inhibition of AEP, clearance of Tau N368 and pharmacological activation of PPAR-δ effectively alleviated CRS-induced depressive-like behaviors and cognitive decline in mice.ConclusionThese results demonstrate that Tau N368 in the hippocampus impairs mitochondrial function by suppressing PPAR-δ, facilitating the occurrence of depressive-like behaviors and cognitive decline. Therefore, our findings may provide new mechanistic insight in the pathophysiology of depression-like phenotype in mouse models of Alzheimer’s disease

Bridge Employment and Longevity: Evidence from a 10-year follow-up cohort study in 0.16 million Chinese

Objectives: Bridge employment has been encouraged by many countries worldwide as the societies age rapidly. However, the health impact on bridge employment is not consistent in previous studies. This study aims to explore the association between bridge employment and the long-term health outcome among the Chinese population.Method: In this prospective cohort study, we used a subset of the China Kadoorie Biobank study, in which 163,619 participants who reached the statutory age of retirement at baseline (2004-2008) were included in this study. Mortality statistics were obtained from death registries in the Death Surveillance Points system annually. We used a Cox proportional hazard model to analyze the association between bridge employment and all-cause mortality.Results: Overall, we found that compared to retired/non-employed men and women, hazards of all-cause mortality were lower in older people with bridge employment (Men: 0.82, 95% CI: 0.77-0.88; Women: 0.79, 95% CI: 0.74-0.94) in healthy populations. The protective effect of bridge employment was stronger among older adults living in rural areas and among those from a relatively low socioeconomic status.Conclusion: The lower risk of all-cause mortality associated with bridge employment was consistently observed among older men and women. Our findings may provide important insights from the health dimension on the retirement policy-making in China as a hyper-ageing society

True triaxial mechanical characteristics of tight sandstone with different oil and water staturation

The occurrence of fluids such as water, oil or natural gas in tight sandstone reservoirs may affect the mechanical characteristics of tight sandstone. This paper selects tight sandstones of Yanchang Formation in Panlong area of Ordos Basin, and uses YSZS-2000 multifunctional electro-hydraulic servo rock true triaxial testing machine to study the mechanical characteristics of tight sandstones with different oil and water saturation degrees. Results show that: ①The oil contents have a weakening effect on the peak stress and elastic modulus of sandstones. Both the peak stress and elastic modulus decrease with the increase of oil saturation. The peak stress can be reduced by 5.35% and the elastic modulus can be reduced by 11.38% when it is "quasi-saturated". ②Sandstones containing water can be divided into the Pa-type and the Pb-type according to the water absorption characteristic curve. Water content weakens the peak stress of sandstones. When saturated, the peak stresses of a Pa-type and a Pb-type sandstone can be reduced by 11.58% and 15.95%, respectively. ③After observing the internal structure of the oil-soaked sandstone, it is found that the oil is concentrated in the fractures between the sandstone minerals, which lubricates the fractured surface and reduces the bearing capacity of the sandstone. The research outcomes of this article can provide a reliable basis for the exploitation of tight oil and gas

Tuning oxygen vacancy and growth step for the high performance of Nd 1+x Ba 2−x Cu 3 O y bulk cryomagnets

International audienceThe Nd 1+x Ba 2−x Cu 3 O y superconductor is considered to be one of the most promising materials in the REBaCu 3 O y family owing to its excellent properties of high critical transition temperature ( T c ) and high current density