Pixel-level intra-domain adaptation for semantic segmentation

Recent advances in unsupervised domain adaptation have achieved remarkable performance on semantic segmentation tasks. Despite such progress, existing works mainly focus on bridging the inter-domain gaps between the source and target domain, while only few of them noticed the intra-domain gaps within the target data. In this work, we propose a pixel-level intra-domain adaptation approach to reduce the intra-domain gaps within the target data. Compared with image-level methods, ours treats each pixel as an instance, which adapts the segmentation model at a more fine-grained level. Specifically, we first conduct the inter-domain adaptation between the source and target domain; Then, we separate the pixels in target images into the easy and hard subdomains; Finally, we propose a pixel-level adversarial training strategy to adapt a segmentation network from the easy to the hard subdomain. Moreover, we show that the segmentation accuracy can be further improved by incorporating a continuous indexing technique in the adversarial training. Experimental results show the effectiveness of our method against existing state-of-the-art approaches

Viscous influences on impulsively generated focused jets

Impulsively generated focused jets play a significant role in various applications, including inkjet 9 printing, needle-free drug delivery, and microfluidic devices. As the demand for generating jets 10 and droplets from medium- to highly viscous liquids increases, understanding the role of viscosity in 11 jetting dynamics becomes crucial. While previous studies have examined the viscous effects on walls, 12 the impact on free surfaces has not been thoroughly understood. This study aims to bridge this gap 13 by integrating experiments with numerical simulations to investigate the viscous effects on focused 14 jet formation. We demonstrate that mass and momentum transfer along the tangential direction of 15 the free surface contribute to focused jet formation, and viscosity plays a key role in this transfer 16 process. The viscosity-induced diffusion of the shear flow and vorticity near the free surface reduces 17 the jet speed. Based on experimental observations and simulation results, we propose an equation to 18 predict the viscous jet velocity. These findings offer new perspectives on viscous interface dynamics 19 in advanced manufacturing and biomedical applications

PVSeRF: joint pixel-, voxel- and surface-aligned radiance field for single-image novel view synthesis

We present PVSeRF, a learning framework that reconstructs neural radiance fields from single-view RGB images, for novel view synthesis. Previous solutions, such as pixelNeRF [68], rely only on pixel-aligned features and suffer from feature ambiguity issues. As a result, they struggle with the disentanglement of geometry and appearance, leading to implausible geometries and blurry results. To address this challenge, we propose to incorporate explicit geometry reasoning and combine it with pixel-aligned features for radiance field prediction. Specifically, in addition to pixel-aligned features, we further constrain the radiance field learning to be conditioned on i) voxel-aligned features learned from a coarse volumetric grid and ii) fine surface-aligned features extracted from a regressed point cloud. We show that the introduction of such geometry-aware features helps to achieve a better disentanglement between appearance and geometry, i.e. recovering more accurate geometries and synthesizing higher quality images of novel views. Extensive experiments against state-of-the-art methods on ShapeNet benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our approach for single-image novel view synthesis

The Effect of Niobium on the Mechanical and Thermodynamic Properties of Zirconium Alloys

The alloy element Nb plays an important role in improving the performance of zirconium alloys in nuclear reactors. The effect mechanism of Nb doping on mechanical and thermodynamic properties was investigated using experimental and theoretical methods. The results of this study showed us that Nb doping refines grains and enhances hardness. The hardness increases from 2.67 GPa of pure Zr to 2.99 GPa of Zr1.5Nb. Depending on the first-principles calculations, the hardness decreases with the increase in the Nb concentration in the Zr matrix, namely from 2.45 Gpa of pure Zr to 1.78 GPa of Zr1.5Nb. If the first-principles calculations indicate that the hardness decreases with the increase in the Nb concentration in the Zr matrix, grain refinement or defects could play a major role in the increase in hardness. Furthermore, regarding the effect of Nb doping on thermal expansion coefficients, the increase in Nb content causes the thermal expansion coefficients to decrease, which might stem from the strong binding energy between Nb and Zr atoms. The thermal conductivities of three samples show similar changing trends, indicating that thermal conductivity begins to decrease at room temperature and reaches a minimum value of around 400 °C. The thermal conductivity of pure zirconium samples is consistently higher, is more obvious than that of Nb-doped samples in the test range, and decreases with an increase in the doping concentration. The possible reasons for this might stem from the distortion of the Zr matrix due to Nb substitution doping and grain refinement, both of which cause phonon propagation scattering and thus hinder the propagation of phonons. The results obtained herein may be useful for the development of advanced nuclear fuels and waste forms that utilize zirconium in applications beyond their current usage

Application of Elastin-like Polypeptide in Tumor Therapy

Elastin-like polypeptides (ELPs) are stimulus-responsive artificially designed proteins synthesized from the core amino acid sequence of human tropoelastin. ELPs have good biocompatibility and biodegradability and do not systemically induce adverse immune responses, making them a suitable module for drug delivery. Design strategies can equip ELPs with the ability to respond to changes in temperature and pH or the capacity to self-assemble into nanoparticles. These unique tunable biophysicochemical properties make ELPs among the most widely studied biopolymers employed in protein purification, drug delivery, tissue engineering and even in tumor therapy. As a module for drug delivery and as a carrier to target tumor cells, the combination of ELPs with therapeutic drugs, antibodies and photo-oxidation molecules has been shown to result in improved pharmacokinetic properties (prolonged half-life, drug targeting, cell penetration and controlled release) while restricting the cytotoxicity of the drug to a confined infected site. In this review, we summarize the latest developments in the application methods of ELP employed in tumor therapy, with a focus on its conjugation with peptide drugs, antibodies and photosensitizers

A goose-type lysozyme gene in Japanese scallop (Mizuhopecten yessoensis): cDNA cloning, mRNA expression and promoter sequence analysis

Lysozyme is an important component of the immune response against bacteria that is characterized by its ability to break down bacterial cell-walls. We constructed a high-quality cDNA library from mantle tissue of adult Japanese scallop (Mizuhopecten yessoensis). The EST which is high homology with g-type lysozyme genes of other species was found in the cDNA library. In the present study, the complete express sequence of g-type lysozyme genes from Japanese scallop (designated as MyLysoG) was directly obtained by PCR. The complete sequence of MyLysoG cDNA consisted of a 5' untranslated region (UTR) of 25 bp, an open reading frame (ORF) of 606 bp, and a 3' UTR of 100 bp with one polyadenylation signal (AATAAA). The deduced amino acids of MyLysoG were 201 amino acids with a putative signal peptide of 18 amino acid residues. It shared the sequence similarity and the common structure features with the g-type lysozyme from other species. Quantitative reverse trancriptase real-time PCR (qRT-PCR) assay demonstrated that mRNA transcripts of g-type lysozyme could be detected in various tissues of unchallenged scallop, and the highest expression of MyLysoG was detected in hepatopancreas tissue. The temporal expression of MyLysoG in hemolymph after Vibrio anguillarum challenge was up-regulated and reached the maximum level at 3 h post stimulation, and then dropped back to the original level even lower than the control group. Furthermore, a 978 bp of 5'-flanking sequence of MyLysoG was identified by genome walking, and several potential transcription factor binding sites (TFBS) were detected in the putative promoter region. One part of the MyLysoG promoter region contains nine sites of SNPs and three sites of insert-deletion (indel) polymorphisms, and these mutations were found organize into two haplotypes. The two haplotypes were associated with different TFBS. The haplotypes could be selected to analyze the transcriptional-level control of scallop g-type lysozyme gene and the scallop immune system. (C) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.Science and Technology Project of Liaoning Province [2011203003]; National Natural Science Foundation of China [31140073, 31101899

Discovery and construction of surface kagome electronic states induced by p-d electronic hybridization in Co3Sn2S2

Abstract Kagome-lattice materials possess attractive properties for quantum computing applications, but their synthesis remains challenging. Herein, based on the compelling identification of the two cleavable surfaces of Co3Sn2S2, we show surface kagome electronic states (SKESs) on a Sn-terminated triangular Co3Sn2S2 surface. Such SKESs are imprinted by vertical p-d electronic hybridization between the surface Sn (subsurface S) atoms and the buried Co kagome-lattice network in the Co3Sn layer under the surface. Owing to the subsequent lateral hybridization of the Sn and S atoms in a corner-sharing manner, the kagome symmetry and topological electronic properties of the Co3Sn layer is proximate to the Sn surface. The SKESs and both hybridizations were verified via qPlus non-contact atomic force microscopy (nc-AFM) and density functional theory calculations. The construction of SKESs with tunable properties can be achieved by the atomic substitution of surface Sn (subsurface S) with other group III-V elements (Se or Te), which was demonstrated theoretically. This work exhibits the powerful capacity of nc-AFM in characterizing localized topological states and reveals the strategy for synthesis of large-area transition-metal-based kagome-lattice materials using conventional surface deposition techniques