Effects of Cognitive Tasks on Drivers\u27 Eye Behavior and Performance

Safe driving involves obtaining and using required visual information. Recent studies have shown that this information acquisition is compromised as a driver performs other mental tasks. We conducted an experiment, inspired by Recarte and Nunes (2000), to investigate the effect of cognitive tasks on drivers’ eye behavior and performance in a single monitor, PC-based driving simulator. The eye behavior (i.e., gaze direction and duration) and driving performance (i.e., lane keeping and speed control) of twelve college students were recorded as they drove in three environments (i.e., highway, rural, urban) under three secondary task conditions (none, verbal task, spatial-imagery task). The results confirmed Recarte and Nunes (2000) observation that such tasks greatly reduce the time and frequency of such safety-related behaviors as checking the speedometer and rear view mirrors, with the spatial-imagery task having the largest effect. Pupil diameter increases significantly when performing secondary tasks, confirming the usefulness of that measure as an indicator of processing load. In contrast, these secondary tasks have no effect on lane-keeping accuracy, though they do increase variation in speed. From the perspective of multiple resource theory (Wickens, 2002; Wickens & Hollands, 2000), this suggests that lane keeping, speed control and other safety-monitoring activities (i.e., checking mirrors and speedometer) all require attentional resources, and that when resources must be given to some new task, there is a prioritization of the remaining tasks. Lane-keeping, the failure of which would produce the most apparent driving failures, is given the highest priority, with other safetymonitoring activities given lower priority. The method employed here can be used to examine the effect of driver activities and devices on their monitoring of safety-related information

Dynamic Prompting: A Unified Framework for Prompt Tuning

It has been demonstrated that the art of prompt tuning is highly effective in efficiently extracting knowledge from pretrained foundation models, encompassing pretrained language models (PLMs), vision pretrained models, and vision-language (V-L) models. However, the efficacy of employing fixed soft prompts with a predetermined position for concatenation with inputs for all instances, irrespective of their inherent disparities, remains uncertain. Variables such as the position, length, and representations of prompts across diverse instances and tasks can substantially influence the performance of prompt tuning. In this context, we provide a theoretical analysis, which reveals that optimizing the position of the prompt to encompass the input can capture additional semantic information that traditional prefix or postfix prompt tuning methods fail to capture. Building upon our analysis, we present a unified dynamic prompt (DP) tuning strategy that dynamically determines different factors of prompts based on specific tasks and instances. To accomplish this, we employ a lightweight learning network with Gumble-Softmax, allowing us to learn instance-dependent guidance. Experimental results underscore the significant performance improvement achieved by dynamic prompt tuning across a wide range of tasks, including NLP tasks, vision recognition tasks, and vision-language tasks. Furthermore, we establish the universal applicability of our approach under full-data, few-shot, and multitask scenarios. Codes are available at https://github.com/Xianjun-Yang/DPT.Comment: updat

Viscum album extract suppresses cell proliferation and induces apoptosis in bladder cancer cells

Purpose: To evaluate the effect of Viscum album (VA) extract on the progression of bladder cancer (BC) and its effect on the proliferation and apoptosis of T24 and J82 bladder cancer cells. Methods: 3-(4,5-Dimethylthiazol-2-yl)-2,5-diphenyltetrazolium bromide assay (MTT assay) was conducted to examine the proliferation of bladder cancer cells. Flow cytometry (FCM) was employed to assess changes in the cell cycle of bladder cancer cells. The expression levels of proliferating cell nuclear antigen (PCNA), CLND1 (cyclin D1), p21, and p27 in control and VA extract-treated (100, 200, or 300 μg/mL) T24 and J82 cells were measured by immunoblot assay. The effects of VA extract on T24 or J82 cell apoptosis were evaluated using FCM. Immunoblot assay was performed to evaluate Bcl2, Bax, and cleaved caspase 3 expression in control or VA extract-treated bladder cancer cells. In addition, the effect of VA extract on Axl-AKT pathways was also evaluated by immunoblot assay. Results: Viscum album extract treatment significantly blocked bladder cancer cell proliferation and induced cell cycle arrest. In addition, VA extract stimulated bladder cancer cell apoptosis. Moreover, this study found that VA extract suppressed Axl-AKT pathways in bladder cancer. Conclusion: Viscum album extract exerts anti-proliferation and pro-apoptosis effects on bladder cancer cells. These abilities render Viscum album extract as promising agent in bladder cancer treatment

Updates on precision medicine of pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor

Since the concept of precision medicine proposed in 2011, the treatment of solid tumors has entered era of precision medicine led by gene testing. As a rare tumor, the incidence rate of pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor (PanNET) is increasing gradually. In the past, clinicopathological factors such as stage and grade system were used as criteria in the diagnosis and prognostic prediction of PanNET patients, and there were few biomarkers guiding the selection of PanNET diagnosis and treatment. As the diagnosis, treatment and prognosis of PanNET have been updated these years, and genomics and molecular testing are wildly used in PanNET research, can precision bring new changes to the diagnosis, treatment and prognostic prediction of PanNET? This article reviewed the current status of PanNET precision therapy through the latest literature

Weak-to-Strong Jailbreaking on Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) are vulnerable to jailbreak attacks - resulting in harmful, unethical, or biased text generations. However, existing jailbreaking methods are computationally costly. In this paper, we propose the weak-to-strong jailbreaking attack, an efficient method to attack aligned LLMs to produce harmful text. Our key intuition is based on the observation that jailbroken and aligned models only differ in their initial decoding distributions. The weak-to-strong attack's key technical insight is using two smaller models (a safe and an unsafe one) to adversarially modify a significantly larger safe model's decoding probabilities. We evaluate the weak-to-strong attack on 5 diverse LLMs from 3 organizations. The results show our method can increase the misalignment rate to over 99% on two datasets with just one forward pass per example. Our study exposes an urgent safety issue that needs to be addressed when aligning LLMs. As an initial attempt, we propose a defense strategy to protect against such attacks, but creating more advanced defenses remains challenging. The code for replicating the method is available at https://github.com/XuandongZhao/weak-to-stron

Current evidences on XPC polymorphisms and gastric cancer susceptibility: a meta-analysis

BACKGROUND: Reduced DNA repair capacities due to inherited polymorphisms may increase the susceptibility to cancers including gastric cancer. Previous studies investigating the association between Xeroderma Pigmentosum group C (XPC) gene polymorphisms and gastric cancer risk reported inconsistent results. We performed a meta-analysis to summarize the possible association. METHODS: All studies published up to January 2014 on the association between XPC polymorphisms and gastric cancer risk were identified by searching electronic databases PubMed, EMBASE, Cochrane library, and Chinese Biomedical Literature database (CBM). The association between XPC polymorphisms and gastric cancer risk was assessed by odds ratios (ORs) together with their 95% confidence intervals (CIs). RESULTS: Six studies with 1,355 gastric cancer cases and 2,573 controls were finally included in the meta-analysis. With respect to Lys939Gln polymorphism, we did not observe a significant association when all studies were pooled into the meta-analysis. When stratified by ethnicity, source of control, and study quality, statistical significant association was not detected in all subgroups. With respect to Ala499Val and PAT−/+polymorphisms, we also did not observe any significant association with gastric cancer risk in the pooled analysis. CONCLUSIONS: This meta-analysis based on current evidences suggested that the XPC polymorphisms (Lys939Gln, Val499Arg, and PAT−/+) did not contribute to gastric cancer risk. Considering the limited sample size and ethnicity included in the meta-analysis, further larger scaled and well-designed studies are needed to confirm our results. VIRTUAL SLIDES: The virtual slide(s) for this article can be found here: http://www.diagnosticpathology.diagnomx.eu/vs/148588031255506

Prognostic Significance of Altered ATRX/DAXX Gene in Pancreatic Neuroendocrine Tumors: A Meta-Analysis

BackgroundPancreatic neuroendocrine tumors (PanNETs) are a heterogeneous group of neoplasms with increasing incidence and unpredictable behavior. Whole-exome sequencing recently has shown very frequent somatic mutations in the alpha-thalassemia/mental retardation X-linked (ATRX) and death domain-associated protein (DAXX) genes in PanNETs. And the prognostic significance of altered ATRX/DAXX genes in PanNETs patients have been revealed in several reports. However, many of these include small sample size and hold controversial opinions. To increase statistical power, we performed a systematic review and meta-analysis to determine a pooled conclusion. We examined the impact of altered ATRX/DAXX genes mainly on overall survival (OS), disease-free survival (DFS) and relapse-free survival (RFS) in PanNETs.MethodsEligible studies were identified and quality was assessed using multiple search strategies (last search May 2021). Data were collected from studies about prognostic significance of altered ATRX/DAXX in PanNETs. Studies were pooled, and combined hazard ratios (HRs) with 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were used to estimate strength of the associations.ResultsFourteen studies involving 2313 patients treated for PanNETs were included. After evaluating for publication bias, disease-free survival and relapse-free survival was significantly shortened in patients with altered ATRX/DAXX gene, with combined HR 5.05 (95% confidence interval (CI): 1.58-16.20, P = 0.01) and 3.21 (95% confidence interval (CI): 1.44-7.16, P < 0.01) respectively. However, the combined data showed there were no difference between patients with altered ATRX/DAXX gene or not in overall survival, with a combined HR 0.71 (95% confidence interval (CI): 0.44-1.15, P = 0.23). We also performed a subgroup analysis with metastatic patients in overall survival, showing a combined HR 0.22 (95% confidence interval (CI): 0.11-0.48, P = 0.96). The small number of studies and paucity of multivariate analyses are the limitations of our study.ConclusionsThis is the first rigorous pooled analysis assessing ATRX/DAXX mutation as prognostic biomarkers in PanNETs. Patients with altered ATRX/DAXX gene would have poor DFS according to the combined data. And altered ATRX/DAXX genes in metastatic patients showed a trend towards improved overall survival, although the difference did not reach statistical significance

Advances in basic research, clinical diagnosis and treatment of pancreatic cancer in 2023

Pancreatic cancer is a highly malignant digestive tract tumor with hidden symptoms, limited treatment options and rapid progression. With an increasing incidence rate year by year, pancreatic cancer has increasingly become a prominent issue endangering public health, causing a huge social burden. Although there was no significant improvement in survival rates for pancreatic cancer patients in the past two decades, recent progress in epidemiology, basic research and clinical research of pancreatic cancer has accelerated significantly compared to the past. Some findings have already enabled a small proportion of pancreatic cancer patients to achieve better survival. This article provided a review of the significant progress made in research, diagnosis and treatment of pancreatic cancer in 2023