119 research outputs found
The use of un-composted spent mushroom residue as a replacement of peat in substrates for Gossypium herbaceum and Talinum paniculatum
In order to evaluate the effect of growing media with peat and spent mushroom residue (SMR) on medicinal plants, we cultured Gossypium herbaceum and Talinum paniculatum seedlings in the substrates with SMR in proportions of 0% (control), 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100%. Results showed that G. herbaceum seedlings can survive in all treatments, but T. paniculatum seedlings died out in 75% and 100% SMR substrates where higher electrical conductance was found (2.3-2.7 dS m-1). Both growth and biomass mostly declined with the increase of SMR proportion in the growing media for the two species except for root biomass in T. paniculatum seedlings between the control and the 25% SMR treatment. Shoot nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) concentrations and contents tended to be higher in low- and high-SMR-proportional substrates, respectively. N and P statuses were both diagnosed to be excessive than needed for the two species. Overall, it was not recommended to culture G. herbaceum seedlings in the substrates with SMR; instead T. paniculatum seedlings can be cultured in the growing media with SMR in volumetric proportion of 25%
A Recipe for Watermarking Diffusion Models
Diffusion models (DMs) have demonstrated advantageous potential on generative
tasks. Widespread interest exists in incorporating DMs into downstream
applications, such as producing or editing photorealistic images. However,
practical deployment and unprecedented power of DMs raise legal issues,
including copyright protection and monitoring of generated content. In this
regard, watermarking has been a proven solution for copyright protection and
content monitoring, but it is underexplored in the DMs literature.
Specifically, DMs generate samples from longer tracks and may have newly
designed multimodal structures, necessitating the modification of conventional
watermarking pipelines. To this end, we conduct comprehensive analyses and
derive a recipe for efficiently watermarking state-of-the-art DMs (e.g., Stable
Diffusion), via training from scratch or finetuning. Our recipe is
straightforward but involves empirically ablated implementation details,
providing a foundation for future research on watermarking DMs. The code is
available at https://github.com/yunqing-me/WatermarkDM
On Evaluating Adversarial Robustness of Large Vision-Language Models
Large vision-language models (VLMs) such as GPT-4 have achieved unprecedented
performance in response generation, especially with visual inputs, enabling
more creative and adaptable interaction than large language models such as
ChatGPT. Nonetheless, multimodal generation exacerbates safety concerns, since
adversaries may successfully evade the entire system by subtly manipulating the
most vulnerable modality (e.g., vision). To this end, we propose evaluating the
robustness of open-source large VLMs in the most realistic and high-risk
setting, where adversaries have only black-box system access and seek to
deceive the model into returning the targeted responses. In particular, we
first craft targeted adversarial examples against pretrained models such as
CLIP and BLIP, and then transfer these adversarial examples to other VLMs such
as MiniGPT-4, LLaVA, UniDiffuser, BLIP-2, and Img2Prompt. In addition, we
observe that black-box queries on these VLMs can further improve the
effectiveness of targeted evasion, resulting in a surprisingly high success
rate for generating targeted responses. Our findings provide a quantitative
understanding regarding the adversarial vulnerability of large VLMs and call
for a more thorough examination of their potential security flaws before
deployment in practice. Code is at https://github.com/yunqing-me/AttackVLM.Comment: NeurIPS 202
AdAM: Few-Shot Image Generation via Adaptation-Aware Kernel Modulation
Few-shot image generation (FSIG) aims to learn to generate new and diverse
images given few (e.g., 10) training samples. Recent work has addressed FSIG by
leveraging a GAN pre-trained on a large-scale source domain and adapting it to
the target domain with few target samples. Central to recent FSIG methods are
knowledge preservation criteria, which select and preserve a subset of source
knowledge to the adapted model. However, a major limitation of existing methods
is that their knowledge preserving criteria consider only source domain/task
and fail to consider target domain/adaptation in selecting source knowledge,
casting doubt on their suitability for setups of different proximity between
source and target domain. Our work makes two contributions. Firstly, we revisit
recent FSIG works and their experiments. We reveal that under setups which
assumption of close proximity between source and target domains is relaxed,
many existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods which consider only source domain
in knowledge preserving perform no better than a baseline method. As our second
contribution, we propose Adaptation-Aware kernel Modulation (AdAM) for general
FSIG of different source-target domain proximity. Extensive experiments show
that AdAM consistently achieves SOTA performance in FSIG, including challenging
setups where source and target domains are more apart.Comment: 33 pages, 35 figures, 13 tables. Extension of NeurIPS-2022 paper
arXiv:2210.1655
The effects of ethylene on the HCl-extractability of trace elements during soybean seed germination
Background: Ethylene is capable of promoting seed germination in some
plant species. Mobilization of metals such as Fe, Cu, Mn, and Zn in
mature seeds takes place when seeds are germinating. However, whether
ethylene is involved in the regulation of soybean seed germination and
metal element mobilization during early seed germination stage remains
unknown. In the present study, seeds were treated with ethylene
synthesis inhibitor aminoethoxyvinylglycine (AVG) and ethylene
precursor 1-aminocyclopropane-1-carboxylic acid (ACC), and double
distilled H2O (ddH20) treatment was used as control. Ethylene emission,
ACC synthase (ACS) expression, ACS enzyme activity and Ca, Zn, Mn, Cu
and Fe content in hypocotyls were qualified to analyze the relationship
between ethylene and mobilization of these elements. Results: The
results showed that ACS expression, ACS enzyme activity and ethylene
emission peaked at 1 and 7 d after sowing. AVG inhibited ethylene
production, promoted the hypocotyls length, ACS expression and its
activity, concentrations of total and HCl-extractable Zn, and
HCl-extractable Fe in hypocotyls, while ACC caused opposite effects.
AVG and ACC treatment had no significantly effects on total and
HCl-extractable Ca, Cu and HCl-extractable Mn. Total Mn concentration
was promoted by AVG at 1, 3, and 5 d significantly, while ACC treatment
tended to have no significantly effects on Mn concentration.
Conclusion: These findings suggested that ethylene is at least partly
involved in the regulation of soybean seed germination. Remobilization
of Zn and Fe may be negatively regulated by ethylene
Growth, Nutrient Uptake, and Foliar Gas Exchange in Pepper Cultured with Un-composted Fresh Spent Mushroom Residue
Spent mushroom substrate (SMS) can be used as the component of growing medium for the culture of crop plants. Fresh SMS may have the potential as an alternative to peat to raise horticultural plants. In this study, five container media characterized by the proportions of SMS to commercial peat in 0% (control), 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100% were used to raise pepper (Capsicum annum L.) plants. Initial SMS was found to have low available nitrogen (N) content (<20 mg kg-1) but moderate extractable phosphorus (P) content (900 mg kg-1). In the second month photosynthetic rate was found to decline in the 75% treatment. At harvest in the third month, plants in the 100% treatment nearly died out. The 25% treatment resulted in the highest height (19 cm) and diameter growth (0.3 cm), shoot (0.6 g) and root biomass accumulation (0.13 g), fruit weight (3 g), and shoot carbohydrate content (98 mg g-1), but lowest foliar acid phosphatase activity (30 µg NPP g-1 FW min-1). With the increase of SMS proportion in the substrate, the medium pH and electrical conductance (EC) increased with the decrease of foliar size. The available N and P contents in the substrates showed contrasting relationship with N and P contents in pepper plants. Therefore, fresh SMS cannot be directly used as the substrate for the culture of pepper plants. According to our findings fresh SMS was recommended to be mixed in the proportion of 25% with commercial peat for the culture of horticultural plants
Comparative analysis of 17 complete chloroplast genomes reveals intraspecific variation and relationships among Pseudostellaria heterophylla (Miq.) Pax populations
Pseudostellaria heterophylla (Miq.) Pax is a well-known medicinal and ecologically important plant. Effectively distinguishing its different genetic resources is essential for its breeding. Plant chloroplast genomes can provide much more information than traditional molecular markers and provide higher-resolution genetic analyses to distinguish closely related planting materials. Here, seventeen P. heterophylla samples from Anhui, Fujian, Guizhou, Hebei, Hunan, Jiangsu, and Shandong provinces were collected, and a genome skimming strategy was employed to obtain their chloroplast genomes. The P. heterophylla chloroplast genomes ranged from 149,356 bp to 149,592 bp in length, and a total of 111 unique genes were annotated, including 77 protein-coding genes, 30 tRNA genes, and four rRNA genes. Codon usage analysis showed that leucine had the highest frequency, while UUU (encoding phenylalanine) and UGC (encoding cysteine) were identified as the most and least frequently used codons, respectively. A total of 75–84 SSRs, 16–21 short tandem repeats, and 27–32 long repeat structures were identified in these chloroplast genomes. Then, four primer pairs were revealed for identifying SSR polymorphisms. Palindromes are the dominant type, accounting for an average of 47.86% of all long repeat sequences. Gene orders were highly collinear, and IR regions were highly conserved. Genome alignment indicated that there were four intergenic regions (psaI-ycf4, ycf3-trnS, ndhC-trnV, and ndhI-ndhG) and three coding genes (ndhJ, ycf1, and rpl20) that were highly variable among different P. heterophylla samples. Moreover, 10 SNP/MNP sites with high polymorphism were selected for further study. Phylogenetic analysis showed that populations of Chinese were clustered into a monophyletic group, in which the non-flowering variety formed a separate subclade with high statistical support. In this study, the comparative analysis of complete chloroplast genomes revealed intraspecific variations in P. heterophylla and further supported the idea that chloroplast genomes could elucidate relatedness among closely related cultivation materials
m-Cresol purple functionalized surface enhanced Raman scattering paper chips for highly sensitive detection of pH in the neutral pH range
High-throughput functional analysis of autism genes in zebrafish identifies convergence in dopaminergic and neuroimmune pathways
Advancing from gene discovery in autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) to the identification of biologically relevant mechanisms remains a central challenge. Here, we perform parallel in vivo functional analysis of 10 ASD genes at the behavioral, structural, and circuit levels in zebrafish mutants, revealing both unique and overlapping effects of gene loss of function. Whole-brain mapping identifies the forebrain and cerebellum as the most significant contributors to brain size differences, while regions involved in sensory-motor control, particularly dopaminergic regions, are associated with altered baseline brain activity. Finally, we show a global increase in microglia resulting from ASD gene loss of function in select mutants, implicating neuroimmune dysfunction as a key pathway relevant to ASD biology
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