Enzymatic preparation and facile purification of medium-chain, and medium- and long-chain fatty acid diacylglycerols

High purity diacylglycerols (DAG) rich in medium-chain fatty acid diacylglycerols (MCD) and medium- and long-chain fatty acid diacylglycerols (MLCD) were prepared via the enzymatic esterification of monoacylglycerols (MAG) with caprylic acid followed by molecular distillation (MD), solvent fraction and low-temperature centrifugation. The content of DAG in the crude product was 44.8 ± 0.1%, under the selected esterification conditions, which were MAGs/caprylic acid mole ratio of 1:3, reaction temperature of 65 °C, reaction time of 30 min and enzyme load of 5 wt%. Subsequently, the one-step MD and solvent fraction in methanol/ethanol increased the DAG content to 61.3 ± 0.8%. Eventually, the product containing 86.6 ± 0.6% of DAG with 39.3 ± 1.3% of MCD and 47.3 ± 0.6% of MLCD was obtained by the methanol crystallization at 0 °C with a water content of 9 wt% and a 1:3 ratio of glycerides/methanol (v/v) followed by the centrifugation separation at 0 °C.The financial support from the National Natural Science Foundationof China under grants 31671781, 31371785 and 31501443, theNational Key Research and Development Program of China under grant2017YFD0400200, the Department of Science and Technology ofGuangdong Province under grants 2017B090907018 and2014A010107014, and the Bureau of Science and Information ofQingyuan under grant 2016D008 are gratefully acknowledged

OpenDelta: A Plug-and-play Library for Parameter-efficient Adaptation of Pre-trained Models

The scale of large pre-trained models (PTMs) poses significant challenges in adapting to downstream tasks due to the high optimization overhead and storage costs associated with full-parameter fine-tuning. To address this, many studies explore parameter-efficient tuning methods, also framed as "delta tuning", which updates only a small subset of parameters, known as "delta modules", while keeping the backbone model's parameters fixed. However, the practicality and flexibility of delta tuning have been limited due to existing implementations that directly modify the code of the backbone PTMs and hard-code specific delta tuning methods for each PTM. In this paper, we present OpenDelta, an open-source library that overcomes these limitations by providing a plug-and-play implementation of various delta tuning methods. Our novel techniques eliminate the need to modify the backbone PTMs' code, making OpenDelta compatible with different, even novel PTMs. OpenDelta is designed to be simple, modular, and extensible, providing a comprehensive platform for researchers and practitioners to adapt large PTMs efficiently.Comment: Accepted to ACL 2023 Demo trac

Bilaterally Combined Electric and Acoustic Hearing in Mandarin-Speaking Listeners: The Population With Poor Residual Hearing

The hearing loss criterion for cochlear implant candidacy in mainland China is extremely stringent (bilateral severe to profound hearing loss), resulting in few patients with substantial residual hearing in the nonimplanted ear. The main objective of the current study was to examine the benefit of bimodal hearing in typical Mandarin-speaking implant users who have poorer residual hearing in the nonimplanted ear relative to those used in the English-speaking studies. Seventeen Mandarinspeaking bimodal users with pure-tone averages of 80 dB HL participated in the study. Sentence recognition in quiet and in noise as well as tone and word recognition in quiet were measured in monaural and bilateral conditions. There was no significant bimodal effect for word and sentence recognition in quiet. Small bimodal effects were observed for sentence recognition in noise (6%) and tone recognition (4%). The magnitude of both effects was correlated with unaided thresholds at frequencies near voice fundamental frequencies (F0s). A weak correlation between the bimodal effect for word recognition and unaided thresholds at frequencies higher than F0s was identified. These results were consistent with previous findings that showed more robust bimodal benefits for speech recognition tasks that require higher spectral resolution than speech recognition in quiet. The significant but small F0-related bimodal benefit was also consistent with the limited acoustic hearing in the nonimplanted ear of the current subject sample, who are representative of the bimodal users in mainland China. These results advocate for a more relaxed implant candidacy criterion to be used in mainland China