Make the U in UDA Matter: Invariant Consistency Learning for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Domain Adaptation (DA) is always challenged by the spurious correlation between domain-invariant features (e.g., class identity) and domain-specific features (e.g., environment) that does not generalize to the target domain. Unfortunately, even enriched with additional unsupervised target domains, existing Unsupervised DA (UDA) methods still suffer from it. This is because the source domain supervision only considers the target domain samples as auxiliary data (e.g., by pseudo-labeling), yet the inherent distribution in the target domain -- where the valuable de-correlation clues hide -- is disregarded. We propose to make the U in UDA matter by giving equal status to the two domains. Specifically, we learn an invariant classifier whose prediction is simultaneously consistent with the labels in the source domain and clusters in the target domain, hence the spurious correlation inconsistent in the target domain is removed. We dub our approach "Invariant CONsistency learning" (ICON). Extensive experiments show that ICON achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the classic UDA benchmarks: Office-Home and VisDA-2017, and outperforms all the conventional methods on the challenging WILDS 2.0 benchmark. Codes are in https://github.com/yue-zhongqi/ICON.Comment: Accepted by NeurIPS 202

Self-Triggered Stochastic MPC for Linear Systems With Disturbances

In this letter, we present a self-triggering mechanism for stochastic model predictive control (SMPC) of discrete-time linear systems subject to probabilistic constraints, where the controller and the plant are connected by a shared communication network. The proposed triggering mechanism requires that only one control input is allowed to be transmitted through the network at each triggering instant which is then applied to the plant for several steps afterward. By doing so, communication is effectively reduced both in terms of frequency and total amount. We establish the theoretical result for recursive feasibility in the light of proper reformulation of constraints on the nominal system trajectories, and also provide stability analysis for the proposed self-triggered SMPC. A numerical example illustrates the efficiency of the proposed scheme in reducing the communication as well as ensuring meeting the probabilistic constraints

Interventional few-shot learning

Ministry of Education, Singapore under its Academic Research Funding Tier 1 and 2; Alibaba Innovative Research (AIR) programm

CGoDial: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Chinese Goal-oriented Dialog Evaluation

Practical dialog systems need to deal with various knowledge sources, noisy user expressions, and the shortage of annotated data. To better solve the above problems, we propose CGoDial, new challenging and comprehensive Chinese benchmark for multi-domain Goal-oriented Dialog evaluation. It contains 96,763 dialog sessions and 574,949 dialog turns totally, covering three datasets with different knowledge sources: 1) a slot-based dialog (SBD) dataset with table-formed knowledge, 2) a flow-based dialog (FBD) dataset with tree-formed knowledge, and a retrieval-based dialog (RBD) dataset with candidate-formed knowledge. To bridge the gap between academic benchmarks and spoken dialog scenarios, we either collect data from real conversations or add spoken features to existing datasets via crowd-sourcing. The proposed experimental settings include the combinations of training with either the entire training set or a few-shot training set, and testing with either the standard test set or a hard test subset, which can assess model capabilities in terms of general prediction, fast adaptability and reliable robustness.Comment: EMNLP 202

Effect of Pre-cooking on Quality Change of Portunus trituberculatus during Frozen Storage

To investigate the effect of pre-cooking treatment on the quality of swimming crab (Portunus trituberculatus) meat during frozen storage, the differences in the quality of group C (control without any treatment), group H-F (heating followed by frozen storage) and group F-H (frozen storage followed by heating) during 180 d storage at −20 ℃ were evaluated in terms of their color difference, water-holding capacity (WHC), pH, total volatile base nitrogen (TVB-N) content, total viable count (TVC), and protein composition and microstructure. The results showed that the whiteness and WHC of the three groups decreased with storage time. The pH of group C decreased first and then increased, while the pH of the other two groups showed the opposite trend and then remained steady. The TVB-N content and TVC of all groups showed an overall upward trend. The TVB-N content and TVC of group H-F were (21.12 ± 0.58) mg/100 g and (4.03 ± 0.17) (lg(CFU/g)) after 180 d, respectively, which were significantly lower than those of group F-H. The microstructure of crab muscle in group C changed from clear and ordered to fuzzy and disordered during the frozen storage process, while pre-cooked crab meat maintained a better morphology. Besides, the results of sodium dodecyl sulfate-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (SDS-PAGE) suggested that crab meat proteins in the three groups were degraded to different degrees during storage, which was more pronounced in group F-H than in group H-F. Therefore, pre-cooking treatment could efficiently reduce the quality deterioration of crab meat during frozen storage, which could provide a reference for subsequent research to improve the frozen storage quality of P. trituberculatus

Exploring potential predictive biomarkers through historical perspectives on the evolution of systemic therapies into the emergence of neoadjuvant therapy for the treatment of hepatocellular carcinoma

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), a type of liver cancer, ranks as the sixth most prevalent cancer globally and represents the third leading cause of cancer-related deaths. Approximately half of HCC patients miss the opportunity for curative treatment and are then limited to undergoing systemic therapies. Currently, systemic therapy has entered the era of immunotherapy, particularly with the advent of immune-checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs), which have significantly enhanced outcomes for patients with advanced HCC. Neoadjuvant treatment for HCC has become a possibility—findings from the IMbrave 050 trial indicated that ICIs offer the benefit of recurrence-free survival for high-risk HCC patients post-resection or local ablation. However, only a small fraction of individuals benefit from systemic therapy. Consequently, there is an urgent need to identify predictive biomarkers for treatment response and outcome assessment. This study reviewed the historical progression of systemic therapy for HCC, highlighting notable therapeutic advancements. This study examined the development of systemic therapies involving conventional drugs and clinical trials utilized in HCC treatment, as well as potential predictive biomarkers for advanced and/or locally advanced HCC. Various studies have revealed potential biomarkers in the context of HCC treatment. These include the association of dendritic cells (DCs) with a favorable response to neoadjuvant therapy, the presence of enriched T effector cells and tertiary lymphoid structures, the identification of CD138+ plasma cells, and distinct spatial arrangements of B cells in close proximity to T cells among responders with locally advanced HCC receiving neoadjuvant cabozantinib and nivolumab treatment. Furthermore, pathological response has been associated with intratumoral cellular triads consisting of progenitor CD8+ T cells and CXCL13+ CD4+ T helper cells surrounding mature DCs in patients receiving neoadjuvant cemiplimab for resectable HCC. Despite no widely recognized predictive biomarkers for HCC individualized treatment, we believe neoadjuvant trials hold the most promise in identifying and validating them. This is because they can collect multiple samples from resectable HCC patients across stages, especially with multi-omics, bridging preclinical and clinical gaps

Integrated Genomic Analysis of the Ubiquitin Pathway across Cancer Types

Protein ubiquitination is a dynamic and reversibleprocess of adding single ubiquitin molecules orvarious ubiquitin chains to target proteins. Here,using multidimensional omic data of 9,125 tumorsamples across 33 cancer types from The CancerGenome Atlas, we perform comprehensive molecu-lar characterization of 929 ubiquitin-related genesand 95 deubiquitinase genes. Among them, we sys-tematically identify top somatic driver candidates,including mutatedFBXW7with cancer-type-specificpatterns and amplifiedMDM2showing a mutuallyexclusive pattern withBRAFmutations. Ubiquitinpathway genes tend to be upregulated in cancermediated by diverse mechanisms. By integratingpan-cancer multiomic data, we identify a group oftumor samples that exhibit worse prognosis. Thesesamples are consistently associated with the upre-gulation of cell-cycle and DNA repair pathways, char-acterized by mutatedTP53,MYC/TERTamplifica-tion, andAPC/PTENdeletion. Our analysishighlights the importance of the ubiquitin pathwayin cancer development and lays a foundation fordeveloping relevant therapeutic strategies