556 research outputs found
Radical Belonging: School as Communion of Peoples, Place, and Power
In wondering āHow are decolonizing, place/land-based, and community-grown learning places created and sustained as alternatives to dominant settler-colonial systems, and what stories would they share about their creation and existence?ā, I formed relationships with two alternative, autonomous, decolonizing schools through a teacher-guide at each school who served as guides for me to enter their spaces with invitation. In developing these relationships over 2-3 years and spending 2-3 weeks alongside each of them at their school sites, I was able to sustain natural and deep conversation with my teacher-guides, who then served as co-storyers of this research to collectively consider research questions through the lens of their stories and lived realities in their schools. This study was carried out through narrative storywork, Indigenous and culturally responsive methodologies, and critical autoethnography, as my experience of entering these school communities and forming these relationships over time became a supporting contribution to the data. Data is regarded as all the stories, conversations, reflections, observations, intuited moments, and elements of portraiture that were gathered through this process of sustained relationship with my co-storyers and my dedicated time in being within and experiencing each school space. I identified four major themes as emergent from the data: (1) a necessary process, (2) school as communion, (3) a radical existence, and (4) belonging. Dialogue with my co-storyers about the emergent themes suggests that this work of creating decolonizing, community-grown, place-specific alternatives to settler-state educational systems is necessary across many communities; yet, entering this work requires a necessary process of individual and collective work to align to place-appropriate, decolonized, and Indigenous principals of place, community, culture, and work. Data also suggests that creating such schools is radical yet sustainable and that these schools embody a paradigmatic shift from colonizing, individualistic systems toward collective, communal systems aligned with Indigenous and anti-colonial communities. Furthermore, the data and dialogue suggest that within this work of growing such place-specific communal schools, members of the community are often afforded a greater sense of belonging and collective ownership over their educational experience. Both schools in the study also demonstrated a positive impact on the place and land on which their school was situated. Therefore, this study implicates that there is value in seeking and growing schools outside of the dominant system and that communities who seek to grow such place and person-specific schools can experience great benefit for both human and more-than-human members of the community.
Keywords: alternative-autonomous school, communal school, school as communion, decolonizing, anti-colonial, Indigenous-aligned, Indigenous methodology, decolonizing communities, portraiture, critical autoethnography, co-storying research, narrative storywork, belonging, culturally responsive methodologies, place-based, land-based, resisting settler-state, sustainable systems thinking, HÄlau KÅ« MÄna, Angeles Workshop School, revolutionary schools, diverse communities, students of colo
Dual Stage Stylization Modulation for Domain Generalized Semantic Segmentation
Obtaining sufficient labeled data for training deep models is often
challenging in real-life applications. To address this issue, we propose a
novel solution for single-source domain generalized semantic segmentation.
Recent approaches have explored data diversity enhancement using hallucination
techniques. However, excessive hallucination can degrade performance,
particularly for imbalanced datasets. As shown in our experiments, minority
classes are more susceptible to performance reduction due to hallucination
compared to majority classes. To tackle this challenge, we introduce a
dual-stage Feature Transform (dFT) layer within the Adversarial Semantic
Hallucination+ (ASH+) framework. The ASH+ framework performs a dual-stage
manipulation of hallucination strength. By leveraging semantic information for
each pixel, our approach adaptively adjusts the pixel-wise hallucination
strength, thus providing fine-grained control over hallucination. We validate
the effectiveness of our proposed method through comprehensive experiments on
publicly available semantic segmentation benchmark datasets (Cityscapes and
SYNTHIA). Quantitative and qualitative comparisons demonstrate that our
approach is competitive with state-of-the-art methods for the Cityscapes
dataset and surpasses existing solutions for the SYNTHIA dataset. Code for our
framework will be made readily available to the research community
A Dominant-Negative PPARĪ³ Mutant Promotes Cell Cycle Progression and Cell Growth in Vascular Smooth Muscle Cells
PPARĪ³ ligands have been shown to have antiproliferative effects on many cell types. We herein report that a synthetic dominant-negative (DN) PPARĪ³ mutant functions like a growth factor to promote cell cycle progression and cell proliferation in human coronary artery smooth muscle cells (CASMCs). In quiescent CASMCs, adenovirus-expressed DN-PPARĪ³ promoted G1āS cell cycle progression, enhanced BrdU incorporation, and increased cell proliferation. DN-PPARĪ³ expression also markedly enhanced positive regulators of the cell cycle, increasing Rb and CDC2 phosphorylation and the expression of cyclin A, B1, D1, and MCM7. Conversely, overexpression of wild-type (WT) or constitutively-active (CA) PPARĪ³ inhibited cell cycle progression and the activity and expression of positive regulators of the cell cycle. DN-PPARĪ³ expression, however, did not up-regulate positive cell cycle regulators in PPARĪ³-deficient cells, strongly suggesting that DN-PPARĪ³ effects on cell cycle result from blocking the function of endogenous wild-type PPARĪ³. DN-PPARĪ³ expression enhanced phosphorylation of ERK MAPKs. Furthermore, the ERK specific-inhibitor PD98059 blocked DN-PPARĪ³-induced phosphorylation of Rb and expression of cyclin A and MCM7. Our data thus suggest that DN-PPARĪ³ promotes cell cycle progression and cell growth in CASMCs by modulating fundamental cell cycle regulatory proteins and MAPK mitogenic signaling pathways in vascular smooth muscle cells (VSMCs)
Contrastive Clustering
In this paper, we propose a one-stage online clustering method called
Contrastive Clustering (CC) which explicitly performs the instance- and
cluster-level contrastive learning. To be specific, for a given dataset, the
positive and negative instance pairs are constructed through data augmentations
and then projected into a feature space. Therein, the instance- and
cluster-level contrastive learning are respectively conducted in the row and
column space by maximizing the similarities of positive pairs while minimizing
those of negative ones. Our key observation is that the rows of the feature
matrix could be regarded as soft labels of instances, and accordingly the
columns could be further regarded as cluster representations. By simultaneously
optimizing the instance- and cluster-level contrastive loss, the model jointly
learns representations and cluster assignments in an end-to-end manner.
Extensive experimental results show that CC remarkably outperforms 17
competitive clustering methods on six challenging image benchmarks. In
particular, CC achieves an NMI of 0.705 (0.431) on the CIFAR-10 (CIFAR-100)
dataset, which is an up to 19\% (39\%) performance improvement compared with
the best baseline
Fast Model Debias with Machine Unlearning
Recent discoveries have revealed that deep neural networks might behave in a
biased manner in many real-world scenarios. For instance, deep networks trained
on a large-scale face recognition dataset CelebA tend to predict blonde hair
for females and black hair for males. Such biases not only jeopardize the
robustness of models but also perpetuate and amplify social biases, which is
especially concerning for automated decision-making processes in healthcare,
recruitment, etc., as they could exacerbate unfair economic and social
inequalities among different groups. Existing debiasing methods suffer from
high costs in bias labeling or model re-training, while also exhibiting a
deficiency in terms of elucidating the origins of biases within the model. To
this respect, we propose a fast model debiasing framework (FMD) which offers an
efficient approach to identify, evaluate and remove biases inherent in trained
models. The FMD identifies biased attributes through an explicit counterfactual
concept and quantifies the influence of data samples with influence functions.
Moreover, we design a machine unlearning-based strategy to efficiently and
effectively remove the bias in a trained model with a small counterfactual
dataset. Experiments on the Colored MNIST, CelebA, and Adult Income datasets
along with experiments with large language models demonstrate that our method
achieves superior or competing accuracies compared with state-of-the-art
methods while attaining significantly fewer biases and requiring much less
debiasing cost. Notably, our method requires only a small external dataset and
updating a minimal amount of model parameters, without the requirement of
access to training data that may be too large or unavailable in practice
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