Wise-IoU: Bounding Box Regression Loss with Dynamic Focusing Mechanism

The loss function for bounding box regression (BBR) is essential to object detection. Its good definition will bring significant performance improvement to the model. Most existing works assume that the examples in the training data are high-quality and focus on strengthening the fitting ability of BBR loss. If we blindly strengthen BBR on low-quality examples, it will jeopardize localization performance. Focal-EIoU v1 was proposed to solve this problem, but due to its static focusing mechanism (FM), the potential of non-monotonic FM was not fully exploited. Based on this idea, we propose an IoU-based loss with a dynamic non-monotonic FM named Wise-IoU (WIoU). The dynamic non-monotonic FM uses the outlier degree instead of IoU to evaluate the quality of anchor boxes and provides a wise gradient gain allocation strategy. This strategy reduces the competitiveness of high-quality anchor boxes while also reducing the harmful gradient generated by low-quality examples. This allows WIoU to focus on ordinary-quality anchor boxes and improve the detector's overall performance. When WIoU is applied to the state-of-the-art real-time detector YOLOv7, the AP-75 on the MS-COCO dataset is improved from 53.03% to 54.50%. Code is available at https://github.com/Instinct323/wiou

Generating Diverse Translation by Manipulating Multi-Head Attention

Transformer model has been widely used on machine translation tasks and obtained state-of-the-art results. In this paper, we report an interesting phenomenon in its encoder-decoder multi-head attention: different attention heads of the final decoder layer align to different word translation candidates. We empirically verify this discovery and propose a method to generate diverse translations by manipulating heads. Furthermore, we make use of these diverse translations with the back-translation technique for better data augmentation. Experiment results show that our method generates diverse translations without severe drop in translation quality. Experiments also show that back-translation with these diverse translations could bring significant improvement on performance on translation tasks. An auxiliary experiment of conversation response generation task proves the effect of diversity as well.Comment: Accepted by AAAI 202

Evaluating approximate asymptotic distributions for fast neutrino flavor conversions in a periodic 1D box

The fast flavor conversions (FFCs) of neutrinos generally exist in core-collapse supernovae and binary neutron-star merger remnants, and can significantly change the flavor composition and affect the dynamics and nucleosynthesis processes. Several analytical prescriptions were proposed recently to approximately explain or predict the asymptotic outcome of FFCs for systems with different initial or boundary conditions, with the aim for providing better understandings of FFCs and for practical implementation of FFCs in hydrodynamic modeling. In this work, we obtain the asymptotic survival probability distributions of FFCs in a survey over thousands of randomly sampled initial angular distributions by means of numerical simulations in one-dimensional boxes with the periodic boundary condition. We also propose improved prescriptions that guarantee the continuity of the angular distributions after FFCs. Detailed comparisons and evaluation of all these prescriptions with our numerical survey results are performed. The survey dataset is made publicly available to inspire the exploration and design for more effective methods applicable to realistic hydrodynamic simulations.Comment: 15 pages, 5 figure

A curve model for association of serum homocysteine with carotid artery hemodynamics

Purpose: To investigate the correlation between carotid artery hemodynamics and serum homocysteine.Methods: A total of 894 participants made up of 439 male (49.11 %) and 455 female (50.89 %) from Ma’anshan, China, enrolled in the cross-sectional study. Data collection included demographics, blood sample and carotid ultrasonography. Piecewise linear regression analysis was used to analyze the relationship between serum homocysteine and carotid artery hemodynamics.Results: Homocysteine (Hcy) levels were divided into four groups by quartiles. The populations of the groups were 226, 220, 222, 226; and their mean ages were 56.52 ± 10.49, 62.27 ± 10.06, 63.42 ± 9.81 and 65.38 ± 10.56 years, respectively. After adjustment for blood biochemical and demographics factors, U-shaped and S-shaped curves were as observed between Hcy and carotid artery hemodynamics. The adjusted regression analysis showed that the threshold values of Hcy with end diastolic velocity (EDV) of right common carotid artery (CCA) were 12.50 and 19.00, while for the EDV of right internal carotid artery (ICA), the values were 11.50 and 22.00. U-shaped curves were observed between Hcy and peak systolic velocity (PSV) of left CCA, EDV of left CCA, PSV of left ICA and EDV of left ICA. The threshold values of Hcy with PSV of left CCA, EDV of left CCA, PSV of left ICA and EDV of left ICA were 14.00, 14.00, 14.00 and 13.50, respectively.Conclusion: These results indicate that a significant correlation exists between homocysteine at different concentrations and carotid artery hemodynamics.Keywords: Homocysteine, Hemodynamics, End diastolic velocity, Peak systolic velocit

Effects of Soybean Agglutinin on Intestinal Barrier Permeability and Tight Junction Protein Expression in Weaned Piglets

This study was developed to provide further information on the intestinal barrier permeability and the tight junction protein expression in weaned piglets fed with different levels of soybean agglutinin (SBA). Twenty-five weaned crossbred barrows (Duroc × Landrace × Yorkshire) were selected and randomly allotted to five groups, each group with five replicates. The piglets in the control group were not fed with leguminous products. 0.05, 0.1, 0.15 and 0.2% SBA was added to the control diet to form four experimental diets, respectively. After the experimental period of 7 days (for each group), all the piglets were anesthetized with excess procaine and slaughtered. The d-lactic acid in plasma and the Ileal mucosa diamine oxidase (DAO) was analyzed to observe the change in the intestinal permeability. The tight junction proteins occludin and ZO-1 in the jejunum tissue distribution and relative expression were detected by immunohistochemistry and Western Blot. The results illustrated that a high dose of SBA (0.1–0.2%) could increase the intestinal permeability and reduce piglet intestinal epithelial tight junction protein occludin or ZO-1 expression, while low dose of SBA (0.05% of total diet) had no significant affects. The contents of DAO, d-lactic acid, occludin or ZO-1, had a linear relationship with the SBA levels (0–0.2%) in diets. The high dose SBA (0.1–0.2%) could increase the intestinal permeability and reduce piglet intestinal epithelial tight junction protein occludin or ZO-1 expression, while low dose of SBA (0.05% of total diet) had no affects

A Robust Statistical Method for Association-Based eQTL Analysis

Background: It has been well established that theoretical kernel for recently surging genome-wide association study (GWAS) is statistical inference of linkage disequilibrium (LD) between a tested genetic marker and a putative locus affecting a disease trait. However, LD analysis is vulnerable to several confounding factors of which population stratification is the most prominent. Whilst many methods have been proposed to correct for the influence either through predicting the structure parameters or correcting inflation in the test statistic due to the stratification, these may not be feasible or may impose further statistical problems in practical implementation. Methodology: We propose here a novel statistical method to control spurious LD in GWAS from population structure by incorporating a control marker into testing for significance of genetic association of a polymorphic marker with phenotypic variation of a complex trait. The method avoids the need of structure prediction which may be infeasible or inadequate in practice and accounts properly for a varying effect of population stratification on different regions of the genome under study. Utility and statistical properties of the new method were tested through an intensive computer simulation study and an association-based genome-wide mapping of expression quantitative trait loci in genetically divergent human populations. Results/Conclusions: The analyses show that the new method confers an improved statistical power for detecting genuin