Robust-MSA: Understanding the Impact of Modality Noise on Multimodal Sentiment Analysis

Improving model robustness against potential modality noise, as an essential step for adapting multimodal models to real-world applications, has received increasing attention among researchers. For Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA), there is also a debate on whether multimodal models are more effective against noisy features than unimodal ones. Stressing on intuitive illustration and in-depth analysis of these concerns, we present Robust-MSA, an interactive platform that visualizes the impact of modality noise as well as simple defence methods to help researchers know better about how their models perform with imperfect real-world data.Comment: Accept by AAAI 2023. Code is available at https://github.com/thuiar/Robust-MS

A Comparative Analysis on the Structure and Function of the Panax notoginseng Rhizosphere Microbiome

Panax notoginseng, an important Chinese medicinal herb, can be mainly cultivated in two planting patterns, cropland planting (DT) and understory planting (LX). We speculate that the rhizosphere microbiome may vary in DT and LX and may play an important role in promoting the growth and health of P. notoginseng. In the present study, culture-independent Illumina HiSeq was employed to investigate the rhizosphere bacteria and fungi under DT and LX planting patterns. Predominant phyla include Proteobacteria, Acidobacteria, Actinobacteria, Gemmatimonadetes, and Ascomycota in the two planting patterns. DT has higher alpha diversity index than LX. The predominant LX-core genera include Bradyrhizobium, Streptomyces, and Actinomadura, and the predominant DT-core genera include Sphingomonas, Variovorax, and Novosphingobium. Total relative abundance of the disease-suppression phylum (Proteobacteria, Firmicutes, and Actinobacteria) and the potential plant growth-promoting rhizobacteria (PGPR) were both significantly higher in LX than in DT. We also identified over-presented microbial functional traits mediating plant–microbe and microbe–microbe interactions, nutrition acquisition, and plant growth promotion in P. notoginseng rhizosphere. Our findings provide a valuable reference for studying beneficial microbes and pathogens of P. notoginseng planted in DT and LX

An End-to-End Traditional Chinese Medicine Constitution Assessment System Based on Multimodal Clinical Feature Representation and Fusion

Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) constitution is a fundamental concept in TCM theory. It is determined by multimodal TCM clinical features which, in turn, are obtained from TCM clinical information of image (face, tongue, etc.), audio (pulse and voice), and text (inquiry) modality. The auto assessment of TCM constitution is faced with two major challenges: (1) learning discriminative TCM clinical feature representations; (2) jointly processing the features using multimodal fusion techniques. The TCM Constitution Assessment System (TCM-CAS) is proposed to provide an end-to-end solution to this task, along with auxiliary functions to aid TCM researchers. To improve the results of TCM constitution prediction, the system combines multiple machine learning algorithms such as facial landmark detection, image segmentation, graph neural networks and multimodal fusion. Extensive experiments are conducted on a four-category multimodal TCM constitution dataset, and the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art accuracy. Provided with datasets containing annotations of diseases, the system can also perform automatic disease diagnosis from a TCM perspective

Kaolin-Enhanced Superabsorbent Composites: Synthesis, Characterization and Swelling Behaviors

One type of low-cost and eco-friendly organic‒inorganic superabsorbent composite (SAPC) was synthesized by free radical polymerization of acrylic acid (AA), starch (ST), sodium alginate (SA) and kaolin (KL) in aqueous solution. The structure and morphology of the SAPC were characterized by Fourier transform infrared spectrometer (FT-IR), scanning electron microscope (SEM), X-ray diffraction (XRD) and thermogravimetric analysis (TGA). The influence of different reaction conditions on water absorption of SAPC, i.e., SA and KL contents, AA neutralization degree (ND), potassium persulfate (KPS) and N, N′-methylenebisacrylamide (MBA) loading were systematically studied. Under the optimal synthesis conditions, very high water absorption of 1200 g/g was achieved. The swelling kinetic mechanism of SAPC was studied by pseudo-second order swelling kinetics model and Ritger‒Peppas model. The performances of SAPC under different environments were tested and results revealed that this new SAPC had excellent swelling capacity, high water retention, good salt tolerance in monovalent salt solution (NaCl solution) and good pH tolerance between 4 and 10

Kaolin-enhanced superabsorbent composites : synthesis, characterization and swelling behaviors

One type of low-cost and eco-friendly organic‒inorganic superabsorbent composite (SAPC) was synthesized by free radical polymerization of acrylic acid (AA), starch (ST), sodium alginate (SA) and kaolin (KL) in aqueous solution. The structure and morphology of the SAPC were characterized by Fourier transform infrared spectrometer (FT-IR), scanning electron microscope (SEM), X-ray diffraction (XRD) and thermogravimetric analysis (TGA). The influence of different reaction conditions on water absorption of SAPC, i.e., SA and KL contents, AA neutralization degree (ND), potassium persulfate (KPS) and N, N′-methylenebisacrylamide (MBA) loading were systematically studied. Under the optimal synthesis conditions, very high water absorption of 1200 g/g was achieved. The swelling kinetic mechanism of SAPC was studied by pseudo-second order swelling kinetics model and Ritger‒Peppas model. The performances of SAPC under different environments were tested and results revealed that this new SAPC had excellent swelling capacity, high water retention, good salt tolerance in monovalent salt solution (NaCl solution) and good pH tolerance between 4 and 10.Published versionThis work was supported by grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (contract grant number 31270608) and the Heilongjiang Educational Committee (contract grant number 1511385)

Chromosome-scale genome assembly of Prunus pusilliflora provides novel insights into genome evolution, disease resistance, and dormancy release in Cerasus L.

Abstract Prunus pusilliflora is a wild cherry germplasm resource distributed mainly in Southwest China. Despite its ornamental and economic value, a high-quality assembled P. pusilliflora genome is unavailable, hindering our understanding of its genetic background, population diversity, and evolutionary processes. Here, we de novo assembled a chromosome-scale P. pusilliflora genome using Oxford Nanopore, Illumina, and chromosome conformation capture sequencing. The assembled genome size was 309.62 Mb, with 76 scaffolds anchored to eight pseudochromosomes. We predicted 33 035 protein-coding genes, functionally annotated 98.27% of them, and identified repetitive sequences covering 49.08% of the genome. We found that P. pusilliflora is closely related to Prunus serrulata and Prunus yedoensis, having diverged from them ~41.8 million years ago. A comparative genomic analysis revealed that P. pusilliflora has 643 expanded and 1128 contracted gene families. Furthermore, we found that P. pusilliflora is more resistant to Colletotrichum viniferum, Phytophthora capsici, and Pseudomonas syringae pv. tomato (Pst) DC3000 infections than cultivated Prunus avium. P. pusilliflora also has considerably more nucleotide-binding site-type resistance gene analogs than P. avium, which explains its stronger disease resistance. The cytochrome P450 and WRKY families of 263 and 61 proteins were divided into 42 and 8 subfamilies respectively in P. pusilliflora. Furthermore, 81 MADS-box genes were identified in P. pusilliflora, accompanying expansions of the SVP and AGL15 subfamilies and loss of the TM3 subfamily. Our assembly of a high-quality P. pusilliflora genome will be valuable for further research on cherries and molecular breeding