SAMP: A Toolkit for Model Inference with Self-Adaptive Mixed-Precision

The latest industrial inference engines, such as FasterTransformer1 and TurboTransformers, have verified that half-precision floating point (FP16) and 8-bit integer (INT8) quantization can greatly improve model inference speed. However, the existing FP16 or INT8 quantization methods are too complicated, and improper usage will lead to performance damage greatly. In this paper, we develop a toolkit for users to easily quantize their models for inference, in which a Self-Adaptive Mixed-Precision (SAMP) is proposed to automatically control quantization rate by a mixed-precision architecture to balance efficiency and performance. Experimental results show that our SAMP toolkit has a higher speedup than PyTorch and FasterTransformer while ensuring the required performance. In addition, SAMP is based on a modular design, decoupling the tokenizer, embedding, encoder and target layers, which allows users to handle various downstream tasks and can be seamlessly integrated into PyTorch.Comment: 6 page

TencentPretrain: A Scalable and Flexible Toolkit for Pre-training Models of Different Modalities

Recently, the success of pre-training in text domain has been fully extended to vision, audio, and cross-modal scenarios. The proposed pre-training models of different modalities are showing a rising trend of homogeneity in their model structures, which brings the opportunity to implement different pre-training models within a uniform framework. In this paper, we present TencentPretrain, a toolkit supporting pre-training models of different modalities. The core feature of TencentPretrain is the modular design. The toolkit uniformly divides pre-training models into 5 components: embedding, encoder, target embedding, decoder, and target. As almost all of common modules are provided in each component, users can choose the desired modules from different components to build a complete pre-training model. The modular design enables users to efficiently reproduce existing pre-training models or build brand-new one. We test the toolkit on text, vision, and audio benchmarks and show that it can match the performance of the original implementations

A Novel Directional Ad Hoc MAC

Recently, Ad Hoc network is adapted widely in military, agriculture, and disaster rescue owing to the character flexible and fast deployment without infrastructure itself. However, the omnidirectional Ad Hoc cannot fulfill the requirements from people of increasing the capacity and the bandwidth of network caused by drastic explosion of information. By contrast, the directional antenna is more advantage than the omnidirectional one, which have the capability to improve the performance of Ad Hoc including more transmission range, less interference, spatial reuse, more capacity and tactical silence. Based on the existing lecture, a novel directional MAC found on STDMA（Spatial Time Division Multiple Access）is raised and provide high throughput, high transmission rate and low delay to network system which contribute to share massive information and improve the performance of the network

Effects of gamma radiation on the impact strength of polypropylene (PP)/high density polyethylene (HDPE) blends

Polypropylene (PP) blends with the other polymer, like polyethylene (PE), is normally used as for improving PP impact strength. In this paper, we wanted to improve the PP/high density polyethylene (HDPE) impact strength by increasing the compatibility of PP/HDPE with gamma irradiation process that the un-irradiated ones were also used for comparison. It was obvious that the impact strength increased when the HDPE (10 phr) was added into the PP matrix, compared with neat PP. Meanwhile, the irradiated ones had higher impact strength than that of un-irradiated PP/HDPE blends. This was contributed to the finer compatibility in γ-irradiated PP/HDPE blends, seen from the SEM. Furthermore, the FTIR data also confirmed that the 1,4-butanediol diacrylate (BDDA) was grafted on the backbone of PP/HDPE blends by γ radiation. It speculated that this correlated with the compatibilization improvement in γ-irradiated PP/HDPE blends. Finally, the possible mechanism after γ-irradiation was also proposed in this paper. Keywords: PP, HDPE, Gamma irradiation, Impact strengt

Cellular microRNA miR-181b Inhibits Replication of Mink Enteritis Virus by Repression of Non-Structural Protein 1 Translation

<div><p>Mink enteritis virus (MEV) is one of the most important viral pathogens in the mink industry. Recent studies have showed that microRNAs (miRNAs), small noncoding RNAs of length ranging from 18–23 nucleotides (nt) participate in host-pathogen interaction networks; however, whether or not miRNAs are involved in MEV infection has not been reported. Our study revealed that miRNA miR-181b inhibited replication of MEV in the feline kidney (F81) cell line by targeting the MEV non-structural protein 1 (NS1) messenger RNA (mRNA) coding region, resulting in NS1 translational repression, while MEV infection reduced miR-181b expression. This is the first description of cellular miRNAs modulating MEV infection in F81 cells, providing further insight into the mechanisms of viral infection, and may be useful in development of naturally-occurring miRNAs antiviral strategies.</p></div

MEV infection regulates cellular miRNAs including miR-181b.

<p>(<b>A</b>) Expression of selected miRNAs in F81 cells infected with MEV (MOI = 1) and in uninfected controls were tested for validation by qPCR using a specific primer for each miRNA. Fold increase/decrease was calculated based on endogenous control U6 small RNA normalization. (<b>B</b>) qPCR was used to detect the expression levels of miR-181b at 0 h, 6 h, 12 h, 24 h and 36 h after MEV infection, normalized to U6 small RNA. Data are from 3 independent experiments (mean ± SD). Statistical significance was analyzed by Student’s <i>t</i> test; * <i>P</i><0.05; ** <i>P</i><0.01; *** <i>P</i><0.001.</p

The conserved binding sites of miR-181b in the NS1 gene of pavovirus strains^a.

<p>^a Collected from NCBI 17 December 2012 and our lab sequencing.</p><p>^b The whole genome sequence of MEV in our lab is unpublished.</p><p>^c All the isolates of canine parvovirus from NCBI.</p><p>^d All the isolates of feline panleukopenia virus from NCBI.</p><p>^e Bold and italic sequences indicate conserved binding sites.</p

qPCR primers for miRNAs.

<p>qPCR primers for miRNAs.</p

miR-181b physically binds to MEV NS1 mRNA in the RISC.

<p>(<b>A</b>) Western blot assay was used to detect Ago2 protein from Ago2 immunoprecipitates of lysates from F81 cells. (<b>B</b>) qPCR analysis of the relative level of miR-181b and MEV NS1 mRNAs from Ago2 or IgG immunoprecipitated lysates of F81 cells transfected with miR-181b mimics (50 pmol/well) in 6-well plates and 12 h later infected with MEV (MOI = 0.1), using U6 small RNA as an internal control. (<b>D</b>) qPCR analysis of the relative level of endogenous miR-181b and MEV NS1 mRNAs from Ago2 or IgG immunoprecipitated lysates without transfection with the mimics. Data are from 3 independent experiments (mean ± SD). Statistical significance was analyzed by Student’s <i>t</i> test; * <i>P</i><0.05; ** <i>P</i><0.01.</p