信息工程最新文献

This study aims to investigate the potential impact of inhibitors targeting the papain-like protease (PLpro) of SARS-CoV-2 on viral replication and the host immune response. A mathematical model was developed to simulate the interaction among susceptible cells, infected cells, PLpro, and immune cells, incorporating data on PLpro inhibition. Through numerical simulations using MATLAB, the model parameters were estimated based on available statistical data. The results indicate that strategically positioned inhibitors could impede the virus’s access to host cellular machinery, thereby enhancing the immune response and gradually reducing susceptible and infected cells over time. The dynamics of the viral enzyme PLpro showed reduced activity with the introduction of the inhibitor, leading to a decline in viral replication. Moreover, the immune cell population exhibited functional recovery as the inhibitor suppressed PLpro activity. These findings suggest that inhibitors targeting PLpro may serve as therapeutic interventions against SARS-CoV-2 by inhibiting viral replication and bolstering the immune response.

Background

External knowledge representations play an essential role in knowledge-based visual question and answering to better understand complex scenarios in the open world. Recent entity-relationship embedding approaches are deficient in representing some complex relations, resulting in a lack of topic-related knowledge and redundancy in topic-irrelevant information.

Methods

To this end, we propose MKEAH: Multimodal Knowledge Extraction and Accumulation on Hyperplanes. To ensure that the lengths of the feature vectors projected onto the hyperplane compare equally and to filter out sufficient topic-irrelevant information, two losses are proposed to learn the triplet representations from the complementary views: range loss and orthogonal loss. To interpret the capability of extracting topic-related knowledge, we present the Topic Similarity (TS) between topic and entity-relations.

Results

Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of hyperplane embedding for knowledge representation in knowledge-based visual question answering. Our model outperformed state-of-the-art methods by 2.12% and 3.24% on two challenging knowledge-request datasets: OK-VQA and KRVQA, respectively.

Conclusions

The obvious advantages of our model in TS show that using hyperplane embedding to represent multimodal knowledge can improve its ability to extract topic-related knowledge.

The hands and face are the most important parts for expressing sign language morphemes in sign language videos. However, we find that existing Continuous Sign Language Recognition (CSLR) methods lack the mining of hand and face information in visual backbones or use expensive and time-consuming external extractors to explore this information. In addition, the signs have different lengths, whereas previous CSLR methods typically use a fixed-length window to segment the video to capture sequential features and then perform global temporal modeling, which disturbs the perception of complete signs. In this study, we propose a Multi-Scale Context-Aware network (MSCA-Net) to solve the aforementioned problems. Our MSCA-Net contains two main modules: (1) Multi-Scale Motion Attention (MSMA), which uses the differences among frames to perceive information of the hands and face in multiple spatial scales, replacing the heavy feature extractors; and (2) Multi-Scale Temporal Modeling (MSTM), which explores crucial temporal information in the sign language video from different temporal scales. We conduct extensive experiments using three widely used sign language datasets, i.e., RWTH-PHOENIX-Weather-2014, RWTH-PHOENIX-Weather-2014T, and CSL-Daily. The proposed MSCA-Net achieve state-of-the-art performance, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach.

Digital watermarking technology plays an essential role in the work of anti-counterfeiting and traceability. However, image watermarking algorithms are weak against hybrid attacks, especially geometric at-tacks, such as cropping attacks, rotation attacks, etc. We propose a robust blind image watermarking algorithm that combines stable interest points and deep learning networks to improve the robustness of the watermarking algorithm further. First, to extract more sparse and stable interest points, we use the Superpoint algorithm for generation and design two steps to perform the screening procedure. We first keep the points with the highest possibility in a given region to ensure the sparsity of the points and then filter the robust interest points by hybrid attacks to ensure high stability. The message is embedded in sub-blocks centered on stable interest points using a deep learning-based framework. Different kinds of attacks and simulated noise are added to the adversarial training to guarantee the robustness of embedded blocks. We use the ConvNext network for watermark extraction and determine the division threshold based on the decoded values of the unembedded sub-blocks. Through extensive experimental results, we demonstrate that our proposed algorithm can improve the accuracy of the network in extracting information while ensuring high invisibility between the embedded image and the original cover image. Comparison with previous SOTA work reveals that our algorithm can achieve better visual and numerical results on hybrid and geometric attacks.

Background

Despite the recent progress in 3D point cloud processing using deep convolutional neural networks, the inability to extract local features remains a challenging problem. In addition, existing methods consider only the spatial domain in the feature extraction process.

Methods

In this paper, we propose a spectral and spatial aggregation convolutional network (S²ANet), which combines spectral and spatial features for point cloud processing. First, we calculate the local frequency of the point cloud in the spectral domain. Then, we use the local frequency to group points and provide a spectral aggregation convolution module to extract the features of the points grouped by the local frequency. We simultaneously extract the local features in the spatial domain to supplement the final features.

Results

S²ANet was applied in several point cloud analysis tasks; it achieved state-of-the-art classification accuracies of 93.8%, 88.0%, and 83.1% on the ModelNet40, ShapeNetCore, and ScanObjectNN datasets, respectively. For indoor scene segmentation, training and testing were performed on the S3DIS dataset, and the mean intersection over union was 62.4%.

Conclusions

The proposed S²ANet can effectively capture the local geometric information of point clouds, thereby improving accuracy on various tasks.

Background

With the development of virtual reality (VR) technology, there is a growing need for customized 3D avatars. However, traditional methods for 3D avatar modeling are either time-consuming or fail to retain the similarity to the person being modeled. This study presents a novel framework for generating animatable 3D cartoon faces from a single portrait image.

Methods

First, we transferred an input real-world portrait to a stylized cartoon image using StyleGAN. We then proposed a two-stage reconstruction method to recover a 3D cartoon face with detailed texture. Our two-stage strategy initially performs coarse estimation based on template models and subsequently refines the model by nonrigid deformation under landmark supervision. Finally, we proposed a semantic-preserving face-rigging method based on manually created templates and deformation transfer.

Conclusions

Compared with prior arts, the qualitative and quantitative results show that our method achieves better accuracy, aesthetics, and similarity criteria. Furthermore, we demonstrated the capability of the proposed 3D model for real-time facial animation.

This research aims to understand the effect of human awareness and the use of bed nets on malaria control programs. A deterministic host-vector mathematical model was utilized and simplified using the Quasi-Steady State Approximation, assuming the mosquito population is at equilibrium due to its fast, dynamic behavior. The model reveals two equilibrium states: the malaria-free equilibrium and the endemic equilibrium. The malaria-free equilibrium is locally asymptotically stable when the basic reproduction number is less than one and unstable if it is larger than one. Conversely, the malaria-endemic equilibrium is unique and stable if the reproduction number exceeds one and does not exist otherwise. Based on incidence data from Papua, parameter estimation and sensitivity analyses indicate that human awareness and the use of bed nets significantly reduce the reproduction number. To address budget constraints for interventions, the model was reformulated as an optimal control problem, characterized using the Pontryagin Maximum Principle, and solved with the forward–backward sweep method. Numerical experiments were conducted to assess the impact of various scenarios on the malaria control program. Cost-effectiveness analyses employing ACER, ICER, and IAR metrics suggest that while the combined implementation of awareness campaigns and bed nets effectively reduces infections, it incurs high costs. In contrast, implementing human awareness campaigns alone emerges as the best strategy based on ACER, ICER, and IAR standards. This study demonstrates that enhancing human awareness and promoting the use of bed nets are effective strategies for controlling malaria. However, due to budget constraints, focusing solely on awareness campaigns proves to be the most cost-effective intervention. This approach not only reduces malaria transmission but also optimizes resource allocation, highlighting the importance of targeted educational programs in public health initiatives for malaria control.