Original AP Research Articles

Enhancing the Transferability of Adversarial Patch via Alternating Minimization

Adversarial patches, a type of adversarial example, pose serious security threats to deep neural networks (DNNs) by inducing erroneous outputs. Existing gradient stabilization methods aim to stabilize the optimization direction of adversarial examples through accumulating gradient momentum to enhance attack transferability on black-box models. However, they are not fully effective for adversarial patches. The accumulated momentum during optimization often misaligns with the optimization direction, reducing their efficacy in black-box scenarios. We introduce an optimization method called Alternating Minimization for Adversarial Patch (AMAP). This method decomposes the original AP into multiple sub-patches and utilizes their update direction to stabilize the optimization of the original AP. Additionally, we propose an adaptive step size optimization method that accelerates convergence and boosts the attack performance. In face recognition tasks, AMAP outperforms baseline methods by a remarkable 5.21% and exceeds the second-best method by 1.4%. Furthermore, AMAP demonstrates practical feasibility in the physical domain, highlighting its potential for robust computer security testing applications.

ABYOLOv4: improved YOLOv4 human object detection based on enhanced multi-scale feature fusion

The purpose of human object detection is to obtain the number of people and their position in images, which is one of the core problems in the field of machine vision. However, the high missing detection rate from small- and medium-sized human bodies due to the large variety of human scale in human object detection tasks still influences the performance of human object detection. To solve the above problem, this paper proposed an improved ASPP_BiFPN_YOLOv4 (ABYOLOv4) method to detect human object detection. In detail, Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling (ASPP) module was used to replace the original Spatial Pyramid Pooling module to increase the receptive field level of the network and improve the perception ability of multi-scale targets. Then, the original Path Aggregation Network (PANet) multi-scale fusion module was replaced by the self-built bi-layer bidirectional feature pyramid network (Bi-FPN). Meanwhile, a new feature was imported into the proposed model to reuse the mid- and low-level features, which could enhance the ability of the network to express the characteristics of small- and medium-sized targets. Finally, the standard convolution in Bi-FPN was replaced by depth-separable convolution to make the network achieve the balance of accuracy and the number of parameters. To identify the performance of the proposed ABYOLOv4 model, the human object detection experiment is carried out by using the public data set of VOC2007 and VOC2012, the improved YOLOv4 algorithm is 0.5% higher than the original AP algorithm, and the weight file size of the model is reduced by 45.3 M. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed ABYOLOv4 network has higher accuracy and lower computational cost for human target detection.

CLT-YOLOX: Improved YOLOX Based on Cross-Layer Transformer for Object Detection Method Regarding Insect Pest

This paper presents an enhanced YOLOX-based algorithm for pest detection, adopting a nature-inspired approach for refining its methodology. To tackle the limited availability of image data pertaining to pests and diseases, the paper incorporates Mosaic and Mixup technologies for effective image preprocessing. Furthermore, a novel training strategy is proposed to enhance the overall quality of the results. The existing architecture is enriched by integrating shallow information, while the CLT module is devised to facilitate cross-layer fusion and extract essential feature information. This advancement enables improved object detection across various scales. Additionally, the paper optimizes the original PFPN structure by eliminating the convolutional layer preceding upsampling, enhancing the C3 module, and integrating the convolutional attention model (CBAM) to identify salient regions within complex scenes. The performance of the proposed CLT-YOLOX model is extensively evaluated using the IP102 dataset, demonstrating its effectiveness. Notably, the model exhibits significant improvements compared to the original AP evaluation index, with an increase of 2.2% in average precision (mAP) and 1.8% in AP75. Furthermore, favorable results are achieved in the COCOmAP index, particularly in the APsmall category where there is a 2.2% improvement in performance.

EXPLORING THE APPLICATIONS OF ISLANDED KEYSTONE FLAP IN THE INDIAN POPULATION

This study aims to explore keystone ap for various soft tissue defect reconstruction, demonstrating its exibility, efciency, reliability and practicality in the Indian population. 30 aps were performed to cover various soft tissue defects. All aps were planned according to the original ap design and standard post-operative patient and ap care was given. All the aps were easy to perform and gave satisfactory 'like tissue' replacement for the defects. Intra-operative and post-operative period was uneventful. After being discharged with necessary advice, patients were followed up regularly for up to a period of six months. All aps settled well with tissue match in function, texture, colour and sensitivity. Hence keystone ap can be considered as a versatile and sturdy one with a short learning curve and can be useful tool for even novice surgeons.

Philosophical context in the work of Sergei Zoruk

S. Zoruk was a bright representative of the artistic circle with an original view and individual ap- proach to art. His innovative methodological theories on academic drawing are organically included in the concept of scientific and methodological base of the Department of Drawing NAOMA and drawing school in general. S. Zoruk constantly studied and improved the technique of drawing, built his personal style. It is in the pictorial compositions that his authorial style with an emphatically refined aesthetic and philosophical subtext is most vividly revealed. The line, the stroke, the spot are combined and intertwined, creating elegant images of his paintings. His style of drawing is characterized by a light, free line. It is extremely interesting to see the evolution of the Zoruk artist: "Game-4" (1991), "Breath of the Wind" (1993), diptychs "Farewell to the Hat" (1993) on carnival themes and "Time to scatter stones, time to collect stones" (1993) for biblical motives. They are made in the technique of drawing. Thanks to the compositional techniques of including large sizes of clean planes of paper and the clarity of the line, the artist achieves the effect when the viewer’s imagination continues to paint the plastic life of the image. S. Zoruk’s creative style is characterized by refinement and detail of the image, elegance and lightness of the line and, at the same time, there is a pause, a colon in the story, which gives space for plot fantasizing. An important place in the artist’s creative activity was occupied by his teaching work, which he began in 1989 at the Department of Drawing KDHI. He alternately taught drawing at the Faculty of Architecture, and later at the restoration, theater, and graphic departments. He took a direct part in the forma- tion of the scientific and theoretical basis for the methods of teaching drawing and introduced methodological development, namely "Double productions in the 5th year" in the working program of the drawing. The level of professional qualification of the artist was marked in 1986 by admission to the National Academy of Arts, the rank — Honored Artist of Ukraine (1996), in 2000 the academic rank of associate professor, and since 2003 S. Zoruk held the position of professor. He successfully combined pedagogical and exhibition activities, repeatedly visited and collaborated with art galleries in Suzhou, Wu Xi (PRC). He has about 40 exhibitions in Ukraine and abroad. His works are in the funds of the Ministry of Culture of Ukraine, the National Union of Artists of Ukraine, the museum "Kachanivka" and the Museum of Contemporary Art (Kaliningrad), in private collections in the Netherlands, Russia, Belgium, France, Germany, Austria, USA, China. S. Zoruk’s creative and pedagogical activity were awarded in 2002 by the award of the Ministry of Culture of Ukraine "For out- standing merits in the development of culture and art". Philosophical sound in combination with intellectual- ism, together with high professional skill gave S. Zoruk’s works of extraordinary artistic value, made them an important phenomenon of Ukrainian art of the last quarter of the XX — beginning of the XXI century. His works have a sense of the space of the theatrical stage: the images, which is raised up to generalization are united by a certain game moment, the artist slowly unfolds in front of the spectator the dramaturgy of the plot, leaving a field for his own interpretations.

Lack of evidence supporting a role of IFN-β and TGF-β in differential polarization of Bordetella pertussis specific-T cell responses

Bordetella Pertussis (BP) vaccine-induced immunity is waning worldwide despite excellent vaccine coverage. Replacement of the whole-cell inactivated vaccine (wP) by an acellular subunit vaccine (aP) is thought to play a major role and to be associated with the recurrence of whooping cough. Previously, we detected that the polarization towards a Th2 and Th1/Th17 response in aP and wP vaccinees, respectively, persists upon aP boosting in adolescents and adults. Additionally, IL-9 and TGF-β were found to be up-regulated in aP-primed donors and network analysis further identified IFN-β as a potential upstream regulator of IL-17 and IL-9. Based on these findings, we hypothesized that IFN-β produced following aP vaccination may lead to increased IL-9 and decreased IL-17 production. Also, due to the well characterized role of TGF-β in both Th17 and Th9 differentiation, we put forth that TGF-β addition to BP-stimulated CD4 + T cells might modulate IL-17 and IL-9 production. To test this hypothesis, we stimulated in vitro cultures of PBMC or isolated naive CD4 + T cells from aP vs wP donors with a pool of BP epitopes and assessed the effect of IFN-β or TGF-β in proliferative responses as well as in the cytokine secretion of IL-4, IL-9, IL-17, and IFN-γ. IFN-β reduced BP-specific proliferation in PBMC as well as cytokine production but increased IL-9, IL-4, and IFN-γ cytokines in naïve CD4 + T cells. These effects were independent of the childhood vaccination received by the donors. Similarly, TGF-β reduced BP-specific proliferation in PBMC but induced proliferation in naïve CD4 + T cells. However, stimulation was associated with a generalized inhibition of cytokine production regardless of the original aP or wP vaccination received by the donors. Our study suggests that key T cell functions such as cytokine secretion are under the control of antigen stimulation and environmental cues but molecular pathways different than the ones investigated here might underlie the long-lasting differential cytokine production associated with aP- vs wP-priming in childhood vaccination.

Classifications in Brief: The Dorr Classification of Femoral Bone.

Classifications in Brief: The Dorr Classification of Femoral Bone.

Development and Validation of a Bordetella pertussis Whole-Genome Screening Strategy.

The immune response elicited by the protective whole-cell pertussis (wP) versus the less-protective acellular pertussis (aP) vaccine has been well characterized; however, important clinical problems remain unsolved, as the inability of the currently administered aP vaccine is resulting in the reemergence of clinical disease (i.e., whooping cough). Strong evidence has shown that original, childhood aP and wP priming vaccines provide a long-lasting imprint on the CD4+ T cells that impacts protective immunity. However, aP vaccination might prevent disease but not infection, which might also affect the breadth of responses to Bordetella pertussis (BP) antigens. Thus, characterizing and defining novel targets associated with T cell reactivity are of considerable interest. Here, we compare the T cell reactivity of original aP and wP priming for different antigens contained or not contained in the aP vaccine and define the basis of a full-scale genomic map of memory T cell reactivity to BP antigens in humans. Our data show that the original priming after birth with aP vaccines has higher T cell reactivity than originally expected against a variety of BP antigens and that the genome-wide mapping of BP using an ex vivo screening methodology is feasible, unbiased, and reproducible. This could provide invaluable knowledge towards the direction of a new and improved pertussis vaccine design.

Fast Clustering by Affinity Propagation Based on Density Peaks

Clustering is an important technique in data mining and knowledge discovery. Affinity propagation clustering (AP) and density peaks and distance-based clustering (DDC) are two significant clustering algorithms proposed in 2007 and 2014 respectively. The two clustering algorithms have simple and clear design ideas, and are effective in finding meaningful clustering solutions. They have been widely used in various applications successfully. However, a key disadvantage of AP is its high time complexity, which has become a bottleneck when applying AP for large-scale problems. The core idea of DDC is to construct the decision graph based on the local density and the distance of each data point, and then select the cluster centers, but the selection of the cluster centers is relatively subjective, and sometimes it is difficult to determine a suitable number of cluster centers. Here, we propose a two-stage clustering algorithm, called DDAP, to overcome these shortcomings. First, we select a small number of potential exemplars based on the two quantities of each data point in DDC to greatly compress the scale of the similarity matrix. Then we implement message-passing on the incomplete similarity matrix. In experiments, two synthetic datasets, nine publicly available datasets, and a real-world electronic medical records (EMRs) dataset are used to evaluate the proposed method. The results demonstrate that DDAP can achieve comparable clustering performance with the original AP algorithm, while the computational efficiency improves observably.

Productive service demands modularization for CNC machine tools based on the improved AP clustering algorithm

The integration of manufacturing and service industry has become the mainstream trend. During the manufacturing process, CNC machine tools, as large-scale and complex equipment, involve a variety of service demands in the life cycle, especially the productive service demands are numerous and scattered. The article established the correlation model between customer demands and productive service demands based on clustering ideas and mathematical statistics theory to complete the modularization of productive service demands for CNC machine tools. A comprehensive correlation coefficient model and an improved AP clustering algorithm were put forward. The comprehensive correlation coefficient model mined the correlation between customer demand and production service demand and the self-correlation of production service demands directly based on the combination weight obtained by the analytic hierarchy process and rough set theory. The improved AP clustering algorithm was the combination of AP and Kruskal minimum tree principle. By this new algorithm, the clustering project of productive service demands for every customer demand could be attained. Finally, the five matrices can be computed in 1083 ms, 1067 ms, 1029 ms, 1149 ms and 1042 ms, respectively, by the improved AP clustering algorithm. However, the original AP method should spend 1122 ms, 1241 ms, 1231 ms, 1383 ms and 1231 ms, respectively. So it was very clear that the improved AP clustering algorithm can improve the data processing efficiency.

A Preference Model on Adaptive Affinity Propagation

In recent years, two new data clustering algorithms have been proposed. One of them isAffinity Propagation (AP). AP is a new data clustering technique that use iterative message passing and consider all data points as potential exemplars. Two important inputs of AP are a similarity matrix (SM) of the data and the parameter ”preference” p. Although the original AP algorithm has shown much success in data clustering, it still suffer from one limitation: it is not easy to determine the value of the parameter ”preference” p which can result an optimal clustering solution. To resolve this limitation, we propose a new model of the parameter ”preference” p, i.e. it is modeled based on the similarity distribution. Having the SM and p, Modified Adaptive AP (MAAP) procedure is running. MAAP procedure means that we omit the adaptive p-scanning algorithm as in original Adaptive-AP (AAP) procedure. Experimental results on random non-partition and partition data sets show that (i) the proposed algorithm, MAAP-DDP, is slower than original AP for random non-partition dataset, (ii) for random 4-partition dataset and real datasets the proposed algorithm has succeeded to identify clusters according to the number of dataset’s true labels with the execution times that are comparable with those original AP. Beside that the MAAP-DDP algorithm demonstrates more feasible and effective than original AAP procedure.

TU‐C‐BRE‐09: Performance Comparisons of Patient Specific IMRT QA Methodologies Using ROC Analysis

Purpose:To evaluate the ability of a selection of patient‐specific QA methods to accurately classify IMRT plans as acceptable or unacceptable based on a multiple ion chamber (MIC) phantom.Methods:Twenty‐four IMRT plans were selected (20 previously failed the institutional QA), and were measured on a MIC phantom to assess their dosimetric acceptability. These same plans were then measured using film (Kodak EDR2) and ion chamber (Wellhofer cc04), ArcCheck (Sun Nuclear), and MapCheck (Sun Nuclear) (delivered AP field‐by‐field, AP composite, and with original gantry angles). All gamma analyses were performed at 2%/2mm, 3%/3mm, and 5%/3mm. By using the MIC results as a gold standard, the sensitivity and specificity were calculated across a range of cut‐off thresholds (% pixels passing for gamma analysis, and % dose difference for ion chamber), and were used to form ROC curves. Area under the curve (AUC) was used as a metric to quantify the performance of the various QA methods.Results:Grouping device’s AUC’s revealed two statistically significant different groups: ion chamber (AUC of 0.94), AP composite MapCheck (AUC of 0.85), ArcCheck (AUC of 0.84), and film (AUC of 0.82) were in the better performing group, while original gantry angles and AP field‐by‐field MapCheck (AUC of 0.65 and 0.66, respectively) matched less well with the gold standard results. Optimal cut‐offs were also assessed using the ROC curves. We found that while often 90% of pixels passing is used as a criteria, the differing sensitivities of QA methods can lead to device and methodology‐based optimal cutoff thresholds.Conclusion:While many methods exist to perform the same task of patient‐specific IMRT QA, they utilize different strategies. This work has shown that there are inconsistencies in these methodologies in terms of their sensitivity and specificity to dosimetric acceptability.This work was supported by Public Health Service grants CA010953, CA081647, and CA21661 awarded by the National Cancer Institute, United States Department of Health and Human Services.

Testing for uncorrelated errors in ARMA models: non‐standard Andrews‐Ploberger tests

A problem of interest in economic and finance applications is testing whether ARMA (Autoregressive moving average) errors are uncorrelated under weak assumptions, namely assumptions where the errors are neither iid nor a martingale difference. In this paper, non-standard versions of the tests of serial correlation introduced by Andrews and Ploberger (1996, hereafter AP) are proposed for diagnostic checking of ARMA errors. The original AP tests are designed for the case where the observed time series is generated by ARMA(1,1) models under the alternative and use asymptotic critical values computed by AP. The non-standard testing procedure uses AP statistics calculated from residuals and critical values based on asymptotic distribution theory derived under weak assumptions. The motivation for modifying the original AP tests is that they have attractive properties for the case for which they were originally designed: They are consistent against all non-white noise alternatives and have good all-round power against non-seasonal alternatives compared to several widely used tests in the literature, including those of Box and Pierce (1970, hereafter BP) and Ljung and Box (1978, hereafter LB) tests. A further advantage of the AP tests is that there is no need to specify a cutoff lag-length as is necessary for the BP and LB tests. We compare the non-standard AP tests with the non-standard BP and LB tests proposed by Francq et al. (2005), the tests of Hong and Lee (2007), and the tests using standardized residuals proposed by Chen (2008). In Monte Carlo experiments using ARMA models with GARCH (Generalised autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity), EGARCH (Exponential GARCH) and non-MDS (Martingale difference sequence) innovations, the non-standard AP tests generally have better power than the other tests we consider. This suggests that the power advantage of the original AP tests extends to the more general framework considered in this paper.

The Tribolium spineless ortholog specifies both larval and adult antennal identity

The morphology of insect antennae varies widely among species, but our understanding of antennal development comes almost solely from studies of one species-the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster. Moreover, this knowledge applies mostly to adult structures, since Drosophila lacks external larval appendages. In contrast to Drosophila, the red flour beetle, Tribolium castaneum, has both larval and adult antennae, which are very different from one another in morphology. Thus, Tribolium provides an ideal system to compare modes of antennal development both within and between species. Here, we report that the Tribolium ortholog of spineless (Tc-ss) is required in both the larval and adult antennae. Knockdown of Tc-ss by RNAi during either larval or imaginal development causes transformation of the distal portion of the antennae to legs. Thus, the function of ss is conserved between Drosophila and Tribolium with respect to adult antennal specification and also between Tribolium larval and adult antennal development. The similarity of the Tc-ss RNAi phenotype to that of a classically described Tribolium mutation, antennapedia (ap) (of no relationship to the Drosophila Hox gene of the same name), led us to characterize the original ap mutation and two newly identified ap alleles. Our mapping and phenotypic data suggest that Tc-ss is the best candidate for the ap locus. These results represent a first step in characterizing larval and adult antennal patterning in Tribolium, which should provide important insights into the evolution of insect antennal development.

A sparse block exact affine projection algorithm

The so-called affine projection algorithm (APA) has become a popular method in adaptive filtering applications and fast versions of it have been developed previously, such as fast affine projection (FAP) and the frequency domain block exact fast affine projection (BEFAP). While it is known that regularization is an absolute necessity in affine projection based adaptive filtering algorithms, FAP and BEFAP rely on an implicit regularization parameter assumption. In this paper, a block exact affine projection algorithm (BE-APA) is derived that does not rely on the assumption of a small regularization parameter. It is an exact frequency domain translation of the original AP algorithm, and still has about the same complexity as, block exact FAR Unlike BEFAP, it can be used with strong regularization. It is then extended to incorporate an alternative to explicit regularization that is based on so-called sparse equations.

Fine structure genetic and physical map of the phage P22 tail protein gene.

Bacteriophage P22 which are incapable of making functional tail protein can be propagated by the addition of purified mature tail protein trimers to either liquid or solidified medium. This unique in vitro complementation condition has allowed us to isolate 74 absolute lethal tail protein mutants of P22 after hydroxylamine mutagenesis. These phage mutants have an absolute requirement for purified P22 tail protein to be present in a soft agar overlay in order to form plaques and do not grow on any nonsense suppressing strains of Salmonella typhimurium. In order to genetically map and physically locate these mutations we have constructed two complementary sets of fine structure deletion mapping strains using a collection of Tn1 insertions in gene 9, the structural gene for the tail protein. Fourteen bacteriophage P22 strains carrying unique Tn1 transposon insertions (Ap phage) in gene 9 have been crossed with Ap phage carrying Tn1 insertions in gene 20. Phage carrying deletions that arose from homologous recombination between the Tn1 elements were isolated as P22 lysogens. The deletion prophage were shown to be missing all genetic information bracketed by the parental Tn1 elements and thus form a set of deletions into gene 9 from the 5' end of the gene. From the frequency of production of these deletion phage the orientation of the Tn1 insertions in gene 9 could be deduced. The genetic end points of the deletions in gene 9 and thus the order of Tn1 insertions were determined by marker rescue experiments using the original Ap phage. The genetic end points of the deletions in gene 20 were determined in similar experiments using nonsense mutations in gene 20. To locate the physical end points of these deletions in gene 9, DNA containing the Tn1 element has been cloned from each of the original Ap phage into plasmids. The precise point of insertion of Tn1 into gene 9 was determined by restriction enzyme mapping and DNA sequencing of the relevant portions of each of these plasmids. In vitro deletion of different 3' gene 9 sequences in the plasmid clones was accomplished through the use of unique restriction endonuclease sites in Tn1. The resulting plasmids form a set of deletions extending into the 3' end of the gene which are complementary compared to the deletion lysogens.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)

EFFECTS OF TOPSOIL LOSS AND INTENSIVE CROPPING ON SOIL PROPERTIES RELATED TO THE CROP PRODUCTION POTENTIAL OF A PODZOLIC GREY LUVISOL

A 5-yr field study was conducted at Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island to determine the effect of losses of topsoil and organic matter likely to accrue from intensive potato production on the crop production potential of a loam to fine sandy loam Podzolic Grey Luvisol representative of major soil types used for potato production on P.E.I. The top 7.5 or 15 cm of the original 20-cm-thick Ap horizon was removed from strips on either side of a control (intact soil) strip. These strips were cropped under a 5-yr potato-barley rotation. Soil-loss treatments reduced the organic carbon content of the new 20-cm-thick Ap horizons formed by tillage by 9.4 and 37%, respectively, from 51.3 tonnes (ha∙20 cm)−1 in the original Ap horizon. Similarly, mineralizable nitrogen levels were reduced initially by 21 and 64%, respectively, compared with the intact soil. During the subsequent 2 yr, mineralizable nitrogen levels in the Ap horizons of the intact and minus 7.5-cm strips fell by 35%. Soil-loss treatments had no effect on Ap horizon texture, porosity, or bulk density. However, losses of topsoil reduced the soil’s capacity to store plant-available water (33 kPa – 1500 kPa) within the rooting zone above a Bt, horizon (bulk density 1.67 tonnes∙m−3) by 1.3 and 3.4 cm of water, respectively, from 9.8 cm for the intact soil. Rainfall patterns on P.E.I. suggest that such reductions in water storage capacity may reduce the soil’s crop production potential in 2 out of 5 yr. Key words: Topsoil loss, intensive cropping, Luvisol, organic carbon, mineralizable nitrogen, water storage capacity

Recalibration of Bartels' geomagnetic activity indicesKpandapto include universal time variations

The ap index (and derived indices) can be recalibrated by using Mayaud's am index to recover the correct universal time variations. Such variations were artificially removed in the original ap index. A number of tests are performed to show that the corrected index is capable of revealing the desired variations. These tests include comparisons of the universal time variations on days of opposite interplanetary magnetic sector polarity. The finding that geomagnetic activity was considerably higher during intervals of toward polarity prior to 1963 is strongly confirmed.