Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Congenital proprotein convertase 1/3 deficiency causes malabsorptive diarrhea and other endocrinopathies in a pediatric cohort.

BACKGROUND & AIMS Proprotein convertase 1/3 (PC1/3) deficiency, an autosomal-recessive disorder caused by rare mutations in the proprotein convertase subtilisin/kexin type 1 (PCSK1) gene, has been associated with obesity, severe malabsorptive diarrhea, and certain endocrine abnormalities. Common variants in PCSK1 also have been associated with obesity in heterozygotes in several population-based studies. PC1/3 is an endoprotease that processes many prohormones expressed in endocrine and neuronal cells. We investigated clinical and molecular features of PC1/3 deficiency. METHODS We studied the clinical features of 13 children with PC1/3 deficiency and performed sequence analysis of PCSK1. We measured enzymatic activity of recombinant PC1/3 proteins. RESULTS We identified a pattern of endocrinopathies that develop in an age-dependent manner. Eight of the mutations had severe biochemical consequences in vitro. Neonates had severe malabsorptive diarrhea and failure to thrive, required prolonged parenteral nutrition support, and had high mortality. Additional endocrine abnormalities developed as the disease progressed, including diabetes insipidus, growth hormone deficiency, primary hypogonadism, adrenal insufficiency, and hypothyroidism. We identified growth hormone deficiency, central diabetes insipidus, and male hypogonadism as new features of PCSK1 insufficiency. Interestingly, despite early growth abnormalities, moderate obesity, associated with severe polyphagia, generally appears. CONCLUSIONS In a study of 13 children with PC1/3 deficiency caused by disruption of PCSK1, failure of enteroendocrine cells to produce functional hormones resulted in generalized malabsorption. These findings indicate that PC1/3 is involved in the processing of one or more enteric hormones that are required for nutrient absorption.
Universal Semi-Supervised Domain Adaptation by Mitigating Common-Class Bias

Domain adaptation is a critical task in machine learning that aims to improve model performance on a target domain by leveraging knowledge from a related source domain. In this work, we introduce Universal Semi-Supervised Domain Adaptation (UniSSDA), a practical yet challenging setting where the target domain is partially labeled, and the source and target label space may not strictly match. UniSSDA is at the intersection of Universal Domain Adaptation (UniDA) and Semi-Supervised Domain Adaptation (SSDA): the UniDA setting does not allow for fine-grained categorization of target private classes not represented in the source domain, while SSDA focuses on the restricted closed-set setting where source and target label spaces match exactly. Existing UniDA and SSDA methods are susceptible to common-class bias in UniSSDA settings, where models overfit to data distributions of classes common to both domains at the expense of private classes. We propose a new prior-guided pseudo-label refinement strategy to reduce the reinforcement of common-class bias due to pseudo-labeling, a common label propagation strategy in domain adaptation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed strategy on benchmark datasets Office-Home, DomainNet, and VisDA. The proposed strategy attains the best performance across UniSSDA adaptation settings and establishes a new baseline for UniSSDA.
CPA-Enhancer: Chain-of-Thought Prompted Adaptive Enhancer for Object Detection under Unknown Degradations

Object detection methods under known single degradations have been extensively investigated. However, existing approaches require prior knowledge of the degradation type and train a separate model for each, limiting their practical applications in unpredictable environments. To address this challenge, we propose a chain-of-thought (CoT) prompted adaptive enhancer, CPA-Enhancer, for object detection under unknown degradations. Specifically, CPA-Enhancer progressively adapts its enhancement strategy under the step-by-step guidance of CoT prompts, that encode degradation-related information. To the best of our knowledge, it's the first work that exploits CoT prompting for object detection tasks. Overall, CPA-Enhancer is a plug-and-play enhancement model that can be integrated into any generic detectors to achieve substantial gains on degraded images, without knowing the degradation type priorly. Experimental results demonstrate that CPA-Enhancer not only sets the new state of the art for object detection but also boosts the performance of other downstream vision tasks under unknown degradations.
Examining the online reading behavior and performance of fifth-graders: evidence from eye-movement data

Online reading is developing at an increasingly rapid rate, but the debate concerning whether learning is more effective when using hypertexts than when using traditional linear texts is still persistent. In addition, several researchers stated that online reading comprehension always starts with a question, but little empirical evidence has been gathered to investigate this claim. This study used eye-tracking technology and retrospective think aloud technique to examine online reading behaviors of fifth-graders (N = 50). The participants were asked to read four texts on the website. The present study employed a three-way mixed design: 2 (reading ability: high vs. low) × 2 (reading goals: with vs. without) × 2 (text types: hypertext vs. linear text). The dependent variables were eye-movement indices and the frequencies of using online reading strategy. The results show that fifth-graders, irrespective of their reading ability, found it difficult to navigate the non-linear structure of hypertexts when searching for and integrating information. When they read with goals, they adjusted their reading speed and the focus of their attention. Their offline reading ability also influenced their online reading performance. These results suggest that online reading skills and strategies have to be taught in order to enhance the online reading abilities of elementary-school students.
Nutritional manipulation of primate retinas, II: effects of age, n-3 fatty acids, lutein, and zeaxanthin on retinal pigment epithelium.

PURPOSE To study the effects of age and of n-3 fatty acids, lutein, and zeaxanthin on the retinal pigment epithelium (RPE). METHODS Rhesus monkeys (age range, 7-17 years; n = 18) were fed xanthophyll-free semipurified diets from birth. The diets had either low or adequate amounts of n-3 fatty acids. Six monkeys remained xanthophyll-free until death. Six received supplements of pure lutein and six of pure zeaxanthin for 6 to 24 months. The central retina was serially sectioned, and the number of RPE cells were counted in an 8-microm strip along the vertical meridian. Cell counts were compared with data from control monkeys (n = 15) fed a standard laboratory diet. RESULTS Foveal and parafoveal RPE cell densities increased with age. Xanthophyll-free monkeys had a dip in the RPE cell density profile at the foveal center, rather than the normal peak. After supplementation with xanthophylls, the RPE profile of animals low in n-3 fatty acids no longer had a dip at the foveal center but became asymmetric, with higher densities in the inferior retina. In animals with adequate n-3 fatty acid levels, xanthophyll supplementation did not restore the foveal peak, and resulted in an asymmetric profile with higher densities in the superior retina. CONCLUSIONS RPE cells are sensitive to the absence of macular pigment. Supplemental xanthophylls interact with n-3 fatty acid levels to produce asymmetries in the RPE profile. Xanthophylls and n-3 fatty acids are essential for the development and/or maintenance of a normal distribution of RPE cells.
Traumatic brain injury: future assessment tools and treatment prospects

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is widespread and leads to death and disability in millions of individuals around the world each year. Overall incidence and prevalence of TBI are likely to increase in absolute terms in the future. Tackling the problem of treating TBI successfully will require improvements in the understanding of normal cerebral anatomy, physiology, and function throughout the lifespan, as well as the pathological and recuperative responses that result from trauma. New treatment approaches and combinations will need to be targeted to the heterogeneous needs of TBI populations. This article explores and evaluates the research evidence in areas that will likely lead to a reduction in TBI-related morbidity and improved outcomes. These include emerging assessment instruments and techniques in areas of structural/chemical and functional neuroimaging and neuropsychology, advances in the realms of cell-based therapies and genetics, promising cognitive rehabilitation techniques including cognitive remediation and the use of electronic technologies including assistive devices and virtual reality, and the emerging field of complementary and alternative medicine.
Spatial arrangement in texture discrimination and texture segregation

We investigated the role of spatial arrangement of texture elements in three psychophysical experiments on texture discrimination and texture segregation. In our stimuli, oriented Gabor elements formed an iso-oriented and a randomly oriented texture region. We manipulated (1) the orientation similarity in the iso-oriented region by adding orientation jitter to the orientation of each Gabor; (2) the spatial arrangement of the Gabors: quasi-random or regular; and (3) the shape of the edge between the two texture regions: straight or curved. In Experiment 1, participants discriminated an iso-oriented stimulus from a stimulus with only randomly oriented elements. Experiment 2 required texture segregation to judge the shape of the texture edge. Experiment 3 replicated Experiment 2 with Gabors of a smaller spatial extent in a denser arrangement. We found comparable performance levels with regular and quasi-random Gabor positions in the discrimination task but not in the segregation tasks. We conclude that spatial arrangement plays a role in a texture segregation task requiring shape discrimination of the texture edge but not in a texture discrimination task in which it is sufficient to discriminate an iso-oriented region from a completely random region.
PALM: Pushing Adaptive Learning Rate Mechanisms for Continual Test-Time Adaptation

Real-world vision models in dynamic environments face rapid shifts in domain distributions, leading to decreased recognition performance. Continual test-time adaptation (CTTA) directly adjusts a pre-trained source discriminative model to these changing domains using test data. A highly effective CTTA method involves applying layer-wise adaptive learning rates, and selectively adapting pre-trained layers. However, it suffers from the poor estimation of domain shift and the inaccuracies arising from the pseudo-labels. In this work, we aim to overcome these limitations by identifying layers through the quantification of model prediction uncertainty without relying on pseudo-labels. We utilize the magnitude of gradients as a metric, calculated by backpropagating the KL divergence between the softmax output and a uniform distribution, to select layers for further adaptation. Subsequently, for the parameters exclusively belonging to these selected layers, with the remaining ones frozen, we evaluate their sensitivity in order to approximate the domain shift, followed by adjusting their learning rates accordingly. Overall, this approach leads to a more robust and stable optimization than prior approaches. We conduct extensive image classification experiments on CIFAR-10C, CIFAR-100C, and ImageNet-C and demonstrate the efficacy of our method against standard benchmarks and prior methods.
Air-sea heat flux under the weather of winter cyclone in the Northwest Pacific during Western Pacific Jet Stream anomaly

The trajectories of the winter cyclone and the thermal field anomaly over the Northwest Pacific Ocean were studied with the atmospheric reanalysis data (from the NCEP/NCAR) and the SST’s observational data (from the Met Office Hadley Centre and the National Climatic Data Center of NOAA). The results showed that the thermal field would change as a response to the circulation shift (e.g. meridional motion of the WPJS). When the WPJS leaned to the north, SHF and LHF would be positive (negative) anomaly in the mid-high (low) latitude, while Qs and SST presented negative anomaly in the mid-high latitude. As a result, the dipole-pattern (+ -) of air temperature anomaly moved northward, which made the storm track leaned to the north. In the opposite, the storm track would lean to the south. On the other hand, if most of the cyclones in the whole winter changed the paths, the transport process of the heat flux, the kinetic energy and the vapor would be significantly different. As a result, there is discrepancy in storm-induced SHF anomaly, LHF anomaly, SST anomaly, and Qs anomaly, compared to other years. Finally, we found the storm-induced thermal field anomaly is comparable to the thermal field climate anomaly.
NOD 2 , CD 14 and TLR 4 mutations do not influence response to adalimumab in patients with Crohn ’ s disease : a preliminary report

Introduction: adalimumab is a recombinant fully-human monoclonal immunoglobulin (IgG1) antibody utilized in the treatment of Crohn ́s disease. Unfortunately no clinical or genetic markers exist to predict response to anti-tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF) therapy. The aim of this study was to evaluate the association between selected genes involved in cytokine regulation and response to adalimumab treatment in Crohn’s disease. Methods: twenty-four patients with Crohn’s disease either naïve (n = 8) or had lost response or were unable to tolerate the chimeric anti-TNF antibody infliximab (n=16) were enrolled in the study. Patients were genotyped for main polymorphisms in NOD2, CD14 and TLR4 genes. Response to adalimumab treatment was defined as a decrease of Crohn’s disease activity index of at least 100 points or a closure of at least 50% of fistulas in case of fistulizing Crohn’s disease. Results: overall, 75% of patients did respond to treatment. However, no statistically significant association was found between any of the genotypes and the response to adalimumab. Conclusions: in our small study group no association between the studied polymorphisms and response to adalimumab was apparent. Systematic studies to search for genetic markers of response to anti-TNF therapy are necessary.
ManipVQA: Injecting Robotic Affordance and Physically Grounded Information into Multi-Modal Large Language Models

The integration of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) with robotic systems has significantly enhanced the ability of robots to interpret and act upon natural language instructions. Despite these advancements, conventional MLLMs are typically trained on generic image-text pairs, lacking essential robotics knowledge such as affordances and physical knowledge, which hampers their efficacy in manipulation tasks. To bridge this gap, we introduce ManipVQA, a novel framework designed to endow MLLMs with Manipulation-centric knowledge through a Visual Question-Answering format. This approach not only encompasses tool detection and affordance recognition but also extends to a comprehensive understanding of physical concepts. Our approach starts with collecting a varied set of images displaying interactive objects, which presents a broad range of challenges in tool object detection, affordance, and physical concept predictions. To seamlessly integrate this robotic-specific knowledge with the inherent vision-reasoning capabilities of MLLMs, we adopt a unified VQA format and devise a fine-tuning strategy that preserves the original vision-reasoning abilities while incorporating the new robotic insights. Empirical evaluations conducted in robotic simulators and across various vision task benchmarks demonstrate the robust performance of ManipVQA. Code and dataset will be made publicly available at https://github.com/SiyuanHuang95/ManipVQA.
The Market for Financial Adviser Misconduct

We document the economywide extent of misconduct among financial advisers and the associated labor market consequences. Seven percent of advisers have misconduct records, and this share reaches more than 15 percent at some of the largest firms. Roughly one-third of advisers with misconduct are repeat offenders. Approximately half of advisers lose their jobs after misconduct. The labor market partially undoes firm-level discipline by rehiring such advisers. Firms that persistently engage in misconduct coexist with firms that have clean records. We show that this phenomenon may be explained by some firms “specializing” in misconduct and catering to unsophisticated consumers.
Analysis of the contributions of topographic, soil, and vegetation features on the spatial distributions of surface soil moisture in a steep natural forested headwater catchment

Surface soil moisture has been extensively studied for various land uses and landforms. Although many studies have reported potential factors that control surface soil moisture over space or time, the findings have not always been consistent, indicating a need for identification of the main factors. This study focused on the static controls of topographic, soil, and vegetation features on surface soil moisture in a steep natural forested headwater catchment consisting of three hillslope units of a gully area, side slope, and valley‐head slope. Using a simple correlation analysis to investigate the effects of the static factors on surface soil moisture at depths of 0–20 cm at 470 points in 13 surveys, we addressed the characteristics of surface soil moisture and its main controlling factors. The results indicated that the mean of surface soil moisture was in the decreasing order of gully area > valley‐head slope > side slope. The relationship between the mean and standard deviation of surface soil moisture showed a convex‐upward shape in the headwater catchment, a negative curvilinear shape in the gully area, and positive curvilinear shapes at the side and valley‐head slopes. At the headwater catchment and valley‐head slope, positive contributions of soil porosity and negative contributions of slope gradient and saturated hydraulic conductivity were the main controlling factors of surface soil moisture under wetter conditions, whereas positive contributions of topographic wetness index and negative contributions of vegetation density were the main controlling factors of surface soil moisture under drier conditions. At the side slope underlain by fractured bedrocks, only saturated hydraulic conductivity and vegetation density were observed to be the controlling factors. Surface soil moisture in the gully area was mainly affected by runoff rather than were static features. Thus, using hillslope units is effective for approximately estimating the hydrological behaviours of surface moisture on a larger scale, whereas dependency between the main static factors and moisture conditions is helpful for estimating the spatial distributions of surface moisture on a smaller scale.
Unifying Feature and Cost Aggregation with Transformers for Semantic and Visual Correspondence

This paper introduces a Transformer-based integrative feature and cost aggregation network designed for dense matching tasks. In the context of dense matching, many works benefit from one of two forms of aggregation: feature aggregation, which pertains to the alignment of similar features, or cost aggregation, a procedure aimed at instilling coherence in the flow estimates across neighboring pixels. In this work, we first show that feature aggregation and cost aggregation exhibit distinct characteristics and reveal the potential for substantial benefits stemming from the judicious use of both aggregation processes. We then introduce a simple yet effective architecture that harnesses self- and cross-attention mechanisms to show that our approach unifies feature aggregation and cost aggregation and effectively harnesses the strengths of both techniques. Within the proposed attention layers, the features and cost volume both complement each other, and the attention layers are interleaved through a coarse-to-fine design to further promote accurate correspondence estimation. Finally at inference, our network produces multi-scale predictions, computes their confidence scores, and selects the most confident flow for final prediction. Our framework is evaluated on standard benchmarks for semantic matching, and also applied to geometric matching, where we show that our approach achieves significant improvements compared to existing methods.
Towards stochastic realization theory for Generalized Linear Switched Systems with inputs: decomposition into stochastic and deterministic components and existence and uniqueness of innovation form

In this paper, we study a class of stochastic Generalized Linear Switched System (GLSS), which includes subclasses of jump-Markov, piecewide-linear and Linear Parameter-Varying (LPV) systems. We prove that the output of such systems can be decomposed into deterministic and stochastic components. Using this decomposition, we show existence of state-space representation in innovation form, and we provide sufficient conditions for such representations to be minimal and unique up to isomorphism.
Multizone Paper Platform for 3D Cell Cultures

In vitro 3D culture is an important model for tissues in vivo. Cells in different locations of 3D tissues are physiologically different, because they are exposed to different concentrations of oxygen, nutrients, and signaling molecules, and to other environmental factors (temperature, mechanical stress, etc). The majority of high-throughput assays based on 3D cultures, however, can only detect the average behavior of cells in the whole 3D construct. Isolation of cells from specific regions of 3D cultures is possible, but relies on low-throughput techniques such as tissue sectioning and micromanipulation. Based on a procedure reported previously (“cells-in-gels-in-paper” or CiGiP), this paper describes a simple method for culture of arrays of thin planar sections of tissues, either alone or stacked to create more complex 3D tissue structures. This procedure starts with sheets of paper patterned with hydrophobic regions that form 96 hydrophilic zones. Serial spotting of cells suspended in extracellular matrix (ECM) gel onto the patterned paper creates an array of 200 micron-thick slabs of ECM gel (supported mechanically by cellulose fibers) containing cells. Stacking the sheets with zones aligned on top of one another assembles 96 3D multilayer constructs. De-stacking the layers of the 3D culture, by peeling apart the sheets of paper, “sections” all 96 cultures at once. It is, thus, simple to isolate 200-micron-thick cell-containing slabs from each 3D culture in the 96-zone array. Because the 3D cultures are assembled from multiple layers, the number of cells plated initially in each layer determines the spatial distribution of cells in the stacked 3D cultures. This capability made it possible to compare the growth of 3D tumor models of different spatial composition, and to examine the migration of cells in these structures.