pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Vagus nerve stimulation as a modulator of feedforward and feedback neural transmission
Authors: Shinichi Kumagai, Tomoyo Isoguchi Shiramatsu, Kensuke Kawai, Hirokazu Takahashi
Date: 2025-01-30 00:00:00

Vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) has emerged as a promising therapeutic intervention across various neurological and psychiatric conditions, including epilepsy, depression, and stroke rehabilitation; however, its mechanisms of action on neural circuits remain incompletely understood. Here, we present a novel theoretical framework based on predictive coding that conceptualizes VNS effects through differential modulation of feedforward and feedback neural circuits. Based on recent evidence, we propose that VNS shifts the balance between feedforward and feedback processing through multiple neuromodulatory systems, resulting in enhanced feedforward signal transmission. This framework integrates anatomical pathways, receptor distributions, and physiological responses to explain the influence of the VNS on neural dynamics across different spatial and temporal scales. VNS may facilitate neural plasticity and adaptive behavior through acetylcholine and noradrenaline (norepinephrine), which differentially modulate feedforward and feedback signaling. This mechanistic understanding serves as a basis for interpreting the cognitive and therapeutic outcomes across different clinical conditions. Our perspective provides a unified theoretical framework for understanding circuit-specific VNS effects and suggests new directions for investigating their therapeutic mechanisms.
A Simple Voltage-Modulated Markov Chain Model for the Piezo1 Ion Channel to Investigate Electromechanical Pacing
Authors: Dennis Ogiermann, Abdulaziz Mohamed, Luigi E. Perotti, Daniel Balzani
Date: 2025-01-31 00:00:00

Piezo1 ion channels are voltage-modulated, stretch-activated ion channels involved in a variety of important physiological and pathophysiological processes, as for example cardiovascular development and homeostasis. Since its discovery, it has been known that this type of ion channel desensitizes when exposed to stretch. However, recent experiments on Piezo1 ion channels have uncovered that their stretch response is qualitatively different when exposed to positive electrochemical driving forces, where the desensitization is reset. In this work, we propose a novel voltage-modulated mathematical model of Piezo1 based on a continuous-time Markov chain. We show that our Piezo1 model is able to quantitatively reproduce a wide range of experimental observations. Furthermore, we integrate our new ion channel model into the Mahajan-Shiferaw ventricular cardiomyocyte model to study the effect of electromechanical pacing at the cellular scale. This integrated cell model is able to qualitatively reproduce some aspects of the experimental observations regarding the rate-dependence of electromechanical pacing protocols. Our studies suggest that the Piezo1 ion channel is an important component that significantly contributes to the electromechanical coupled response of cardiomyocytes.
Quantifying HiPSC-CM Structural Organization at Scale with Deep Learning-Enhanced SarcGraph
Authors: Saeed Mohammadzadeh, Emma Lejeune
Date: 2025-01-30 00:00:00

In cardiac cells, structural organization is an important indicator of cell maturity and healthy function. Healthy cardiomyocytes exhibit well-aligned morphology with densely packed and organized sarcomeres. Immature or diseased cardiomyocytes typically lack this organized structure. Critically, human induced pluripotent stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes (hiPSC-CMs) offer a valuable model for studying human cardiac cells in a controlled environment. However, these cells often exhibit a disorganized structure. In this work, we extend the SarcGraph computational framework -- designed to assess the structural and functional behavior of hiPSC-CMs -- to better accommodate the structural features of immature cells. There are two key enhancements: (1) incorporating a deep learning-based z-disc classifier, and (2) introducing a novel ensemble graph-scoring approach. These modification significantly reduced false positive sarcomere detections in immature cells, and resulted in the detection of longer myofibrils in mature samples. With this enhanced framework, we analyze an open-source dataset published by the Allen Institute for Cell Science, where, for the first time, we are able to extract key structural features from these data using information from each individually detected sarcomere. Not only are we able to use these structural features to predict expert scores, but we are also able to use these structural features to identify bias in expert scoring and offer an alternative unsupervised learning approach based on explainable clustering. These results demonstrate the efficacy of our modified SarcGraph in extracting biologically meaningful features, enabling a deeper understanding of hiPSC-CM structural integrity. By making our code and tools open-source, we aim to empower the broader cardiac research community and foster further development of computational tools for cardiac tissue analysis.
Effect of a new type of healthy and live food supplement on osteoporosis blood parameters and induced rheumatoid arthritis in Wistar rats
Authors: Azam Bayat, Aref Khalkhali, Ali Reza Mahjoub
Date: 2025-01-31 00:00:00

Summary Osteoporosis is a skeletal disorder, characterized by a decrease in bone strength and puts the individual at risk for fracture. On the other hand, rheumatoid arthritis is a systemic disease of unknown etiology that causes inflammation of the joints of the organs. Purpose Due to the destructive effects of these diseases and its increasing prevalence and lack of appropriate medication for treatment, the present study aimed to evaluate the therapeutic effect of a new type of healthy and live food supplement on rheumatoid arthritis and induced osteoporosis in rats. Methods In this research, healthy and live food powder were synthesized by a new and green route. This organic biomaterial was named NBS. The NBS food supplement had various vitamins, macro and micro molecules, and ingredients. The new healthy and nutritious diet showed that the use of this supplement led to the return of the parameters to normal levels. Results The concentration of 12.5 mg/ kg showed the least therapeutic effect and 50 mg/ kg had the highest therapeutic effect for osteoporosis. The results of blood parameters involved in inflammation in both healthy and patient groups showed that the use of complete adjuvant induction causes joint inflammation. In the study of the interaction of the concentrations, it was observed that the concentration of 50 mg/ kg had the highest therapeutic effect against the disease in the studied mice. Conclusion The results showed that the new healthy and viable supplement restores the blood osteoporotic and rheumatoid factors of the mice to normal.
Geometric immunosuppression in CAR-T cell treatment: Insights from mathematical modeling
Authors: Silvia Bordel-Vozmediano, Soukaina Sabir, Lucía Benito-Barca, Bettina Weigelin, Víctor M. Pérez-García
Date: 2025-01-30 00:00:00

Chimeric antigen receptor T (CAR-T) cell therapy has emerged as a promising treatment for hematological malignancies, offering a targeted approach to cancer treatment. Understanding the complexities of CAR-T cell therapy within solid tumors poses challenges due to the intricate interactions within the tumor microenvironment. Mathematical modeling may serve as a valuable tool to unravel the dynamics of CAR-T cell therapy and improve its effectiveness in solid tumors. This study aimed to investigate the impact of spatial aspects in CAR-T therapy of solid tumors, utilizing cellular automata for modeling purposes. Our main objective was to deepen our understanding of treatment effects by analyzing scenarios with different spatial distributions and varying the initial quantities of tumor and CAR-T cells. Tumor geometry significantly influenced treatment efficacy in-silico, with notable differences observed between tumors with block-like arrangements and those with sparse cell distributions, leading to the concept of immune suppression due to geometrical effects. This research delves into the intricate relationship between spatial dynamics and the effectiveness of CAR-T therapy in solid tumors, highlighting the relevance of tumor geometry in the outcome of cellular immunotherapy treatments. Our results provide a basis for improving the efficacy of CAR-T cell treatments by combining them with other ones reducing the density of compact tumor areas and thus opening access ways for tumor killing T-cells.
Testing for the Minimum Mean-Variance Spanning Set
Authors: Zhipeng Liao, Bin Wang, Wenyu Zhou
Date: 2025-01-31 00:00:00

This paper explores the estimation and inference of the minimum spanning set (MSS), the smallest subset of risky assets that spans the mean-variance efficient frontier of the full asset set. We establish identification conditions for the MSS and develop a novel procedure for its estimation and inference. Our theoretical analysis shows that the proposed MSS estimator covers the true MSS with probability approaching 1 and converges asymptotically to the true MSS at any desired confidence level, such as 0.95 or 0.99. Monte Carlo simulations confirm the strong finite-sample performance of the MSS estimator. We apply our method to evaluate the relative importance of individual stock momentum and factor momentum strategies, along with a set of well-established stock return factors. The empirical results highlight factor momentum, along with several stock momentum and return factors, as key drivers of mean-variance efficiency. Furthermore, our analysis uncovers the sources of contribution from these factors and provides a ranking of their relative importance, offering new insights into their roles in mean-variance analysis.
Targeted Data Fusion for Causal Survival Analysis Under Distribution Shift
Authors: Yi Liu, Alexander W. Levis, Ke Zhu, Shu Yang, Peter B. Gilbert, Larry Han
Date: 2025-01-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Causal Inference, Data Integration, Federated Learning, Privacy Preserving, Survival Analysis

Causal inference across multiple data sources offers a promising avenue to enhance the generalizability and replicability of scientific findings. However, data integration methods for time-to-event outcomes, common in biomedical research, are underdeveloped. Existing approaches focus on binary or continuous outcomes but fail to address the unique challenges of survival analysis, such as censoring and the integration of discrete and continuous time. To bridge this gap, we propose two novel methods for estimating target site-specific causal effects in multi-source settings. First, we develop a semiparametric efficient estimator for settings where individual-level data can be shared across sites. Second, we introduce a federated learning framework designed for privacy-constrained environments, which dynamically reweights source-specific contributions to account for discrepancies with the target population. Both methods leverage flexible, nonparametric machine learning models to improve robustness and efficiency. We illustrate the utility of our approaches through simulation studies and an application to multi-site randomized trials of monoclonal neutralizing antibodies for HIV-1 prevention, conducted among cisgender men and transgender persons in the United States, Brazil, Peru, and Switzerland, as well as among women in sub-Saharan Africa. Our findings underscore the potential of these methods to enable efficient, privacy-preserving causal inference for time-to-event outcomes under distribution shift.
Vision Aided Channel Prediction for Vehicular Communications: A Case Study of Received Power Prediction Using RGB Images
Authors: Xuejian Zhang, Ruisi He, Mi Yang, Zhengyu Zhang, Ziyi Qi, Bo Ai
Date: 2025-01-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Instance Segmentation, object-detection, Object Detection, Prediction, Semantic Segmentation

The communication scenarios and channel characteristics of 6G will be more complex and difficult to characterize. Conventional methods for channel prediction face challenges in achieving an optimal balance between accuracy, practicality, and generalizability. Additionally, they often fail to effectively leverage environmental features. Within the framework of integration communication and artificial intelligence as a pivotal development vision for 6G, it is imperative to achieve intelligent prediction of channel characteristics. Vision-aided methods have been employed in various wireless communication tasks, excluding channel prediction, and have demonstrated enhanced efficiency and performance. In this paper, we propose a vision-aided two-stage model for channel prediction in millimeter wave vehicular communication scenarios, realizing accurate received power prediction utilizing solely RGB images. Firstly, we obtain original images of propagation environment through an RGB camera. Secondly, three typical computer vision methods including object detection, instance segmentation and binary mask are employed for environmental information extraction from original images in stage 1, and prediction of received power based on processed images is implemented in stage 2. Pre-trained YOLOv8 and ResNets are used in stages 1 and 2, respectively, and fine-tuned on datasets. Finally, we conduct five experiments to evaluate the performance of proposed model, demonstrating its feasibility, accuracy and generalization capabilities. The model proposed in this paper offers novel solutions for achieving intelligent channel prediction in vehicular communications.
FAAGC: Feature Augmentation on Adaptive Geodesic Curve Based on the shape space theory
Authors: Yuexing Han, Ruijie Li
Date: 2025-01-25 00:00:00
Tasks: ARC

Deep learning models have been widely applied across various domains and industries. However, many fields still face challenges due to limited and insufficient data. This paper proposes a Feature Augmentation on Adaptive Geodesic Curve (FAAGC) method in the pre-shape space to increase data. In the pre-shape space, objects with identical shapes lie on a great circle. Thus, we project deep model representations into the pre-shape space and construct a geodesic curve, i.e., an arc of a great circle, for each class. Feature augmentation is then performed by sampling along these geodesic paths. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FAAGC improves classification accuracy under data-scarce conditions and generalizes well across various feature types.
Human Re-ID Meets LVLMs: What can we expect?
Authors: Kailash Hambarde, Pranita Samale, Hugo Proença
Date: 2025-01-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Person Re-Identification, Prompt Engineering

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have been regarded as a breakthrough advance in an astoundingly variety of tasks, from content generation to virtual assistants and multimodal search or retrieval. However, for many of these applications, the performance of these methods has been widely criticized, particularly when compared with state-of-the-art methods and technologies in each specific domain. In this work, we compare the performance of the leading large vision-language models in the human re-identification task, using as baseline the performance attained by state-of-the-art AI models specifically designed for this problem. We compare the results due to ChatGPT-4o, Gemini-2.0-Flash, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Qwen-VL-Max to a baseline ReID PersonViT model, using the well-known Market1501 dataset. Our evaluation pipeline includes the dataset curation, prompt engineering, and metric selection to assess the models' performance. Results are analyzed from many different perspectives: similarity scores, classification accuracy, and classification metrics, including precision, recall, F1 score, and area under curve (AUC). Our results confirm the strengths of LVLMs, but also their severe limitations that often lead to catastrophic answers and should be the scope of further research. As a concluding remark, we speculate about some further research that should fuse traditional and LVLMs to combine the strengths from both families of techniques and achieve solid improvements in performance.
Strong and Controllable 3D Motion Generation
Authors: Canxuan Gang
Date: 2025-01-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Motion Generation, Robot Manipulation

Human motion generation is a significant pursuit in generative computer vision with widespread applications in film-making, video games, AR/VR, and human-robot interaction. Current methods mainly utilize either diffusion-based generative models or autoregressive models for text-to-motion generation. However, they face two significant challenges: (1) The generation process is time-consuming, posing a major obstacle for real-time applications such as gaming, robot manipulation, and other online settings. (2) These methods typically learn a relative motion representation guided by text, making it difficult to generate motion sequences with precise joint-level control. These challenges significantly hinder progress and limit the real-world application of human motion generation techniques. To address this gap, we propose a simple yet effective architecture consisting of two key components. Firstly, we aim to improve hardware efficiency and computational complexity in transformer-based diffusion models for human motion generation. By customizing flash linear attention, we can optimize these models specifically for generating human motion efficiently. Furthermore, we will customize the consistency model in the motion latent space to further accelerate motion generation. Secondly, we introduce Motion ControlNet, which enables more precise joint-level control of human motion compared to previous text-to-motion generation methods. These contributions represent a significant advancement for text-to-motion generation, bringing it closer to real-world applications.
INT: Instance-Specific Negative Mining for Task-Generic Promptable Segmentation
Authors: Jian Hu, Zixu Cheng, Shaogang Gong
Date: 2025-01-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Instance Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Task-generic promptable image segmentation aims to achieve segmentation of diverse samples under a single task description by utilizing only one task-generic prompt. Current methods leverage the generalization capabilities of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to infer instance-specific prompts from these task-generic prompts in order to guide the segmentation process. However, when VLMs struggle to generalise to some image instances, predicting instance-specific prompts becomes poor. To solve this problem, we introduce \textbf{I}nstance-specific \textbf{N}egative Mining for \textbf{T}ask-Generic Promptable Segmentation (\textbf{INT}). The key idea of INT is to adaptively reduce the influence of irrelevant (negative) prior knowledge whilst to increase the use the most plausible prior knowledge, selected by negative mining with higher contrast, in order to optimise instance-specific prompts generation. Specifically, INT consists of two components: (1) instance-specific prompt generation, which progressively fliters out incorrect information in prompt generation; (2) semantic mask generation, which ensures each image instance segmentation matches correctly the semantics of the instance-specific prompts. INT is validated on six datasets, including camouflaged objects and medical images, demonstrating its effectiveness, robustness and scalability.
RUN: Reversible Unfolding Network for Concealed Object Segmentation
Authors: Chunming He, Rihan Zhang, Fengyang Xiao, Chenyu Fang, Longxiang Tang, Yulun Zhang, Linghe Kong, Deng-Ping Fan, Kai Li, Sina Farsiu
Date: 2025-01-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Existing concealed object segmentation (COS) methods frequently utilize reversible strategies to address uncertain regions. However, these approaches are typically restricted to the mask domain, leaving the potential of the RGB domain underexplored. To address this, we propose the Reversible Unfolding Network (RUN), which applies reversible strategies across both mask and RGB domains through a theoretically grounded framework, enabling accurate segmentation. RUN first formulates a novel COS model by incorporating an extra residual sparsity constraint to minimize segmentation uncertainties. The iterative optimization steps of the proposed model are then unfolded into a multistage network, with each step corresponding to a stage. Each stage of RUN consists of two reversible modules: the Segmentation-Oriented Foreground Separation (SOFS) module and the Reconstruction-Oriented Background Extraction (ROBE) module. SOFS applies the reversible strategy at the mask level and introduces Reversible State Space to capture non-local information. ROBE extends this to the RGB domain, employing a reconstruction network to address conflicting foreground and background regions identified as distortion-prone areas, which arise from their separate estimation by independent modules. As the stages progress, RUN gradually facilitates reversible modeling of foreground and background in both the mask and RGB domains, directing the network's attention to uncertain regions and mitigating false-positive and false-negative results. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of RUN and highlight the potential of unfolding-based frameworks for COS and other high-level vision tasks. We will release the code and models.
Early Diagnosis and Severity Assessment of Weligama Coconut Leaf Wilt Disease and Coconut Caterpillar Infestation using Deep Learning-based Image Processing Techniques
Authors: Samitha Vidhanaarachchi, Janaka L. Wijekoon, W. A. Shanaka P. Abeysiriwardhana, Malitha Wijesundara
Date: 2025-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection, Transfer Learning

Global Coconut (Cocos nucifera (L.)) cultivation faces significant challenges, including yield loss, due to pest and disease outbreaks. In particular, Weligama Coconut Leaf Wilt Disease (WCWLD) and Coconut Caterpillar Infestation (CCI) damage coconut trees, causing severe coconut production loss in Sri Lanka and nearby coconut-producing countries. Currently, both WCWLD and CCI are detected through on-field human observations, a process that is not only time-consuming but also limits the early detection of infections. This paper presents a study conducted in Sri Lanka, demonstrating the effectiveness of employing transfer learning-based Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Mask Region-based-CNN (Mask R-CNN) to identify WCWLD and CCI at their early stages and to assess disease progression. Further, this paper presents the use of the You Only Look Once (YOLO) object detection model to count the number of caterpillars distributed on leaves with CCI. The introduced methods were tested and validated using datasets collected from Matara, Puttalam, and Makandura, Sri Lanka. The results show that the proposed methods identify WCWLD and CCI with an accuracy of 90% and 95%, respectively. In addition, the proposed WCWLD disease severity identification method classifies the severity with an accuracy of 97%. Furthermore, the accuracies of the object detection models for calculating the number of caterpillars in the leaflets were: YOLOv5-96.87%, YOLOv8-96.1%, and YOLO11-95.9%.