A PLMs based protein retrieval framework

Protein retrieval, which targets the deconstruction of the relationship between sequences, structures and functions, empowers the advancing of biology. Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST), a sequence-similarity-based algorithm, has proved the efficiency of this field. Despite the existing tools for protein retrieval, they prioritize sequence similarity and probably overlook proteins that are dissimilar but share homology or functionality. In order to tackle this problem, we propose a novel protein retrieval framework that mitigates the bias towards sequence similarity. Our framework initiatively harnesses protein language models (PLMs) to embed protein sequences within a high-dimensional feature space, thereby enhancing the representation capacity for subsequent analysis. Subsequently, an accelerated indexed vector database is constructed to facilitate expedited access and retrieval of dense vectors. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework can equally retrieve both similar and dissimilar proteins. Moreover, this approach enables the identification of proteins that conventional methods fail to uncover. This framework will effectively assist in protein mining and empower the development of biology.

Synth-to-Real Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Instance Segmentation

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) aims to transfer knowledge learned from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain. While UDA methods for synthetic to real-world domains (synth-to-real) show remarkable performance in tasks such as semantic segmentation and object detection, very few were proposed for the instance segmentation task. In this paper, we introduce UDA4Inst, a model of synth-to-real UDA for instance segmentation in autonomous driving. We propose a novel cross-domain bidirectional data mixing method at the instance level to fully leverage the data from both source and target domains. Rare-class balancing and category module training are also employed to further improve the performance. It is worth noting that we are the first to demonstrate results on two new synth-to-real instance segmentation benchmarks, with 39.0 mAP on UrbanSyn->Cityscapes and 35.7 mAP on Synscapes->Cityscapes. UDA4Inst also achieves the state-of-the-art result on SYNTHIA->Cityscapes with 31.3 mAP, +15.6 higher than the latest approach. Our code will be released.

Linear building pattern recognition via spatial knowledge graph

Building patterns are important urban structures that reflect the effect of the urban material and social-economic on a region. Previous researches are mostly based on the graph isomorphism method and use rules to recognize building patterns, which are not efficient. The knowledge graph uses the graph to model the relationship between entities, and specific subgraph patterns can be efficiently obtained by using relevant reasoning tools. Thus, we try to apply the knowledge graph to recognize linear building patterns. First, we use the property graph to express the spatial relations in proximity, similar and linear arrangement between buildings; secondly, the rules of linear pattern recognition are expressed as the rules of knowledge graph reasoning; finally, the linear building patterns are recognized by using the rule-based reasoning in the built knowledge graph. The experimental results on a dataset containing 1289 buildings show that the method in this paper can achieve the same precision and recall as the existing methods; meanwhile, the recognition efficiency is improved by 5.98 times.

iExam: A Novel Online Exam Monitoring and Analysis System Based on Face Detection and Recognition

Online exams via video conference software like Zoom have been adopted in many schools due to COVID-19. While it is convenient, it is challenging for teachers to supervise online exams from simultaneously displayed student Zoom windows. In this paper, we propose iExam, an intelligent online exam monitoring and analysis system that can not only use face detection to assist invigilators in real-time student identification, but also be able to detect common abnormal behaviors (including face disappearing, rotating faces, and replacing with a different person during the exams) via a face recognition-based post-exam video analysis. To build such a novel system in its first kind, we overcome three challenges. First, we discover a lightweight approach to capturing exam video streams and analyzing them in real time. Second, we utilize the left-corner names that are displayed on each student's Zoom window and propose an improved OCR (optical character recognition) technique to automatically gather the ground truth for the student faces with dynamic positions. Third, we perform several experimental comparisons and optimizations to efficiently shorten the training and testing time required on teachers' PC. Our evaluation shows that iExam achieves high accuracy, 90.4% for real-time face detection and 98.4% for post-exam face recognition, while maintaining acceptable runtime performance. We have made iExam's source code available at https://github.com/VPRLab/iExam.