Deep Learning (DL) models have rapidly advanced, focusing on achieving high performance through testing model accuracy and robustness. However, it is unclear whether DL projects, as software systems, are tested thoroughly or functionally correct when there is a need to treat and test them like other software systems. Therefore, we empirically study the unit tests in open-source DL projects, analyzing 9,129 projects from GitHub. We find that: (1) unit tested DL projects have positive correlation with the open-source project metrics and have a higher acceptance rate of pull requests; (2) 68% of the sampled DL projects are not unit tested at all; (3) the layer and utilities (utils) of DL models have the most unit tests. Based on these findings and previous research outcomes, we built a mapping taxonomy between unit tests and faults in DL projects. We discuss the implications of our findings for developers and researchers and highlight the need for unit testing in open-source DL projects to ensure their reliability and stability. The study contributes to this community by raising awareness of the importance of unit testing in DL projects and encouraging further research in this area.

Non-coding RNA (ncRNA) plays a critical role in biology. ncRNAs from the same family usually have similar functions, as a result, it is essential to predict ncRNA families before identifying their functions. There are two primary methods for predicting ncRNA families, namely, traditional biological methods and computational methods. In traditional biological methods, a lot of manpower and resources are required to predict ncRNA families. Therefore, this paper proposed a new ncRNA family prediction method called MFPred based on computational methods. MFPred identified ncRNA families by extracting sequence features of ncRNAs, and it possessed three primary modules, including (1) four ncRNA sequences encoding and feature extraction module, which encoded ncRNA sequences and extracted four different features of ncRNA sequences, (2) dynamic Bi_GRU and feature fusion module, which extracted contextual information features of the ncRNA sequence and (3) ResNet_SE module that extracted local information features of the ncRNA sequence. In this study, MFPred was compared with the previously proposed ncRNA family prediction methods using two frequently used public ncRNA datasets, NCY and nRC. The results showed that MFPred outperformed other prediction methods in the two datasets.

BACKGROUND: Although research on non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) is a hot topic in life sciences, the functions of numerous ncRNAs remain unclear. In recent years, researchers have found that ncRNAs of the same family have similar functions, therefore, it is important to accurately predict ncRNAs families to identify their functions. There are several methods available to solve the prediction problem of ncRNAs family, whose main ideas can be divided into two categories, including prediction based on the secondary structure features of ncRNAs, and prediction according to sequence features of ncRNAs. The first type of prediction method requires a complicated process and has a low accuracy in obtaining the secondary structure of ncRNAs, while the second type of method has a simple prediction process and a high accuracy, but there is still room for improvement. The existing methods for ncRNAs family prediction are associated with problems such as complicated prediction processes and low accuracy, in this regard, it is necessary to propose a new method to predict the ncRNAs family more perfectly. RESULTS: A deep learning model-based method, ncDENSE, was proposed in this study, which predicted ncRNAs families by extracting ncRNAs sequence features. The bases in ncRNAs sequences were encoded by one-hot coding and later fed into an ensemble deep learning model, which contained the dynamic bi-directional gated recurrent unit (Bi-GRU), the dense convolutional network (DenseNet), and the Attention Mechanism (AM). To be specific, dynamic Bi-GRU was used to extract contextual feature information and capture long-term dependencies of ncRNAs sequences. AM was employed to assign different weights to features extracted by Bi-GRU and focused the attention on information with greater weights. Whereas DenseNet was adopted to extract local feature information of ncRNAs sequences and classify them by the full connection layer. According to our results, the ncDENSE method improved the Accuracy, Sensitivity, Precision, F-score, and MCC by 2.08[Formula: see text], 2.33[Formula: see text], 2.14[Formula: see text], 2.16[Formula: see text], and 2.39[Formula: see text], respectively, compared with the suboptimal method. CONCLUSIONS: Overall, the ncDENSE method proposed in this paper extracts sequence features of ncRNAs by dynamic Bi-GRU and DenseNet and improves the accuracy in predicting ncRNAs family and other data.

OBJECTIVE: Breast cancer is a significant health issue for women, and human epidermal growth factor receptor-2 (HER2) plays a crucial role as a vital prognostic and predictive factor. The HER2 status is essential for formulating effective treatment plans for breast cancer. However, the assessment of HER2 status using immunohistochemistry (IHC) is time-consuming and costly. Existing computational methods for evaluating HER2 status have limitations and lack sufficient accuracy. Therefore, there is an urgent need for an improved computational method to better assess HER2 status, which holds significant importance in saving lives and alleviating the burden on pathologists. RESULTS: This paper analyzes the characteristics of histological images of breast cancer and proposes a neural network model named HAHNet that combines multi-scale features with attention mechanisms for HER2 status classification. HAHNet directly classifies the HER2 status from hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) stained histological images, reducing additional costs. It achieves superior performance compared to other computational methods. CONCLUSIONS: According to our experimental results, the proposed HAHNet achieved high performance in classifying the HER2 status of breast cancer using only H&E stained samples. It can be applied in case classification, benefiting the work of pathologists and potentially helping more breast cancer patients.

Iris images captured in less-constrained environments often suffer from adverse noise, challenging many existing segmentation algorithms. In this paper, we propose an efficient Hybrid Transformer U-Net (HTU-Net) to address this dilemma. Unlike previous studies that only focus on utilizing popular CNN technology to predict iris masks accurately, HTU-Net can simultaneously obtain segmentation masks and parameterized pupillary and limbic boundaries by a multi-task network, further enabling CNN-based iris segmentation to be applied in any regular iris recognition systems. We explore the application of the Transformer in iris segmentation and propose a hybrid encoder that employs convolutional layers to extract local intensity features and the Transformer to capture long-range associative information. For decoding, we adopt a novel Multi-Head Dilated Attention to exploit the multi-scale contextual information by gating mechanism, thus emphasizing the important features and rendering powerful representations. Inspired by the consistent class characteristics of iris, we further devise a Pyramid Center-Aware Module to capture the global structural context of iris from a categorical perspective to improve performance. Experimental results show that our method, with fewer parameters than previous approaches, achieves competitive or new state-of-the-art performance in both iris segmentation and localization on three challenging iris datasets. Code will be released at https://github.com/Syloveslife/HTU-Net.

In this paper, a two-stage multi-category recognition structure based on texture features is proposed. This method can solve the problem of the decline in recognition accuracy in the scene of lightweight training samples. Besides, the problem of recognition effect different in the same recognition structure caused by the unsteady iris can also be solved. In this paper’s structure, digitized values of the edge shape in the iris texture of the image are set as the texture trend feature, while the differences between the gray values of the image obtained by convolution are set as the grayscale difference feature. Furthermore, the texture trend feature is used in the first-stage recognition. The template category that does not match the tested iris is the elimination category, and the remaining categories are uncertain categories. Whereas, in the second-stage recognition, uncertain categories are adopted to determine the iris recognition conclusion through the grayscale difference feature. Then, the experiment results using the JLU iris library show that the method in this paper can be highly efficient in multi-category heterogeneous iris recognition under lightweight training samples and unsteady state.

Graphical User Interface (GUI) is ubiquitous in almost all modern desktop software, mobile applications and online websites. A good GUI design is crucial to the success of the software in the market, but designing a good GUI which requires much innovation and creativity is difficult even to well-trained designers. In addition, the requirement of rapid development of GUI design also aggravates designers' working load. So, the availability of various automated generated GUIs can help enhance the design personalization and specialization as they can cater to the taste of different designers. To assist designers, we develop a model tool to automatically generate GUI designs. Different from conventional image generation models based on image pixels, our tool is to reuse GUI components collected from existing mobile app GUIs for composing a new design which is similar to natural-language generation. Our tool is based on SeqGAN by modelling the GUI component style compatibility and GUI structure. The evaluation demonstrates that our model significantly outperforms the best of the baseline methods by 30.77% in Fr'echet Inception distance (FID) and 12.35% in 1-Nearest Neighbor Accuracy (1-NNA). Through a pilot user study, we provide initial evidence of the usefulness of our approach for generating acceptable brand new GUI designs.

After utterly researching existing fingerprint classification algorithms, this article gives out a new definition of core and delta point, putting forward an improved algorithm based on the gray level picture, implementing a fast and precise fingerprint classification system used in police. The experiments indicate that the excellent improvement has been made compared to the known methods in localization of delta and core points and accuracy ratio of classification, which can meet practical requirement.