MOTIVATION: For spot-based spatial transcriptomics (ST), accurate cell-type deconvolution is essential for downstream analysis since each spot captures mixtures of multiple cell types. Meanwhile, spatial niches define distinct micro-environmental contexts, also salient for biological interpretation. However, existing deconvolution methods usually rely on fixed reference signatures or mapping single cells onto ST spots, without incorporating niche priors or modeling niche-dependent shifts. Consequently, existing methods remain focused on spot-level proportion estimation, with limited ability to support functional analysis of niche-associated molecular programs. RESULTS: We present NicheDeSig for niche-aware deconvolution. NicheDeSig models each cell type through adaptive signatures, enabling spot deconvolution under context-dependent signatures and supporting niche-aware analysis of cell-state variation across spatial micro-environments. Our method achieves strong deconvolution performance across the simulated benchmark datasets and improves spatial fidelity in the simulated colon dataset. The learned signatures recover laminar and white-matter-associated programs in the human dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), domain-stratified tumor microenvironment patterns in breast cancer (BRCA), and region-associated signatures in pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma sample A (PDAC-A) and colorectal liver metastasis analyses. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: Source code and the archived code snapshot are available at https://github.com/Davidcoach/NicheDeSig and https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20685597.

Freezing of gait (FoG) is a common motor impairment that occurs as Parkinson's disease patients enter the moderate stage or higher, leading to a high risk of falls. Although previous methods have accurately identified FoG, significant challenges remain in predicting it. These challenges include difficulties in labeling Pre-FoG due to its personalization, sudden onset, and variability; the imbalance between the amount of FoG and normal gait data; and inadequate feature representation by the model. To address these challenges, we introduce a deep learning-based method for FoG prediction, named FoG-M3 (Mixup, MoCo, and MU-Net). This method employs a non-fixed length for Pre-FoG rather than a fixed length, allowing for more accurate labeling. To address the long-tail issue in the dataset, we integrated FoG-Mix with U-Net and the Mamba module. Additionally, the FoG-MoCo contrastive learning strategy was applied to enhance the model's representational capacity. The overall prediction accuracy reaches 95% on the Daphnet dataset and 93% on the BHXC dataset. Pre-FoG prediction accuracy also achieves approximately 90% on both datasets, surpassing the performance of FoG-Net, ResNeXt, and contrastive learning-based ResNet. Using the proposed method, we can predict FoG occurrences with enough time for posture adjustments, approximately 6 seconds before onset, which is more than typically available to Parkinson's disease patients. Therefore, the FoG-M3 method can predict Pre-FoG with high accuracy and efficiency, demonstrating substantial potential for use in Parkinson's disease rehabilitation.

Background As visual simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is primarily based on the assumption of a static scene, the presence of dynamic objects in the frame causes problems such as a deterioration of system robustness and inaccurate position estimation. In this study, we propose a YGC-SLAM for indoor dynamic environments based on the ORB-SLAM2 framework combined with semantic and geometric constraints to improve the positioning accuracy and robustness of the system. Methods First, the recognition accuracy of YOLOv5 was improved by introducing the convolution block attention model and the improved EIOU loss function, whereby the prediction frame converges quickly for better detection. The improved YOLOv5 was then added to the tracking thread for dynamic target detection to eliminate dynamic points. Subsequently, multi-view geometric constraints were used for re-judging to further eliminate dynamic points while enabling more useful feature points to be retained and preventing the semantic approach from over-eliminating feature points, causing a failure of map building. The K-means clustering algorithm was used to accelerate this process and quickly calculate and determine the motion state of each cluster of pixel points. Finally, a strategy for drawing keyframes with de-redundancy was implemented to construct a clear 3D dense static point-cloud map. Results Through testing on TUM dataset and a real environment, the experimental results show that our algorithm reduces the absolute trajectory error by 98.22% and the relative trajectory error by 97.98% compared with the original ORB-SLAM2, which is more accurate and has better real-time performance than similar algorithms, such as DynaSLAM and DS-SLAM. Conclusions The YGC-SLAM proposed in this study can effectively eliminate the adverse effects of dynamic objects, and the system can better complete positioning and map building tasks in complex environments.

Transaction performance in geo-replicated databases heavily relies on the request location: when not issued by the primary region, transactions are forced to involve costly wide-area communication. While existing systems distribute primary roles across regions, such assignment typically occurs at the shard level, making it difficult to align with geographically dispersed access to individual records. This paper introduces PolyBase, a pioneering architecture to address such misalignment, leveraging the widely adopted Paxos-based log replication mechanisms. It enables flexible row-level consensus group affiliation , which runs on an unchanged Paxos protocol , but dynamically re-assigns database rows between Paxos log replication groups, whose leaders become the primary region, enjoying faster writes and up-to-date versions for reads. With carefully designed data structures and protocols, PolyBase significantly reduces wide-area RTTs without compromising transaction or log replication consistency or reliability guarantees. We implemented PolyBase with optimized re-assignment policies and integrated it into two popular databases (RocksDB and MySQL). Our evaluation on AWS, using a production e-commerce workload and microbench-marks confirms that PolyBase offers significantly higher transaction throughput and lower average/tail latency compared to baselines.

Multi-focus image fusion is a technique to fuse the images focused on different depth ranges to generate an all-in-focus image. Existing deep learning approaches to multi-focus image fusion can be categorized as end-to-end methods and decision map based methods. End-to-end methods can generate natural fusion near the focus-defocus boundaries (FDB), but the output is often inconsistent with the input in the areas far from the boundaries (FFB). On the contrary, decision map based methods can preserve original images in the FFB areas, but often generate artifacts near the FDB. In this paper, we propose a dual-branch network for multi-focus image fusion (DB-MFIF) to exploit the best of both worlds, achieving better results in both FDB and FFB areas, i.e. with naturally sharper FDB areas and more consistent FFB areas with the inputs. In our DB-MFIF, an end-to-end branch and a decision map based branch are proposed to mutually assist each other. In addition, to this end, two map-based loss functions are also proposed. Experiments show that our method surpasses existing algorithms on multiple datasets, both qualitatively and quantitatively, and achieves the state-of-the-art performance. The code and model is available on GitHub:https://github.com/Zancelot/DB-MFIF.

Caching is crucial for accelerating data access, employed as a ubiquitous design in modern systems at many parts of computer systems. With increasing core count, and shrinking latency gap between cache and modern storage devices, hit-path scalability becomes increasingly critical. However, existing production in-memory caches often use list-based management with promotion on each cache hit, which requires extensive locking and poses a significant overhead for scaling beyond a few cores. Moreover, existing techniques for improving scalability either (1) only focus on the indexing structure and do not improve cache management scalability, or (2) sacrifice efficiency or miss-path scalability.

Natural bokeh is a typical characteristic of digital single-lens reflex (DSLR) cameras and high-quality lenses, which is commonly used to emphasize a subject from a distracting background. However, it is still a big challenge for mobile platforms to produce similar effects due to the small apertures of their lenses. Unlike many previous methods formulated as a two-stage task composed of depth/defocus estimation and defocus magnification, we propose a feature pyramid boosting network with novel hierarchical attention modules to render bokeh in one step. In addition, existing learning-based methods suffer from the pixel misalignment of the datasets. We present a well-aligned bokeh dataset captured by a DSLR to address this problem. Experiments show that our method can render comparable bokeh with the state-of-the-art method but requires fewer parameters.

Driver’s emotion recognition is vital to improving driving safety, comfort, and acceptance of intelligent vehicles. This article presents a cognitive-feature-augmented driver emotion detection method that is based on emotional cognitive process theory and deep networks. Different from the traditional methods, both the driver’s facial expression and cognitive process characteristics (age, gender, and driving age) were used as the inputs of the proposed model. Convolutional techniques were adopted to construct the model for driver’s emotion detection simultaneously considering the driver’s facial expression and cognitive process characteristics. A driver’s emotion data collection was carried out to validate the performance of the proposed method. The collected dataset consists of 40 drivers’ frontal facial videos, their cognitive process characteristics, and self-reported assessments of driver emotions. Another two deep networks were also used to compare recognition performance. The results prove that the proposed method can achieve well detection results for different databases on the discrete emotion model and dimensional emotion model, respectively.

Different from the object motion blur, the defocus blur is caused by the limitation of the cameras' depth of field. The defocus amount can be characterized by the parameter of point spread function and thus forms a defocus map. In this paper, we propose a new network architecture called Defocus Image Deblurring Auxiliary Learning Net (DID-ANet), which is specifically designed for single image defocus deblurring by using defocus map estimation as auxiliary task to improve the deblurring result. To facilitate the training of the network, we build a novel and large-scale dataset for single image defocus deblurring, which contains the defocus images, the defocus maps and the all-sharp images. To the best of our knowledge, the new dataset is the first large-scale defocus deblurring dataset for training deep networks. Moreover, the experimental results demonstrate that the proposed DID-ANet outperforms the state-of-the-art methods for both tasks of defocus image deblurring and defocus map estimation, both quantitatively and qualitatively. The dataset, code, and model is available on GitHub: https://github.com/xytmhy/DID-ANet-Defocus-Deblurring.

To pursue high accuracy, most image semantic segmentation methods are computationally costly and thus not suitable to real-time applications. Existing lightweight methods either adopt a single branch without feature fusion, which dam-ages accuracy, or introduce extra branches for feature fusion, which harms efficiency. In this paper, we propose a lightweight network named EFRNet, with feature fusion and refinement in a single branch to achieve better balance between accuracy and efficiency in real-time semantic segmentation. Specifically, in EFRNet, we design a novel Feature Fusion Module to fuse multi-stage features in a single CNN efficiently, and we propose a lightweight Channel Attention Refinement Module to refine features with few extra parameters. Extensive experiments show that our EFRNet achieves decent accuracy with an extremely small model size and high inference speed. It achieves the best accuracy of 70.02% mIoU compared with state-of-the-art lightweight methods on CamVid with only 0.48M parameters.

This paper proposes a self-organizing control system for uncertain nonlinear systems. The proposed neural network is composed of a conventional brain emotional learning network (BEL) and a cerebellar model articulation controller network (CMAC). The input value of the network is feed to a BEL channel and a CMAC channel. The output of the network is generated by the comprehensive action of the two channels. The structure of the network is dynamic, using a self-organizing algorithm allows increasing or decreasing weight layers. The parameters of the proposed network are on-line tuned by the brain emotional learning rules; the updating rules of CMAC and the robust controller are derived from the Lyapunov function; in addition, stability analysis theory is used to guaranty the proposed controller's convergence. A simulated mobile robot is applied to prove the effectiveness of the proposed control system. By comparing with the performance of other neural-network-based control systems, the proposed network produces better performance.

Capturing an all-in-focus image with a single camera is difficult since the depth of field of the camera is usually limited. An alternative method to obtain the all-in-focus image is to fuse several images that are focused at different depths. However, existing multi-focus image fusion methods cannot obtain clear results for areas near the focused/defocused boundary (FDB). In this paper, a novel α-matte boundary defocus model is proposed to generate realistic training data with the defocus spread effect precisely modeled, especially for areas near the FDB. Based on this α-matte defocus model and the generated data, a cascaded boundary-aware convolutional network termed MMF-Net is proposed and trained, aiming to achieve clearer fusion results around the FDB. Specifically, the MMF-Net consists of two cascaded subnets for initial fusion and boundary fusion. These two subnets are designed to first obtain a guidance map of FDB and then refine the fusion near the FDB. Experiments demonstrate that with the help of the new α-matte boundary defocus model, the proposed MMF-Net outperforms the state-of-the-art methods both qualitatively and quantitatively.

Since it is usually difficult to capture an all-in-focus image of a 3D scene directly, various multi-focus image fusion methods are employed to generate it from several images focusing at different depths. However, the performance of existing methods is barely satisfactory and often degrades for areas near the focused/defocused boundary (FDB). In this paper, a boundary aware method using deep neural network is proposed to overcome this problem. (1) Aiming to acquire improved fusion images, a 2-channel deep network is proposed to better extract the relative defocus information of the two source images. (2) After analyzing the different situations for patches far away from and near the FDB, we use two networks to handle them respectively. (3) To simulate the reality more precisely, a new approach of dataset generation is designed. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, both qualitatively and quantitatively.