Rethinking Weight Decay for Efficient Neural Network Pruning.

Introduced in the late 1980s for generalization purposes, pruning has now become a staple for compressing deep neural networks. Despite many innovations in recent decades, pruning approaches still face core issues that hinder their performance or scalability. Drawing inspiration from early work in the field, and especially the use of weight decay to achieve sparsity, we introduce Selective Weight Decay (SWD), which carries out efficient, continuous pruning throughout training. Our approach, theoretically grounded on Lagrangian smoothing, is versatile and can be applied to multiple tasks, networks, and pruning structures. We show that SWD compares favorably to state-of-the-art approaches, in terms of performance-to-parameters ratio, on the CIFAR-10, Cora, and ImageNet ILSVRC2012 datasets.

A sub-nJ CMOS ECG classifier for wireless smart sensor.

Body area sensor networks hold the promise of more efficient and cheaper medical care services through the constant monitoring of physiological markers such as heart beats. Continuously transmitting the electrocardiogram (ECG) signal requires most of the wireless ECG sensor energy budget. This paper presents the analog implantation of a classifier for ECG signals that can be embedded onto a sensor. The classifier is a sparse neural associative memory. It is implemented using the ST 65 nm CMOS technology and requires only 234 pJ per classification while achieving a 93.6% classification accuracy. The energy requirement is 6 orders of magnitude lower than a digital accelerator that performs a similar task. The lifespan of the resulting sensor is 191 times as large as that of a sensor sending all the data.

New low-complexity and robust time synchronization technique for optical IMDD OFDM transmissions.

This paper provides an analysis of the performance of conventional preamble-based time synchronization techniques, which have been proposed for Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) radio transmissions, in the context of optical Intensity Modulated and Direct Detected (IMDD) OFDM transmissions over single-mode fiber. A novel preamble structure along with a two-stage synchronization algorithm is proposed. Thanks to the particular structure of the preamble, a first coarse synchronization metric does not present minor peaks. In addition, without the knowledge of the preamble waveform the receiver can perform both coarse and fine synchronization steps. As maximal delay in arrival time between different frequency components of a signal depends on chromatic dispersion and the signal bandwidth, it is also observed that a slowly time-varying preamble is more robust than a fast time-varying one. By means of numerical simulations, the proposed method is shown to provide better performance when compared to other conventional methods in terms of timing offset variance with reduced receiver complexity. In unamplified transmissions the proposed technique guarantees a quasi-optimal transmission capacity even with a short cyclic prefix.

MAPK- and PKC/CREB-dependent induction of interleukin-11 by the environmental contaminant formaldehyde in human bronchial epithelial cells.

Formaldehyde (FA) is a volatile organic compound (VOC), considered as a major indoor air pollutant and suspected to favor the development of inflammatory lung diseases. The present study was aimed at identifying cytokines/chemokines targeted by FA in human lung cells. This VOC was demonstrated to up-regulate interleukin-11 (IL-11) mRNA and secretion levels in a dose-dependent manner in cultured lung epithelial BEAS-2B cells. It concomitantly induced mRNA expression of transforming growth factor (TGF)-ß1, a fibrogenic marker regulated by IL-11. FA was also found to trigger an early phosphorylation of p38 and extracellular signal-regulated kinase (ERK)1/2 mitogen-activated protein kinases (MAPKs) in BEAS-2B cells, whose inhibition by ERK and p38 MAPK chemical inhibitors (U0126 and SB203580, respectively) counteracted FA-mediated induction of IL-11. In addition, FA increased phosphorylation of cAMP response element binding protein (CREB) and the use of small-interfering RNA targeting CREB demonstrated that this transcription factor was required for the up-regulation of IL-11 by FA. Implication of protein kinase C (PKC) in FA-induced IL-11 expression was moreover demonstrated by using RO-31-8220, a PKC inhibitor. We finally showed using SB203580 and RO-31-8220 that phosphorylation of CREB and CREB-promoter activity induced by FA are under the control of both p38 MAPK and PKC. Taken together, the results showed that FA uses different pathways to induce IL-11 expression in lung BEAS-2B cells. IL-11, well-known to contribute to lung inflammatory diseases, appears thus as a molecular target of FA, which could be involved in putative deleterious inflammatory and fibrogenic pulmonary effects of this VOC.

A self-powered telemetry system to estimate the postoperative instability of a knee implant.

Estimating in vivo the life span of a total knee replacement prosthesis is currently done by estimating the polyethylene (PE) wear rate from measurement of the femorotibial distance using X-ray photographies. This efficient method requires, however, waiting for few years to obtain a readout. This letter proposes using another metric that can be obtained within a couple of months of surgery, namely the center of pressure (COP). This metric represents the point, where the axial force applies the most onto the tibial tray. The displacement of the COP with respect to its ideal position can be used to estimate the wear and the life span of the PE. This requires the implant to be fitted with a telemetry system described briefly. The proposed method is supported by measures and simulations.

Ligament imbalance metrics and an autonomous measurement system for post TKA.

This paper describes two useful metrics to estimate the ligament imbalance for post Total Knee Arthroplasty (TKA) scenario: the center of pressure and the net moments (varus-valgus and anterior posterior). Both metrics have been evaluated using high level models and experimental measurement. Self-powered analog and digital architectures for the center of pressure are elaborated here and complies with the Medical Implant Communication Service (MICS) standard. It is shown that the analog architecture is advantageous in terms of surface area and overall power consumption.

The Arabidopsis pop2-1 mutant reveals the involvement of GABA transaminase in salt stress tolerance.

BACKGROUND: GABA (gamma-aminobutyric acid) is a non protein amino acid that has been reported to accumulate in a number of plant species when subjected to high salinity and many other environmental constraints. However, no experimental data are to date available on the molecular function of GABA and the involvement of its metabolism in salt stress tolerance in higher plants. Here, we investigated the regulation of GABA metabolism in Arabidopsis thaliana at the metabolite, enzymatic activity and gene transcription levels upon NaCl stress. RESULTS: We identified the GABA transaminase (GABA-T), the first step of GABA catabolism, as the most responsive to NaCl. We further performed a functional analysis of the corresponding gene POP2 and demonstrated that the previously isolated loss-of-function pop2-1 mutant was oversensitive to ionic stress but not to osmotic stress suggesting a specific role in salt tolerance. NaCl oversensitivity was not associated with overaccumulation of Na+ and Cl- but mutant showed a slight decrease in K+. To bring insights into POP2 function, a promoter-reporter gene strategy was used and showed that POP2 was mainly expressed in roots under control conditions and was induced in primary root apex and aerial parts of plants in response to NaCl. Additionally, GC-MS- and UPLC-based metabolite profiling revealed major changes in roots of pop2-1 mutant upon NaCl stress including accumulation of amino acids and decrease in carbohydrates content. CONCLUSIONS: GABA metabolism was overall up-regulated in response to NaCl in Arabidopsis. Particularly, GABA-T was found to play a pivotal function and impairment of this step was responsible for a decrease in salt tolerance indicating that GABA catabolism was a determinant of Arabidopsis salt tolerance. GABA-T would act in salt responses in linking N and C metabolisms in roots.