Deep neural networks (DNNs) are vulnerable to adversarial examples where inputs with imperceptible perturbations mislead DNNs to incorrect results. Recently, adversarial patch, with noise confined to a small and localized patch, emerged for its easy accessibility in real-world. However, existing attack strategies are still far from generating visually natural patches with strong attacking ability, since they often ignore the perceptual sensitivity of the attacked network to the adversarial patch, including both the correlations with the image context and the visual attention. To address this problem, this paper proposes a perceptual-sensitive generative adversarial network (PS-GAN) that can simultaneously enhance the visual fidelity and the attacking ability for the adversarial patch. To improve the visual fidelity, we treat the patch generation as a patch-to-patch translation via an adversarial process, feeding any types of seed patch and outputting the similar adversarial patch with high perceptual correlation with the attacked image. To further enhance the attacking ability, an attention mechanism coupled with adversarial generation is introduced to predict the critical attacking areas for placing the patches, which can help producing more realistic and aggressive patches. Extensive experiments under semi-whitebox and black-box settings on two large-scale datasets GTSRB and ImageNet demonstrate that the proposed PS-GAN outperforms state-of-the-art adversarial patch attack methods.

The recently described role of RNA methylation in regulating immune cell infiltration into tumors has attracted interest, given its potential impact on immunotherapy response. YTHDF1 is a versatile and powerful m6A reader, but the understanding of its impact on immune evasion is limited. Here, we reveal that tumor-intrinsic YTHDF1 drives immune evasion and immune checkpoint inhibitor (ICI) resistance. Additionally, YTHDF1 deficiency converts cold tumors into responsive hot tumors, which improves ICI efficacy. Mechanistically, YTHDF1 deficiency inhibits the translation of lysosomal genes and limits lysosomal proteolysis of the major histocompatibility complex class I (MHC-I) and antigens, ultimately restoring tumor immune surveillance. In addition, we design a system for exosome-mediated CRISPR/Cas9 delivery to target YTHDF1 in vivo, resulting in YTHDF1 depletion and antitumor activity. Our findings elucidate the role of tumor-intrinsic YTHDF1 in driving immune evasion and its underlying mechanism.

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The increasing number of privately owned vehicles in large metropolitan cities have contributed to congestion, increased energy waste due to congestion, raised CO2 emissions, and impacted our living conditions negatively. Analysis of data representing human mobility and citizens' driving behavior can provide insights to reverse these conditions. This article presents a large-scale driving status and trajectory dataset consisting of 426,992,602 records collected from 68,069 vehicles over a month. From the dataset, we analyze the driving behavior and produce random distributions of trip duration and millage to characterize the car trips. We have found that a private car has more than 17% probability to make four trips per day, and a trip has more than 25% probability to last 20-30 minutes and 33% probability to travel 10 Kilometers during the trip. The collective distributions of trip mileage and duration follow Weibull distribution, whereas the hourly trips follow the well known diurnal pattern and so the hourly fuel efficiency. Based on these findings, we have developed an application which recommends the drivers to find the nearby gas stations and possible popular places from the historical trips. We further highlight that our dataset can be applied for developing dynamic Green maps for fuel efficient routing, modeling efficient Vehicle-2-Vehicle (V2V) communications protocols, verifying existing V2V protocols, and understanding user behavior in driving their private cars.

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In June 2012, Governor Jerry Brown signed the California Budget Act of 2012, which included a series of budget trailer bills, one of which-Senate Bill (SB) 1041-included significant reforms to California's Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, known as CalWORKs (California Work Opportunity and Responsibility to Kids). The reforms, effective six months later (in January 2013), included changes to work requirements and the exemption for having a young child, with the goal of engaging CalWORKs welfare-to-work (WTW) clients in more-intensive work-related activities as early as possible. The reforms also provide enhanced supports to address barriers to work, offer more flexibility in work activity options, and increase incentives to work as WTW clients move toward self-sufficiency. To fully understand whether SB 1041 is achieving its objectives and whether there are any unintended consequences, the California legislature required an independent evaluation. Following a competitive bidding process, the California Department of Social Services (CDSS) awarded the evaluation contract to the RAND Corporation, in partnership with the American Institutes for Research (AIR).As described in the evaluation background and study design report, the evaluation design includes five components:• The process study addresses questions related to SB 1041 implementation over time using data from interviews with state-level key informants, from annual interviews and focus groups in six focal counties (Alameda, Fresno, Los Angeles, Riverside, Sacramento, and Stanislaus), and from an annual All-County Survey (ACS) of welfare directors. • The county welfare operations impact study relies on the information gathered from the focal counties and the ACS, as well as administrative data from county welfare offices regarding program staffing, budgets, and other matters, to assess the impact of SB 1041 on multiple dimensions of county welfare office operations.• The CalWORKs WTW client status study employs CDSS welfare system administrative data to provide a series of annual snapshots of indicators for the population of CalWORKs WTW clients.• The CalWORKs WTW client tracking study likewise draws on the array of state-and county-level administrative databases to provide a series of annual summaries of the dynamics of the CalWORKs WTW caseload.• The CalWORKs WTW client impact study combines administrative data with the California Socioeconomic Survey (CalSES)-primary data collected over time for a sample of CalWORKs entrants-to investigate the impact of SB 1041 on a range of adult and child outcomes for current and former CalWORKs WTW clients. iv This second evaluation report extends the analyses in the initial evaluation report through updated findings, drawing on process study data collected in 2016, specifically the second wave of the ACS and qualitative data from interviews with county welfare office staff, focus groups with caseworkers, and interviews with CalWORKs WTW clients conducted in the six focal counties. Findings from t...