Wenkai Wang

Abstract RNA 3D structure prediction is a long-standing challenge. Inspired by the recent breakthrough in protein structure prediction, we developed trRosettaRNA, an automated deep learning-based approach to RNA 3D structure prediction. The trRosettaRNA pipeline comprises two major steps: 1D and 2D geometries prediction by a transformer network; and 3D structure folding by energy minimization. Benchmark tests suggest that trRosettaRNA outperforms traditional automated methods. In the blind tests of the 15 th Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction (CASP15) and the RNA-Puzzles experiments, the automated trRosettaRNA predictions for the natural RNAs are competitive with the top human predictions. trRosettaRNA also outperforms other deep learning-based methods in CASP15 when measured by the Z-score of the Root-Mean-Square Deviation. Nevertheless, it remains challenging to predict accurate structures for synthetic RNAs with an automated approach. We hope this work could be a good start toward solving the hard problem of RNA structure prediction with deep learning.

Collaborative sensing in cognitive radio networks can significantly improve the probability of detecting the transmission of primary users. In current collaborative sensing schemes, all collaborative secondary users are assumed to be honest. As a consequence, the system is vulnerable to attacks in which malicious secondary users report false detection results. In this paper, we investigate how to improve the security of collaborative sensing. Particularly, we develop a malicious user detection algorithm that calculates the suspicious level of secondary users based on their past reports. Then, we calculate trust values as well as consistency values that are used to eliminate the malicious users' influence on the primary user detection results. Through simulations, we show that even a single malicious user can significantly degrade the performance of collaborative sensing. The proposed trust value indicator can effectively differentiate honest and malicious secondary users. The receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves for the primary user detection demonstrate the improvement in the security of collaborative sensing.

The accuracy of de novo protein structure prediction has been improved considerably in recent years, mostly due to the introduction of deep learning techniques. In this work, trRosettaX, an improved version of trRosetta for protein structure prediction is presented. The major improvement over trRosetta consists of two folds. The first is the application of a new multi-scale network, i.e., Res2Net, for improved prediction of inter-residue geometries, including distance and orientations. The second is an attention-based module to exploit multiple homologous templates to increase the accuracy further. Compared with trRosetta, trRosettaX improves the contact precision by 6% and 8% on the free modeling targets of CASP13 and CASP14, respectively. A preliminary version of trRosettaX is ranked as one of the top server groups in CASP14's blind test. Additional benchmark test on 161 targets from CAMEO (between Jun and Sep 2020) shows that trRosettaX achieves an average TM-score ≈0.8, outperforming the top groups in CAMEO. These data suggest the effectiveness of using the multi-scale network and the benefit of incorporating homologous templates into the network. The trRosettaX algorithm is incorporated into the trRosetta server since Nov 2020. The web server, the training and inference codes are available at: https://yanglab.nankai.edu.cn/trRosetta/.