Multimodal Sentiment Analysis Based on a Cross-Modal Multihead Attention Mechanism

Multimodal sentiment analysis aims to understand people’s emotions and opinions from diverse data.Concate-nating or multiplying various modalities is a traditional multi-modal sentiment analysis fusion method.This fusion method does not utilize the correlation information between modalities.To solve this problem,this paper proposes amodel based on amulti-head attention mechanism.First,after preprocessing the original data.Then,the feature representation is converted into a sequence of word vectors and positional encoding is introduced to better understand the semantic and sequential information in the input sequence.Next,the input coding sequence is fed into the transformer model for further processing and learning.At the transformer layer,a cross-modal attention consisting of a pair of multi-head attention modules is employed to reflect the correlation between modalities.Finally,the processed results are input into the feedforward neural network to obtain the emotional output through the classification layer.Through the above processing flow,the model can capture semantic information and contextual relationships and achieve good results in various natural language processing tasks.Our model was tested on the CMU Multimodal Opinion Sentiment and Emotion Intensity(CMU-MOSEI)and Multimodal EmotionLines Dataset(MELD),achieving an accuracy of 82.04% and F1 parameters reached 80.59% on the former dataset.

A Robust Framework for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis with Noisy Labels Generated from Distributed Data Annotation

Multimodal sentiment analysis utilizes multimodal data such as text,facial expressions and voice to detect people’s attitudes.With the advent of distributed data collection and annotation,we can easily obtain and share such multimodal data.However,due to professional discrepancies among annotators and lax quality control,noisy labels might be introduced.Recent research suggests that deep neural networks(DNNs)will overfit noisy labels,leading to the poor performance of the DNNs.To address this challenging problem,we present a Multimodal Robust Meta Learning framework(MRML)for multimodal sentiment analysis to resist noisy labels and correlate distinct modalities simultaneously.Specifically,we propose a two-layer fusion net to deeply fuse different modalities and improve the quality of the multimodal data features for label correction and network training.Besides,a multiple meta-learner(label corrector)strategy is proposed to enhance the label correction approach and prevent models from overfitting to noisy labels.We conducted experiments on three popular multimodal datasets to verify the superiority of ourmethod by comparing it with four baselines.

MAIPFE:An Efficient Multimodal Approach Integrating Pre-Emptive Analysis,Personalized Feature Selection,and Explainable AI

Medical Internet of Things(IoT)devices are becoming more and more common in healthcare.This has created a huge need for advanced predictive health modeling strategies that can make good use of the growing amount of multimodal data to find potential health risks early and help individuals in a personalized way.Existing methods,while useful,have limitations in predictive accuracy,delay,personalization,and user interpretability,requiring a more comprehensive and efficient approach to harness modern medical IoT devices.MAIPFE is a multimodal approach integrating pre-emptive analysis,personalized feature selection,and explainable AI for real-time health monitoring and disease detection.By using AI for early disease detection,personalized health recommendations,and transparency,healthcare will be transformed.The Multimodal Approach Integrating Pre-emptive Analysis,Personalized Feature Selection,and Explainable AI(MAIPFE)framework,which combines Firefly Optimizer,Recurrent Neural Network(RNN),Fuzzy C Means(FCM),and Explainable AI,improves disease detection precision over existing methods.Comprehensive metrics show the model’s superiority in real-time health analysis.The proposed framework outperformed existing models by 8.3%in disease detection classification precision,8.5%in accuracy,5.5%in recall,2.9%in specificity,4.5%in AUC(Area Under the Curve),and 4.9%in delay reduction.Disease prediction precision increased by 4.5%,accuracy by 3.9%,recall by 2.5%,specificity by 3.5%,AUC by 1.9%,and delay levels decreased by 9.4%.MAIPFE can revolutionize healthcare with preemptive analysis,personalized health insights,and actionable recommendations.The research shows that this innovative approach improves patient outcomes and healthcare efficiency in the real world.

A Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis of Lingnan Cultural Promotional Videos on Social Media

In recent years,more and more directors of culture and tourism have taken part in the promotion of local cultural tourism by cross-dressing,talent shows,and pushing their limits on self-media platforms.This study investigates short videos of Lingnan culture promoted by directors general and deputy directors general of the Culture,Radio,Television,Tourism,and Sports Bureau of counties and cities in Guangdong Province on social media by the method of multimodal critical discourse analysis.The analysis of 33 videos shows that Lingnan culture is a domineering and confident culture,historical culture,graceful and elegant culture,and vibrant and active culture.Domineering and confident culture is embedded in the utterances and behaviors of the directors general or deputy directors general in the video.Historical culture is realized through the conversation with historical figures through time travel.Graceful and elegant culture is constructed in the depiction of sceneries and the depiction of characters’manners.Vibrant and active culture is represented in the depiction of the characters’actional process and analytical process.

A Study of the English Translation of Characteristic Cuisines of the Hexi Corridor from the Perspective of Multimodal Discourse Analysis

Given the diversity of geographical and cultural backgrounds,it is difficult to find precise counterparts of many food-related vocabularies in the unique dietary culture of the Hexi Corridor in the target language,making it challenging to fully convey the essence of its local dietary culture in translation.To achieve the purpose of translation,the theory of multimodal discourse analysis provides an ideal translation approach through the language mode,image mode,sound mode,and the synergistic effect of multimodalities,which can accurately address the deficiencies in the translation of dietary culture.Through this research,it is not only possible to highlight the unique charm of the dietary culture of the Hexi Corridor but also to build a bridge for its international dissemination,promoting cross-border cultural exchanges and mutual understanding.

Analysis of Commuting Modal Shift in Consideration of Social Interaction of Consciousness for Environment

It is the matter for achievement of the low carbon transport system that the excessive use of private vehicles can be controlled appropriately.Not only improvement of service level of modes except private vehicle,but also consciousness for environmental problem of individual trip maker is important for eco-commuting promotion.On the other hand,consciousness for environment would be changed by influence of other person.Accordingly,it is aimed in the study that the structure of decision-making process for modal shift to the eco-commuting mode in the local city is described considering environmental consciousness and social interaction.For the purpose,the consciousness for the environment problem and the travel behavior of the commuter at the suburban area in the local city are investigated by the questionnaire survey.The covariance structure about the eco-consciousness is analyzed with the database of the questionnaire survey by structural equation modeling.As the result,it can be confirmed with the structural equation model that the individual environmental consciousness is strongly related with the intention of self-sacrifice and is influenced with the local interaction of the individual connections.On the other hand,the intention of modal shift for the commuting mode is analyzed with the database of the questionnaire survey.It can be found out that the environmental consciousness is not statistically significant for commuting mode choice with the present poor level of service of public transport.However,the intention of self-sacrifice for the prevention of the global warming is statistically confirmed as the factor of modal shift with the operation of eco-commuting bus service with the RP/SP integrated estimation method.As the result,the multi-agent simulation system with social interaction model for eco consciousness is developed to measure the effect of the eco-commuting promotion.For the purpose,the carbon dioxide emission is estimated based on traffic demand and road network condition in the traffic environment model.On the other hand,the relation between agents is defined based on the small world network.The proposed multi-agent simulation is applied to measure the effect of the eco-commuting promotion such as improvement of level of service on the public transport or education of eco-consciousness.The effect of the promotion plan can be observed with the proposed multi-agent system.Finally,it can be concluded that the proposed multi-agent simulation with social interaction for eco-consciousness is useful for planning of eco-commuting promotion.

Structural design and modal behaviors analysis of a new swept baffled inflatable wing

Inflatable wing has significant application value in the design of loitering munitions because of its advantages such as lightweight and foldability.However,due to the flexible characteristics,aeroelastic behaviors of inflatable wings such as flutter are nonnegligible in flight.By designing a certain angle between the inflatable beam and the wing span,the structural dynamic and even the aeroelastic performance of the inflatable wing can be effectively improved.Based on the analysis of the mechanical and geometric characteristics of the inflatable structure,a new inflatable wing with sweep arranged inflatable beams is proposed,and the main design variables and methods are analyzed.For purpose of investigating the aeroelastic performance of the swept baffled inflatable wing,the modal behaviors by considering the wet mode are studied.In consideration of the deficiencies of the traditional wet modal analysis method,by introducing the influence on the additional stiffness of flow field,an added massstiffness method is proposed in this paper,and the advantages are verified by ground vibration experiments.On this basis,the effects of baffles sweep angle,pressure,and boundary conditions on the modal parameters and aeroelastic performance of inflatable wing are analyzed.The results show that the aeroelastic performance of the inflatable wing can be designed by changing the baffles sweep angle,which is enlightened for the aeroelastic tailoring design on inflatable wings.

A Multilevel Hierarchical Parallel Algorithm for Large-Scale Finite Element Modal Analysis

The strict and high-standard requirements for the safety and stability ofmajor engineering systems make it a tough challenge for large-scale finite element modal analysis.At the same time,realizing the systematic analysis of the entire large structure of these engineering systems is extremely meaningful in practice.This article proposes a multilevel hierarchical parallel algorithm for large-scale finite element modal analysis to reduce the parallel computational efficiency loss when using heterogeneous multicore distributed storage computers in solving large-scale finite element modal analysis.Based on two-level partitioning and four-transformation strategies,the proposed algorithm not only improves the memory access rate through the sparsely distributed storage of a large amount of data but also reduces the solution time by reducing the scale of the generalized characteristic equation(GCEs).Moreover,a multilevel hierarchical parallelization approach is introduced during the computational procedure to enable the separation of the communication of inter-nodes,intra-nodes,heterogeneous core groups(HCGs),and inside HCGs through mapping computing tasks to various hardware layers.This method can efficiently achieve load balancing at different layers and significantly improve the communication rate through hierarchical communication.Therefore,it can enhance the efficiency of parallel computing of large-scale finite element modal analysis by fully exploiting the architecture characteristics of heterogeneous multicore clusters.Finally,typical numerical experiments were used to validate the correctness and efficiency of the proposedmethod.Then a parallel modal analysis example of the cross-river tunnel with over ten million degrees of freedom(DOFs)was performed,and ten-thousand core processors were applied to verify the feasibility of the algorithm.

Study of Axial Vibration of a Motor-Compressor System Using Operational Modal Analysis

A case study of excessive vibration on a motor-compressor system is presented in this paper.After barely two months of operation,the reciprocating compressor motor’s routine monitoring revealed excessive axial vibration amplitude.For this reason,the Operational Modal Analysis(OMA)was carried out in order to identify the pri-mary cause.According to the investigation,one of the harmonic components which was 18 times the motor’s running speed matched with a resonance frequency of 112 Hz.According to OMA study,the motor was vibrating in torsional motion because the compressor’s load had stimulated the entire motor-compressor unit at this reso-nance frequency.The analysis also demonstrates the bulging effect of the motor shaft’s axial vibration on the motor’s endplate.

Multimodal Sentiment Analysis Using BiGRU and Attention-Based Hybrid Fusion Strategy

Recently,multimodal sentiment analysis has increasingly attracted attention with the popularity of complementary data streams,which has great potential to surpass unimodal sentiment analysis.One challenge of multimodal sentiment analysis is how to design an efficient multimodal feature fusion strategy.Unfortunately,existing work always considers feature-level fusion or decision-level fusion,and few research works focus on hybrid fusion strategies that contain feature-level fusion and decision-level fusion.To improve the performance of multimodal sentiment analysis,we present a novel multimodal sentiment analysis model using BiGRU and attention-based hybrid fusion strategy(BAHFS).Firstly,we apply BiGRU to learn the unimodal features of text,audio and video.Then we fuse the unimodal features into bimodal features using the bimodal attention fusion module.Next,BAHFS feeds the unimodal features and bimodal features into the trimodal attention fusion module and the trimodal concatenation fusion module simultaneously to get two sets of trimodal features.Finally,BAHFS makes a classification with the two sets of trimodal features respectively and gets the final analysis results with decision-level fusion.Based on the CMU-MOSI and CMU-MOSEI datasets,extensive experiments have been carried out to verify BAHFS’s superiority.

Screening biomarkers for spinal cord injury using weighted gene co-expression network analysis and machine learning

Immune changes and inflammatory responses have been identified as central events in the pathological process of spinal co rd injury.They can greatly affect nerve regeneration and functional recovery.However,there is still limited understanding of the peripheral immune inflammato ry response in spinal cord inju ry.In this study.we obtained microRNA expression profiles from the peripheral blood of patients with spinal co rd injury using high-throughput sequencing.We also obtained the mRNA expression profile of spinal cord injury patients from the Gene Expression Omnibus(GEO)database(GSE151371).We identified 54 differentially expressed microRNAs and 1656 diffe rentially expressed genes using bioinformatics approaches.Functional enrichment analysis revealed that various common immune and inflammation-related signaling pathways,such as neutrophil extracellular trap formation pathway,T cell receptor signaling pathway,and nuclear factor-κB signal pathway,we re abnormally activated or inhibited in spinal cord inju ry patient samples.We applied an integrated strategy that combines weighted gene co-expression network analysis,LASSO logistic regression,and SVM-RFE algorithm and identified three biomarke rs associated with spinal cord injury:ANO10,BST1,and ZFP36L2.We verified the expression levels and diagnostic perfo rmance of these three genes in the original training dataset and clinical samples through the receiver operating characteristic curve.Quantitative polymerase chain reaction results showed that ANO20 and BST1 mRNA levels were increased and ZFP36L2 mRNA was decreased in the peripheral blood of spinal cord injury patients.We also constructed a small RNA-mRNA interaction network using Cytoscape.Additionally,we evaluated the proportion of 22 types of immune cells in the peripheral blood of spinal co rd injury patients using the CIBERSORT tool.The proportions of naive B cells,plasma cells,monocytes,and neutrophils were increased while the proportions of memory B cells,CD8^(+)T cells,resting natural killer cells,resting dendritic cells,and eosinophils were markedly decreased in spinal cord injury patients increased compared with healthy subjects,and ANO10,BST1 and ZFP26L2we re closely related to the proportion of certain immune cell types.The findings from this study provide new directions for the development of treatment strategies related to immune inflammation in spinal co rd inju ry and suggest that ANO10,BST2,and ZFP36L2 are potential biomarkers for spinal cord injury.The study was registe red in the Chinese Clinical Trial Registry(registration No.ChiCTR2200066985,December 12,2022).

Social-ecological perspective on the suicidal behaviour factors of early adolescents in China:a network analysis

Background In early adolescence,youth are highly prone to suicidal behaviours.Identifying modifiable risk factors during this critical phase is a priority to inform effective suicide prevention strategies.Aims To explore the risk and protective factors of suicidal behaviours(ie,suicidal ideation,plans and attempts)in early adolescence in China using a social-ecological perspective.Methods Using data from the cross-sectional project‘Healthy and Risky Behaviours Among Middle School Students in Anhui Province,China',stratified random cluster sampling was used to select 5724 middle school students who had completed self-report questionnaires in November 2020.Network analysis was employed to examine the correlates of suicidal ideation,plans and attempts at four levels,namely individual(sex,academic performance,serious physical llness/disability,history of self-harm,depression,impulsivity,sleep problems,resilience),family(family economic status,relationship with mother,relationship with father,family violence,childhood abuse,parental mental illness),school(relationship with teachers,relationship with classmates,school-bullying victimisation and perpetration)and social(social support,satisfaction with society).Results In total,37.9%,19.0%and 5.5%of the students reported suicidal ideation,plans and attempts in the past 6 months,respectively.The estimated network revealed that suicidal ideation,plans and attempts were collectively associated with a history of self-harm,sleep problems,childhood abuse,school bullying and victimisation.Centrality analysis indicated that the most influential nodes in the network were history of self-harm and childhood abuse.Notably,the network also showed unique correlates of suicidal ideation(sex,weight=0.60;impulsivity,weight=0.24;family violence,weight=0.17;relationship with teachers,weight=-0.03;school-bullying perpetration,weight=0.22),suicidal plans(social support,weight=-0.15)and suicidal attempts(relationship with mother,weight=-0.10;parental mental llness,weight=0.61).Conclusions This study identified the correlates of suicidal ideation,plans and attempts,and provided practical implications for suicide prevention for young adolescents in China.Firstly,this study highlighted the importance of joint interventions across multiple departments.Secondly,the common risk factors of suicidal ideation,plans and attempts were elucidated.Thirdly,this study proposed target interventions to address the unique influencing factors of suicidal ideation,plans and attempts.

Modal and Thermal Analysis of a Modified Connecting Rod of an Internal Combustion Engine Using Finite Element Method

The connecting rod is one of the most important moving components in an internal combustion engine. The present work determined the possibility of using aluminium alloy 7075 material to design and manufacture a connecting rod for weight optimisation without losing the strength of the connecting rod. It considered modal and thermal analyses to investigate the suitability of the material for connecting rod design. The parameters that were considered under the modal analysis were: total deformation, and natural frequency, while the thermal analysis looked at the temperature distribution, total heat flux and directional heat flux of the four connecting rods made with titanium alloy, grey cast iron, structural steel and aluminium 7075 alloy respectively. The connecting rod was modelled using Autodesk inventor2017 software using the calculated parameters. The steady-state thermal analysis was used to determine the induced heat flux and directional heat flux. The study found that Aluminium 7075 alloy deformed more than the remaining three other materials but has superior qualities in terms of vibrational natural frequency, total heat flux and lightweight compared to structural steel, grey cast iron and titanium alloy.

Sparse Modal Decomposition Method Addressing Underdetermined Vortex-Induced Vibration Reconstruction Problem for Marine Risers

When investigating the vortex-induced vibration(VIV)of marine risers,extrapolating the dynamic response on the entire length based on limited sensor measurements is a crucial step in both laboratory experiments and fatigue monitoring of real risers.The problem is conventionally solved using the modal decomposition method,based on the principle that the response can be approximated by a weighted sum of limited vibration modes.However,the method is not valid when the problem is underdetermined,i.e.,the number of unknown mode weights is more than the number of known measurements.This study proposed a sparse modal decomposition method based on the compressed sensing theory and the Compressive Sampling Matching Pursuit(Co Sa MP)algorithm,exploiting the sparsity of VIV in the modal space.In the validation study based on high-order VIV experiment data,the proposed method successfully reconstructed the response using only seven acceleration measurements when the conventional methods failed.A primary advantage of the proposed method is that it offers a completely data-driven approach for the underdetermined VIV reconstruction problem,which is more favorable than existing model-dependent solutions for many practical applications such as riser structural health monitoring.

Multimodal sentiment analysis for social media contents during public emergencies

Purpose:Nowadays,public opinions during public emergencies involve not only textual contents but also contain images.However,the existing works mainly focus on textual contents and they do not provide a satisfactory accuracy of sentiment analysis,lacking the combination of multimodal contents.In this paper,we propose to combine texts and images generated in the social media to perform sentiment analysis.Design/methodology/approach:We propose a Deep Multimodal Fusion Model(DMFM),which combines textual and visual sentiment analysis.We first train word2vec model on a large-scale public emergency corpus to obtain semantic-rich word vectors as the input of textual sentiment analysis.BiLSTM is employed to generate encoded textual embeddings.To fully excavate visual information from images,a modified pretrained VGG16-based sentiment analysis network is used with the best-performed fine-tuning strategy.A multimodal fusion method is implemented to fuse textual and visual embeddings completely,producing predicted labels.Findings:We performed extensive experiments on Weibo and Twitter public emergency datasets,to evaluate the performance of our proposed model.Experimental results demonstrate that the DMFM provides higher accuracy compared with baseline models.The introduction of images can boost the performance of sentiment analysis during public emergencies.Research limitations:In the future,we will test our model in a wider dataset.We will also consider a better way to learn the multimodal fusion information.Practical implications:We build an efficient multimodal sentiment analysis model for the social media contents during public emergencies.Originality/value:We consider the images posted by online users during public emergencies on social platforms.The proposed method can present a novel scope for sentiment analysis during public emergencies and provide the decision support for the government when formulating policies in public emergencies.

Advances in microfluidic-based DNA methylation analysis

DNA methylation has been extensively investigated in recent years,not least because of its known relationship with various diseases.Progress in analytical methods can greatly increase the relevance of DNA methylation studies to both clinical medicine and scientific research.Microflu-idic chips are excellent carriers for molecular analysis,and their use can provide improvements from multiple aspects.On-chip molecular analysis has received extensive attention owing to its advantages of portability,high throughput,low cost,and high efficiency.In recent years,the use of novel microfluidic chips for DNA methylation analysis has been widely reported and has shown obvious superiority to conventional methods.In this review,wefirst focus on DNA methylation and its applications.Then,we discuss advanced microfluidic-based methods for DNA methylation analysis and describe the great progress that has been made in recent years.Finally,we summarize the advantages that microfluidic technology brings to DNA methylation analysis and describe several challenges and perspectives for on-chip DNA methylation analysis.This review should help researchers improve their understanding and make progress in developing microfluidic-based methods for DNA methylation analysis.

A Review on Sources,Extractions and Analysis Methods of a Sustainable Biomaterial:Tannins

Condensed and hydrolysable tannins are non-toxic natural polyphenols that are a commercial commodity industrialized for tanning hides to obtain leather and for a growing number of other industrial applications mainly to substitute petroleum-based products.They are a definite class of sustainable materials of the forestry industry.They have been in operation for hundreds of years to manufacture leather and now for a growing number of applications in a variety of other industries,such as wood adhesives,metal coating,pharmaceutical/medical applications and several others.This review presents the main sources,either already or potentially commercial of this forestry by-materials,their industrial and laboratory extraction systems,their systems of analysis with their advantages and drawbacks,be these methods so simple to even appear primitive but nonetheless of proven effectiveness,or very modern and instrumental.It constitutes a basic but essential summary of what is necessary to know of these sustainable materials.In doing so,the review highlights some of the main challenges that remain to be addressed to deliver the quality and economics of tannin supply necessary to fulfill the industrial production requirements for some materials-based uses.

Lagrangian coherent structure analysis on transport of Acetes chinensis along coast of Lianyungang,China

Spatial heterogeneity or“patchiness”of plankton distributions in the ocean has always been an attractive and challenging scientific issue to oceanographers.We focused on the accumulation and dynamic mechanism of the Acetes chinensis in the Lianyungang nearshore licensed fishing area.The Lagrangian frame approaches including the Lagrangian coherent structures theory,Lagrangian residual current,and Lagrangian particle-tracking model were applied to find the transport pathways and aggregation characteristics of Acetes chinensis.There exist some material transport pathways for Acetes chinensis passing through the licensed fishing area,and Acetes chinensis is easy to accumulate in the licensed fishing area.The main mechanism forming this distribution pattern is the local circulation induced by the nonlinear interaction of topography and tidal flow.Both the Lagrangian coherent structure analysis and the particle trajectory tracking indicate that Acetes chinensis in the licensed fishing area come from the nearshore estuary.This work contributed to the adjustment of licensed fishing area and the efficient utilization of fishery resources.

Iron and ferritin effects on intensive care unit mortality:A metaanalysis

BACKGROUND The effect of serum iron or ferritin parameters on mortality among critically ill patients is not well characterized.AIM To determine the association between serum iron or ferritin parameters and mortality among critically ill patients.METHODS Web of Science,Embase,PubMed,and Cochrane Library databases were searched for studies on serum iron or ferritin parameters and mortality among critically ill patients.Two reviewers independently assessed,selected,and abstracted data from studies reporting on serum iron or ferritin parameters and mortality among critically ill patients.Data on serum iron or ferritin levels,mortality,and demographics were extracted.RESULTS Nineteen studies comprising 125490 patients were eligible for inclusion.We observed a slight negative effect of serum ferritin on mortality in the United States population[relative risk(RR)1.002;95%CI:1.002-1.004].In patients with sepsis,serum iron had a significant negative effect on mortality(RR=1.567;95%CI:1.208-1.925).CONCLUSION This systematic review presents evidence of a negative correlation between serum iron levels and mortality among patients with sepsis.Furthermore,it reveals a minor yet adverse impact of serum ferritin on mortality among the United States population.

Identification of an Aux/IAA regulator for flesh firmness using combined GWAS and bulked segregant RNA-Seq analysis in watermelon

Watermelon is a highly cultivated fruit crop renowned for its quality properties of fruit flesh.Among various quality factors,fruit flesh firmness is a crucial quality parameter influencing the fruit texture,shelf life and its commercial value.The auxin/indole-3-acetic acid(Aux/IAA)plays a significant role in fruit development and ripening of non-climacteric fruits.However,the regulatory mechanism of Aux/IAA in controlling fruit flesh firmness and ripening in watermelon remains unknown.In this study,we employed an integrative approach combining genome-wide association study(GWAS)and bulked segregant RNA-Seq analysis(BSR-Seq)to identify an overlapping candidate region between 12776310 and 12968331 bp on chromosome 6,underlying an auxin-responsive gene(Aux/IAA)associated with flesh firmness in watermelon.Transcriptome analysis,followed by real-time quantitative reverse transcription PCR(qRT-PCR),confirmed that the expression of Aux/IAA was consistently higher in fruits with high flesh firmness.The sequence alignment revealed a single base mutation in the coding region of Aux/IAA.Furthermore,the concomitant Kompetitive/Competitive allele-specific PCR(KASP)genotyping data sets for F2 population and germplasm accessions identified Aux/IAA as a strong candidate gene associated with flesh firmness.Aux/IAA was enriched in the plant hormone signal transduction pathway,involving cell enlargement and leading to low flesh firmness.We determined the higher accumulation of abscisic acid(ABA)in fruits with low flesh firmness than hard flesh.Moreover,overexpression of Aux/IAA induced higher flesh firmness with an increased number of fruit flesh cells while reducing ABA content and flesh cell sizes.Additionally,the allelic variation in Aux/IAA for soft flesh firmness was found to exist in Citrullus mucosospermus and gradually fixed into Citrullus lanatus during domestication,indicating that soft flesh firmness was a domesticated trait.These findings significantly enhanced our understanding of watermelon fruit flesh firmness and consequently the watermelon fruit quality.