Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Learning Vector Representation of Content and Matrix Representation of Change: Towards a Representational Model of V1

This paper entertains the hypothesis that the primary purpose of the cells of the primary visual cortex (V1) is to perceive motions and predict changes of local image contents. Specifically, we propose a model that couples the vector representations of local image contents with the matrix representations of local pixel displacements caused by the relative motions between the agent and the surrounding objects and scene. When the image changes from one time frame to the next due to pixel displacements, the vector at each pixel is multiplied by a matrix that represents the displacement of this pixel. We show that by learning from pair of images that are deformed versions of each other, we can learn both vector and matrix representations. The units in the learned vector representations resemble V1 cells. The learned vector-matrix representations enable prediction of image frames over time, and more importantly, inference of the local pixel displacements caused by relative motions.
One-Class Kernel Spectral Regression

The paper introduces a new efficient nonlinear one-class classifier formulated as the Rayleigh quotient criterion optimisation. The method, operating in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space, minimises the scatter of target distribution along an optimal projection direction while at the same time keeping projections of positive observations distant from the mean of the negative class. We provide a graph embedding view of the problem which can then be solved efficiently using the spectral regression approach. In this sense, unlike previous similar methods which often require costly eigen-computations of dense matrices, the proposed approach casts the problem under consideration into a regression framework which is computationally more efficient. In particular, it is shown that the dominant complexity of the proposed method is the complexity of computing the kernel matrix. Additional appealing characteristics of the proposed one-class classifier are: 1-the ability to be trained in an incremental fashion (allowing for application in streaming data scenarios while also reducing the computational complexity in a non-streaming operation mode); 2-being unsupervised, but providing the option for refining the solution using negative training examples, when available; And last but not the least, 3-the use of the kernel trick which facilitates a nonlinear mapping of the data into a high-dimensional feature space to seek better solutions.
Achieving Secure and Efficient Cloud Search Services: Cross-Lingual Multi-Keyword Rank Search Over Encrypted Cloud Data

Multi-user multi-keyword ranked search scheme in arbitrary language is a novel multi-keyword rank searchable encryption (MRSE) framework based on Paillier Cryptosystem with Threshold Decryption (PCTD). Compared to previous MRSE schemes constructed based on the k-nearest neighbor searchable encryption (KNN-SE) algorithm, it can mitigate some drawbacks and achieve better performance in terms of functionality and efficiency. Additionally, it does not require a predefined keyword set and support keywords in arbitrary languages. However, due to the pattern of exact matching of keywords in the new MRSE scheme, multilingual search is limited to each language and cannot be searched across languages. In this paper, we propose a cross-lingual multi-keyword rank search (CLRSE) scheme which eliminates the barrier of languages and achieves semantic extension with using the Open Multilingual Wordnet. Our CLRSE scheme also realizes intelligent and personalized search through flexible keyword and language preference settings. We evaluate the performance of our scheme in terms of security, functionality, precision and efficiency, via extensive experiments.
A Novel Secure Authentication Scheme for Heterogeneous Internet of Things

Today, Internet of Things (IoT) technology is being increasingly popular which is applied in a wide range of industry sectors such as healthcare, transportation and some critical infrastructures. With the widespread applications of IoT technology, people's lives have changed dramatically. Due to its capabilities of sensitive data-aware, information collection, communication and processing, it raises security and privacy concerns. Moreover, a malicious attacker may impersonate a legitimate user, which may cause security threat and violation privacy. In allusion to the above problems, we propose a novel and lightweight anonymous authentication and key agreement scheme for heterogeneous IoT, which is innovatively designed to shift between the public key infrastructure (PKI) and certificateless cryptography (CLC) environment. The proposed scheme not only achieves secure communication among the legal authorized users, but also possesses more attributes with user anonymity, non-repudiation and key agreement fairness. Through the security analysis, it is proved that the proposed scheme can resist replay attacks and denial of service (DOS) attacks. Finally, the performance evaluation demonstrates that our scheme is more lightweight and innovative.
Exploiting Structure of Uncertainty for Efficient Combinatorial Semi-Bandits

We improve the efficiency of algorithms for stochastic \emph{combinatorial semi-bandits}. In most interesting problems, state-of-the-art algorithms take advantage of structural properties of rewards, such as \emph{independence}. However, while being minimax optimal in terms of regret, these algorithms are intractable. In our paper, we first reduce their implementation to a specific \emph{submodular maximization}. Then, in case of \emph{matroid} constraints, we design adapted approximation routines, thereby providing the first efficient algorithms that exploit the reward structure. In particular, we improve the state-of-the-art efficient gap-free regret bound by a factor $\sqrt{k}$, where $k$ is the maximum action size. Finally, we show how our improvement translates to more general \emph{budgeted combinatorial semi-bandits}.
Accounting for Significance and Multicollinearity in Building Linear Regression Models

We derive explicit Mixed Integer Optimization (MIO) constraints, as opposed to iteratively imposing them in a cutting plane framework, that impose significance and avoid multicollinearity for building linear regression models. In this way we extend and improve the research program initiated in Bertsimas and King (2016) that imposes sparsity, robustness, pairwise collinearity and group sparsity explicitly and significance and avoiding multicollinearity iteratively. We present a variety of computational results on real and synthetic datasets that suggest that the proposed MIO has a significant computational edge compared to Bertsimas and King (2016) in accuracy, false detection rate and computational time in accounting for significance and multicollinearity as well as providing a holistic framework to produce regression models with desirable properties a priori.
Shallow Triple Stream Three-dimensional CNN (STSTNet) for Micro-expression Recognition

In the recent year, state-of-the-art for facial micro-expression recognition have been significantly advanced by deep neural networks. The robustness of deep learning has yielded promising performance beyond that of traditional handcrafted approaches. Most works in literature emphasized on increasing the depth of networks and employing highly complex objective functions to learn more features. In this paper, we design a Shallow Triple Stream Three-dimensional CNN (STSTNet) that is computationally light whilst capable of extracting discriminative high level features and details of micro-expressions. The network learns from three optical flow features (i.e., optical strain, horizontal and vertical optical flow fields) computed based on the onset and apex frames of each video. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed STSTNet, which obtained an unweighted average recall rate of 0.7605 and unweighted F1-score of 0.7353 on the composite database consisting of 442 samples from the SMIC, CASME II and SAMM databases.
Live Emoji: Semantic Emotional Expressiveness of 2D Live Animation

Live animation of 2D characters has recently become a popular way for storytelling, and has potential application scenarios like tele-present agents or robots. As an extension of human-human communication, there is a need for augmenting the emotional communication experience of live animation. In this paper, we explore the emotional expressiveness issue of 2D live animation. In particular, we propose a descriptive emotion command model to bind a triggering action, the semantic meaning, psychology measurements, and behaviors of an emotional expression. Based on the model, we designed and implemented a proof-of-concept 2D live animation system, where a novel visual programming tool for editing the behaviors of 2D digital characters, and an emotion command recommendation algorithm are proposed. Through a user evaluation, we showcase the usability of our system and its potential for boosting creativity and enhancing the emotional communication experience.
Taxonomy driven indicator scoring in MISP threat intelligence platforms

IT security community is recently facing a change of trend from closed to open working groups and from restrictive information to full information disclosure and sharing. One major feature for this trend change is the number of incidents and various Indicators of compromise (IoC) that appear on a daily base, which can only be faced and solved in a collaborative way. Sharing information is key to stay on top of the threats. To cover the needs of having a medium for information sharing, different initiatives were taken such as the Open Source Threat Intelligence and Sharing Platform called MISP. At current state, this sharing and collection platform has become far more than a malware information sharing platform. It includes all kind of IoCs, malware and vulnerabilities, but also financial threat or fraud information. Hence, the volume of information is increasing and evolving. In this paper we present implemented distributed data interaction methods for MISP followed by a generic scoring model for decaying information that is shared within MISP communities. As the MISP community members do not have the same objectives, use cases and implementations of the scoring model are discussed. A commonly encountered use case in practice is the detection of indicators of compromise in operational networks.
An Optimal-Storage Approach to Semidefinite Programming using Approximate Complementarity

This paper develops a new storage-optimal algorithm that provably solves generic semidefinite programs (SDPs) in standard form. This method is particularly effective for weakly constrained SDPs. The key idea is to formulate an approximate complementarity principle: Given an approximate solution to the dual SDP, the primal SDP has an approximate solution whose range is contained in the eigenspace with small eigenvalues of the dual slack matrix. For weakly constrained SDPs, this eigenspace has very low dimension, so this observation significantly reduces the search space for the primal solution. This result suggests an algorithmic strategy that can be implemented with minimal storage: (1) Solve the dual SDP approximately; (2) compress the primal SDP to the eigenspace with small eigenvalues of the dual slack matrix; (3) solve the compressed primal SDP. The paper also provides numerical experiments showing that this approach is successful for a range of interesting large-scale SDPs.
Use Symmetry to Elucidate the Roles of Global Shape and Local Interactions in Protein Dynamics and Cooperativity

Shape had been intuitively recognized to play a dominant role in determining the global motion patterns of bio-molecular assemblies. However, it is not clear exactly how shape determines the motion patterns. What about the local interactions that hold a structure together to a certain shape? The contributions of global shape and local interactions usually mix together and are difficult to tease part. In this work, we use symmetry to elucidate the distinct roles of global shape and local interactions in protein dynamics. Symmetric complexes provide an ideal platform for this task since in them the effects of local interactions and global shape are separable, allowing their distinct roles to be identified. Our key findings based on symmetric assemblies are: (i) the motion patterns of each subunit are determined primarily by intra-subunit interactions (IRSi), and secondarily by inter-subunit interactions (IESi); (ii) the motion patterns of the whole assembly are fully dictated by the global symmetry/shape and have nothing to do with local iESi or IRSi. This is followed by a discussion on how the findings may be generalized to complexes in any shape, with or without symmetry.
Model-Based Reinforcement Learning for Whole-Chain Recommendations

With the recent prevalence of Reinforcement Learning (RL), there have been tremendous interests in developing RL-based recommender systems. In practical recommendation sessions, users will sequentially access multiple scenarios, such as the entrance pages and the item detail pages, and each scenario has its own recommendation strategy. However, the majority of existing RL-based recommender systems focus on optimizing one strategy for all scenarios or separately optimizing each strategy, which could lead to sub-optimal overall performance. In this paper, we study the recommendation problem with multiple (consecutive) scenarios, i.e., whole-chain recommendations. We propose a multi-agent reinforcement learning based approach (DeepChain), which can capture the sequential correlation among different scenarios and jointly optimize multiple recommendation strategies. To be specific, all recommender agents share the same memory of users' historical behaviors, and they work collaboratively to maximize the overall reward of a session. Note that optimizing multiple recommendation strategies jointly faces two challenges in existing model-free RL model \cite{feng2018learning}- (i) it requires huge amounts of user behavior data, and (ii) the distribution of reward (users' feedback) are extremely unbalanced. In this paper, we introduce model-based reinforcement learning techniques to reduce the training data requirement and execute more accurate strategy updates. The experimental results based on a real e-commerce platform demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.
Colorectal Cancer Outcome Prediction from H&E Whole Slide Images using Machine Learning and Automatically Inferred Phenotype Profiles

Digital pathology (DP) is a new research area which falls under the broad umbrella of health informatics. Owing to its potential for major public health impact, in recent years DP has been attracting much research attention. Nevertheless, a wide breadth of significant conceptual and technical challenges remain, few of them greater than those encountered in the field of oncology. The automatic analysis of digital pathology slides of cancerous tissues is particularly problematic due to the inherent heterogeneity of the disease, extremely large images, amongst numerous others. In this paper we introduce a novel machine learning based framework for the prediction of colorectal cancer outcome from whole digitized haematoxylin & eosin (H&E) stained histopathology slides. Using a real-world data set we demonstrate the effectiveness of the method and present a detailed analysis of its different elements which corroborate its ability to extract and learn salient, discriminative, and clinically meaningful content.
Analyzing, Comparing, and Detecting Emerging Malware: A Graph-based Approach

The growth in the number of Android and Internet of Things (IoT) devices has witnessed a parallel increase in the number of malicious software (malware), calling for new analysis approaches. We represent binaries using their graph properties of the Control Flow Graph (CFG) structure and conduct an in-depth analysis of malicious graphs extracted from the Android and IoT malware to understand their differences. Using 2,874 and 2,891 malware binaries corresponding to IoT and Android samples, we analyze both general characteristics and graph algorithmic properties. Using the CFG as an abstract structure, we then emphasize various interesting findings, such as the prevalence of unreachable code in Android malware, noted by the multiple components in their CFGs, and larger number of nodes in the Android malware, compared to the IoT malware, highlighting a higher order of complexity. We implement a Machine Learning based classifiers to detect IoT malware from benign ones, and achieved an accuracy of 97.9% using Random Forests (RF).
Data-driven network alignment

In this study, we deal with the problem of biological network alignment (NA), which aims to find a node mapping between species’ molecular networks that uncovers similar network regions, thus allowing for the transfer of functional knowledge between the aligned nodes. We provide evidence that current NA methods, which assume that topologically similar nodes (i.e., nodes whose network neighborhoods are isomorphic-like) have high functional relatedness, do not actually end up aligning functionally related nodes. That is, we show that the current topological similarity assumption does not hold well. Consequently, we argue that a paradigm shift is needed with how the NA problem is approached. So, we redefine NA as a data-driven framework, called TARA (data-driven NA), which attempts to learn the relationship between topological relatedness and functional relatedness without assuming that topological relatedness corresponds to topological similarity. TARA makes no assumptions about what nodes should be aligned, distinguishing it from existing NA methods. Specifically, TARA trains a classifier to predict whether two nodes from different networks are functionally related based on their network topological patterns (features). We find that TARA is able to make accurate predictions. TARA then takes each pair of nodes that are predicted as related to be part of an alignment. Like traditional NA methods, TARA uses this alignment for the across-species transfer of functional knowledge. TARA as currently implemented uses topological but not protein sequence information for functional knowledge transfer. In this context, we find that TARA outperforms existing state-of-the-art NA methods that also use topological information, WAVE and SANA, and even outperforms or complements a state-of-the-art NA method that uses both topological and sequence information, PrimAlign. Hence, adding sequence information to TARA, which is our future work, is likely to further improve its performance. The software and data are available at http://www.nd. edu/~cone/TARA/.
Homogeneous and Mixed Energy Communities Discovery with Spatial-Temporal Net Energy

Smart grid has integrated an increasing number of distributed energy resources to improve the efficiency and flexibility of power generation and consumption as well as the resilience of the power grid. The energy consumers on the power grid (e.g., households) equipped with the distributed energy resources can be considered as "microgrids" that both generate and consume electricity. In this paper, we study the energy community discovery problems which identify multiple kinds of energy communities for the microgrids to facilitate energy management (e.g., power supply adjustment, load balancing, energy sharing) on the grid, such as homogeneous energy communities (HECs), mixed energy communities (MECs), and self-sufficient energy communities (SECs). Specifically, we present efficient algorithms to discover such communities of microgrids by taking into account not only their geo-locations but also their net energy over any period. Finally, we experimentally validate the performance of the algorithms using both synthetic and real datasets.
When Causal Intervention Meets Image Masking and Adversarial Perturbation for Deep Neural Networks

Discovering and exploiting the causality in deep neural networks (DNNs) are crucial challenges for understanding and reasoning causal effects (CE) on an explainable visual model. "Intervention" has been widely used for recognizing a causal relation ontologically. In this paper, we propose a causal inference framework for visual reasoning via do-calculus. To study the intervention effects on pixel-level feature(s) for causal reasoning, we introduce pixel-wise masking and adversarial perturbation. In our framework, CE is calculated using features in a latent space and perturbed prediction from a DNN-based model. We further provide a first look into the characteristics of discovered CE of adversarially perturbed images generated by gradient-based methods. Experimental results show that CE is a competitive and robust index for understanding DNNs when compared with conventional methods such as class-activation mappings (CAMs) on the ChestX-ray 14 dataset for human-interpretable feature(s) (e.g., symptom) reasoning. Moreover, CE holds promises for detecting adversarial examples as it possesses distinct characteristics in the presence of adversarial perturbations.
Does the "Artificial Intelligence Clinician" learn optimal treatment strategies for sepsis in intensive care?

From 2017 to 2018 the number of scientific publications found via PubMed search using the keyword "Machine Learning" increased by 46% (4,317 to 6,307). The results of studies involving machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI), and big data have captured the attention of healthcare practitioners, healthcare managers, and the public at a time when Western medicine grapples with unmitigated cost increases and public demands for accountability. The complexity involved in healthcare applications of machine learning and the size of the associated data sets has afforded many researchers an uncontested opportunity to satisfy these demands with relatively little oversight. In a recent Nature Medicine article, "The Artificial Intelligence Clinician learns optimal treatment strategies for sepsis in intensive care," Komorowski and his coauthors propose methods to train an artificial intelligence clinician to treat sepsis patients with vasopressors and IV fluids. In this post, we will closely examine the claims laid out in this paper. In particular, we will study the individual treatment profiles suggested by their AI Clinician to gain insight into how their AI Clinician intends to treat patients on an individual level.
ELKI: A large open-source library for data analysis - ELKI Release 0.7.5 "Heidelberg"

This paper documents the release of the ELKI data mining framework, version 0.7. 5. ELKI is an open source (AGPLv3) data mining software written in Java. The focus of ELKI is research in algorithms, with an emphasis on unsupervised methods in cluster analysis and outlier detection. In order to achieve high performance and scalability, ELKI offers data index structures such as the R*-tree that can provide major performance gains. ELKI is designed to be easy to extend for researchers and students in this domain, and welcomes contributions of additional methods. ELKI aims at providing a large collection of highly parameterizable algorithms, in order to allow easy and fair evaluation and benchmarking of algorithms. We will first outline the motivation for this release, the plans for the future, and then give a brief overview over the new functionality in this version. We also include an appendix presenting an overview on the overall implemented functionality.