Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Statistical Characterization of Wireless MIMO Channels in Mode-Stirred Enclosures

We present the statistical characterization of a 2x2 Multiple-Input Multiple-Output wireless link operated in a mode-stirred enclosure, with channel state information available only at the receiver (agnostic transmitter). Our wireless channel measurements are conducted in absence of line of sight and varying the inter-element spacing between the two antenna elements in both the transmit and receive array. The mode-stirred cavity is operated: i) at a low number of stirrer positions to create statistical inhomogeneity; ii) at two different loading conditions, empty and with absorbers, in order to mimic a wide range of realistic equipment level enclosures. Our results show that two parallel channels are obtained within the confined space at both the operating conditions. The statistical characterization of the wireless channel is presented in terms of coherence bandwidth, path loss, delay spread and Rician factor, and wideband channel capacity. It is found that the severe multipath fading supported by a highly reflecting environment creates unbalance between the two Multiple-Input Multiple-Output channels, even in presence of substantial losses. Furthermore, the channel capacity has a multi-modal distribution whose average and variance scale monotonically with the number of absorbers. Results are of interest in IoT devices, including wireless chip-to-chip and device-to-device communications, operating in highly reflective environments.
Gamified crowdsourcing for idiom corpora construction

Abstract Learning idiomatic expressions is seen as one of the most challenging stages in second-language learning because of their unpredictable meaning. A similar situation holds for their identification within natural language processing applications such as machine translation and parsing. The lack of high-quality usage samples exacerbates this challenge not only for humans but also for artificial intelligence systems. This article introduces a gamified crowdsourcing approach for collecting language learning materials for idiomatic expressions; a messaging bot is designed as an asynchronous multiplayer game for native speakers who compete with each other while providing idiomatic and nonidiomatic usage examples and rating other players’ entries. As opposed to classical crowd-processing annotation efforts in the field, for the first time in the literature, a crowd-creating & crowd-rating approach is implemented and tested for idiom corpora construction. The approach is language-independent and evaluated on two languages in comparison to traditional data preparation techniques in the field. The reaction of the crowd is monitored under different motivational means (namely, gamification affordances and monetary rewards). The results reveal that the proposed approach is powerful in collecting the targeted materials, and although being an explicit crowdsourcing approach, it is found entertaining and useful by the crowd. The approach has been shown to have the potential to speed up the construction of idiom corpora for different natural languages to be used as second-language learning material, training data for supervised idiom identification systems, or samples for lexicographic studies.
Learning From How Human Correct

In industry NLP application, our manually labeled data has a certain number of noisy data. We present a simple method to find the noisy data and relabel them manually, meanwhile we collect the correction information. Then we present novel method to incorporate the human correction information into deep learning model. Human know how to correct noisy data. So the correction information can be inject into deep learning model. We do the experiment on our own text classification dataset, which is manually labeled, because we relabel the noisy data in our dataset for our industry application. The experiment result shows that our method improve the classification accuracy from 91.7% to 92.5%. The 91.7% baseline is based on BERT training on the corrected dataset, which is hard to surpass.
When the Umpire is also a Player: Bias in Private Label Product Recommendations on E-commerce Marketplaces

Algorithmic recommendations mediate interactions between millions of customers and products (in turn, their producers and sellers) on large e-commerce marketplaces like Amazon. In recent years, the producers and sellers have raised concerns about the fairness of black-box recommendation algorithms deployed on these marketplaces. Many complaints are centered around marketplaces biasing the algorithms to preferentially favor their own 'private label' products over competitors. These concerns are exacerbated as marketplaces increasingly de-emphasize or replace 'organic' recommendations with ad-driven 'sponsored' recommendations, which include their own private labels. While these concerns have been covered in popular press and have spawned regulatory investigations, to our knowledge, there has not been any public audit of these marketplace algorithms. In this study, we bridge this gap by performing an end-to-end systematic audit of related item recommendations on Amazon. We propose a network-centric framework to quantify and compare the biases across organic and sponsored related item recommendations. Along a number of our proposed bias measures, we find that the sponsored recommendations are significantly more biased toward Amazon private label products compared to organic recommendations. While our findings are primarily interesting to producers and sellers on Amazon, our proposed bias measures are generally useful for measuring link formation bias in any social or content networks.
Data-driven aggregation in circular deconvolution

In a circular deconvolution model we consider the fully data driven density estimation of a circular random variable where the density of the additive independent measurement error is unknown. We have at hand two independent iid samples, one of the contaminated version of the variable of interest, and the other of the additive noise. We show optimality, in an oracle and minimax sense, of a fully data-driven weighted sum of orthogonal series density estimators. Two shapes of random weights are considered, one motivated by a Bayesian approach and the other by a well known model selection method. We derive non-asymptotic upper bounds for the quadratic risk and the maximal quadratic risk over Sobolev-like ellipsoids of the fully data-driven estimator. We compute rates which can be obtained in different configurations for the smoothness of the density of interest and the error density. The rates (strictly) match the optimal oracle or minimax rates for a large variety of cases, and feature otherwise at most a deterioration by a logarithmic factor. We illustrate the performance of the fully data-driven weighted sum of orthogonal series estimators by a simulation study.
Generative and Discriminative Deep Belief Network Classifiers: Comparisons Under an Approximate Computing Framework

The use of Deep Learning hardware algorithms for embedded applications is characterized by challenges such as constraints on device power consumption, availability of labeled data, and limited internet bandwidth for frequent training on cloud servers. To enable low power implementations, we consider efficient bitwidth reduction and pruning for the class of Deep Learning algorithms known as Discriminative Deep Belief Networks (DDBNs) for embedded-device classification tasks. We train DDBNs with both generative and discriminative objectives under an approximate computing framework and analyze their power-at-performance for supervised and semi-supervised applications. We also investigate the out-of-distribution performance of DDBNs when the inference data has the same class structure yet is statistically different from the training data owing to dynamic real-time operating environments. Based on our analysis, we provide novel insights and recommendations for choice of training objectives, bitwidth values, and accuracy sensitivity with respect to the amount of labeled data for implementing DDBN inference with minimum power consumption on embedded hardware platforms subject to accuracy tolerances. Keywords—generative learning objective, discriminative learning objective, supervised learning, semi-supervised learning, approximate computing
A Self-Supervised Learning-Based 6-DOF Grasp Planning Method for Manipulator

To realize a robust robotic grasping system for unknown objects in an unstructured environment, large amounts of grasp data and 3D model data for the object are required; the sizes of these data directly affect the rate of successful grasps. To reduce the time cost of data acquisition and labeling and increase the rate of successful grasps, we developed a self-supervised learning mechanism to control grasp tasks performed by manipulators. First, a manipulator automatically collects the point cloud for the objects from multiple perspectives to increase the efficiency of data acquisition. The complete point cloud for the objects is obtained using the hand-eye vision of the manipulator and the truncated signed distance function algorithm. Then, the point cloud data for the objects are used to generate a series of six-degrees-of-freedom grasp poses, and the force-closure decision algorithm is used to add the grasp quality label to each grasp pose to realize the automatic labeling of grasp data. Finally, the point cloud in the gripper closing area corresponding to each grasp pose is obtained and used to train the grasp-quality classification model for the manipulator. The results of performing actual grasping experiments demonstrate that the proposed self-supervised learning method can increase the rate of successful grasps for the manipulator. Note to Practitioners—Most of the existing grasp planning methods of the manipulator are based on public datasets or simulation data to train model algorithms. Owing to the limited types of objects, the limited amount of data in the public datasets, and the lack of real sensor noise in the simulation data, the robustness of the trained algorithm model is insufficient, and it is difficult to apply to unstructured production environments. To solve the above problems, we propose a 6-DOF capture planning method based on self-supervised learning and introduce a self-supervised learning mechanism to solve the problem of grasp data acquisition in real scenes. The manipulator automatically collects object data from multiple perspectives, performs desktop-level 3D reconstruction, and finally uses the force-closure decision algorithm to automatically label the data in order to realize automatic acquisition and labeling of the grasp data in a real scenario. Preliminary experiments show that this method can obtain high-quality grasp data and can be applied to grasp operations in real multi-target and cluttered environments. However, it has not been tested in actual production environments. This paper focuses on the data acquisition module in the 6-DOF grasp planning framework. In future research, we will design a more efficient grasp planning module to improve the grasp efficiency of the manipulator.
Molecular analysis of plant architecture in Arabidopsis thaliana using activation tagging.

Keywords: Arabidopsisthaliana, activation tagging, T-DNA, transposon, mutants, enhancer, DNA methylation, plant architecture, development, forward/reverse genetics, lateral organs, flower, vascular tissue, HLH, transmembrane, transcription factors Plant development is one of the most important aspects of plant's life cycle that has extensively been studied at the morphological, genetic and molecular level. It is import for systematic and taxonomic classification, but also for applied agronomic reasons, because it affects the growth and cultivation leading to higher yield and quality of the product. The generation of genetic variants, like mutants may increase genetic pool and gives information about plant processes and their genetic control. Activation tagging is a new powerful tool to generate and identify new mutants, which emerged as an alternative for gene function analysis. This thesis reports the study on the molecular control of plant architecture, using mutants generated by an activation tagging-based approach in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana . In addition, it also describes experiments that could explain why the low frequencies of mutants were obtained by T-DNA based activation tagging. Based on this comparison, the transposon-based activation tagging strategy was chosen and a screen for flower and silique mutants in a large Arabidopsis population yielded three gain-of-function mutants. These mutants were designated downwards siliques1 ( ds1-D ), needle1 ( ndl1-D ) and twisted1 ( twt1-D ). In the ds1-D mutant, internodes are shorter and the lateral organs such as flowers are bending downwards. Further molecular and genetic studies on this mutant revealed that DS1 is important to control petiole-blade boundary in Arabidopsis petals. In the ndl1-D mutant, the normal formation of valve tissues is altered, resulting in a pin-like structure that replaces the two fused carpels of the wild type pistil. The results suggest that NDL1 is involved in normal carpel development, in which auxin distribution plays an important role. In the third mutant, twt1-D , the overexpression of TWT1 led to twisting of all organs, which is most pronounced in siliques. This phenotype and the expression pattern of the gene suggest that TWT1 is involved in proper vascular tissue development in Arabidopsis . These studies demonstrate the power of activation tagging and it gains valuable knowledge about the molecular networks that control plant development.
An Information-Theoretic Law Governing Human Multi-Task Navigation Decisions

To better understand the process by which humans make navigation decisions when tasked with multiple stopovers, we analyze motion data captured from shoppers in a grocery store. We discover several trends in the data that are consistent with a noisy decision making process for the order of item retrieval, and decompose a shopping trip into a sequence of discrete choices about the next item to retrieve. Our analysis reveals that the likelihood of inverting any two items in the order is monotonically bound to the information-theoretic entropy of the pair-wise ordering task. Based on this analysis, we propose a noisy distance estimation model for predicting the order of item retrieval given a shopping list. We show that our model theoretically reproduces the entropy-governed trend seen in the data with high accuracy, and in practice matches the trends in the data when used to simulate the same shopping lists. Our approach has direct applications to improving simulations of human navigation in retail and other settings.
Jiffy: a lock-free skip list with batch updates and snapshots

In this paper we introduce Jiffy, the first lock-free, linearizable, ordered key-value index that offers both (1) batch updates, i.e., put and remove operations that are executed atomically, and (2) consistent snapshots used by, e.g., range scan operations. Jiffy is built as a multiversioned lock-free skip list and relies on system-provided timestamps (e.g., on x86_64 obtained through the Time Stamp Counter register) to generate version numbers at minimal cost. For faster skip list traversals and better utilization of CPU caches, key-value entries are grouped into immutable objects called revisions. By (automatically) controlling the size of new revisions, our index can adapt to varying contention levels (e.g., smaller revisions are more suited for write-heavy workloads). Structure modifications to the index, which result in changing the size of revisions, happen through (lock-free) skip list node split and merge operations that are carefully coordinated with the update operations. Despite rich semantics, Jiffy offers highly scalable performance across varied workloads. Compared to Jiffy's lock-based rivals that support batch updates, our index can execute large batch updates up to 7.4 times more efficiently. Moreover, Jiffy often outperforms the state-of-the-art lock-free ordered indices that feature linearizable range scan operations but lack batch updates.
Automatic Detection of B-lines in Lung Ultrasound Videos from Severe Dengue Patients

Lung ultrasound (LUS) imaging is used to assess lung abnormalities, including the presence of B-line artefacts due to fluid leakage into the lungs caused by a variety of diseases. However, manual detection of these artefacts is challenging. In this paper, we propose a novel methodology to automatically detect and localize B-lines in LUS videos using deep neural networks trained with weak labels. To this end, we combine a convolutional neural network (CNN) with a long short-term memory (LSTM) network and a temporal attention mechanism. Four different models are compared using data from 60 patients. Results show that our best model can determine whether one-second clips contain B-lines or not with an F1 score of 0.81, and extracts a representative frame with B-lines with an accuracy of 87.5%.
Fine-Grained Visual Classification via Simultaneously Learning of Multi-regional Multi-grained Features

Fine-grained visual classification is a challenging task that recognizes the sub-classes belonging to the same meta-class. Large inter-class similarity and intra-class variance is the main challenge of this task. Most exiting methods try to solve this problem by designing complex model structures to explore more minute and discriminative regions. In this paper, we argue that mining multi-regional multi-grained features is precisely the key to this task. Specifically, we introduce a new loss function, termed top-down spatial attention loss (TDSA-Loss), which contains a multi-stage channel constrained module and a top-down spatial attention module. The multi-stage channel constrained module aims to make the feature channels in different stages category-aligned. Meanwhile, the top-down spatial attention module uses the attention map generated by high-level aligned feature channels to make middle-level aligned feature channels to focus on particular regions. Finally, we can obtain multiple discriminative regions on high-level feature channels and obtain multiple more minute regions within these discriminative regions on middle-level feature channels. In summary, we obtain multi-regional multi-grained features. Experimental results over four widely used fine-grained image classification datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Ablative studies further show the superiority of two modules in the proposed method. Codes are available at: https://github.com/dongliangchang/Top-Down-Spatial-Attention-Loss.
Deep Learning-Based Forgery Attack on Document Images

With the ongoing popularization of online services, the digital document images have been used in various applications. Meanwhile, there have emerged some deep learning-based text editing algorithms which alter the textual information of an image in an end-to-end fashion. In this work, we present a low-cost document forgery algorithm by the existing deep learning-based technologies to edit practical document images. To achieve this goal, the limitations of existing text editing algorithms towards complicated characters and complex background are addressed by a set of network design strategies. First, the unnecessary confusion in the supervision data is avoided by disentangling the textual and background information in the source images. Second, to capture the structure of some complicated components, the text skeleton is provided as auxiliary information and the continuity in texture is considered explicitly in the loss function. Third, the forgery traces induced by the text editing operation are mitigated by some post-processing operations which consider the distortions from the print-and-scan channel. Quantitative comparisons of the proposed method and the exiting approach have shown the advantages of our design by reducing the about 2/3 reconstruction error measured in MSE, improving reconstruction quality measured in PSNR and in SSIM by 4 dB and 0.21, respectively. Qualitative experiments have confirmed that the reconstruction results of the proposed method are visually better than the existing approach in both complicated characters and complex texture. More importantly, we have demonstrated the performance of the proposed document forgery algorithm under a practical scenario where an attacker is able to alter the textual information in an identity document using only one sample in the target domain. The forged-and-recaptured samples created by the proposed text editing attack and recapturing operation have successfully fooled some existing document authentication systems.
Seeing is believing: atomic force microscopy imaging for nanomaterial research

The research and development of nanotechnology has led to materials science and engineering entering the “nanomaterial era”. It is pivotal for analyzing the physicochemical properties of nanomaterials for new nanotechnological instruments to be developed. Over the past three decades, atomic force microscopy (AFM), as a powerful nanotechnological imaging tool, has provided many imaging modes for analyzing nanomaterial properties such as the topography, elasticity, adhesion, friction, electrical properties, and magnetism of the materials. The focus of this review is on the development of AFM imaging observation tools and methods for nanomaterial research. First, AFM and nanomaterials are briefly introduced. Then, AFM imaging techniques for nanomaterial research are comprehensively summarized. Finally, the advantages and disadvantages of AFM imaging techniques for nanomaterial research are discussed. This review will provide comprehensive information of AFM imaging techniques for materials scientists and engineers.
Towards Imperceptible Query-limited Adversarial Attacks with Perceptual Feature Fidelity Loss

Recently, there has been a large amount of work towards fooling deep-learning-based classifiers, particularly for images, via adversarial inputs that are visually similar to the benign examples. However, researchers usually use Lp-norm minimization as a proxy for imperceptibility, which oversimplifies the diversity and richness of real-world images and human visual perception. In this work, we propose a novel perceptual metric utilizing the well-established connection between the low-level image feature fidelity and human visual sensitivity, where we call it Perceptual Feature Fidelity Loss. We show that our metric can robustly reflect and describe the imperceptibility of the generated adversarial images validated in various conditions. Moreover, we demonstrate that this metric is highly flexible, which can be conveniently integrated into different existing optimization frameworks to guide the noise distribution for better imperceptibility. The metric is particularly useful in the challenging black-box attack with limited queries, where the imperceptibility is hard to achieve due to the non-trivial perturbation power.