Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Molecular Phylogeny of Four Gouramis Based on Divergent Domain D11 of 28S rRNA Gene

The phylogenetic relationship among the four gouramis namely blue, dwarf, gold and yellow was studied using D11 domain of 28S rRNA gene. The ribosomal RNA (rRNA) genes were widely used for the detection of phylogenetic relationships and studying the genetic variability and divergence within and between species of many organisms. The study suggested that blue gourami is most closely related to gold gourami and less closely related to dwarf and pearl gouramis. The genetic distance between the dwarf and blue gourami was highest and most distantly related to each other, whereas the genetic distance between the blue and gold gouramis was found to be least and considered to be closely related to each other in phylogenetic tree as they also formed a separate cluster due to minimum genetic distance. The nucleotide sequences and G+C percent of the D11 domain of 28S rRNA gene ranged between 585613bp and 53.3 54.2% respectively.
Implementation of Spatial-Scale Domain Based De-Noising Techniques using Different Thresholding

This paper aims in presenting a thorough comparison of performance and usefulness of multi-resolution based de-noising technique. Multi-resolution based image denoising techniques overcome the limitation of Fourier, spatial, as well as, purely frequency based techniques, as it provides the information of 2-Dimensional (2-D) signal at different levels and scales, which is desirable for image de-noising. The multiresolution based de-noising techniques, namely, Contourlet Transform (CT), Non Sub-sampled Contourlet Transform (NSCT), Stationary Wavelet Transform (SWT) and Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT), have been selected for the de-noising of camera images. Further, the performance of different denosing techniques have been compared in terms of different noise variances, thresholding techniques and by using well defined metrics, such as Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Root Mean Square Error (RMSE). Analysis of result shows that shift-invariant NSCT technique outperforms the CT, SWT and DWT based de-noising techniques in terms of qualititaive and quantitative objective evaluation
Enhancing the Performance of Direct Seeded Fine Rice by Seed Priming

Abstract Higher water requirements and increasing labor costs are the major problems of the traditional rice production system. Direct seeded rice culture, growing rice without standing water, can be an attractive alternate. However, poor emergence and seedling establishment, and weed infestation are the main hindrances in the adoption of this culture. An attempt to improve the performance of direct seeded rice by seed priming was made in the present study. Priming tools employed were traditional soaking (soaking in tap water up to radicle protrusion), hydropriming for 48 h, osmohardening with KCl or CaCl2 (osmotic potential of – 1.25 MPa) for 24 h, vitamin priming (ascorbate 10 ppm) for 48 h and seed hardening for 24 h. All the priming techniques improved crop stand establishment, growth, yield and quality except traditional soaking, which resulted in impaired germination and seedling establishment that ended in reduced kernel yield and lower harvest index than that of control. Early and synchronized germination was accompanied by enhanced amylase activity and total sugars. Osmohardening with CaCl2 resulted in the best performance, followed by hardening and osmohardening with KCl. Osmohardening with CaCl2 produced 2.96 t ha-1 (vs 2.11 t ha-1 from untreated control) kernel yield, 10.13 t ha-1 (vs 9.35 t ha-1 from untreated control) straw yield and 22.61% (vs 18.91% from untreated control) harvest index. Mean emergence time and emergence to heading days, germination percentage and panicle bearing tillers; plant height and straw yield, 1000-kernel weight and kernel yield, α-amylase activity and total sugars, kernel proteins and kernel water absorption were correlated positively.
Assessment and Comparison of Image Inpainting Algorithms

mage inpainting refers to the process of restoring missing or damaged areas in an image. Numerous and different types of approaches have been proposed with varying applicability in restoring images from scratches or text overlays, loss concealment in a context of impaired image transmission, object removal in a context of editing, or disocclusion in image-based rendering (IBR) of viewpoints different from those captured by the cameras. In this article, it is tried to survey the most suitable and pleasing method among different algorithms of image inpainting that with the advent of sparse representations and compress sensing, sparse priors have also been considered for solving the inpainting problem. Diffusion-based techniques are better suited for filling large texture areas. The image (or the patch) is in this algorithm assumed to be sparse in a given basis [e.g., discrete cosine transform ( DCT ) , or wavelets]. With this goal that an inpainted image is as physically plausible and as visually pleasing as possible.
A sequence-based personalized service for the short life cycle products

Most new products not only suddenly disappear in the market but also quickly cannibalize older products. Under such a circumstance, retailers may have too much stock, and customers may be faced with difficulties discovering products suitable to their preferences among short life cycle products. To address these problems, recommender systems are good solutions. However, most previous recommender systems had difficulty in reflecting changes in customer preferences because the systems employ static customer preferences. In this paper, we propose a recommendation methodology that considers dynamic customer preferences. The proposed methodology consists of dynamic customer profile creation, neighborhood formation, and recommendation list generation. For the experiments, we employ a mobile image transaction dataset that has a short product life cycle. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed methodology has a higher quality of recommendation than a typical collaborative filtering-based system. From these results, we conclude that the proposed methodology is effective under conditions where most new products have short life cycles. The proposed methodology need to be verified in the physical environment at a future time
An Emotion Recognition Based on Physiological Signals

Emotion recognition is alluring considerable interest among the researchers. Emotions are discovered by facial, speech, gesture, posture and physiological signals. Physiological signals are a plausible mechanism to recognize emotion using human-computer interaction. The objective of this paper is to put forth the recognition of emotions using physiological signals. Various emotion elicitation protocols, feature extraction techniques, classification methods that aim at recognizing emotions from physiological signals are discussed here. Wrist Pulse Signal is also discussed to fill the lacunae of the other physiological signal for emotion detection. Working on basic as well as non-basic human emotion and human-computer interface will make the system robust.
Multimodal Analysis of Human Fear

Human emotion detection is very much relevant in today’s scenario. Human life become fast due to modernisation. People like to lead sophisticated, peaceful and healthy life. Human emotion plays a vital role in present scenario. Six basic emotions are considered for research purpose. Those are happy, sad, fear, anger, disgust and boredom. In this paper, human fear is analysed based on Electroencephalogram (EEG) signal, physical parameters and facial images. Statistical parameters both from time and frequency domain are used as feature set. Own database is used for the analysis. It is seen from the result that the efficiency is enhanced significantly after multimodal analysis of human fear. The classification results for discrete wavelet transform and logistic regression model are improved by 8.33% and 8.33% respectively.
deepSIP: linking Type Ia supernova spectra to photometric quantities with deep learning

We present deepSIP (deep learning of Supernova Ia Parameters), a software package for measuring the phase and – for the first time using deep learning – the light-curve shape of a Type Ia supernova (SN Ia) from an optical spectrum. At its core, deepSIP consists of three convolutional neural networks trained on a substantial fraction of all publicly available low-redshift SN Ia optical spectra, on to which we have carefully coupled photometrically derived quantities. We describe the accumulation of our spectroscopic and photometric data sets, the cuts taken to ensure quality, and our standardized technique for fitting light curves. These considerations yield a compilation of 2754 spectra with photometrically characterized phases and light-curve shapes. Though such a sample is significant in the SN community, it is small by deep-learning standards where networks routinely have millions or even billions of free parameters. We therefore introduce a data-augmentation strategy that meaningfully increases the size of the subset we allocate for training while prioritizing model robustness and telescope agnosticism. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our models by deploying them on a sample unseen during training and hyperparameter selection, finding that Model I identifies spectra that have a phase between −10 and 18 d and light-curve shape, parametrized by Δm15, between 0.85 and 1.55 mag with an accuracy of 94.6 per cent. For those spectra that do fall within the aforementioned region in phase–Δm15 space, Model II predicts phases with a root-mean-square error (RMSE) of 1.00 d and Model III predicts Δm15 values with an RMSE of 0.068 mag.
A Brief Look at Generalization in Visual Meta-Reinforcement Learning

Due to the realization that deep reinforcement learning algorithms trained on high-dimensional tasks can strongly overfit to their training environments, there have been several studies that investigated the generalization performance of these algorithms. However, there has been no similar study that evaluated the generalization performance of algorithms that were specifically designed for generalization, i.e. meta-reinforcement learning algorithms. In this paper, we assess the generalization performance of these algorithms by leveraging high-dimensional, procedurally generated environments. We find that these algorithms can display strong overfitting when they are evaluated on challenging tasks. We also observe that scalability to high-dimensional tasks with sparse rewards remains a significant problem among many of the current meta-reinforcement learning algorithms. With these results, we highlight the need for developing meta-reinforcement learning algorithms that can both generalize and scale.
How Many Samples is a Good Initial Point Worth?

Given a sufficiently large amount of labeled data, the non-convex low-rank matrix recovery problem contains no spurious local minima, so a local optimization algorithm is guaranteed to converge to a global minimum starting from any initial guess. However, the actual amount of data needed by this theoretical guarantee is very pessimistic, as it must prevent spurious local minima from existing anywhere, including at adversarial locations. In contrast, prior work based on good initial guesses have more realistic data requirements, because they allow spurious local minima to exist outside of a neighborhood of the solution. In this paper, we quantify the relationship between the quality of the initial guess and the corresponding reduction in data requirements. Using the restricted isometry constant as a surrogate for sample complexity, we compute a sharp threshold number of samples needed to prevent each specific point on the optimization landscape from becoming a spurious local minima. Optimizing the threshold over regions of the landscape, we see that, for initial points not too close to the ground truth, a linear improvement in the quality of the initial guess amounts to a constant factor improvement in the sample complexity.
for Learning from Label Proportions: A Mutual Contamination Framework

We offer a simple example where minimizing the empirical proportion risk leads to suboptimal performance. Let P− be uniform on [0, 1], with density p−(x) = 1{x∈[0,1]}, and let P+ have the triangular density function p+(x) = 2x1{x∈[0,1]}. Suppose there is a single bag, and that the label proportion is γ = 12 . Also suppose F consists of threshold classifiers ft(x) = sign(x− t), t ∈ [0, 1]. This class contains the optimal BER classifier (define wrt 0-1 loss) corresponding to t∗ = 12 . Now suppose we are in the infinite bag-size limit (which only makes the problem easier), so that the observed label proportion γ̂ is simply γ = 12 . Then we seek the threshold t ′ that minimizes
A stochastic biomass blending problem in decentralized supply chains

Blending biomass materials of different physical or chemical properties provides an opportunity to adjust the quality of the feedstock to meet the specifications of the conversion platform. We propose a model which identifies the right mix of biomass to optimize the performance of the thermochemical conversion process at the minimum cost. This is a chance‐constraint programming (CCP) model which takes into account the stochastic nature of biomass quality. The proposed CCP model ensures that process requirements, which are impacted by physical and chemical properties of biomass, are met most of the time. We consider two problem settings, a centralized and a decentralized supply chain. We propose a mixed‐integer linear program to model the blending problem in the centralized setting and a bilevel program to model the blending problem in the decentralized setting. We use the sample average approximation method to approximate the chance constraints, and propose solution algorithms to solve this approximation. We develop a case study for South Carolina using data provided by the Billion Ton Study. Based on our results, the blends identified consist mainly of pine and softwood residues. The blends identified and the suppliers selected by both models are different. The cost of the centralized supply chain is 2%–6% lower. The implications of these results are twofold. First, these results could lead to improved collaborations in the supply chain. Second, these results provide an estimate of the approximation error from assuming centralized decision making in the supply chain.
Symbolic Regression using Mixed-Integer Nonlinear Optimization

Tyler Josephson was primarily supported by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Office of Basic Energy Sciences, Division of Chemical Sciences, Geosciences and Biosciences under Award DE-FG02- 17ER16362. Tyler Josephson and Lior Horesh gratefully acknowledge the support of the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications (IMA), where a part of this work was initiated.
Multiple-Vehicle Tracking in the Highway Using Appearance Model and Visual Object Tracking

In recent decades, due to the groundbreaking improvements in machine vision, many daily tasks are performed by computers. One of these tasks is multiple-vehicle tracking, which is widely used in different areas such as video surveillance and traffic monitoring. This paper focuses on introducing an efficient novel approach with acceptable accuracy. This is achieved through an efficient appearance and motion model based on the features extracted from each object. For this purpose, two different approaches have been used to extract features, i.e. features extracted from a deep neural network, and traditional features. Then the results from these two approaches are compared with state-of-the-art trackers. The results are obtained by executing the methods on the UA-DETRACK benchmark. The first method led to 58.9% accuracy while the second method caused up to 15.9%. The proposed methods can still be improved by extracting more distinguishable features.
Domain-adversarial training of multi-speaker TTS

Multi-speaker TTS has to learn both linguistic embedding and text embedding to generate speech of desired linguistic content in desired voice. However, it is unclear which characteristic of speech results from speaker and which part from linguistic content. In this paper, text embedding is forced to unlearn speaker dependent characteristic using gradient reversal layer to auxiliary speaker classifier that we introduce. We train a speaker classifier using angular margin softmax loss. In subjective evaluation, it is shown that the adversarial training of text embedding for unilingual multi-speaker TTS results in 39.9% improvement on similarity MOS and 40.1% improvement on naturalness MOS.
Multigrid-in-Channels Architectures for Wide Convolutional Neural Networks

We present a multigrid approach that combats the quadratic growth of the number of parameters with respect to the number of channels in standard convolutional neural networks (CNNs). It has been shown that there is a redundancy in standard CNNs, as networks with much sparser convolution operators can yield similar performance to full networks. The sparsity patterns that lead to such behavior, however, are typically random, hampering hardware efficiency. In this work, we present a multigrid-in-channels approach for building CNN architectures that achieves full coupling of the channels, and whose number of parameters is linearly proportional to the width of the network. To this end, we replace each convolution layer in a generic CNN with a multilevel layer consisting of structured (i.e., grouped) convolutions. Our examples from supervised image classification show that applying this strategy to residual networks and MobileNetV2 considerably reduces the number of parameters without negatively affecting accuracy. Therefore, we can widen networks without dramatically increasing the number of parameters or operations.
Fast Objective and Duality Gap Convergence for Non-convex Strongly-concave Min-max Problems

This paper focuses on stochastic methods for solving smooth non-convex strongly-concave min-max problems, which have received increasing attention due to their potential applications in deep learning (e.g., deep AUC maximization). However, most of the existing algorithms are slow in practice, and their analysis revolves around the convergence to a nearly stationary point. We consider leveraging the Polyak-Łojasiewicz (PL) condition to design faster stochastic algorithms with stronger convergence guarantee. Although PL condition has been utilized for designing many stochastic minimization algorithms, their applications for non-convex min-max optimization remains rare. In this paper, we propose and analyze proximal epoch-based methods, and establish fast convergence in terms of both {\bf the primal objective gap and the duality gap}. Our analysis is interesting in threefold: (i) it is based on a novel Lyapunov function that consists of the primal objective gap and the duality gap of a regularized function; (ii) it only requires a weaker PL condition for establishing the primal objective convergence than that required for the duality gap convergence; (iii) it yields the optimal dependence on the accuracy level $\epsilon$, i.e., $O(1/\epsilon)$. We also make explicit the dependence on the problem parameters and explore regions of weak convexity parameter that lead to improved dependence on condition numbers. Experiments on deep AUC maximization demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods. Our method (MaxAUC) achieved an AUC of 0.922 on private testing set on {\bf CheXpert competition}.
Hindsight Logging for Model Training

Due to the long time-lapse between the triggering and detection of a bug in the machine learning lifecycle, model developers favor data-centric logfile analysis over traditional interactive debugging techniques. But when useful execution data is missing from the logs after training, developers have little recourse beyond re-executing training with more logging statements, or guessing. In this paper, we present hindsight logging, a novel technique for efficiently querying ad-hoc execution data, long after model training. The goal of hindsight logging is to enable analysis of past executions as if the logs had been exhaustive. Rather than materialize logs up front, we draw on the idea of physiological database recovery, and adapt it to arbitrary programs. Developers can query the state in past runs of a program by adding arbitrary log statements to their code; a combination of physical and logical recovery is used to quickly produce the output of the new log statements. We implement these ideas in Flor, a record-replay system for hindsight logging in Python. We evaluate Flor's performance on eight different model training workloads from current computer vision and NLP benchmarks. We find that Flor replay achieves near-ideal scale-out and order-of-magnitude speedups in replay, with just 1.47% average runtime overhead from record.
Unmasking the Inductive Biases of Unsupervised Object Representations for Video Sequences

Perceiving the world in terms of objects is a crucial prerequisite for reasoning and scene understanding. Recently, several methods have been proposed for unsupervised learning of object-centric representations. However, since these models have been evaluated with respect to different downstream tasks, it remains unclear how they compare in terms of basic perceptual abilities such as detection, figure-ground segmentation and tracking of individual objects. In this paper, we argue that the established evaluation protocol of multi-object tracking tests precisely these perceptual qualities and we propose a new benchmark dataset based on procedurally generated video sequences. Using this benchmark, we compare the perceptual abilities of three state-of-the-art unsupervised object-centric learning approaches. Towards this goal, we propose a video-extension of MONet, a seminal object-centric model for static scenes, and compare it to two recent video models: OP3, which exploits clustering via spatial mixture models, and TBA, which uses an explicit factorization via spatial transformers. Our results indicate that architectures which employ unconstrained latent representations based on per-object variational autoencoders and full-image object masks are able to learn more powerful representations in terms of object detection, segmentation and tracking than the explicitly parameterized spatial transformer based architecture. We also observe that none of the methods are able to gracefully handle the most challenging tracking scenarios, suggesting that our synthetic video benchmark may provide fruitful guidance towards learning more robust object-centric video representations.
Large-scale Hybrid Approach for Predicting User Satisfaction with Conversational Agents

Measuring user satisfaction level is a challenging task, and a critical component in developing large-scale conversational agent systems serving the needs of real users. An widely used approach to tackle this is to collect human annotation data and use them for evaluation or modeling. Human annotation based approaches are easier to control, but hard to scale. A novel alternative approach is to collect user's direct feedback via a feedback elicitation system embedded to the conversational agent system, and use the collected user feedback to train a machine-learned model for generalization. User feedback is the best proxy for user satisfaction, but is not available for some ineligible intents and certain situations. Thus, these two types of approaches are complementary to each other. In this work, we tackle the user satisfaction assessment problem with a hybrid approach that fuses explicit user feedback, user satisfaction predictions inferred by two machine-learned models, one trained on user feedback data and the other human annotation data. The hybrid approach is based on a waterfall policy, and the experimental results with Amazon Alexa's large-scale datasets show significant improvements in inferring user satisfaction. A detailed hybrid architecture, an in-depth analysis on user feedback data, and an algorithm that generates data sets to properly simulate the live traffic are presented in this paper.