Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Density Ratio Estimation-based Bayesian Optimization with Semi-Supervised Learning

Bayesian optimization has attracted huge attention from diverse research areas in science and engineering, since it is capable of finding a global optimum of an expensive-to-evaluate black-box function efficiently. In general, a probabilistic regression model, e.g., Gaussian processes and Bayesian neural networks, is widely used as a surrogate function to model an explicit distribution over function evaluations given an input to estimate and a training dataset. Beyond the probabilistic regression-based Bayesian optimization, density ratio estimation-based Bayesian optimization has been suggested in order to estimate a density ratio of the groups relatively close and relatively far to a global optimum. Developing this line of research further, a supervised classifier can be employed to estimate a class probability for the two groups instead of a density ratio. However, the supervised classifiers used in this strategy are prone to be overconfident for a global solution candidate. To solve this problem, we propose density ratio estimation-based Bayesian optimization with semi-supervised learning. Finally, we demonstrate the experimental results of our methods and several baseline methods in two distinct scenarios with unlabeled point sampling and a fixed-size pool.
Mesoscale Organization of Springtime Rainstorms in Oklahoma

Abstract Radar reflectivity and raingage data obtained during six springtimes indicate the types of mesoscale organization that occur in association with major rain events in Oklahoma (at least 25 mm of rain in 24 h over an area exceeding 12 500 km2). In these storms the primary rain area is found to be a contiguous region of precipitation 10s to 100s of km in scale that consists partly of deep convection and partly of stratiform rain. The patterns of rain formed by the convective and stratiform areas comprise a continuous spectrum of mesoscale structures. About two-thirds of the cases examined exhibited variations on the type of organization in which convective cells arranged in a moving line are followed by a region of stratiform rain. Storm organization was graded according to the degree to which it matched an idealized model of this “leading-line/trailing-stratiform” structure. The precipitation pattern was further graded according to whether its structure was relatively symmetric with respect to an a.
DoWG Unleashed: An Efficient Universal Parameter-Free Gradient Descent Method

This paper proposes a new easy-to-implement parameter-free gradient-based optimizer: DoWG (Distance over Weighted Gradients). We prove that DoWG is efficient -- matching the convergence rate of optimally tuned gradient descent in convex optimization up to a logarithmic factor without tuning any parameters, and universal -- automatically adapting to both smooth and nonsmooth problems. While popular algorithms following the AdaGrad framework compute a running average of the squared gradients to use for normalization, DoWG maintains a new distance-based weighted version of the running average, which is crucial to achieve the desired properties. To complement our theory, we also show empirically that DoWG trains at the edge of stability, and validate its effectiveness on practical machine learning tasks.
Possible connections between relativity theory and a version of quantum theory based upon theoretical variables

An alternative approach towards quantum theory is described, and tentative attempts to connect his approach to special and general relativity are discussed. Important concepts are gauge groups and information/entropy connected to some physical systems. Some recent results on information in connection to black holes are touched upon, and it is indicated how expected information can be argued to be conserved. This argument only depends on what happens outside the black hole. Everything connected to the interior of the black hole is inaccessible.
USING TE WAVE RESONANCES FOR THE MEASUREMENT OF ELECTRON CLOUD DENSITY

In the past few years, electron cloud (EC) density has been measured by means of its effect on TE waves propagated through the accelerator vacuum chamber. This technique has been used in several laboratories around the world (CERN, SLAC, FNAL, Cornell, INFN-LNF). Recent measurements at CESRTA and DAFNE show that the simple theory relating the phase shift of a propagating TE wave to the electron cloud density provides an inadequate description of the data. Standing waves set up between discontinuities in the vacuum chamber make the propagation length ill-defined and the standing wave pattern is not confined to the portion of beampipe between the input and output couplers. In this paper we present evidence that the response function near cutoff is the result of coupling to standing waves trapped in the vacuum chamber and that the analysis should be based on the response of a resonant cavity rather than waveguide transmission. This evidence includes measurements at DAFNE, CESRTA, a test waveguide, computer EM simulations, and analytical calculations.
On the Impact of Knowledge Distillation for Model Interpretability

Several recent studies have elucidated why knowledge distillation (KD) improves model performance. However, few have researched the other advantages of KD in addition to its improving model performance. In this study, we have attempted to show that KD enhances the interpretability as well as the accuracy of models. We measured the number of concept detectors identified in network dissection for a quantitative comparison of model interpretability. We attributed the improvement in interpretability to the class-similarity information transferred from the teacher to student models. First, we confirmed the transfer of class-similarity information from the teacher to student model via logit distillation. Then, we analyzed how class-similarity information affects model interpretability in terms of its presence or absence and degree of similarity information. We conducted various quantitative and qualitative experiments and examined the results on different datasets, different KD methods, and according to different measures of interpretability. Our research showed that KD models by large models could be used more reliably in various fields.
Self-tuned robust mean estimators

In this paper, we propose new self-tuned robust estimators for estimating the mean of distributions with only finite variances. Our method involves introducing a new loss function that considers both the mean parameter and a robustification parameter. By simultaneously optimizing the empirical loss function with respect to both parameters, the resulting estimator for the robustification parameter can adapt to the unknown variance automatically and can achieve near-optimal finite-sample performance. Our approach outperforms previous methods in terms of both computational and asymptotic e ffi ciency. Specifically, it does not require cross-validation or Lepski’s method to tune the robustification parameter, and the variance of our estimator achieves the Cram´er-Rao lower bound.
CN-Celeb-AV: A Multi-Genre Audio-Visual Dataset for Person Recognition

Audio-visual person recognition (AVPR) has received extensive attention. However, most datasets used for AVPR research so far are collected in constrained environments, and thus cannot reflect the true performance of AVPR systems in real-world scenarios. To meet the request for research on AVPR in unconstrained conditions, this paper presents a multi-genre AVPR dataset collected `in the wild', named CN-Celeb-AV. This dataset contains more than 419k video segments from 1,136 persons from public media. In particular, we put more emphasis on two real-world complexities: (1) data in multiple genres; (2) segments with partial information. A comprehensive study was conducted to compare CN-Celeb-AV with two popular public AVPR benchmark datasets, and the results demonstrated that CN-Celeb-AV is more in line with real-world scenarios and can be regarded as a new benchmark dataset for AVPR research. The dataset also involves a development set that can be used to boost the performance of AVPR systems in real-life situations. The dataset is free for researchers and can be downloaded from http://cnceleb.org/.
Power Allocation for Multi-Access Channel with Generalized Power Constraint

We study the problem of decentralized power allocation in a multi-access channel (MAC) with non-cooperative users, additive noise of arbitrary distribution and a generalized power constraint, i.e., the transmit power constraint is modeled by an upper bound on $\mathbb{E}[\phi(|S|)]$, where $S$ is the transmit signal and $\phi(.)$ is some non-negative, increasing and bounded function. The generalized power constraint captures the notion of power for different wireless signals such as RF, optical, acoustic, etc. We derive the optimal power allocation policy when there a large number of non-cooperative users in the MAC. Further, we show that, once the number of users in the MAC crosses a finite threshold, the proposed power allocation policy of all users is optimal and remains invariant irrespective of the actual number of users. We derive the above results under the condition that the entropy power of the MAC, $e^{2h(S)+c}$, is strictly convex, where $h(S)$ is the maximum achievable entropy of the transmit signal and $c$ is a finite constant corresponding to the entropy of the additive noise.
Security Impact Analysis of Degree of Field Extension in Lattice Attacks on Ring-LWE Problem

Modern information communications use cryptography to keep the contents of communications confidential. RSA (Rivest–Shamir–Adleman) cryptography and elliptic curve cryptography, which are public-key cryptosystems, are widely used cryptographic schemes. However, it is known that these cryptographic schemes can be deciphered in a very short time by Shor’s algorithm when a quantum computer is put into practical use. Therefore, several methods have been proposed for quantum computer-resistant cryptosystems that cannot be cracked even by a quantum computer. A simple implementation of LWE-based lattice cryptography based on the LWE (Learning With Errors) problem requires a key length of O(n2) to ensure the same level of security as existing public-key cryptography schemes such as RSA and elliptic curve cryptography. In this paper, we attacked the Ring-LWE (RLWE) scheme, which can be implemented with a short key length, with a modified LLL (Lenstra-Lenstra-Lovasz) basis reduction algorithm and investigated the trend in the degree of field extension required to generate a secure and small key. Results showed that the lattice-based cryptography may be strengthened by employing Cullen or Mersenne prime numbers as the degree of field extension.
Neural Natural Language Processing for Long Texts: A Survey of the State-of-the-Art

The adoption of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) has greatly benefited Natural Language Processing (NLP) during the past decade. However, the demands of long document analysis are quite different from those of shorter texts, while the ever increasing size of documents uploaded on-line renders automated understanding of long texts a critical area of research. This article has two goals: a) it overviews the relevant neural building blocks, thus serving as a short tutorial, and b) it surveys the state-of-the-art in long document NLP, mainly focusing on two central tasks: document classification and document summarization. Sentiment analysis for long texts is also covered, since it is typically treated as a particular case of document classification. Additionally, this article discusses the main challenges, issues and current solutions related to long document NLP. Finally, the relevant, publicly available, annotated datasets are presented, in order to facilitate further research.
On Computing Universal Plans for Partially Observable Multi-Agent Path Finding

Multi-agent routing problems have drawn significant attention nowadays due to their broad industrial applications in, e.g., warehouse robots, logistics automation, and traffic control. Conventionally, they are modelled as classical planning problems. In this paper, we argue that it is beneficial to formulate them as universal planning problems. We therefore propose universal plans, also known as policies, as the solution concepts, and implement a system called ASP-MAUPF (Answer Set Programming for Multi-Agent Universal Plan Finding) for computing them. Given an arbitrary two-dimensional map and a profile of goals for the agents, the system finds a feasible universal plan for each agent that ensures no collision with others. We use the system to conduct some experiments, and make some observations on the types of goal profiles and environments that will have feasible policies, and how they may depend on agents' sensors. We also demonstrate how users can customize action preferences to compute more efficient policies, even (near-)optimal ones.
Augmented Memory: Capitalizing on Experience Replay to Accelerate De Novo Molecular Design

Sample efficiency is a fundamental challenge in de novo molecular design. Ideally, molecular generative models should learn to satisfy a desired objective under minimal oracle evaluations (computational prediction or wet-lab experiment). This problem becomes more apparent when using oracles that can provide increased predictive accuracy but impose a significant cost. Consequently, these oracles cannot be directly optimized under a practical budget. Molecular generative models have shown remarkable sample efficiency when coupled with reinforcement learning, as demonstrated in the Practical Molecular Optimization (PMO) benchmark. Here, we propose a novel algorithm called Augmented Memory that combines data augmentation with experience replay. We show that scores obtained from oracle calls can be reused to update the model multiple times. We compare Augmented Memory to previously proposed algorithms and show significantly enhanced sample efficiency in an exploitation task and a drug discovery case study requiring both exploration and exploitation. Our method achieves a new state-of-the-art in the PMO benchmark which enforces a computational budget, outperforming the previous best performing method on 19/23 tasks.
Diversity-Aware Coherence Loss for Improving Neural Topic Models

The standard approach for neural topic modeling uses a variational autoencoder (VAE) framework that jointly minimizes the KL divergence between the estimated posterior and prior, in addition to the reconstruction loss. Since neural topic models are trained by recreating individual input documents, they do not explicitly capture the coherence between words on the corpus level. In this work, we propose a novel diversity-aware coherence loss that encourages the model to learn corpus-level coherence scores while maintaining high diversity between topics. Experimental results on multiple datasets show that our method significantly improves the performance of neural topic models without requiring any pretraining or additional parameters.
A New Weighted Time Window-based Method to Detect B-point in Impedance Cardiogram

Background: Impedance Cardiogram (ICG) has impressive number of applications in healthcare. However, its wider adoption is excessively limited due to the well recognized challenges in ICG delineation. We present a simple, adaptive, and efficient method for the most demanding ICG delineation task - detection of less distinct B-point that marks the onset of the left ventricular ejection. Method: The core of the new method is transformation of ICG time series by weighted time window of an ICG segment preceding the maximal ICG peak (the C-point) aiming at the B-point enhancement. The resulting Modified B-point (MB-point) is then easily delineated. To evaluate the proposed workflow, the dataset comprising 20 healthy participants and 21065 B-points are manually annotated and openly shared with the software code. To the best of our knowledge, our ICG dataset has the largest number of annotated B-points. Detector performance is evaluated on two recorded segments with distinct noises, as well as on an open dataset comprising ICG recorded in another set of 24 healthy subjects. Results: The results showed that the method was superior to the competing methods when the tolerance for B-point detection was set to +/-150 ms in all cases and for both datasets (>99.4%). Conclusions: Proposed approach based on the weighted time windows presents a promising technique for reliable ICG delineation that is instrumental for appropriate feature extraction and ICG characterization. Further customization could incorporate labeling of other pathological ICG segments, other biomedical signals, as well as additional enhancements for improving robustness to noise.
Deep Neural Networks in Video Human Action Recognition: A Review

Currently, video behavior recognition is one of the most foundational tasks of computer vision. The 2D neural networks of deep learning are built for recognizing pixel-level information such as images with RGB, RGB-D, or optical flow formats, with the current increasingly wide usage of surveillance video and more tasks related to human action recognition. There are increasing tasks requiring temporal information for frames dependency analysis. The researchers have widely studied video-based recognition rather than image-based(pixel-based) only to extract more informative elements from geometry tasks. Our current related research addresses multiple novel proposed research works and compares their advantages and disadvantages between the derived deep learning frameworks rather than machine learning frameworks. The comparison happened between existing frameworks and datasets, which are video format data only. Due to the specific properties of human actions and the increasingly wide usage of deep neural networks, we collected all research works within the last three years between 2020 to 2022. In our article, the performance of deep neural networks surpassed most of the techniques in the feature learning and extraction tasks, especially video action recognition.
Random Utterance Concatenation Based Data Augmentation for Improving Short-video Speech Recognition

One of limitations in end-to-end automatic speech recognition (ASR) framework is its performance would be compromised if train-test utterance lengths are mismatched. In this paper, we propose an on-the-fly random utterance concatenation (RUC) based data augmentation method to alleviate train-test utterance length mismatch issue for short-video ASR task. Specifically, we are motivated by observations that our human-transcribed training utterances tend to be much shorter for short-video spontaneous speech (~3 seconds on average), while our test utterance generated from voice activity detection front-end is much longer (~10 seconds on average). Such a mismatch can lead to suboptimal performance. Empirically, it's observed the proposed RUC method significantly improves long utterance recognition without performance drop on short one. Overall, it achieves 5.72% word error rate reduction on average for 15 languages and improved robustness to various utterance length.
Post-processing Private Synthetic Data for Improving Utility on Selected Measures

Existing private synthetic data generation algorithms are agnostic to downstream tasks. However, end users may have specific requirements that the synthetic data must satisfy. Failure to meet these requirements could significantly reduce the utility of the data for downstream use. We introduce a post-processing technique that improves the utility of the synthetic data with respect to measures selected by the end user, while preserving strong privacy guarantees and dataset quality. Our technique involves resampling from the synthetic data to filter out samples that do not meet the selected utility measures, using an efficient stochastic first-order algorithm to find optimal resampling weights. Through comprehensive numerical experiments, we demonstrate that our approach consistently improves the utility of synthetic data across multiple benchmark datasets and state-of-the-art synthetic data generation algorithms.
A Conceptual Model for End-to-End Causal Discovery in Knowledge Tracing

In this paper, we take a preliminary step towards solving the problem of causal discovery in knowledge tracing, i.e., finding the underlying causal relationship among different skills from real-world student response data. This problem is important since it can potentially help us understand the causal relationship between different skills without extensive A/B testing, which can potentially help educators to design better curricula according to skill prerequisite information. Specifically, we propose a conceptual solution, a novel causal gated recurrent unit (GRU) module in a modified deep knowledge tracing model, which uses i) a learnable permutation matrix for causal ordering among skills and ii) an optionally learnable lower-triangular matrix for causal structure among skills. We also detail how to learn the model parameters in an end-to-end, differentiable way. Our solution placed among the top entries in Task 3 of the NeurIPS 2022 Challenge on Causal Insights for Learning Paths in Education. We detail preliminary experiments as evaluated on the challenge's public leaderboard since the ground truth causal structure has not been publicly released, making detailed local evaluation impossible.
A Higher-Order Temporal H-Index for Evolving Networks

The H-index of a node in a static network is the maximum value h such that at least h of its neighbors have a degree of at least h. Recently, a generalized version, the n-th order H-index, was introduced, allowing to relate degree centrality, H-index, and the k-core of a node. We extend the n-th order H-index to temporal networks and define corresponding temporal centrality measures and temporal core decompositions. Our n-th order temporal H-index respects the reachability in temporal networks leading to node rankings, which reflect the importance of nodes in spreading processes. We derive natural decompositions of temporal networks into subgraphs with strong temporal coherence. We analyze a recursive computation scheme and develop a highly scalable streaming algorithm. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates the efficiency of our algorithms and the conceptional validity of our approach. Specifically, we show that the n-th order temporal H-index is a strong heuristic for identifying possible super-spreaders in evolving social networks and detects temporally well-connected components.
Perturbation-Based Self-Supervised Attention for Attention Bias in Text Classification

In text classification, the traditional attention mechanisms usually focus too much on frequent words, and need extensive labeled data in order to learn. This article proposes a perturbation-based self-supervised attention approach to guide attention learning without any annotation overhead. Specifically, we add as much noise as possible to all the words in the sentence without changing their semantics and predictions. We hypothesize that words that tolerate more noise are less significant, and we can use this information to refine the attention distribution. Experimental results on three text classification tasks show that our approach can significantly improve the performance of current attention-based models, and is more effective than existing self-supervised methods. We also provide a visualization analysis to verify the effectiveness of our approach.