Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Subject Cross Validation in Human Activity Recognition

K-fold Cross Validation is commonly used to evaluate classifiers and tune their hyperparameters. However, it assumes that data points are Independent and Identically Distributed (i.i.d.) so that samples used in the training and test sets can be selected randomly and uniformly. In Human Activity Recognition datasets, we note that the samples produced by the same subjects are likely to be correlated due to diverse factors. Hence, k-fold cross validation may overestimate the performance of activity recognizers, in particular when overlapping sliding windows are used. In this paper, we investigate the effect of Subject Cross Validation on the performance of Human Activity Recognition, both with non-overlapping and with overlapping sliding windows. Results show that k-fold cross validation artificially increases the performance of recognizers by about 10%, and even by 16% when overlapping windows are used. In addition, we do not observe any performance gain from the use of overlapping windows. We conclude that Human Activity Recognition systems should be evaluated by Subject Cross Validation, and that overlapping windows are not worth their extra computational cost.
Constrained Generative Adversarial Networks for Interactive Image Generation

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have received a great deal of attention due in part to recent success in generating original, high-quality samples from visual domains. However, most current methods only allow for users to guide this image generation process through limited interactions. In this work we develop a novel GAN framework that allows humans to be "in-the-loop" of the image generation process. Our technique iteratively accepts relative constraints of the form "Generate an image more like image A than image B". After each constraint is given, the user is presented with new outputs from the GAN, informing the next round of feedback. This feedback is used to constrain the output of the GAN with respect to an underlying semantic space that can be designed to model a variety of different notions of similarity (e.g. classes, attributes, object relationships, color, etc.). In our experiments, we show that our GAN framework is able to generate images that are of comparable quality to equivalent unsupervised GANs while satisfying a large number of the constraints provided by users, effectively changing a GAN into one that allows users interactive control over image generation without sacrificing image quality.
Black is to Criminal as Caucasian is to Police: Detecting and Removing Multiclass Bias in Word Embeddings

Online texts -- across genres, registers, domains, and styles -- are riddled with human stereotypes, expressed in overt or subtle ways. Word embeddings, trained on these texts, perpetuate and amplify these stereotypes, and propagate biases to machine learning models that use word embeddings as features. In this work, we propose a method to debias word embeddings in multiclass settings such as race and religion, extending the work of (Bolukbasi et al., 2016) from the binary setting, such as binary gender. Next, we propose a novel methodology for the evaluation of multiclass debiasing. We demonstrate that our multiclass debiasing is robust and maintains the efficacy in standard NLP tasks.
StereoDRNet: Dilated Residual Stereo Net

We propose a system that uses a convolution neural network (CNN) to estimate depth from a stereo pair followed by volumetric fusion of the predicted depth maps to produce a 3D reconstruction of a scene. Our proposed depth refinement architecture, predicts view-consistent disparity and occlusion maps that helps the fusion system to produce geometrically consistent reconstructions. We utilize 3D dilated convolutions in our proposed cost filtering network that yields better filtering while almost halving the computational cost in comparison to state of the art cost filtering architectures.For feature extraction we use the Vortex Pooling architecture. The proposed method achieves state of the art results in KITTI 2012, KITTI 2015 and ETH 3D stereo benchmarks. Finally, we demonstrate that our system is able to produce high fidelity 3D scene reconstructions that outperforms the state of the art stereo system.
Massively Multilingual Adversarial Speech Recognition

We report on adaptation of multilingual end-to-end speech recognition models trained on as many as 100 languages. Our findings shed light on the relative importance of similarity between the target and pretraining languages along the dimensions of phonetics, phonology, language family, geographical location, and orthography. In this context, experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of two additional pretraining objectives in encouraging language-independent encoder representations: a context-independent phoneme objective paired with a language-adversarial classification objective.
Private Information Retrieval from Heterogeneous Uncoded Storage Constrained Databases with Reduced Sub-Messages

We propose capacity-achieving schemes for private information retrieval (PIR) from uncoded databases (DBs) with both homogeneous and heterogeneous storage constraints. In the PIR setting, a user queries a set of DBs to privately download a message, where privacy implies that no one DB can infer which message the user desires. In general, a PIR scheme is comprised of storage placement and delivery designs. Previous works have derived the capacity, or infimum download cost, of PIR with uncoded storage placement and also sufficient conditions of a storage placement design to meet capacity. However, the currently proposed storage placement designs require splitting each message into an exponential number of sub-messages with respect to the number of DBs. In this work, when DBs have the same storage constraint, we propose two simple storage placement designs that satisfy the capacity conditions. Then, for more general heterogeneous storage constraints, we translate the storage placement design process into a "filling problem". We design an iterative algorithm to solve the filling problem where, in each iteration, messages are partitioned into sub-messages and stored at subsets of DBs. All of our proposed storage placement designs require a number of sub-messages per message at most equal to the number of DBs.
Structural Scaffolds for Citation Intent Classification in Scientific Publications

Identifying the intent of a citation in scientific papers (e.g., background information, use of methods, comparing results) is critical for machine reading of individual publications and automated analysis of the scientific literature. We propose structural scaffolds, a multitask model to incorporate structural information of scientific papers into citations for effective classification of citation intents. Our model achieves a new state-of-the-art on an existing ACL anthology dataset (ACL-ARC) with a 13.3% absolute increase in F1 score, without relying on external linguistic resources or hand-engineered features as done in existing methods. In addition, we introduce a new dataset of citation intents (SciCite) which is more than five times larger and covers multiple scientific domains compared with existing datasets. Our code and data are available at: https://github.com/allenai/scicite.
Using Multi-Sense Vector Embeddings for Reverse Dictionaries

Popular word embedding methods such as word2vec and GloVe assign a single vector representation to each word, even if a word has multiple distinct meanings. Multi-sense embeddings instead provide different vectors for each sense of a word. However, they typically cannot serve as a drop-in replacement for conventional single-sense embeddings, because the correct sense vector needs to be selected for each word. In this work, we study the effect of multi-sense embeddings on the task of reverse dictionaries. We propose a technique to easily integrate them into an existing neural network architecture using an attention mechanism. Our experiments demonstrate that large improvements can be obtained when employing multi-sense embeddings both in the input sequence as well as for the target representation. An analysis of the sense distributions and of the learned attention is provided as well.
DNS-Morph: UDP-Based Bootstrapping Protocol For Tor

Tor is one of the most popular systems for anonymous communication and censorship circumvention on the web, currently used by millions of users every day. This puts Tor as a target for attacks by organizations and governmental bodies whose goal is to hinder users' ability to connect to it. These attacks include deep packet inspection (DPI) to classify Tor traffic as well as legitimate Tor client impersonation (active probing) to expose Tor bridges. As a response to Tor-blocking attempts, the Tor community has developed Pluggable Transports (PTs), tools that transform the appearance of Tor's traffic flow. In this paper we introduce a new approach aiming to enhance the PT's resistance against active probing attacks, as well as white-listing censorship by partitioning the handshake of the PT from its encrypted communication. Thus, allowing mixing different PTs, e.g., ScrambleSuit for the handshake and FTE for the traffic itself. We claim that this separation reduces the possibility of marking Tor related communications. To illustrate our claim, we introduce DNS-Morph: a new method of transforming the handshake data of a PT by imitating a sequence of DNS queries and responses. Using DNS-Morph, the Tor client acts as a DNS client which sends DNS queries to the Tor bridge, and receives DNS responses from it. We implemented and successfully tested DNS-Morph using one of the PTs (ScrambleSuit), and verified its capabilities.
Ranking and Selecting Multi-Hop Knowledge Paths to Better Predict Human Needs

To make machines better understand sentiments, research needs to move from polarity identification to understanding the reasons that underlie the expression of sentiment. Categorizing the goals or needs of humans is one way to explain the expression of sentiment in text. Humans are good at understanding situations described in natural language and can easily connect them to the character's psychological needs using commonsense knowledge. We present a novel method to extract, rank, filter and select multi-hop relation paths from a commonsense knowledge resource to interpret the expression of sentiment in terms of their underlying human needs. We efficiently integrate the acquired knowledge paths in a neural model that interfaces context representations with knowledge using a gated attention mechanism. We assess the model's performance on a recently published dataset for categorizing human needs. Selectively integrating knowledge paths boosts performance and establishes a new state-of-the-art. Our model offers interpretability through the learned attention map over commonsense knowledge paths. Human evaluation highlights the relevance of the encoded knowledge.
Precise Detection in Densely Packed Scenes

Man-made scenes can be densely packed, containing numerous objects, often identical, positioned in close proximity. We show that precise object detection in such scenes remains a challenging frontier even for state-of-the-art object detectors. We propose a novel, deep-learning based method for precise object detection, designed for such challenging settings. Our contributions include: (1) A layer for estimating the Jaccard index as a detection quality score; (2) a novel EM merging unit, which uses our quality scores to resolve detection overlap ambiguities; finally, (3) an extensive, annotated data set, SKU-110K, representing packed retail environments, released for training and testing under such extreme settings. Detection tests on SKU-110K and counting tests on the CARPK and PUCPR+ show our method to outperform existing state-of-the-art with substantial margins. The code and data will be made available on \url{www.github.com/eg4000/SKU110K_CVPR19}.
Stochastic Subspace Descent

We present two stochastic descent algorithms that apply to unconstrained optimization and are particularly efficient when the objective function is slow to evaluate and gradients are not easily obtained, as in some PDE-constrained optimization and machine learning problems. The basic algorithm projects the gradient onto a random subspace at each iteration, similar to coordinate descent but without restricting directional derivatives to be along the axes. This algorithm is previously known but we provide new analysis. We also extend the popular SVRG method to this framework but without requiring that the objective function be written as a finite sum. We provide proofs of convergence for our methods under various convexity assumptions and show favorable results when compared to gradient descent and BFGS on non-convex problems from the machine learning and shape optimization literature. We also note that our analysis gives a proof that the iterates of SVRG and several other popular first-order stochastic methods, in their original formulation, converge almost surely to the optimum; to our knowledge, prior to this work the iterates of SVRG had only been known to converge in expectation.
Equivariant Multi-View Networks

Several popular approaches to 3D vision tasks process multiple views of the input independently with deep neural networks pre-trained on natural images, achieving view permutation invariance through a single round of pooling over all views. We argue that this operation discards important information and leads to subpar global descriptors. In this paper, we propose a group convolutional approach to multiple view aggregation where convolutions are performed over a discrete subgroup of the rotation group, enabling, thus, joint reasoning over all views in an equivariant (instead of invariant) fashion, up to the very last layer. We further develop this idea to operate on smaller discrete homogeneous spaces of the rotation group, where a polar view representation is used to maintain equivariance with only a fraction of the number of input views. We set the new state of the art in several large scale 3D shape retrieval tasks, and show additional applications to panoramic scene classification.
Heavy Metal Speciation and Evolution in Groundwaters Within the Lower Cross River Hydrological Basin, Se-Nigeria

Abstract In recent times, a lot of work has been carried out in evaluating environmental impacts of potentially toxic metals on a wide variety of environmental materials in a wide range of different applications. This study documents the concentration levels and risk potentials of selected potentially toxic metals in shallow groundwaters across the lower Cross River hydrological basin. This is achieved by geochemical modeling using the VISUAL-MINTEQ computer program to identify ionic species, their saturation indices and possible bioavailability. Chemical analytical results show that the metals, Fe, Mn, Cu, Pb, Zn, Cd and Cr are of low concentrations, with no direct risk to water quality. Modeling indicates they are dominantly present as free mobile ions contributing major percentages to total ion concentration (approximate 60–90% of all metals in the groundwaters). Other ionic species, dominantly aqueous carbonate, sulphates, chlorides and hydroxides of these metals, exhibit lesser percentages of contributions to total ion concentrations. Estimated saturation indices shows the groundwaters are generally undersaturated with metallic species, with only Fe 2+ ionic species recording oversaturation in groundwaters within the basement sector of the study area. Mn ions also show low levels of saturation in parts of the study area. The low concentrations of these metals and their ionic species are attributed to hydrochemical processes controlled by the presence of limiting mineral phases (carbonates and sulphates). Dominant presences of goethite further inhibit mobility of ionic species of metals and consequently reduce the risk of their contamination to groundwater and possible bioavailability.
Matching Corporate Software Engineers and Data Offerings - from Discovery to Recommendations

Data plays an essential role in developing software, especially in large and complex projects. Data can be collected from different stages of the software life cycle and can form the basis for decision-making and thereby the success of projects. With increasingly automated and tool-supported development landscapes, the amount of data that is generated and accessible rises as well. Large corporate software projects, in addition to generating data also give rise to a high volume of offerings based on the data. These aim to increase the value generated by stakeholders like developers, requirement engineers, and testers. The offering land-scape brings new complexities and difficulties with it and needs to be managed, systematized, and brought to the correct person at the right time in order to create value. In this publication, models for abstracting and generalizing data offerings and data consumers are presented and their applicability is verified in a global corporate software environment. In addition, approaches for matching data offerings and consumers are presented. Our results show that offerings and consumers can be abstracted and matched using a recommender system.
A benchmark for C program verification

We present twenty-five C programs, as a benchmark for C program verification using formal methods. This benchmark can be used for system demonstration, for comparison of verification effort between systems, and as a friendly competition. For this last purpose, we give a scoring formula that allows a verification system to score up to a hundred points.
Syntactic Interchangeability in Word Embedding Models

Nearest neighbors in word embedding models are commonly observed to be semantically similar, but the relations between them can vary greatly. We investigate the extent to which word embedding models preserve syntactic interchangeability, as reflected by distances between word vectors, and the effect of hyper-parameters---context window size in particular. We use part of speech (POS) as a proxy for syntactic interchangeability, as generally speaking, words with the same POS are syntactically valid in the same contexts. We also investigate the relationship between interchangeability and similarity as judged by commonly-used word similarity benchmarks, and correlate the result with the performance of word embedding models on these benchmarks. Our results will inform future research and applications in the selection of word embedding model, suggesting a principle for an appropriate selection of the context window size parameter depending on the use-case.
Aristotelian assertoric syllogistic

Aristotelian assertoric syllogistic, which is currently of growing interest, has attracted the attention of the founders of modern logic, who approached it in several (semantical and syntactical) ways. Further approaches were introduced later on. These approaches (with few exceptions) are here discussed, developed and interrelated. Among other things, different facets of soundness, completeness, decidability and independence are investigated. Specifically arithmetization (Leibniz), algebraization (Leibniz and Boole), and Venn models (Euler and Venn) are closely examined. All proofs are simple. In particular there is no recourse to maximal nor minimal conditions (with only one, dispensable, exception), which makes the long awaited deciphering of the enigmatic Leibniz characteristic numbers possible. The problem was how to look at matters from the right perspective.
Variational Adversarial Active Learning

Active learning aims to develop label-efficient algorithms by sampling the most representative queries to be labeled by an oracle. We describe a pool-based semi-supervised active learning algorithm that implicitly learns this sampling mechanism in an adversarial manner. Unlike conventional active learning algorithms, our approach is task agnostic, i.e., it does not depend on the performance of the task for which we are trying to acquire labeled data. Our method learns a latent space using a variational autoencoder (VAE) and an adversarial network trained to discriminate between unlabeled and labeled data. The mini-max game between the VAE and the adversarial network is played such that while the VAE tries to trick the adversarial network into predicting that all data points are from the labeled pool, the adversarial network learns how to discriminate between dissimilarities in the latent space. We extensively evaluate our method on various image classification and semantic segmentation benchmark datasets and establish a new state of the art on $\text{CIFAR10/100}$, $\text{Caltech-256}$, $\text{ImageNet}$, $\text{Cityscapes}$, and $\text{BDD100K}$. Our results demonstrate that our adversarial approach learns an effective low dimensional latent space in large-scale settings and provides for a computationally efficient sampling method. Our code is available at https://github.com/sinhasam/vaal.
SART - Similarity, Analogies, and Relatedness for Tatar Language: New Benchmark Datasets for Word Embeddings Evaluation

There is a huge imbalance between languages currently spoken and corresponding resources to study them. Most of the attention naturally goes to the "big" languages: those which have the largest presence in terms of media and number of speakers. Other less represented languages sometimes do not even have a good quality corpus to study them. In this paper, we tackle this imbalance by presenting a new set of evaluation resources for Tatar, a language of the Turkic language family which is mainly spoken in Tatarstan Republic, Russia. We present three datasets: Similarity and Relatedness datasets that consist of human scored word pairs and can be used to evaluate semantic models; and Analogies dataset that comprises analogy questions and allows to explore semantic, syntactic, and morphological aspects of language modeling. All three datasets build upon existing datasets for the English language and follow the same structure. However, they are not mere translations. They take into account specifics of the Tatar language and expand beyond the original datasets. We evaluate state-of-the-art word embedding models for two languages using our proposed datasets for Tatar and the original datasets for English and report our findings on performance comparison.
Deep Learning in steganography and steganalysis from 2015 to 2018

For almost 10 years, the detection of a hidden message in an image has been mainly carried out by the computation of Rich Models (RM), followed by classification using an Ensemble Classifier (EC). In 2015, the first study using a convolutional neural network (CNN) obtained the first results of steganalysis by Deep Learning approaching the performances of the two-step approach (EC + RM). Between 2015-2018, numerous publications have shown that it is possible to obtain improved performances, notably in spatial steganalysis, JPEG steganalysis, Selection-Channel-Aware steganalysis, and in quantitative steganalysis. This chapter deals with deep learning in steganalysis from the point of view of current methods, by presenting different neural networks from the period 2015-2018, that have been evaluated with a methodology specific to the discipline of steganalysis. The chapter is not intended to repeat the basic concepts of machine learning or deep learning. So, we will present the structure of a deep neural network, in a generic way and present the networks proposed in existing literature for the different scenarios of steganalysis, and finally, we will discuss steganography by deep learning.