Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
An Efficient Plaintext-Related Chaotic Image Encryption Scheme Based on Compressive Sensing

With the development of mobile communication network, especially 5G today and 6G in the future, the security and privacy of digital images are important in network applications. Meanwhile, high resolution images will take up a lot of bandwidth and storage space in the cloud applications. Facing the demands, an efficient and secure plaintext-related chaotic image encryption scheme is proposed based on compressive sensing for achieving the compression and encryption simultaneously. In the proposed scheme, the internal keys for controlling the whole process of compression and encryption is first generated by plain image and initial key. Subsequently, discrete wavelets transform is used in order to convert the plain image to the coefficient matrix. After that, the permutation processing, which is controlled by the two-dimensional Sine improved Logistic iterative chaotic map (2D-SLIM), was done on the coefficient matrix in order to make the matrix energy dispersive. Furthermore, a plaintext related compressive sensing has been done utilizing a measurement matrix generated by 2D-SLIM. In order to make the cipher image lower correlation and distribute uniform, measurement results quantified the 0∼255 and the permutation and diffusion operation is done under the controlling by two-dimensional Logistic-Sine-coupling map (2D-LSCM). Finally, some common compression and security performance analysis methods are used to test our scheme. The test and comparison results shown in our proposed scheme have both excellent security and compression performance when compared with other recent works, thus ensuring the digital image application in the network.
Earthquake Arrival Association with Backprojection and Graph Theory

Abstract The association of seismic‐wave arrivals with causative earthquakes becomes progressively more challenging as arrival detection methods become more sensitive, and particularly when earthquake rates are high. For instance, seismic waves arriving across a monitoring network from several sources may overlap in time, false arrivals may be detected, and some arrivals may be of unknown phase (e.g., P or S waves). We propose an automated method to associate arrivals with earthquake sources and obtain source locations applicable to such situations. To do so, we use a pattern detection metric based on the principle of backprojection to reveal candidate sources followed by graph‐theory‐based clustering and an integer linear optimization routine to associate arrivals with the minimum number of sources necessary to explain the data. This method solves for all sources and phase assignments simultaneously, rather than in a sequential greedy procedure as is common in other association routines. We demonstrate our method on both synthetic and real data from the Integrated Plate Boundary Observatory Chile seismic network of northern Chile. For the synthetic tests, we report results for cases with varying complexity, including rates of 500 earthquakes/day and 500 false arrivals/station/day, for which we measure true positive detection accuracy of &gt;95%. For the real data, we develop a new catalog between 1 January 2010 and 31 December 2017 containing 817,548 earthquakes, with detection rates on average 279 earthquakes/day and a magnitude‐of‐completion of M∼1.8. A subset of detections are identified as sources related to quarry and industrial site activity, and we also detect thousands of foreshocks and aftershocks of the 1 April 2014 Mw 8.2 Iquique earthquake. During the highest rate of aftershock activity, &gt;600 earthquakes/day are detected in the vicinity of the Iquique earthquake rupture zone.
Liver segmentation in abdominal CT images via auto-context neural network and self-supervised contour attention

Objective: Accurate image segmentation of the liver is a challenging problem owing to its large shape variability and unclear boundaries. Although the applications of fully convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown groundbreaking results, limited studies have focused on the performance of generalization. In this study, we introduce a CNN for liver segmentation on abdominal computed tomography (CT) images that focus on the performance of generalization and accuracy. Methods: To improve the generalization performance, we initially propose an auto-context algorithm in a single CNN. The proposed auto-context neural network exploits an effective high-level residual estimation to obtain the shape prior. Identical dual paths are effectively trained to represent mutual complementary features for an accurate posterior analysis of a liver. Further, we extend our network by employing a self-supervised contour scheme. We trained sparse contour features by penalizing the ground-truth contour to focus more contour attentions on the failures. Results: We used 180 abdominal CT images for training and validation. Two-fold cross-validation is presented for a comparison with the state-of-the-art neural networks. The experimental results show that the proposed network results in better accuracy when compared to the state-of-the-art networks by reducing 10.31% of the Hausdorff distance. Novel multiple N-fold cross-validations are conducted to show the best performance of generalization of the proposed network. Conclusion and significance: The proposed method minimized the error between training and test images more than any other modern neural networks. Moreover, the contour scheme was successfully employed in the network by introducing a self-supervising metric.
Segmentation-Renormalized Deep Feature Modulation for Unpaired Image Harmonization

Deep networks are now ubiquitous in large-scale multi-center imaging studies. However, the direct aggregation of images across sites is contraindicated for downstream statistical and deep learning-based image analysis due to inconsistent contrast, resolution, and noise. To this end, in the absence of paired data, variations of Cycle-consistent Generative Adversarial Networks have been used to harmonize image sets between a source and target domain. Importantly, these methods are prone to instability, contrast inversion, intractable manipulation of pathology, and steganographic mappings which limit their reliable adoption in real-world medical imaging. In this work, based on an underlying assumption that morphological shape is consistent across imaging sites, we propose a segmentation-renormalized image translation framework to reduce inter-scanner heterogeneity while preserving anatomical layout. We replace the affine transformations used in the normalization layers within generative networks with trainable scale and shift parameters conditioned on jointly learned anatomical segmentation embeddings to modulate features at every level of translation. We evaluate our methodologies against recent baselines across several imaging modalities (T1w MRI, FLAIR MRI, and OCT) on datasets with and without lesions. Segmentation-renormalization for translation GANs yields superior image harmonization as quantified by Inception distances, demonstrates improved downstream utility via post-hoc segmentation accuracy, and improved robustness to translation perturbation and self-adversarial attacks.
Fairness Violations and Mitigation under Covariate Shift

We study the problem of learning fair prediction models for unseen test sets distributed differently from the train set. Stability against changes in data distribution is an important mandate for responsible deployment of models. The domain adaptation literature addresses this concern, albeit with the notion of stability limited to that of prediction accuracy. We identify sufficient conditions under which stable models, both in terms of prediction accuracy and fairness, can be learned. Using the causal graph describing the data and the anticipated shifts, we specify an approach based on feature selection that exploits conditional independencies in the data to estimate accuracy and fairness metrics for the test set. We show that for specific fairness definitions, the resulting model satisfies a form of worst-case optimality. In context of a healthcare task, we illustrate the advantages of the approach in making more equitable decisions.
Privacy versus Public Health? A Reassessment of Centralised and Decentralised Digital Contact Tracing

Abstract At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, high hopes were placed on digital contact tracing. Digital contact tracing apps can now be downloaded in many countries, but as further waves of COVID-19 tear through much of the northern hemisphere, these apps are playing a less important role in interrupting chains of infection than anticipated. We argue that one of the reasons for this is that most countries have opted for decentralised apps, which cannot provide a means of rapidly informing users of likely infections while avoiding too many false positive reports. Centralised apps, in contrast, have the potential to do this. But policy making was influenced by public debates about the right app configuration, which have tended to focus heavily on privacy, and are driven by the assumption that decentralised apps are “privacy preserving by design”. We show that both types of apps are in fact vulnerable to privacy breaches, and, drawing on principles from safety engineering and risk analysis, compare the risks of centralised and decentralised systems along two dimensions, namely the probability of possible breaches and their severity. We conclude that a centralised app may in fact minimise overall ethical risk, and contend that we must reassess our approach to digital contact tracing, and should, more generally, be cautious about a myopic focus on privacy when conducting ethical assessments of data technologies.
Automatic Image Annotation Based on Deep Learning Models: A Systematic Review and Future Challenges

Recently, much attention has been given to image annotation due to the massive increase in image data volume. One of the image retrieval methods which guarantees the retrieval of images in the same way as texts are automatic image annotation (AIA). Consequently, numerous studies have been conducted on AIA, particularly on the classification-based and probabilistic modeling techniques. Several image annotation techniques that performed reasonably on standard datasets have been developed over the last decade. In this paper, a review of the image annotation method was conducted, focusing more on deep learning models. Automatic image annotation (AIA) methods were also classified into five categories, including i) Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based on AIA, ii) Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) based on AIA, iii) Deep Neural Networks (DNN) based on AIA, iv) Long-Short-Term Memory (LSTM) based on AIA, and v) Stacked auto-encoder (SAE) based on AIA. An assessment of the five varieties of AIA methods was also offered based on their principal notion, feature mining technique, explanation precision, computational density, and examined aggregated data. Moreover, the evaluation metrics used to evaluate AIA methods were reviewed and discussed. The need for careful consideration of methods throughout the improvement of novel procedures and datasets for image annotation assignment was highly demanded. From the analysis of the achievements so far, it is certain that more attention should be paid to automatic image annotation.
Unknown hostile environment-oriented autonomous WSN deployment using a mobile robot

In this study, we consider the Internet of Things (IoT) with an autonomous deployment framework and seek optimal localizable k-coverage (OLKC) strategies to preserve the connectivity and robustness in IoT networks to assist robots during disaster recovery activities. Therefore, we define localizable k-coverage as the covered region within which a mobile robot can localize itself aided by k neighboring beacon nodes (BNs) in a wireless sensor network (WSN). To this end, we first propose the optimal localizable k-coverage WSN deployment problem (OLKWDP) and present a novel framework that preserves WSN connectivity and robustness for mobile robots. To localize a mobile robot with at least k BNs and overcome the network hole problem that can occur in unknown hostile environments, we propose a hole recovery method for the OLKC achieved by a mobile robot that knows the concurrent mapping, deployment and localization of the WSN. We then present a mapping-to-image transformation method to reveal the interactions between the WSN deployment and the network holes for the OLKC while constructing the online mapping. To solve the OLKWDP, we also develop two optimality conditions to achieve maximum coverage by the proposed OLKC in the unknown hostile environment using the minimum number of sensors. Moreover, we analyze the factors that influence the probability of success of the OLKC and the factors that influence the performance of a mobile robot when determining the WSN deployment. The simulation results illustrate that our framework outperforms the trilateration and spanning tree (TST) method in unknown hostile environment exploration and can achieve the OLKC in a WSN. In 27 simulated situations, our framework achieved average rates of nearly 100% 1-coverage, 91.34% 2-coverage and 89.00% 3-coverage.
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We present a gauge invariant digitization of $(1+1)$d scalar quantum electrodynamics for an arbitrary spin truncation for qudit-based quantum computers. We provide a construction of the Trotter operator in terms of a universal qudit-gate set. The cost savings of using a qutrit based spin-1 encoding versus a qubit encoding are illustrated. We show that a simple initial state could be simulated on current qutrit based hardware using noisy simulations for two different native gate set.
Mitigating Demographic Bias in Facial Datasets with Style-Based Multi-attribute Transfer

Abstract Deep learning has catalysed progress in tasks such as face recognition and analysis, leading to a quick integration of technological solutions in multiple layers of our society. While such systems have proven to be accurate by standard evaluation metrics and benchmarks, a surge of work has recently exposed the demographic bias that such algorithms exhibit–highlighting that accuracy does not entail fairness . Clearly, deploying biased systems under real-world settings can have grave consequences for affected populations. Indeed, learning methods are prone to inheriting, or even amplifying the bias present in a training set, manifested by uneven representation across demographic groups. In facial datasets, this particularly relates to attributes such as skin tone , gender , and age . In this work, we address the problem of mitigating bias in facial datasets by data augmentation. We propose a multi-attribute framework that can successfully transfer complex, multi-scale facial patterns even if these belong to underrepresented groups in the training set. This is achieved by relaxing the rigid dependence on a single attribute label, and further introducing a tensor-based mixing structure that captures multiplicative interactions between attributes in a multilinear fashion. We evaluate our method with an extensive set of qualitative and quantitative experiments on several datasets, with rigorous comparisons to state-of-the-art methods. We find that the proposed framework can successfully mitigate dataset bias, as evinced by extensive evaluations on established diversity metrics, while significantly improving fairness metrics such as equality of opportunity.
Adding Chit-Chat to Enhance Task-Oriented Dialogues

Existing dialogue corpora and models are typically designed under two disjoint motives: while task-oriented systems focus on achieving functional goals (e.g., booking hotels), open-domain chatbots aim at making socially engaging conversations.In this work, we propose to integrate both types of systems by Adding Chit-Chat to ENhance Task-ORiented dialogues (ACCENTOR), with the goal of making virtual assistant conversations more engaging and interactive.Specifically, we propose a Human ↔ AI collaborative data collection approach for generating diverse chitchat responses to augment task-oriented dialogues with minimal annotation effort.We then present our new chit-chat-based annotations to 23.8K dialogues from two popular task-oriented datasets (Schema-Guided Dialogue and MultiWOZ 2.1) and demonstrate their advantage over the originals via human evaluation.Lastly, we propose three new models for adding chit-chat to task-oriented dialogues, explicitly trained to predict user goals and to generate contextually relevant chit-chat responses.Automatic and human evaluations show that, compared with the state-of-the-art task-oriented baseline, our models can codeswitch between task and chit-chat to be more engaging, interesting, knowledgeable, and humanlike, while maintaining competitive task performance.
BioM-Transformers: Building Large Biomedical Language Models with BERT, ALBERT and ELECTRA

The impact of design choices on the performance of biomedical language models recently has been a subject for investigation.In this paper, we empirically study biomedical domain adaptation with large transformer models using different design choices.We evaluate the performance of our pretrained models against other existing biomedical language models in the literature.Our results show that we achieve state-of-the-art results on several biomedical domain tasks despite using similar or less computational cost compared to other models in the literature.Our findings highlight the significant effect of design choices on improving the performance of biomedical language models.
Bitcoin in the economics and finance literature: a survey

This paper provides a review of the literature on key matters related to the popular cryptocurrency Bitcoin. Another key motivation of this paper is to understand the underlying principle of this digital currency from the economic and financial point of view. For the survey to be comprehensive, the paper is categorized into varied themes: price dynamics, volatility, bubble dynamics, mode of recognition in the financial market, efficiency, economics, social media and investor sentiment, and lastly regulation and legality. We argue that Bitcoin is still in an embryonic phase and needs to evolve with time especially keeping in pace with technological advancements. It should be robust to get accepted as an alternative currency and be able to prevent any fraudulent exploitation.
On the Tight Security of TLS 1.3: Theoretically Sound Cryptographic Parameters for Real-World Deployments

Abstract We consider the theoretically sound selection of cryptographic parameters, such as the size of algebraic groups or RSA keys, for TLS 1.3 in practice. While prior works gave security proofs for TLS 1.3, their security loss is quadratic in the total number of sessions across all users, which due to the pervasive use of TLS is huge. Therefore, in order to deploy TLS 1.3 in a theoretically sound way, it would be necessary to compensate this loss with unreasonably large parameters that would be infeasible for practical use at large scale. Hence, while these previous works show that in principle the design of TLS 1.3 is secure in an asymptotic sense, they do not yet provide any useful concrete security guarantees for real-world parameters used in practice. In this work, we provide a new security proof for the cryptographic core of TLS 1.3 in the random oracle model, which reduces the security of TLS 1.3 tightly (that is, with constant security loss) to the (multi-user) security of its building blocks. For some building blocks, such as the symmetric record layer encryption scheme, we can then rely on prior work to establish tight security. For others, such as the RSA-PSS digital signature scheme currently used in TLS 1.3, we obtain at least a linear loss in the number of users, independent of the number of sessions, which is much easier to compensate with reasonable parameters. Our work also shows that by replacing the RSA-PSS scheme with a tightly secure scheme (e.g., in a future TLS version), one can obtain the first fully tightly secure TLS protocol. Our results enable a theoretically sound selection of parameters for TLS 1.3, even in large-scale settings with many users and sessions per user.
Rethinking Pseudo Labels for Semi-supervised Object Detection

Recent advances in semi-supervised object detection (SSOD) are largely driven by consistency-based pseudo-labeling methods for image classification tasks, producing pseudo labels as supervisory signals. However, when using pseudo labels, there is a lack of consideration in localization precision and amplified class imbalance, both of which are critical for detection tasks. In this paper, we introduce certainty-aware pseudo labels tailored for object detection, which can effectively estimate the classification and localization quality of derived pseudo labels. This is achieved by converting conventional localization as a classification task followed by refinement. Conditioned on classification and localization quality scores, we dynamically adjust the thresholds used to generate pseudo labels and reweight loss functions for each category to alleviate the class imbalance problem. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method improves state-of-the-art SSOD performance by 1-2% AP on COCO and PASCAL VOC while being orthogonal and complementary to most existing methods. In the limited-annotation regime, our approach improves supervised baselines by up to 10% AP using only 1-10% labeled data from COCO.
DeepCOVID: An Operational Deep Learning-driven Framework for Explainable Real-time COVID-19 Forecasting

How do we forecast an emerging pandemic in real time in a purely data-driven manner? How to leverage rich heterogeneous data based on various signals such as mobility, testing, and/or disease exposure for forecasting? How to handle noisy data and generate uncertainties in the forecast? In this paper, we present DeepCOVID, an operational deep learning framework designed for real-time COVID-19 forecasting. DeepCOVID works well with sparse data and can handle noisy heterogeneous data signals by propagating the uncertainty from the data in a principled manner resulting in meaningful uncertainties in the forecast. The deployed framework also consists of modules for both real-time and retrospective exploratory analysis to enable interpretation of the forecasts. Results from real-time predictions (featured on the CDC website and FiveThirtyEight.com) since April 2020 indicates that our approach is competitive among the methods in the COVID-19 Forecast Hub, especially for short-term predictions.