Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
A Novel Approach to Recommendation System Business Workflows: A Case Study for Book E-Commerce Websites

Have you ever wondered why a song or a book or a movie becomes so popular that everyone everywhere starts talking about it? If we did not have the technology, we would say that people who love something would start recommending it to their friends and families. We live in the age of technology where there are so many algorithms that can discover the patterns of human interaction and make an excellent guess about someone’s opinion about something. These algorithms are building blocks of digital streaming services and E-Commerce websites. These services require as accurate as possible recommendation systems for them to function. While many businesses prefer one type or another of recommendation algorithms, in this study, we developed a hybrid recommendation system for a book E-Commerce website by integrating many popular classical and Deep Neural Network-based recommendation algorithms. Since explicit feedback is unavailable most of the time, all our implementations are on implicit binary feedback. The four algorithms that we were concerned about in this study were the well-known Collaborative filtering algorithms, item-based CF and user-based CF, ALS Matrix Factorization, and Deep Neural Network Based approaches. Consequently, comparing their performances and accuracy, it was not surprising that the Deep Neural Network approach was the most accurate recommender for our E-Commerce website.
Estimating Galactic Distances From Images Using Self-supervised  Representation Learning

We use a contrastive self-supervised learning framework to estimate distances to galaxies from their photometric images. We incorporate data augmentations from computer vision as well as an application-specific augmentation accounting for galactic dust. We find that the resulting visual representations of galaxy images are semantically useful and allow for fast similarity searches, and can be successfully fine-tuned for the task of redshift estimation. We show that (1) pretraining on a large corpus of unlabeled data followed by fine-tuning on some labels can attain the accuracy of a fully-supervised model which requires 2-4x more labeled data, and (2) that by fine-tuning our self-supervised representations using all available data labels in the Main Galaxy Sample of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), we outperform the state-of-the-art supervised learning method.
Bandwidth Allocation for Multiple Federated Learning Services in  Wireless Edge Networks

This paper studies a federated learning (FL) system, where \textit{multiple} FL services co-exist in a wireless network and share common wireless resources. It fills the void of wireless resource allocation for multiple simultaneous FL services in the existing literature. Our method designs a two-level resource allocation framework comprising \emph{intra-service} resource allocation and \emph{inter-service} resource allocation. The intra-service resource allocation problem aims to minimize the length of FL rounds by optimizing the bandwidth allocation among the clients of each FL service. Based on this, an inter-service resource allocation problem is further considered, which distributes bandwidth resources among multiple simultaneous FL services. We consider both cooperative and selfish providers of the FL services. For cooperative FL service providers, we design a distributed bandwidth allocation algorithm to optimize the overall performance of multiple FL services, meanwhile cater to the fairness among FL services and the privacy of clients. For selfish FL service providers, a new auction scheme is designed with the FL service owners as the bidders and the network provider as the auctioneer. The designed auction scheme strikes a balance between the overall FL performance and fairness. Our simulation results show that the proposed algorithms outperform other benchmarks under various network conditions.
Similarity Reasoning and Filtration for Image-Text Matching

Image-text matching plays a critical role in bridging the vision and language, and great progress has been made by exploiting the global alignment between image and sentence, or local alignments between regions and words. However, how to make the most of these alignments to infer more accurate matching scores is still underexplored. In this paper, we propose a novel Similarity Graph Reasoning and Attention Filtration (SGRAF) network for image-text matching. Specifically, the vector-based similarity representations are firstly learned to characterize the local and global alignments in a more comprehensive manner, and then the Similarity Graph Reasoning (SGR) module relying on one graph convolutional neural network is introduced to infer relation-aware similarities with both the local and global alignments. The Similarity Attention Filtration (SAF) module is further developed to integrate these alignments effectively by selectively attending on the significant and representative alignments and meanwhile casting aside the interferences of non-meaningful alignments. We demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method with achieving state-of-the-art performances on the Flickr30K and MSCOCO datasets, and the good interpretability of SGR and SAF modules with extensive qualitative experiments and analyses.
Shed Various Lights on a Low-Light Image: Multi-Level Enhancement Guided  by Arbitrary References

It is suggested that low-light image enhancement realizes one-to-many mapping since we have different definitions of NORMAL-light given application scenarios or users' aesthetic. However, most existing methods ignore subjectivity of the task, and simply produce one result with fixed brightness. This paper proposes a neural network for multi-level low-light image enhancement, which is user-friendly to meet various requirements by selecting different images as brightness reference. Inspired by style transfer, our method decomposes an image into two low-coupling feature components in the latent space, which allows the concatenation feasibility of the content components from low-light images and the luminance components from reference images. In such a way, the network learns to extract scene-invariant and brightness-specific information from a set of image pairs instead of learning brightness differences. Moreover, information except for the brightness is preserved to the greatest extent to alleviate color distortion. Extensive results show strong capacity and superiority of our network against existing methods.
A Framework for Fast Scalable BNN Inference using Googlenet and Transfer  Learning

Efficient and accurate object detection in video and image analysis is one of the major beneficiaries of the advancement in computer vision systems with the help of deep learning. With the aid of deep learning, more powerful tools evolved, which are capable to learn high-level and deeper features and thus can overcome the existing problems in traditional architectures of object detection algorithms. The work in this thesis aims to achieve high accuracy in object detection with good real-time performance. In the area of computer vision, a lot of research is going into the area of detection and processing of visual information, by improving the existing algorithms. The binarized neural network has shown high performance in various vision tasks such as image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation. The Modified National Institute of Standards and Technology database (MNIST), Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), and Street View House Numbers (SVHN) datasets are used which is implemented using a pre-trained convolutional neural network (CNN) that is 22 layers deep. Supervised learning is used in the work, which classifies the particular dataset with the proper structure of the model. In still images, to improve accuracy, Googlenet is used. The final layer of the Googlenet is replaced with the transfer learning to improve the accuracy of the Googlenet. At the same time, the accuracy in moving images can be maintained by transfer learning techniques. Hardware is the main backbone for any model to obtain faster results with a large number of datasets. Here, Nvidia Jetson Nano is used which is a graphics processing unit (GPU), that can handle a large number of computations in the process of object detection. Results show that the accuracy of objects detected by the transfer learning method is more when compared to the existing methods.
A survey of image quality defects and their effect on the performance of an automated visual evaluation classifier

Cervical cancer disproportionately affects low and middle income countries. Automated visual evaluation – using deep learning to analyze a digital cervix photograph – has been proposed for patient management. Image quality remains a key challenge, as it can be degraded by many types of image defects. A series of such defects were artificially added to a test set consisting of N=344 digitized cervigram images from existing studies. Replicate test sets were created for different image defects: blur, recoloring, obstructions of different colors and directions, rotations, and white Gaussian noise. The augmented images were evaluated by a classifier. The two most significant image defects were blur and Gaussian noise.
Active Learning Under Malicious Mislabeling and Poisoning Attacks

Deep neural networks usually require large labeled datasets for training to achieve state-of-the-art performance in many tasks, such as image classification and natural language processing. Although a lot of data is created each day by active Internet users, most of these data are unlabeled and are vulnerable to data poisoning attacks. In this paper, we develop an efficient active learning method that requires fewer labeled instances and incorporates the technique of adversarial retraining in which additional labeled artificial data are generated without increasing the budget of the labeling. The generated adversarial examples also provide a way to measure the vulnerability of the model. To check the performance of the proposed method under an adversarial setting, i.e., malicious mislabeling and data poisoning attacks, we perform an extensive evaluation on the reduced CIFAR-10 dataset, which contains only two classes: airplane and frog. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed active learning method is efficient for defending against malicious mislabeling and data poisoning attacks. Specifically, whereas the baseline active learning method based on the random sampling strategy performs poorly (about 50%) under a malicious mislabeling attack, the proposed active learning method can achieve the desired accuracy of 89% using only one-third of the dataset on average.
Detecting Hate Speech in Multi-modal Memes

In the past few years, there has been a surge of interest in multi-modal problems, from image captioning to visual question answering and beyond. In this paper, we focus on hate speech detection in multi-modal memes wherein memes pose an interesting multi-modal fusion problem. We aim to solve the Facebook Meme Challenge \cite{kiela2020hateful} which aims to solve a binary classification problem of predicting whether a meme is hateful or not. A crucial characteristic of the challenge is that it includes "benign confounders" to counter the possibility of models exploiting unimodal priors. The challenge states that the state-of-the-art models perform poorly compared to humans. During the analysis of the dataset, we realized that majority of the data points which are originally hateful are turned into benign just be describing the image of the meme. Also, majority of the multi-modal baselines give more preference to the hate speech (language modality). To tackle these problems, we explore the visual modality using object detection and image captioning models to fetch the "actual caption" and then combine it with the multi-modal representation to perform binary classification. This approach tackles the benign text confounders present in the dataset to improve the performance. Another approach we experiment with is to improve the prediction with sentiment analysis. Instead of only using multi-modal representations obtained from pre-trained neural networks, we also include the unimodal sentiment to enrich the features. We perform a detailed analysis of the above two approaches, providing compelling reasons in favor of the methodologies used.
Why Neural Machine Translation Prefers Empty Outputs

We investigate why neural machine translation (NMT) systems assign high probability to empty translations. We find two explanations. First, label smoothing makes correct-length translations less confident, making it easier for the empty translation to finally outscore them. Second, NMT systems use the same, high-frequency EoS word to end all target sentences, regardless of length. This creates an implicit smoothing that increases zero-length translations. Using different EoS types in target sentences of different lengths exposes and eliminates this implicit smoothing.
AsyncTaichi: On-the-fly Inter-kernel Optimizations for Imperative and  Spatially Sparse Programming

Leveraging spatial sparsity has become a popular approach to accelerate 3D computer graphics applications. Spatially sparse data structures and efficient sparse kernels (such as parallel stencil operations on active voxels), are key to achieve high performance. Existing work focuses on improving performance within a single sparse computational kernel. We show that a system that looks beyond a single kernel, plus additional domain-specific sparse data structure analysis, opens up exciting new space for optimizing sparse computations. Specifically, we propose a domain-specific data-flow graph model of imperative and sparse computation programs, which describes kernel relationships and enables easy analysis and optimization. Combined with an asynchronous execution engine that exposes a wide window of kernels, the inter-kernel optimizer can then perform effective sparse computation optimizations, such as eliminating unnecessary voxel list generations and removing voxel activation checks. These domain-specific optimizations further make way for classical general-purpose optimizations that are originally challenging to directly apply to computations with sparse data structures. Without any computational code modification, our new system leads to $4.02\times$ fewer kernel launches and $1.87\times$ speed up on our GPU benchmarks, including computations on Eulerian grids, Lagrangian particles, meshes, and automatic differentiation.
Equalization Loss v2: A New Gradient Balance Approach for Long-tailed  Object Detection

Recently proposed decoupled training methods emerge as a dominant paradigm for long-tailed object detection. But they require an extra fine-tuning stage, and the disjointed optimization of representation and classifier might lead to suboptimal results. However, end-to-end training methods, like equalization loss (EQL), still perform worse than decoupled training methods. In this paper, we reveal the main issue in long-tailed object detection is the imbalanced gradients between positives and negatives, and find that EQL does not solve it well. To address the problem of imbalanced gradients, we introduce a new version of equalization loss, called equalization loss v2 (EQL v2), a novel gradient guided reweighing mechanism that re-balances the training process for each category independently and equally. Extensive experiments are performed on the challenging LVIS benchmark. EQL v2 outperforms origin EQL by about 4 points overall AP with 14-18 points improvements on the rare categories. More importantly, it also surpasses decoupled training methods. Without further tuning for the Open Images dataset, EQL v2 improves EQL by 7.3 points AP, showing strong generalization ability. Codes have been released at https://github.com/tztztztztz/eqlv2
Image Inpainting Guided by Coherence Priors of Semantics and Textures

Existing inpainting methods have achieved promising performance in recovering defected images of specific scenes. However, filling holes involving multiple semantic categories remains challenging due to the obscure semantic boundaries and the mixture of different semantic textures. In this paper, we introduce coherence priors between the semantics and textures which make it possible to concentrate on completing separate textures in a semantic-wise manner. Specifically, we adopt a multi-scale joint optimization framework to first model the coherence priors and then accordingly interleavingly optimize image inpainting and semantic segmentation in a coarse-to-fine manner. A Semantic-Wise Attention Propagation (SWAP) module is devised to refine completed image textures across scales by exploring non-local semantic coherence, which effectively mitigates mix-up of textures. We also propose two coherence losses to constrain the consistency between the semantics and the inpainted image in terms of the overall structure and detailed textures. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method for challenging cases with complex holes.
Holistic 3D Human and Scene Mesh Estimation from Single View Images

The 3D world limits the human body pose and the human body pose conveys information about the surrounding objects. Indeed, from a single image of a person placed in an indoor scene, we as humans are adept at resolving ambiguities of the human pose and room layout through our knowledge of the physical laws and prior perception of the plausible object and human poses. However, few computer vision models fully leverage this fact. In this work, we propose an end-to-end trainable model that perceives the 3D scene from a single RGB image, estimates the camera pose and the room layout, and reconstructs both human body and object meshes. By imposing a set of comprehensive and sophisticated losses on all aspects of the estimations, we show that our model outperforms existing human body mesh methods and indoor scene reconstruction methods. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first model that outputs both object and human predictions at the mesh level, and performs joint optimization on the scene and human poses.
Scaling Laws for Autoregressive Generative Modeling

We identify empirical scaling laws for the cross-entropy loss in four domains: generative image modeling, video modeling, multimodal image$\leftrightarrow$text models, and mathematical problem solving. In all cases autoregressive Transformers smoothly improve in performance as model size and compute budgets increase, following a power-law plus constant scaling law. The optimal model size also depends on the compute budget through a power-law, with exponents that are nearly universal across all data domains. The cross-entropy loss has an information theoretic interpretation as $S($True$) + D_{\mathrm{KL}}($True$||$Model$)$, and the empirical scaling laws suggest a prediction for both the true data distribution's entropy and the KL divergence between the true and model distributions. With this interpretation, billion-parameter Transformers are nearly perfect models of the YFCC100M image distribution downsampled to an $8\times 8$ resolution, and we can forecast the model size needed to achieve any given reducible loss (ie $D_{\mathrm{KL}}$) in nats/image for other resolutions. We find a number of additional scaling laws in specific domains: (a) we identify a scaling relation for the mutual information between captions and images in multimodal models, and show how to answer the question "Is a picture worth a thousand words?"; (b) in the case of mathematical problem solving, we identify scaling laws for model performance when extrapolating beyond the training distribution; (c) we finetune generative image models for ImageNet classification and find smooth scaling of the classification loss and error rate, even as the generative loss levels off. Taken together, these results strengthen the case that scaling laws have important implications for neural network performance, including on downstream tasks.
Robust & Asymptotically Locally Optimal UAV-Trajectory Generation Based  on Spline Subdivision

Generating locally optimal UAV-trajectories is challenging due to the non-convex constraints of collision avoidance and actuation limits. We present the first local, optimization-based UAV-trajectory generator that simultaneously guarantees the validity and asymptotic optimality for known environments. \textit{Validity:} Given a feasible initial guess, our algorithm guarantees the satisfaction of all constraints throughout the process of optimization. \textit{Asymptotic Optimality:} We use an asymptotic exact piecewise approximation of the trajectory with an automatically adjustable resolution of its discretization. The trajectory converges under refinement to the first-order stationary point of the exact non-convex programming problem. Our method has additional practical advantages including joint optimality in terms of trajectory and time-allocation, and robustness to challenging environments as demonstrated in our experiments.
Attention that does not Explain Away

Models based on the Transformer architecture have achieved better accuracy than the ones based on competing architectures for a large set of tasks. A unique feature of the Transformer is its universal application of a self-attention mechanism, which allows for free information flow at arbitrary distances. Following a probabilistic view of the attention via the Gaussian mixture model, we find empirical evidence that the Transformer attention tends to "explain away" certain input neurons. To compensate for this, we propose a doubly-normalized attention scheme that is simple to implement and provides theoretical guarantees for avoiding the "explaining away" effect without introducing significant computational or memory cost. Empirically, we show that the new attention schemes result in improved performance on several well-known benchmarks.
How Neural Networks Extrapolate: From Feedforward to Graph Neural  Networks

We study how neural networks trained by gradient descent extrapolate, i.e., what they learn outside the support of the training distribution. Previous works report mixed empirical results when extrapolating with neural networks: while feedforward neural networks, a.k.a. multilayer perceptrons (MLPs), do not extrapolate well in certain simple tasks, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) -- structured networks with MLP modules -- have shown some success in more complex tasks. Working towards a theoretical explanation, we identify conditions under which MLPs and GNNs extrapolate well. First, we quantify the observation that ReLU MLPs quickly converge to linear functions along any direction from the origin, which implies that ReLU MLPs do not extrapolate most nonlinear functions. But, they can provably learn a linear target function when the training distribution is sufficiently "diverse". Second, in connection to analyzing the successes and limitations of GNNs, these results suggest a hypothesis for which we provide theoretical and empirical evidence: the success of GNNs in extrapolating algorithmic tasks to new data (e.g., larger graphs or edge weights) relies on encoding task-specific non-linearities in the architecture or features. Our theoretical analysis builds on a connection of over-parameterized networks to the neural tangent kernel. Empirically, our theory holds across different training settings.