Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Tensorized Incomplete Multi-View Clustering with Intrinsic Graph Completion

Most of the existing incomplete multi-view clustering (IMVC) methods focus on attaining a consensus representation from different views but ignore the important information hidden in the missing views and the latent intrinsic structures in each view. To tackle these issues, in this paper, a unified and novel framework, named tensorized incomplete multi-view clustering with intrinsic graph completion (TIMVC_IGC) is proposed. Firstly, owing to the effectiveness of the low-rank representation in revealing the inherent structure of the data, we exploit it to infer the missing instances and construct the complete graph for each view. Afterwards, inspired by the structural consistency, a between-view consistency constraint is imposed to guarantee the similarity of the graphs from different views. More importantly, the TIMVC_IGC simultaneously learns the low-rank structures of the different views and explores the correlations of the different graphs in a latent manifold sub-space using a low-rank tensor constraint, such that the intrinsic graphs of the different views can be obtained. Finally, a consensus representation for each sample is gained with a co-regularization term for final clustering. Experimental results on several real-world databases illustrates that the proposed method can outperform the other state-of-the-art related methods for incomplete multi-view clustering.
Eliciting Structural and Semantic Global Knowledge in Unsupervised Graph Contrastive Learning

Graph Contrastive Learning (GCL) has recently drawn much research interest for learning generalizable node representations in a self-supervised manner. In general, the contrastive learning process in GCL is performed on top of the representations learned by a graph neural network (GNN) backbone, which transforms and propagates the node contextual information based on its local neighborhoods. However, nodes sharing similar characteristics may not always be geographically close, which poses a great challenge for unsupervised GCL efforts due to their inherent limitations in capturing such global graph knowledge. In this work, we address their inherent limitations by proposing a simple yet effective framework -- Simple Neural Networks with Structural and Semantic Contrastive Learning} (S^3-CL). Notably, by virtue of the proposed structural and semantic contrastive learning algorithms, even a simple neural network can learn expressive node representations that preserve valuable global structural and semantic patterns. Our experiments demonstrate that the node representations learned by S^3-CL) achieve superior performance on different downstream tasks compared with the state-of-the-art unsupervised GCL methods. Implementation and more experimental details are publicly available at https://github.com/kaize0409/S-3-CL.
Generative Image Inpainting with Segmentation Confusion Adversarial Training and Contrastive Learning

This paper presents a new adversarial training framework for image inpainting with segmentation confusion adversarial training (SCAT) and contrastive learning. SCAT plays an adversarial game between an inpainting generator and a segmentation network, which provides pixel-level local training signals and can adapt to images with free-form holes. By combining SCAT with standard global adversarial training, the new adversarial training framework exhibits the following three advantages simultaneously: (1) the global consistency of the repaired image, (2) the local fine texture details of the repaired image, and (3) the flexibility of handling images with free-form holes. Moreover, we propose the textural and semantic contrastive learning losses to stabilize and improve our inpainting model's training by exploiting the feature representation space of the discriminator, in which the inpainting images are pulled closer to the ground truth images but pushed farther from the corrupted images. The proposed contrastive losses better guide the repaired images to move from the corrupted image data points to the real image data points in the feature representation space, resulting in more realistic completed images. We conduct extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets, demonstrating our model's effectiveness and superiority both qualitatively and quantitatively.
VLTinT: Visual-Linguistic Transformer-in-Transformer for Coherent Video Paragraph Captioning

Video Paragraph Captioning aims to generate a multi-sentence description of an untrimmed video with multiple temporal event locations in a coherent storytelling. Following the human perception process, where the scene is effectively understood by decomposing it into visual (e.g. human, animal) and non-visual components (e.g. action, relations) under the mutual influence of vision and language, we first propose a visual-linguistic (VL) feature. In the proposed VL feature, the scene is modeled by three modalities including (i) a global visual environment; (ii) local visual main agents; (iii) linguistic scene elements. We then introduce an autoregressive Transformer-in-Transformer (TinT) to simultaneously capture the semantic coherence of intra- and inter-event contents within a video. Finally, we present a new VL contrastive loss function to guarantee the learnt embedding features are consistent with the captions semantics. Comprehensive experiments and extensive ablation studies on the ActivityNet Captions and YouCookII datasets show that the proposed Visual-Linguistic Transformer-in-Transform (VLTinT) outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy and diversity. The source code is made publicly available at: https://github.com/UARK-AICV/VLTinT.
Black Box Optimization Using QUBO and the Cross Entropy Method

Black-box optimization (BBO) can be used to optimize functions whose analytic form is unknown. A common approach to realising BBO is to learn a surrogate model which approximates the target black-box function which can then be solved via white-box optimization methods. In this paper, we present our approach BOX-QUBO, where the surrogate model is a QUBO matrix. However, unlike in previous state-of-the-art approaches, this matrix is not trained entirely by regression, but mostly by classification between "good" and "bad" solutions. This better accounts for the low capacity of the QUBO matrix, resulting in significantly better solutions overall. We tested our approach against the state-of-the-art on four domains and in all of them BOX-QUBO showed better results. A second contribution of this paper is the idea to also solve white-box problems, i.e. problems which could be directly formulated as QUBO, by means of black-box optimization in order to reduce the size of the QUBOs to the information-theoretic minimum. Experiments show that this significantly improves the results for MAX-k-SAT.
FeedFormer: Revisiting Transformer Decoder for Efficient Semantic Segmentation

With the success of Vision Transformer (ViT) in image classification, its variants have yielded great success in many downstream vision tasks. Among those, the semantic segmentation task has also benefited greatly from the advance of ViT variants. However, most studies of the transformer for semantic segmentation only focus on designing efficient transformer encoders, rarely giving attention to designing the decoder. Several studies make attempts in using the transformer decoder as the segmentation decoder with class-wise learnable query. Instead, we aim to directly use the encoder features as the queries. This paper proposes the Feature Enhancing Decoder transFormer (FeedFormer) that enhances structural information using the transformer decoder. Our goal is to decode the high-level encoder features using the lowest-level encoder feature. We do this by formulating high-level features as queries, and the lowest-level feature as the key and value. This enhances the high-level features by collecting the structural information from the lowest-level feature. Additionally, we use a simple reformation trick of pushing the encoder blocks to take the place of the existing self-attention module of the decoder to improve efficiency. We show the superiority of our decoder with various light-weight transformer-based decoders on popular semantic segmentation datasets. Despite the minute computation, our model has achieved state-of-the-art performance in the performance computation trade-off. Our model FeedFormer-B0 surpasses SegFormer-B0 with 1.8% higher mIoU and 7.1% less computation on ADE20K, and 1.7% higher mIoU and 14.4% less computation on Cityscapes, respectively. Code will be released at: https://github.com/jhshim1995/FeedFormer.
Data-Efficient Image Quality Assessment with Attention-Panel Decoder

Blind Image Quality Assessment (BIQA) is a fundamental task in computer vision, which however remains unresolved due to the complex distortion conditions and diversified image contents. To confront this challenge, we in this paper propose a novel BIQA pipeline based on the Transformer architecture, which achieves an efficient quality-aware feature representation with much fewer data. More specifically, we consider the traditional fine-tuning in BIQA as an interpretation of the pre-trained model. In this way, we further introduce a Transformer decoder to refine the perceptual information of the CLS token from different perspectives. This enables our model to establish the quality-aware feature manifold efficiently while attaining a strong generalization capability. Meanwhile, inspired by the subjective evaluation behaviors of human, we introduce a novel attention panel mechanism, which improves the model performance and reduces the prediction uncertainty simultaneously. The proposed BIQA method maintains a light-weight design with only one layer of the decoder, yet extensive experiments on eight standard BIQA datasets (both synthetic and authentic) demonstrate its superior performance to the state-of-the-art BIQA methods, i.e., achieving the SRCC values of 0.875 (vs. 0.859 in LIVEC) and 0.980 (vs. 0.969 in LIVE). Checkpoints, logs and code will be available at https://github.com/narthchin/DEIQT.
Breaking Immutable: Information-Coupled Prototype Elaboration for Few-Shot Object Detection

Few-shot object detection, expecting detectors to detect novel classes with a few instances, has made conspicuous progress. However, the prototypes extracted by existing meta-learning based methods still suffer from insufficient representative information and lack awareness of query images, which cannot be adaptively tailored to different query images. Firstly, only the support images are involved for extracting prototypes, resulting in scarce perceptual information of query images. Secondly, all pixels of all support images are treated equally when aggregating features into prototype vectors, thus the salient objects are overwhelmed by the cluttered background. In this paper, we propose an Information-Coupled Prototype Elaboration (ICPE) method to generate specific and representative prototypes for each query image. Concretely, a conditional information coupling module is introduced to couple information from the query branch to the support branch, strengthening the query-perceptual information in support features. Besides, we design a prototype dynamic aggregation module that dynamically adjusts intra-image and inter-image aggregation weights to highlight the salient information useful for detecting query images. Experimental results on both Pascal VOC and MS COCO demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in almost all settings. Code will be available at: https://github.com/lxn96/ICPE.
Holistic Adversarial Robustness of Deep Learning Models

Adversarial robustness studies the worst-case performance of a machine learning model to ensure safety and reliability. With the proliferation of deep-learning-based technology, the potential risks associated with model development and deployment can be amplified and become dreadful vulnerabilities. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of research topics and foundational principles of research methods for adversarial robustness of deep learning models, including attacks, defenses, verification, and novel applications.
Revisiting the Spatial and Temporal Modeling for Few-Shot Action Recognition

Spatial and temporal modeling is one of the most core aspects of few-shot action recognition. Most previous works mainly focus on long-term temporal relation modeling based on high-level spatial representations, without considering the crucial low-level spatial features and short-term temporal relations. Actually, the former feature could bring rich local semantic information, and the latter feature could represent motion characteristics of adjacent frames, respectively. In this paper, we propose SloshNet, a new framework that revisits the spatial and temporal modeling for few-shot action recognition in a finer manner. First, to exploit the low-level spatial features, we design a feature fusion architecture search module to automatically search for the best combination of the low-level and high-level spatial features. Next, inspired by the recent transformer, we introduce a long-term temporal modeling module to model the global temporal relations based on the extracted spatial appearance features. Meanwhile, we design another short-term temporal modeling module to encode the motion characteristics between adjacent frame representations. After that, the final predictions can be obtained by feeding the embedded rich spatial-temporal features to a common frame-level class prototype matcher. We extensively validate the proposed SloshNet on four few-shot action recognition datasets, including Something-Something V2, Kinetics, UCF101, and HMDB51. It achieves favorable results against state-of-the-art methods in all datasets.
SCEI: A Smart-Contract Driven Edge Intelligence Framework for IoT Systems

Federated learning (FL) enables collaborative training of a shared model on edge devices while maintaining data privacy. FL is effective when dealing with independent and identically distributed (iid) datasets, but struggles with non-iid datasets. Various personalized approaches have been proposed, but such approaches fail to handle underlying shifts in data distribution, such as data distribution skew commonly observed in real-world scenarios (e.g., driver behavior in smart transportation systems changing across time and location). Additionally, trust concerns among unacquainted devices and security concerns with the centralized aggregator pose additional challenges. To address these challenges, this paper presents a dynamically optimized personal deep learning scheme based on blockchain and federated learning. Specifically, the innovative smart contract implemented in the blockchain allows distributed edge devices to reach a consensus on the optimal weights of personalized models. Experimental evaluations using multiple models and real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves higher accuracy and faster convergence compared to traditional federated and personalized learning approaches.
Learning the Kalman Filter with Fine-Grained Sample Complexity

We develop the first end-to-end sample complexity of model-free policy gradient (PG) methods in discrete-time infinite-horizon Kalman filtering. Specifically, we introduce the receding-horizon policy gradient (RHPG-KF) framework and demonstrate sample complexity for RHPG-KF in learning a stabilizing filter that is ϵ-close to the optimal Kalman filter. Notably, the proposed RHPG-KF framework does not require the system to be open-loop stable nor assume any prior knowledge of a stabilizing filter. Our results shed light on applying model-free PG methods to control a linear dynamical system where the state measurements could be corrupted by statistical noises and other (possibly adversarial) disturbances.
Privacy-Preserving Video Conferencing via Thermal-Generative Images

Due to the COVID-19 epidemic, video conferencing has evolved as a new paradigm of communication and teamwork. However, private and personal information can be easily leaked through cameras during video conferencing. This includes leakage of a person's appearance as well as the contents in the background. This paper proposes a novel way of using online low-resolution thermal images as conditions to guide the synthesis of RGB images, bringing a promising solution for real-time video conferencing when privacy leakage is a concern. SPADE-SR [1] (Spatially-Adaptive De-normalization with Self Resampling), a variant of SPADE, is adopted to incorporate the spatial property of a thermal heatmap and the non-thermal property of a normal, privacy-free pre-recorded RGB image provided in a form of latent code. We create a PAIR-LRT-Human (LRT = Low-Resolution Thermal) dataset to validate our claims. The result enables a convenient way of video conferencing where users no longer need to groom themselves and tidy up backgrounds for a short meeting. Additionally, it allows a user to switch to a different appearance and background during a conference.
FHIR-PYrate: a data science friendly Python package to query FHIR servers

Abstract Background We present FHIR-PYrate, a Python package to handle the full clinical data collection and extraction process. The software is to be plugged into a modern hospital domain, where electronic patient records are used to handle the entire patient’s history. Most research institutes follow the same procedures to build study cohorts, but mainly in a non-standardized and repetitive way. As a result, researchers spend time writing boilerplate code, which could be used for more challenging tasks. Methods The package can improve and simplify existing processes in the clinical research environment. It collects all needed functionalities into a straightforward interface that can be used to query a FHIR server, download imaging studies and filter clinical documents. The full capacity of the search mechanism of the FHIR REST API is available to the user, leading to a uniform querying process for all resources, thus simplifying the customization of each use case. Additionally, valuable features like parallelization and filtering are included to make it more performant. Results As an exemplary practical application, the package can be used to analyze the prognostic significance of routine CT imaging and clinical data in breast cancer with tumor metastases in the lungs. In this example, the initial patient cohort is first collected using ICD-10 codes. For these patients, the survival information is also gathered. Some additional clinical data is retrieved, and CT scans of the thorax are downloaded. Finally, the survival analysis can be computed using a deep learning model with the CT scans, the TNM staging and positivity of relevant markers as input. This process may vary depending on the FHIR server and available clinical data, and can be customized to cover even more use cases. Conclusions FHIR-PYrate opens up the possibility to quickly and easily retrieve FHIR data, download image data, and search medical documents for keywords within a Python package. With the demonstrated functionality, FHIR-PYrate opens an easy way to assemble research collectives automatically.
Power-Weighted Prediction of Photovoltaic Power Generation in the Context of Structural Equation Modeling

With the popularization of solar energy development and utilization, photovoltaic power generation is widely used in countries around the world and is increasingly becoming an important part of new energy generation. However, it cannot be ignored that changes in solar radiation and meteorological conditions can cause volatility and intermittency in power generation, which, in turn, affects the stability and security of the power grid. Therefore, many studies aim to solve this problem by constructing accurate power prediction models for PV plants. However, most studies focus on adjusting the photovoltaic power station prediction model structure and parameters to achieve a high prediction accuracy. Few studies have examined how the various parameters affect the output of photovoltaic power plants, as well as how significantly and effectively these elements influence the forecast accuracy. In this study, we evaluate the correlations between solar irradiance intensity (GHI), atmospheric density (ρ), cloudiness (CC), wind speed (WS), relative humidity (RH), and ambient temperature (T) and a photovoltaic power station using a Pearson correlation analysis and remove the factors that have little correlation. The direct and indirect effects of the five factors other than wind speed (CC) on the photovoltaic power station are then estimated based on structural equation modeling; the indirect effects are generated by the interaction between the variables and ultimately have an impact on the power of the photovoltaic power station. Particle swarm optimization-based support vector regression (PSO-SVR) and variable weights utilizing the Mahalanobis distance were used to estimate the power of the photovoltaic power station over a short period of time, based on the contribution of the various solar radiation and climatic elements. Experiments were conducted on the basis of the measured data from a distributed photovoltaic power station in Changzhou, Jiangsu province, China. The results demonstrate that the short-term power of a photovoltaic power station is significantly influenced by the global horizontal irradiance (GHI), ambient temperature (T), and atmospheric density (ρ). Furthermore, the results also demonstrate how calculating the relative importance of the various contributing factors can help to improve the accuracy when estimating how powerful a photovoltaic power station will be. The multiple weighted regression model described in this study is demonstrated to be superior to the standard multiple regression model (PSO-SVR). The multiple weighted regression model resulted in a 7.2% increase in R2, a 10.7% decrease in the sum of squared error (SSE), a 2.2% decrease in the root mean square error (RMSE), and a 2.06% decrease in the continuous ranked probability score (CRPS).
Towards an Optimal KELM Using the PSO-BOA Optimization Strategy with Applications in Data Classification

The features of the kernel extreme learning machine—efficient processing, improved performance, and less human parameter setting—have allowed it to be effectively used to batch multi-label classification tasks. These classic classification algorithms must at present contend with accuracy and space–time issues as a result of the vast and quick, multi-label, and concept drift features of the developing data streams in the practical application sector. The KELM training procedure still has a difficulty in that it has to be repeated numerous times independently in order to maximize the model’s generalization performance or the number of nodes in the hidden layer. In this paper, a kernel extreme learning machine multi-label data classification method based on the butterfly algorithm optimized by particle swarm optimization is proposed. The proposed algorithm, which fully accounts for the optimization of the model generalization ability and the number of hidden layer nodes, can train multiple KELM hidden layer networks at once while maintaining the algorithm’s current time complexity and avoiding a significant number of repeated calculations. The simulation results demonstrate that, in comparison to the PSO-KELM, BBA-KELM, and BOA-KELM algorithms, the PSOBOA-KELM algorithm proposed in this paper can more effectively search the kernel extreme learning machine parameters and more effectively balance the global and local performance, resulting in a KELM prediction model with a higher prediction accuracy.