Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Divide and Conquer: Answering Questions with Object Factorization and Compositional Reasoning

Humans have the innate capability to answer diverse questions, which is rooted in the natural ability to correlate different concepts based on their semantic relationships and decompose difficult problems into sub-tasks. On the contrary, existing visual reasoning methods assume training samples that capture every possible object and reasoning problem, and rely on black-boxed models that commonly exploit statistical priors. They have yet to develop the capability to address novel objects or spurious biases in real-world scenarios, and also fall short of interpreting the rationales behind their decisions. Inspired by humans' reasoning of the visual world, we tackle the aforementioned challenges from a compositional perspective, and propose an integral framework consisting of a principled object factorization method and a novel neural module network. Our factorization method decomposes objects based on their key characteristics, and automatically derives prototypes that represent a wide range of objects. With these prototypes encoding important semantics, the proposed network then correlates objects by measuring their similarity on a common semantic space and makes decisions with a compositional reasoning process. It is capable of answering questions with diverse objects regardless of their availability during training, and overcoming the issues of biased question-answer distributions. In addition to the enhanced generalizability, our framework also provides an interpretable interface for understanding the decision-making process of models. Our code is available at https://github.com/szzexpoi/POEM.
Movie Recommendation System Based on Traditional Recommendation Algorithm and CNN Model

As streaming services have expanded in recent years, an excellent recommendation algorithm, as one of the core technologies in movie service, brings huge benefits. Although the current application research of recommendation algorithms is mature, most systems or products usually rely on only one main algorithm. This makes it difficult for the system to overcome the shortcomings of various algorithms and cannot benefit from the combination of multiple recommendation algorithms. In addition, the widely used recommendation models are found to be unable to extract the finer features of users and movies, and the calculation time is very long. Meanwhile, the recommendation results are inaccurate, and they are not user-friendly. In this research, we design and construct a system to recommend movies which is consisted by a model based on a convolutional neural network consisting. By extracting the features of users and movies, we can calculate the direct similarity of different users' movies and then predict movie ratings to give recommendations. When extracting features of users and movies, we refer to traditional algorithms based on content and content. Through the "cosine similarity" and "user movie score matrix", the Item-Based Collaborative Filtering and User-Based Collaborative Filtering can be well implemented. To sum up, our movie recommendation system is based on Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model and the performance of the system is improved by adopting multiple recommendation algorithms such as content-based recommendation and system filtering. We efficiently trained the neural network and finally built a movie recommendation system with a faster operation speed, although some parts are not perfect.
Efficient Method to Message-Image Cryptography Using Reordered Image-Key

Color image may be secret or holding secret data, also secret messages may be so confidential.To protect these data, we have to use a simple and efficient method.In this research a method of data encryption-decryption will be presented.The suggested method will use a complicated PK to apply image encryption/decryption using XORing operation, the used image key will be reordered using a secret ordering sequence.Any modifications made to the PK during the decryption process will be regarded as a hacking attempt and result in corrupted decrypted data; hence, the encryption and decryption processes must employ the same secret information.The PK will provide an enormous key space that could resist any type of hacking attempts.The suggested method will be tested and the obtained results will be compared with those of DES and AES, the throughputs and speedup will be calculated.It will be shown how easily we can use encrypt decrypt color images with any size using a fix image key, and it will be shown how the suggested method maintain desirable values of MSE and PSNR parameters.
Role of Corporate Governance in Industries Facing Difference Levels of Competition: Empirical Evidence from Pakistan

The purpose of this study is to figure out the role of corporate governance in competitive industries and its impact along with product market competition on firm’s value. The sample of this study is obtained from the PSX-100 index, containing fifty-two non-financial firms from 2009 to 2018. This study documents the complementary association between competition in the product market and governance mechanisms. It concludes that good governance in Pakistani firms improves the value of the firm only in highly competitive industries, largely through mitigating the agency problem of empire-building. These findings are robust by employing alternate measures of sample division, firm governance structure, regression specifications, and ownership structure. Policymakers are required to focus governance policies mainly on the firms in highly competitive industries to get maximum progress. Moreover, they also need to improve anti-trust laws to increase the level of competition in all industries in the context of Pakistan.
Integration of wearable and ambient sensors towards characterization of physical effort

Abstract. Human performance monitoring in complex operational environments calls for sensing solutions that measure human physiology as well as human interactions with their surroundings. Recent advances in multimodal sensing have led to the development of intelligent environments that analyze human activities with high granularity. One of the greatest challenges is to unify multiple discrete sensing systems through synchronization and integration of multimodal data streams. This paper describes an intelligent environment that consolidates wearable skin-strain sensors for physiological monitoring; geophones and microphones to record ambient vibrations and sounds; and video cameras to visually observe human activities. We show proof-of-concept functionality by using the system to differentiate walking effort in human subjects. First, the work shows the alignment of wearable and ambient sensor time-history records. Then, data features are extracted and correlated to walking speed using three sensor modalities. Finally, feature-level analysis is done to associate the data features with the perceived walking exertion for each subject.
The Representational Status of Deep Learning Models

This paper aims to clarify the representational status of Deep Learning Models (DLMs). While commonly referred to as 'representations', what this entails is ambiguous due to a conflation of functional and relational conceptions of representation. This paper argues that while DLMs represent their targets in a relational sense, they are best understood as highly idealized models. This result has immediate implications for explainable AI (XAI) and directs philosophical attention toward examining the idealized nature of DLM representations and their role in future scientific investigation.
Actionlet-Dependent Contrastive Learning for Unsupervised Skeleton-Based Action Recognition

The self-supervised pretraining paradigm has achieved great success in skeleton-based action recognition. However, these methods treat the motion and static parts equally, and lack an adaptive design for different parts, which has a negative impact on the accuracy of action recognition. To realize the adaptive action modeling of both parts, we propose an Actionlet-Dependent Contrastive Learning method (ActCLR). The actionlet, defined as the discriminative subset of the human skeleton, effectively decomposes motion regions for better action modeling. In detail, by contrasting with the static anchor without motion, we extract the motion region of the skeleton data, which serves as the actionlet, in an unsupervised manner. Then, centering on actionlet, a motion-adaptive data transformation method is built. Different data transformations are applied to actionlet and non-actionlet regions to introduce more diversity while maintaining their own characteristics. Meanwhile, we propose a semantic-aware feature pooling method to build feature representations among motion and static regions in a distinguished manner. Extensive experiments on NTU RGB+D and PKUMMD show that the proposed method achieves remarkable action recognition performance. More visualization and quantitative experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Our project website is available at https://langlandslin.github.io/projects/ActCLR/
Less is More: Towards Lightweight Cost Estimator for Database Systems

We present FasCo, a simple yet effective learning-based estimator for the cost of executing a database query plan. FasCo uses significantly shorter training time and a lower inference cost than the state-of-the-art approaches, while achieving higher estimation accuracy. The effectiveness of FasCo comes from embedding abundant explicit execution-plan-based features and incorporating a novel technique called cardinality calibration. Extensive experimental results show that FasCo achieves orders of magnitude higher efficiency than the state-of-the-art methods: on the JOB-M benchmark dataset, it cuts off training plans by 98\%, reducing training time from more than two days to about eight minutes while entailing better accuracy. Furthermore, in dynamic environments, FasCo can maintain satisfactory accuracy even without retraining, narrowing the gap between learning-based estimators and real systems.
Multi-modal reward for visual relationships-based image captioning

Deep neural networks have achieved promising results in automatic image captioning due to their effective representation learning and context-based content generation capabilities. As a prominent type of deep features used in many of the recent image captioning methods, the well-known bottomup features provide a detailed representation of different objects of the image in comparison with the feature maps directly extracted from the raw image. However, the lack of high-level semantic information about the relationships between these objects is an important drawback of bottom-up features, despite their expensive and resource-demanding extraction procedure. To take advantage of visual relationships in caption generation, this paper proposes a deep neural network architecture for image captioning based on fusing the visual relationships information extracted from an image's scene graph with the spatial feature maps of the image. A multi-modal reward function is then introduced for deep reinforcement learning of the proposed network using a combination of language and vision similarities in a common embedding space. The results of extensive experimentation on the MSCOCO dataset show the effectiveness of using visual relationships in the proposed captioning method. Moreover, the results clearly indicate that the proposed multi-modal reward in deep reinforcement learning leads to better model optimization, outperforming several state-of-the-art image captioning algorithms, while using light and easy to extract image features. A detailed experimental study of the components constituting the proposed method is also presented.
DocRED-FE: A Document-Level Fine-Grained Entity And Relation Extraction Dataset

Joint entity and relation extraction (JERE) is one of the most important tasks in information extraction. However, most existing works focus on sentence-level coarse-grained JERE, which have limitations in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we construct a large-scale document-level fine-grained JERE dataset DocRED-FE, which improves DocRED with Fine-Grained Entity Type. Specifically, we redesign a hierarchical entity type schema including 11 coarse-grained types and 119 fine-grained types, and then re-annotate DocRED manually according to this schema. Through comprehensive experiments we find that: (1) DocRED-FE is challenging to existing JERE models; (2) Our fine-grained entity types promote relation classification. We make DocRED-FE with instruction and the code for our baselines publicly available at https://github.com/PKU-TANGENT/DOCRED-FE.
What does it take to catch a Chinchilla? Verifying Rules on Large-Scale Neural Network Training via Compute Monitoring

As advanced machine learning systems' capabilities begin to play a significant role in geopolitics and societal order, it may become imperative that (1) governments be able to enforce rules on the development of advanced ML systems within their borders, and (2) countries be able to verify each other's compliance with potential future international agreements on advanced ML development. This work analyzes one mechanism to achieve this, by monitoring the computing hardware used for large-scale NN training. The framework's primary goal is to provide governments high confidence that no actor uses large quantities of specialized ML chips to execute a training run in violation of agreed rules. At the same time, the system does not curtail the use of consumer computing devices, and maintains the privacy and confidentiality of ML practitioners' models, data, and hyperparameters. The system consists of interventions at three stages: (1) using on-chip firmware to occasionally save snapshots of the the neural network weights stored in device memory, in a form that an inspector could later retrieve; (2) saving sufficient information about each training run to prove to inspectors the details of the training run that had resulted in the snapshotted weights; and (3) monitoring the chip supply chain to ensure that no actor can avoid discovery by amassing a large quantity of un-tracked chips. The proposed design decomposes the ML training rule verification problem into a series of narrow technical challenges, including a new variant of the Proof-of-Learning problem [Jia et al. '21].
Deep Learning for Video-based Person Re-Identification: A Survey

Video-based person re-identification (video re-ID) has lately fascinated growing attention due to its broad practical applications in various areas, such as surveillance, smart city, and public safety. Nevertheless, video re-ID is quite difficult and is an ongoing stage due to numerous uncertain challenges such as viewpoint, occlusion, pose variation, and uncertain video sequence, etc. In the last couple of years, deep learning on video re-ID has continuously achieved surprising results on public datasets, with various approaches being developed to handle diverse problems in video re-ID. Compared to image-based re-ID, video re-ID is much more challenging and complex. To encourage future research and challenges, this first comprehensive paper introduces a review of up-to-date advancements in deep learning approaches for video re-ID. It broadly covers three important aspects, including brief video re-ID methods with their limitations, major milestones with technical challenges, and architectural design. It offers comparative performance analysis on various available datasets, guidance to improve video re-ID with valuable thoughts, and exciting research directions.
GNN-Ensemble: Towards Random Decision Graph Neural Networks

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have enjoyed wide spread applications in graph-structured data. However, existing graph based applications commonly lack annotated data. GNNs are required to learn latent patterns from a limited amount of training data to perform inferences on a vast amount of test data. The increased complexity of GNNs, as well as a single point of model parameter initialization, usually lead to overfitting and sub-optimal performance. In addition, it is known that GNNs are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. In this paper, we push one step forward on the ensemble learning of GNNs with improved accuracy, generalization, and adversarial robustness. Following the principles of stochastic modeling, we propose a new method called GNN-Ensemble to construct an ensemble of random decision graph neural networks whose capacity can be arbitrarily expanded for improvement in performance. The essence of the method is to build multiple GNNs in randomly selected substructures in the topological space and subfeatures in the feature space, and then combine them for final decision making. These GNNs in different substructure and subfeature spaces generalize their classification in complementary ways. Consequently, their combined classification performance can be improved and overfitting on the training data can be effectively reduced. In the meantime, we show that GNN-Ensemble can significantly improve the adversarial robustness against attacks on GNNs.
Polynomial Implicit Neural Representations For Large Diverse Datasets

Implicit neural representations (INR) have gained significant popularity for signal and image representation for many end-tasks, such as superresolution, 3D modeling, and more. Most INR architectures rely on sinusoidal positional encoding, which accounts for high-frequency information in data. However, the finite encoding size restricts the model's representational power. Higher representational power is needed to go from representing a single given image to representing large and diverse datasets. Our approach addresses this gap by representing an image with a polynomial function and eliminates the need for positional encodings. Therefore, to achieve a progressively higher degree of polynomial representation, we use element-wise multiplications between features and affine-transformed coordinate locations after every ReLU layer. The proposed method is evaluated qualitatively and quantitatively on large datasets like ImageNet. The proposed Poly-INR model performs comparably to state-of-the-art generative models without any convolution, normalization, or self-attention layers, and with far fewer trainable parameters. With much fewer training parameters and higher representative power, our approach paves the way for broader adoption of INR models for generative modeling tasks in complex domains. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/Rajhans0/Poly_INR}
Bias mitigation techniques in image classification: fair machine learning in human heritage collections

A major problem with using automated classification systems is that if they are not engineered correctly and with fairness considerations, they could be detrimental to certain populations. Furthermore, while engineers have developed cutting-edge technologies for image classification, there is still a gap in the application of these models in human heritage collections, where data sets usually consist of low-quality pictures of people with diverse ethnicity, gender, and age. In this work, we evaluate three bias mitigation techniques using two state-of-the-art neural networks, Xception and EfficientNet, for gender classification. Moreover, we explore the use of transfer learning using a fair data set to overcome the training data scarcity. We evaluated the effectiveness of the bias mitigation pipeline on a cultural heritage collection of photographs from the 19th and 20th centuries, and we used the FairFace data set for the transfer learning experiments. After the evaluation, we found that transfer learning is a good technique that allows better performance when working with a small data set. Moreover, the fairest classifier was found to be accomplished using transfer learning, threshold change, re-weighting and image augmentation as bias mitigation methods.
EPiC: Ensemble of Partial Point Clouds for Robust Classification

Robust point cloud classification is crucial for real-world applications, as consumer-type 3D sensors often yield partial and noisy data, degraded by various artifacts. In this work we propose a general ensemble framework, based on partial point cloud sampling. Each ensemble member is exposed to only partial input data. Three sampling strategies are used jointly, two local ones, based on patches and curves, and a global one of random sampling. We demonstrate the robustness of our method to various local and global degradations. We show that our framework significantly improves the robustness of top classification netowrks by a large margin. Our experimental setting uses the recently introduced ModelNet-C database by Ren et al.[24], where we reach SOTA both on unaugmented and on augmented data. Our unaugmented mean Corruption Error (mCE) is 0.64 (current SOTA is 0.86) and 0.50 for augmented data (current SOTA is 0.57). We analyze and explain these remarkable results through diversity analysis. Our code is available at: https://github.com/yossilevii100/EPiC
Geometrical aspects of lattice gauge equivariant convolutional neural networks

Lattice gauge equivariant convolutional neural networks (L-CNNs) are a framework for convolutional neural networks that can be applied to non-Abelian lattice gauge theories without violating gauge symmetry. We demonstrate how L-CNNs can be equipped with global group equivariance. This allows us to extend the formulation to be equivariant not just under translations but under global lattice symmetries such as rotations and reflections. Additionally, we provide a geometric formulation of L-CNNs and show how convolutions in L-CNNs arise as a special case of gauge equivariant neural networks on SU($N$) principal bundles.
Greedy Pruning with Group Lasso Provably Generalizes for Matrix Sensing

Pruning schemes have been widely used in practice to reduce the complexity of trained models with a massive number of parameters. In fact, several practical studies have shown that if a pruned model is fine-tuned with some gradient-based updates it generalizes well to new samples. Although the above pipeline, which we refer to as pruning + fine-tuning, has been extremely successful in lowering the complexity of trained models, there is very little known about the theory behind this success. In this paper, we address this issue by investigating the pruning + fine-tuning framework on the overparameterized matrix sensing problem with the ground truth $U_\star \in \mathbb{R}^{d \times r}$ and the overparameterized model $U \in \mathbb{R}^{d \times k}$ with $k \gg r$. We study the approximate local minima of the mean square error, augmented with a smooth version of a group Lasso regularizer, $\sum_{i=1}^k \| U e_i \|_2$. In particular, we provably show that pruning all the columns below a certain explicit $\ell_2$-norm threshold results in a solution $U_{\text{prune}}$ which has the minimum number of columns $r$, yet close to the ground truth in training loss. Moreover, in the subsequent fine-tuning phase, gradient descent initialized at $U_{\text{prune}}$ converges at a linear rate to its limit. While our analysis provides insights into the role of regularization in pruning, we also show that running gradient descent in the absence of regularization results in models which {are not suitable for greedy pruning}, i.e., many columns could have their $\ell_2$ norm comparable to that of the maximum. To the best of our knowledge, our results provide the first rigorous insights on why greedy pruning + fine-tuning leads to smaller models which also generalize well.