Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
New Blockchain-Based Architecture for Service Interoperations in Internet of Things

Internet of Things (IoT) is able to integrate the computation and physical processes as services in the social world. The number of services at the edge of IoT is rising rapidly due to the prevalent uses of smart devices and cyber-physical systems (CPSs). To explore the promising applications of IoT services, one of the challenges is to enable the interoperability of the services in a decentralized environment. The blockchain technology (BCT) has been proven as a promising solution to establish the trust of data and call for executions; theoretically, it can be used to support the interoperability of services. BCT verifies data or a process and stores it as a transaction in a distributed ledger. Similar to the topology to IoT, applying BCT at the edges of the network exhibits the distributed characteristic. However, currently, BCT is still facing the challenges for interoperability due to a number of factors such as consensus protocols, block sizes, and interval of blocks. Prominent protocols such as proof-of-work (PoW) may cause excessive delays in finality settlement. One promising protocol Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerant offers a fast finality settlement and uses hyperledger to support the scalability; however, the trust might also be a concern if the validators are chosen improperly. This paper discusses the interoperability of IoT services and the challenges and proposes an architecture solution by integrating BCT, service-oriented architecture (SoA), and enablers of key performance indicators (KPIs) and service selections. The proposed architecture aims to solve both interoperability and trust issues for IoT services. The feasibility of the proposed method is validated by the examples of smart contract implementations.
Model Reconstruction from Model Explanations

We show through theory and experiment that gradient-based explanations of a model quickly reveal the model itself. Our results speak to a tension between the desire to keep a proprietary model secret and the ability to offer model explanations.
UAV Autonomous Target Search Based on Deep Reinforcement Learning in Complex Disaster Scene

In recent years, artificial intelligence has played an increasingly important role in the field of automated control of drones. After AlphaGo used Intensive Learning to defeat the World Go Championship, intensive learning gained widespread attention. However, most of the existing reinforcement learning is applied in games with only two or three moving directions. This paper proves that deep reinforcement learning can be successfully applied to an ancient puzzle game Nokia Snake after further processing. A game with four directions of movement. Through deep intensive learning and training, the Snake (or self-learning Snake) learns to find the target path autonomously, and the average score on the Snake Game exceeds the average score on human level. This kind of Snake algorithm that can find the target path autonomously has broad prospects in the industrial field, such as: UAV oil and gas field inspection, Use drones to search for and rescue injured people after a complex disaster. As we all know, post-disaster relief requires careful staffing and material dispatch. There are many factors that need to be considered in the artificial planning of disaster relief. Therefore, we want to design a drone that can search and rescue personnel and dispatch materials. Current drones are quite mature in terms of automation control, but current drones require manual control. Therefore, the Snake algorithm proposed here to be able to find the target path autonomously is an attempt and key technology in the design of autonomous search and rescue personnel and material dispatching drones.
An enhanced hybrid image watermarking scheme for security of medical and non-medical images based on DWT and 2-D SVD

In this paper, we proposed a blind image watermarking scheme to enhance the effectiveness of hybrid Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) and Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) based schemes using the second level of SVD. The foremost contribution of this paper is to eliminate the constraints of our previous proposed scheme based on DWT and 2-level SVD. In the previous scheme, the size of the watermark was dependent to the size of cover image. For example, for a cover image with the size of 512*512, the watermark should be changed to 64*64 because of the limitation in capacity. In the proposed scheme, we enhanced the scheme to be independent from the sizes of cover and watermark images as well as improving the robustness and imperceptibility. For this purpose, we presented image blocking to find optimum block size for embedding the watermark and to correct the enslavement of capacity with the host image size. To achieve these goals, an additional preprocessing is performed on the watermark image before watermark embedding. The watermark image will be duplicated redundantly to the size of the cover image. Then both cover and watermark images will be divided into non overlap 16*16 blocks. Also, security is ensured in this scheme by proposing a two-level authentication system for watermark extraction to detect both false positive and false negative problems. The proposed scheme is tested and certified for medical and non-medical images exposing on 10 types of signal processing and geometric attacks. Experimental result shows, significant enhancement in both imperceptibility and robustness with the average of 46.9496 db and more than 99% respectively, while image blocking makes the capacity independent from the size of the host image.
Libra: Succinct Zero-Knowledge Proofs with Optimal Prover Computation

We present Libra, the first zero-knowledge proof system that has both optimal prover time and succinct proof size/verification time. In particular, if C is the size of the circuit being proved (i) the prover time is O(C) irrespective of the circuit type; (ii) the proof size and verification time are both $$O(d\log C)$$ for d-depth log-space uniform circuits (such as RAM programs). In addition Libra features an one-time trusted setup that depends only on the size of the input to the circuit and not on the circuit logic. Underlying Libra is a new linear-time algorithm for the prover of the interactive proof protocol by Goldwasser, Kalai and Rothblum (also known as GKR protocol), as well as an efficient approach to turn the GKR protocol to zero-knowledge using small masking polynomials. Not only does Libra have excellent asymptotics, but it is also efficient in practice. For example, our implementation shows that it takes 200 s to generate a proof for constructing a SHA2-based Merkle tree root on 256 leaves, outperforming all existing zero-knowledge proof systems. Proof size and verification time of Libra are also competitive.
Variational Spin-Squeezing Algorithms on Programmable Quantum Sensors

Arrays of atoms trapped in optical tweezers combine features of programmable analog quantum simulators with atomic quantum sensors. Here we propose variational quantum algorithms, tailored for tweezer arrays as programmable quantum sensors, capable of generating entangled states on-demand for precision metrology. The scheme is designed to generate metrological enhancement by optimizing it in a feedback loop on the quantum device itself, thus preparing the best entangled states given the available quantum resources. We apply our ideas to generate spin-squeezed states on Sr atom tweezer arrays, where finite-range interactions are generated through Rydberg dressing. The complexity of experimental variational optimization of our quantum circuits is expected to scale favorably with system size. We numerically show our approach to be robust to noise, and surpassing known protocols.
A novel image encryption system merging fractional-order edge detection and generalized chaotic maps

This paper presents a novel lossless image encryption algorithm based on edge detection and generalized chaotic maps for key generation. Generalized chaotic maps, including the fractional-order, the delayed, and the Double-Humped logistic maps, are used to design the pseudo-random number key generator. The generalization parameters add extra degrees of freedom to the system and increase the keyspace achieving more secure keys. Fractional order edge detection filters exhibited better noise robustness than the conventional integer-order ones, rendering the system to be suitable for medical imaging security. The proposed system flexibly integrate different edge detectors, as well as various logistic maps for key generation. The sensitivity of the chaotic maps to all parameters guarantees the encryption system key sensitivity. Security analyses aspects assure the efficiency of the proposed algorithm performance, having high pixel correlation coefficients and flat histograms of cipher images reported. A comparison between the proposed scheme with existing cryptosystems is also presented, regarding histogram uniformity, contrast analysis, Shannon entropy measurements. Compared to the state of the art algorithms, the proposed algorithm has higher statistical and cryptanalytic properties.
Toward Characterizing Blockchain-Based Cryptocurrencies for Highly Accurate Predictions

Recently, the Blockchain-based cryptocurrency market witnessed enormous growth. Bitcoin, the leading cryptocurrency, reached all-time highs many times over the year leading to speculations to explain the trend in its growth. In this article, we study Bitcoin and Ethereum and explore features in their network that explain their price hikes. We gather data and analyze user and network activity that highly impact the price of these cryptocurrencies. We monitor the change in the activities over time and relate them to economic theories. We identify key network features that help us to determine the demand and supply dynamics in a cryptocurrency. Finally, we use machine learning methods to construct models that predict Bitcoin price. Based on our experimental results using two large datasets for validation, we confirm that our approach provides an accuracy of up to 99% for Bitcoin and Ethereum price prediction in both instances.
Chaos-enhanced synchronized bat optimizer

In this paper, a chaos-enhanced bat algorithm is proposed to tackle the global optimization problems. Bat algorithm is a relatively new stochastic optimizer inspired by the echolocation behavior of bats in nature. Due to its effectiveness, it has been applied to many fields such as engineering design, feature selection, and machine learning. However, the classical approach is often prone to falling into local optima. This paper proposes an enhanced bat algorithm to alleviate this problem observed in the original algorithm. The proposed method controls the steps of chaotic mapping by a threshold and synchronizes the velocity of agents using a velocity inertia weight. These mechanisms are designed to boost the stability and convergence speed of the bat algorithm, instantly. Eighteen well-established and the state-of-the-art meta-heuristic approaches are considered to validate the effectiveness of the developed algorithm. Experimental results reveal that the proposed chaos-enhanced bat algorithm is not only superior to the well-established algorithms such as the original method but also the latest improved approaches. Also, the proposed method is successfully applied to I-beam design problems, welded beam design, and pressure vessel design. The results show that chaos-enhanced bat algorithm can deal with unconstrained and constrained feature spaces, effectively.
Nonlinear Regression via Deep Negative Correlation Learning

Nonlinear regression has been extensively employed in many computer vision problems (e.g., crowd counting, age estimation, affective computing). Under the umbrella of deep learning, two common solutions exist i) transforming nonlinear regression to a robust loss function which is jointly optimizable with the deep convolutional network, and ii) utilizing ensemble of deep networks. Although some improved performance is achieved, the former may be lacking due to the intrinsic limitation of choosing a single hypothesis and the latter may suffer from much larger computational complexity. To cope with those issues, we propose to regress via an efficient “divide and conquer” manner. The core of our approach is the generalization of negative correlation learning that has been shown, both theoretically and empirically, to work well for non-deep regression problems. Without extra parameters, the proposed method controls the bias-variance-covariance trade-off systematically and usually yields a deep regression ensemble where each base model is both “accurate” and “diversified.” Moreover, we show that each sub-problem in the proposed method has less Rademacher Complexity and thus is easier to optimize. Extensive experiments on several diverse and challenging tasks including crowd counting, personality analysis, age estimation, and image super-resolution demonstrate the superiority over challenging baselines as well as the versatility of the proposed method. The source code and trained models are available on our project page: https://mmcheng.net/dncl/.
An Indirect Eavesdropping Attack of Keystrokes on Touch Screen through Acoustic Sensing

This paper demonstrates the feasibility of a side-channel attack to infer keystrokes on touch screen leveraging an off-the-shelf smartphone. Although there exist some studies on keystroke eavesdropping attacks on touch screen, they are mainly direct eavesdropping attacks, i.e., require the device of victims compromised to provide side-channel information for the adversary, which are hardly launched in practical scenarios. In this work, we show the practicability of an indirect eavesdropping attack, KeyListener, which infers keystrokes on QWERTY keyboards of touch screen leveraging audio devices on a smartphone. We investigate the attenuation of acoustic signals, and find that a user's keystroke fingers can be localized through the attenuation of acoustic signals received by the microphones in the smartphone. We then utilize the attenuation of acoustic signals to localize each keystroke, and further analyze errors induced by ambient noises. To improve the accuracy of keystroke localization, KeyListener further tracks finger movements during inputs through phase change and Doppler effect to reduce errors of acoustic signal attenuation-based keystroke localization. In addition, a binary tree-based search approach is employed to infer keystrokes in a context-aware manner. The proposed keystroke eavesdropping attack is robust to various environments without the assistance of additional infrastructures. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the accuracy of keystroke inference in top-5 candidates can approach 90 percent with a top-5 error rate of around 6 percent, which is a strong indication of the possible user privacy leakage of inputs on QWERTY keyboard.
TransEdge: Translating Relation-Contextualized Embeddings for Knowledge Graphs

Learning knowledge graph (KG) embeddings has received increasing attention in recent years. Most embedding models in literature interpret relations as linear or bilinear mapping functions to operate on entity embeddings. However, we find that such relation-level modeling cannot capture the diverse relational structures of KGs well. In this paper, we propose a novel edge-centric embedding model TransEdge, which contextualizes relation representations in terms of specific head-tail entity pairs. We refer to such contextualized representations of a relation as edge embeddings and interpret them as translations between entity embeddings. TransEdge achieves promising performance on different prediction tasks. Our experiments on benchmark datasets indicate that it obtains the state-of-the-art results on embedding-based entity alignment. We also show that TransEdge is complementary with conventional entity alignment methods. Moreover, it shows very competitive performance on link prediction.
Fairness GAN: Generating datasets with fairness properties using a generative adversarial network

We introduce the Fairness GAN (generative adversarial network), an approach for generating a dataset that is plausibly similar to a given multimedia dataset, but is more fair with respect to protected attributes in decision making. We propose a novel auxiliary classifier GAN that strives for demographic parity or equality of opportunity and show empirical results on several datasets, including the CelebFaces Attributes (CelebA) dataset, the Quick, Draw! dataset, and a dataset of soccer player images and the offenses for which they were called. The proposed formulation is well suited to absorbing unlabeled data; we leverage this to augment the soccer dataset with the much larger CelebA dataset. The methodology tends to improve demographic parity and equality of opportunity while generating plausible images.
MGFS: A multi-label graph-based feature selection algorithm via PageRank centrality

In multi-label data, each instance corresponds to a set of labels instead of one label whereby the instances belonging to a label in the corresponding column of that label are assigned 1, while instances that do not belong to that label are assigned 0 in the data set. This type of data is usually considered as high-dimensional data, so many methods, using machine learning algorithms, seek to choose the best subset of features for reducing the dimensionality of data and then to create an acceptable model for classification. In this paper, we have designed a fast algorithm for feature selection on the multi-label data using the PageRank algorithm, which is an effective method used to calculate the importance of web pages on the Internet. This algorithm, which is called multi-label graph-based feature selection (MGFS), first constructs an M × L matrix, called Correlation Distance Matrix (CDM), where M is the number of features and L represents the number of class labels. Then, MGFS creates a complete weighted graph, called Feature-Label Graph (FLG), where each feature is considered as a vertex, and the weight between two vertices (or features) represents their Euclidean distance in CDM. Finally, the importance of each graph vertex (or feature) is estimated via the PageRank algorithm. In the proposed method, the number of features can be determined by the user. To prove the performance of the proposed algorithm, we have tested this algorithm with several methods for multi-label feature selection and on several multi-label datasets with different dimensions. The results show the superiority of the proposed method in the classification criteria and run-time.
Towards Adversarially Robust Object Detection

Object detection is an important vision task and has emerged as an indispensable component in many vision system, rendering its robustness as an increasingly important performance factor for practical applications. While object detection models have been demonstrated to be vulnerable against adversarial attacks by many recent works, very few efforts have been devoted to improving their robustness. In this work, we take an initial attempt towards this direction. We first revisit and systematically analyze object detectors and many recently developed attacks from the perspective of model robustness. We then present a multi-task learning perspective of object detection and identify an asymmetric role of task losses. We further develop an adversarial training approach which can leverage the multiple sources of attacks for improving the robustness of detection models. Extensive experiments on PASCAL-VOC and MS-COCO verified the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
Bayesian Relational Memory for Semantic Visual Navigation

We introduce a new memory architecture, Bayesian Relational Memory (BRM), to improve the generalization ability for semantic visual navigation agents in unseen environments, where an agent is given a semantic target to navigate towards. BRM takes the form of a probabilistic relation graph over semantic entities (e.g., room types), which allows (1) capturing the layout prior from training environments, i.e., prior knowledge, (2) estimating posterior layout at test time, i.e., memory update, and (3) efficient planning for navigation, altogether. We develop a BRM agent consisting of a BRM module for producing sub-goals and a goal-conditioned locomotion module for control. When testing in unseen environments, the BRM agent outperforms baselines that do not explicitly utilize the probabilistic relational memory structure.
Towards Bridging Semantic Gap to Improve Semantic Segmentation

Aggregating multi-level features is essential for capturing multi-scale context information for precise scene semantic segmentation. However, the improvement by directly fusing shallow features and deep features becomes limited as the semantic gap between them increases. To solve this problem, we explore two strategies for robust feature fusion. One is enhancing shallow features using a semantic enhancement module (SeEM) to alleviate the semantic gap between shallow features and deep features. The other strategy is feature attention, which involves discovering complementary information (i.e., boundary information) from low-level features to enhance high-level features for precise segmentation. By embedding these two strategies, we construct a parallel feature pyramid towards improving multi-level feature fusion. A Semantic Enhanced Network called SeENet is constructed with the parallel pyramid to implement precise segmentation. Experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method for robust multi-level feature aggregation. As a result, our SeENet has achieved better performance than other state-of-the-art methods for semantic segmentation.
Joint Syntax Representation Learning and Visual Cue Translation for Video Captioning

Video captioning is a challenging task that involves not only visual perception but also syntax representation learning. Recent progress in video captioning has been achieved through visual perception, but syntax representation learning is still under-explored. We propose a novel video captioning approach that takes into account both visual perception and syntax representation learning to generate accurate descriptions of videos. Specifically, we use sentence templates composed of Part-of-Speech (POS) tags to represent the syntax structure of captions, and accordingly, syntax representation learning is performed by directly inferring POS tags from videos. The visual perception is implemented by a mixture model which translates visual cues into lexical words that are conditional on the learned syntactic structure of sentences. Thus, a video captioning task consists of two sub-tasks: video POS tagging and visual cue translation, which are jointly modeled and trained in an end-to-end fashion. Evaluations on three public benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed method achieves substantially better performance than the state-of-the-art methods, which validates the superiority of joint modeling of syntax representation learning and visual perception for video captioning.
Photo-Realistic Facial Details Synthesis From Single Image

We present a single-image 3D face synthesis technique that can handle challenging facial expressions while recovering fine geometric details. Our technique employs expression analysis for proxy face geometry generation and combines supervised and unsupervised learning for facial detail synthesis. On proxy generation, we conduct emotion prediction to determine a new expression-informed proxy. On detail synthesis, we present a Deep Facial Detail Net (DFDN) based on Conditional Generative Adversarial Net (CGAN) that employs both geometry and appearance loss functions. For geometry, we capture 366 high-quality 3D scans from 122 different subjects under 3 facial expressions. For appearance, we use additional 163K in-the-wild face images and apply image-based rendering to accommodate lighting variations. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our framework can produce high-quality 3D faces with realistic details under challenging facial expressions.