Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
A General Offline Reinforcement Learning Framework for Interactive Recommendation

This paper studies the problem of learning interactive recommender systems from logged feedbacks without any exploration in online environments. We address the problem by proposing a general offline reinforcement learning framework for recommendation, which enables maximizing cumulative user rewards without online exploration. Specifically, we first introduce a probabilistic generative model for interactive recommendation, and then propose an effective inference algorithm for discrete and stochastic policy learning based on logged feedbacks. In order to perform offline learning more effectively, we propose five approaches to minimize the distribution mismatch between the logging policy and recommendation policy: support constraints, supervised regularization, policy constraints, dual constraints and reward extrapolation. We conduct extensive experiments on two public real-world datasets, demonstrating that the proposed methods can achieve superior performance over existing supervised learning and reinforcement learning methods for recommendation.
Optimization of Convolutional Neural Networks Architectures Using PSO for Sign Language Recognition

This paper presents an approach to design convolutional neural network architectures, using the particle swarm optimization algorithm. The adjustment of the hyper-parameters and finding the optimal network architecture of convolutional neural networks represents an important challenge. Network performance and achieving efficient learning models for a particular problem depends on setting hyper-parameter values and this implies exploring a huge and complex search space. The use of heuristic-based searches supports these types of problems; therefore, the main contribution of this research work is to apply the PSO algorithm to find the optimal parameters of the convolutional neural networks which include the number of convolutional layers, the filter size used in the convolutional process, the number of convolutional filters, and the batch size. This work describes two optimization approaches; the first, the parameters obtained by PSO are kept under the same conditions in each convolutional layer, and the objective function evaluated by PSO is given by the classification rate; in the second, the PSO generates different parameters per layer, and the objective function is composed of the recognition rate in conjunction with the Akaike information criterion, the latter helps to find the best network performance but with the minimum parameters. The optimized architectures are implemented in three study cases of sign language databases, in which are included the Mexican Sign Language alphabet, the American Sign Language MNIST, and the American Sign Language alphabet. According to the results, the proposed methodologies achieved favorable results with a recognition rate higher than 99%, showing competitive results compared to other state-of-the-art approaches.
Topic-Aware Multi-turn Dialogue Modeling

In the retrieval-based multi-turn dialogue modeling, it remains a challenge to select the most appropriate response according to extracting salient features in context utterances. As a conversation goes on, topic shift at discourse-level naturally happens through the continuous multi-turn dialogue context. However, all known retrieval-based systems are satisfied with exploiting local topic words for context utterance representation but fail to capture such essential global topic-aware clues at discourse-level. Instead of taking topic-agnostic n-gram utterance as processing unit for matching purpose in existing systems, this paper presents a novel topic-aware solution for multi-turn dialogue modeling, which segments and extracts topic-aware utterances in an unsupervised way, so that the resulted model is capable of capturing salient topic shift at discourse-level in need and thus effectively track topic flow during multi-turn conversation. Our topic-aware modeling is implemented by a newly proposed unsupervised topic-aware segmentation algorithm and Topic-Aware Dual-attention Matching (TADAM) Network, which matches each topic segment with the response in a dual cross-attention way. Experimental results on three public datasets show TADAM can outperform the state-of-the-art method, especially by 3.3% on E-commerce dataset that has an obvious topic shift.
Collision Avoidance for an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle in the Presence of Static and Moving Obstacles

A new collision-avoidance procedure for an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) in the presence of static and moving obstacles is presented. The proposed procedure is based on a new form of local parameterized guidance vector fields, called collision-avoidance vector fields, which produce smooth and intuitive maneuvers around obstacles. These vector fields are generated from a decomposition of UAV kinematics and a proximity-based velocity modulation. The proposed kinematic decomposition encodes both collision avoidance and constant-speed motion for the UAV. As such, the resulting maneuvers follow nominal collision-free paths, which are referred to as streamlines of the collision-avoidance vector fields, with constant speed. Next, in accordance with the computed guidance vector fields, different collision-avoidance controllers that generate collision-free maneuvers are developed. Furthermore, it is shown that any tracking controller with convergence guarantees can be used with the avoidance controllers to track the streamlines of the collision-avoidance vector fields. Finally, numerical simulations demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approach and its ability to avoid collisions with static and moving pop-up threats in different practical scenarios.
The role of organizational capabilities on e-business successful implementation

This study sought to investigate the role of organizational capabilities on e-business successful implementation. The proposed conceptual framework was tested on a sample of 16 Jordanian companies with an online involvement, and a total of 263 valid returns were obtained in a questionnaire based survey. The results provide quite a strong support for the hypothesized relations: organizational capabilities, namely learning organizational capabilities and IT capabilities have significant impact on e-business implementation success. However, no statistical support was found for the significant impact of the knowledge management capabilities on e-business successful implementation. This study implies that the policy-makers should focus on formulating policies and targeting appropriate organizational capabilities to ensure effective e-business implementation, which will eventually yield positive results for the company as a whole. An organization needs a well-designed IT infrastructure to create and maintain the organizational knowledge deriving from organizational learning capabilities and enabling IT assimilation. In light of these results, the research presented many recommendations for future research and a set of limitations.
Towards Bridging Event Captioner and Sentence Localizer for Weakly Supervised Dense Event Captioning

Dense Event Captioning (DEC) aims to jointly localize and describe multiple events of interest in untrimmed videos, which is an advancement of the conventional video captioning task (generating a single sentence description for a trimmed video). Weakly Supervised Dense Event Captioning (WS-DEC) goes one step further by not relying on human-annotated temporal event boundaries. However, there are few methods trying to tackle this task, and how to connect localization and description remains an open problem. In this paper, we demonstrate that under weak supervision, the event captioning module and localization module should be more closely bridged in order to improve description performance. Different from previous approaches, in our method, the event captioner generates a sentence from a video segment and feeds it to the sentence localizer to reconstruct the segment, and the localizer produces word importance weights as a guidance for the captioner to improve event description. To further bridge the sentence localizer and event captioner, a concept learner is adopted as the basis of the sentence localizer, which can be utilized to construct an induced set of concept features to enhance video features and improve the event captioner. Finally, our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art WS-DEC methods on the ActivityNet Captions dataset.
Holistic Combination of Structural and Textual Code Information for Context Based API Recommendation

Context based API recommendation is an important way to help developers find the needed APIs effectively and efficiently. For effective API recommendation, we need not only a joint view of both structural and textual code information, but also a holistic view of correlated API usage in control and data flow graph as a whole. Unfortunately, existing API recommendation methods exploit structural or textual code information separately. In this work, we propose a novel API recommendation approach called APIRec-CST (API Recommendation by Combining Structural and Textual code information). APIRec-CST is a deep learning model that combines the API usage with the text information in the source code based on an API Context Graph Network and a Code Token Network that simultaneously learn structural and textual features for API recommendation. We apply APIRec-CST to train a model for JDK library based on 1,914 open-source Java projects and evaluate the accuracy and MRR (Mean Reciprocal Rank) of API recommendation with another 6 open-source projects. The results show that our approach achieves respectively a top-1, top-5, top-10 accuracy and MRR of 60.3, 81.5, 87.7 and 69.4 percent, and significantly outperforms an existing graph-based statistical approach and a tree-based deep learning approach for API recommendation. A further analysis shows that textual code information makes sense and improves the accuracy and MRR. The sensitivity analysis shows that the top-k accuracy and MRR of APIRec-CST are insensitive to the number of APIs to be recommended in a hole. We also conduct a user study in which two groups of students are asked to finish 6 programming tasks with or without our APIRec-CST plugin. The results show that APIRec-CST can help the students to finish the tasks faster and more accurately and the feedback on the usability is overwhelmingly positive.
Sequence Level Contrastive Learning for Text Summarization

Contrastive learning models have achieved great success in unsupervised visual representation learning, which maximize the similarities between feature representations of different views of the same image, while minimize the similarities between feature representations of views of different images. In text summarization, the output summary is a shorter form of the input document and they have similar meanings. In this paper, we propose a contrastive learning model for supervised abstractive text summarization, where we view a document, its gold summary and its model generated summaries as different views of the same mean representation and maximize the similarities between them during training. We improve over a strong sequence-to-sequence text generation model (i.e., BART) on three different summarization datasets. Human evaluation also shows that our model achieves better faithfulness ratings compared to its counterpart without contrastive objectives. We release our code at https://github.com/xssstory/SeqCo.
Reliable Recurrence Algorithm for High-Order Krawtchouk Polynomials

Krawtchouk polynomials (KPs) and their moments are promising techniques for applications of information theory, coding theory, and signal processing. This is due to the special capabilities of KPs in feature extraction and classification processes. The main challenge in existing KPs recurrence algorithms is that of numerical errors, which occur during the computation of the coefficients in large polynomial sizes, particularly when the KP parameter (p) values deviate away from 0.5 to 0 and 1. To this end, this paper proposes a new recurrence relation in order to compute the coefficients of KPs in high orders. In particular, this paper discusses the development of a new algorithm and presents a new mathematical model for computing the initial value of the KP parameter. In addition, a new diagonal recurrence relation is introduced and used in the proposed algorithm. The diagonal recurrence algorithm was derived from the existing n direction and x direction recurrence algorithms. The diagonal and existing recurrence algorithms were subsequently exploited to compute the KP coefficients. First, the KP coefficients were computed for one partition after dividing the KP plane into four. To compute the KP coefficients in the other partitions, the symmetry relations were exploited. The performance evaluation of the proposed recurrence algorithm was determined through different comparisons which were carried out in state-of-the-art works in terms of reconstruction error, polynomial size, and computation cost. The obtained results indicate that the proposed algorithm is reliable and computes lesser coefficients when compared to the existing algorithms across wide ranges of parameter values of p and polynomial sizes N. The results also show that the improvement ratio of the computed coefficients ranges from 18.64% to 81.55% in comparison to the existing algorithms. Besides this, the proposed algorithm can generate polynomials of an order ∼8.5 times larger than those generated using state-of-the-art algorithms.
speechocean762: An Open-Source Non-Native English Speech Corpus for Pronunciation Assessment

This paper introduces a new open-source speech corpus named speechocean762 designed for pronunciation assessment use, consisting of 5000 English utterances from 250 non-native speakers, where half of the speakers are children. Five experts annotated each of the utterances at sentence-level, word-level and phoneme-level. A baseline system is released in open source to illustrate the phoneme-level pronunciation assessment workflow on this corpus. This corpus is allowed to be used freely for commercial and non-commercial purposes. It is available for free download from OpenSLR, and the corresponding baseline system is published in the Kaldi speech recognition toolkit.
Universal activation function for machine learning

This article proposes a Universal Activation Function (UAF) that achieves near optimal performance in quantification, classification, and reinforcement learning (RL) problems. For any given problem, the optimization algorithms are able to evolve the UAF to a suitable activation function by tuning the UAF's parameters. For the CIFAR-10 classification and VGG-8, the UAF converges to the Mish like activation function, which has near optimal performance $F_{1} = 0.9017\pm0.0040$ when compared to other activation functions. For the quantification of simulated 9-gas mixtures in 30 dB signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) environments, the UAF converges to the identity function, which has near optimal root mean square error of $0.4888 \pm 0.0032$ $\mu M$. In the BipedalWalker-v2 RL dataset, the UAF achieves the 250 reward in $961 \pm 193$ epochs, which proves that the UAF converges in the lowest number of epochs. Furthermore, the UAF converges to a new activation function in the BipedalWalker-v2 RL dataset.
Quantum machine learning beyond kernel methods

Machine learning algorithms based on parametrized quantum circuits are prime candidates for near-term applications on noisy quantum computers. In this direction, various types of quantum machine learning models have been introduced and studied extensively. Yet, our understanding of how these models compare, both mutually and to classical models, remains limited. In this work, we identify a constructive framework that captures all standard models based on parametrized quantum circuits: that of linear quantum models. In particular, we show using tools from quantum information theory how data re-uploading circuits, an apparent outlier of this framework, can be efficiently mapped into the simpler picture of linear models in quantum Hilbert spaces. Furthermore, we analyze the experimentally-relevant resource requirements of these models in terms of qubit number and amount of data needed to learn. Based on recent results from classical machine learning, we prove that linear quantum models must utilize exponentially more qubits than data re-uploading models in order to solve certain learning tasks, while kernel methods additionally require exponentially more data points. Our results provide a more comprehensive view of quantum machine learning models as well as insights on the compatibility of different models with NISQ constraints.
Analog quantum simulation of chemical dynamics

Ultrafast chemical reactions are difficult to simulate because they involve entangled, many-body wavefunctions whose computational complexity grows rapidly with molecular size. In photochemistry, the breakdown of the Born-Oppenheimer approximation further complicates the problem by entangling nuclear and electronic degrees of freedom. Here, we show that analog quantum simulators can efficiently simulate molecular dynamics using commonly available bosonic modes to represent molecular vibrations. Our approach can be implemented in any device with a qudit controllably coupled to bosonic oscillators and with quantum hardware resources that scale linearly with molecular size, and offers significant resource savings compared to digital quantum simulation algorithms. Advantages of our approach include a time resolution orders of magnitude better than ultrafast spectroscopy, the ability to simulate large molecules with limited hardware using a Suzuki-Trotter expansion, and the ability to implement realistic system-bath interactions with only one additional interaction per mode. Our approach can be implemented with current technology; e.g., the conical intersection in pyrazine can be simulated using a single trapped ion. Therefore, we expect our method will enable classically intractable chemical dynamics simulations in the near term.
Quantum Crosstalk Analysis for Simultaneous Gate Operations on Superconducting Qubits

Maintaining or even improving gate performance with growing numbers of parallel controlled qubits is a vital requirement for fault-tolerant quantum computing. For superconducting quantum processors, though isolated one- or two-qubit gates have been demonstrated with high fidelity, implementing these gates in parallel commonly shows worse performance. Generally, this degradation is attributed to various crosstalks between qubits, such as quantum crosstalk due to residual inter-qubit coupling. An understanding of the exact nature of these crosstalks is critical to figuring out respective mitigation schemes and improved qubit architecture designs with low crosstalk. Here we give a theoretical analysis of quantum crosstalk impact on simultaneous gate operations in a qubit architecture, where fixed-frequency transmon qubits are coupled via a tunable bus, and sub-100-ns controlled-Z (cz) gates can be realized by applying a baseband flux pulse on the bus. Our analysis shows that for microwave-driven single-qubit gates, the dressing from the qubit-qubit coupling can cause non-negligible cross-driving errors when qubits operate near frequency collision regions. During cz gate operations, although unwanted nearest-neighbor interactions are nominally turned off, sub-MHz parasitic next-nearest-neighbor interactions involving spectator qubits can still exist, causing considerable leakage or control error when one operates qubit systems around these parasitic resonance points. To ensure high-fidelity simultaneous operations, a request could be raised to figure out a better way to balance the gate error from target qubit systems themselves and the error from nonparticipating spectator qubits. Overall, our analysis suggests that towards useful quantum processors, the qubit architecture should be examined carefully in the context of high-fidelity simultaneous gate operations in a scalable qubit lattice.8 MoreReceived 27 October 2021Revised 30 December 2021Accepted 16 February 2022DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PRXQuantum.3.020301Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.Published by the American Physical SocietyPhysics Subject Headings (PhySH)Research AreasQuantum computationQuantum controlQuantum gatesQuantum information architectures & platformsQuantum Information
Ethical leadership, trust in organization and their impacts on critical hotel employee outcomes

Drawing on social exchange, social learning, and reformulation of attitude theories, our paper proposes a research model and empirically tests the interrelationships of ethical leadership, trust in organization, absenteeism, social loafing behavior, and service recovery performance. Data collected from hotel customer-contact employees two weeks apart and their direct supervisors in Nigeria were utilized to test the aforesaid linkages via structural equation modeling. The findings reveal that ethical leadership fosters employees’ trust in organization and service recovery performance, while it mitigates their absenteeism. In addition, trust in organization triggers service recovery performance, while it is a panacea to absenteeism and social loafing behavior. The abovementioned findings implicitly suggest that trust in organization mediates the influence of ethical leadership on absenteeism, social loafing behavior, and service recovery performance. The findings emphasize the need for ethical leadership, which fosters trust in organization and service recovery performance and alleviates absenteeism.
Hyperparameter Tuning of Machine Learning Algorithms Using Response Surface Methodology: A Case Study of ANN, SVM, and DBN

This study applies response surface methodology (RSM) to the hyperparameter fine-tuning of three machine learning (ML) algorithms: artificial neural network (ANN), support vector machine (SVM), and deep belief network (DBN). The purpose is to demonstrate RSM effectiveness in maintaining ML algorithm performance while reducing the number of runs required to reach effective hyperparameter settings in comparison with the commonly used grid search (GS). The ML algorithms are applied to a case study dataset from a food producer in Thailand. The objective is to predict a raw material quality measured on a numerical scale. K-fold cross-validation is performed to ensure that the ML algorithm performance is robust to the data partitioning process in the training, validation, and testing sets. The mean absolute error (MAE) of the validation set is used as the prediction accuracy measurement. The reliability of the hyperparameter values from GS and RSM is evaluated using confirmation runs. Statistical analysis shows that (1) the prediction accuracy of the three ML algorithms tuned by GS and RSM is similar, (2) hyperparameter settings from GS are 80% reliable for ANN and DBN, and settings from RSM are 90% and 100% reliable for ANN and DBN, respectively, and (3) savings in the number of runs required by RSM over GS are 97.79%, 97.81%, and 80.69% for ANN, SVM, and DBN, respectively.