Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Universal quantum control through deep reinforcement learning

Abstract Emerging reinforcement learning techniques using deep neural networks have shown great promise in control optimization. They harness non-local regularities of noisy control trajectories and facilitate transfer learning between tasks. To leverage these powerful capabilities for quantum control optimization, we propose a new control framework to simultaneously optimize the speed and fidelity of quantum computation against both leakage and stochastic control errors. For a broad family of two-qubit unitary gates that are important for quantum simulation of many-electron systems, we improve the control robustness by adding control noise into training environments for reinforcement learning agents trained with trusted-region-policy-optimization. The agent control solutions demonstrate a two-order-of-magnitude reduction in average-gate-error over baseline stochastic-gradient-descent solutions and up to a one-order-of-magnitude reduction in gate time from optimal gate synthesis counterparts. These significant improvements in both fidelity and runtime are achieved by combining new physical understandings and state-of-the-art machine learning techniques. Our results open a venue for wider applications in quantum simulation, quantum chemistry and quantum supremacy tests using near-term quantum devices.
Secure and Efficient Vehicle-to-Grid Energy Trading in Cyber Physical Systems: Integration of Blockchain and Edge Computing

Smart grid has emerged as a successful application of cyber-physical systems in the energy sector. Among numerous key technologies of the smart grid, vehicle-to-grid (V2G) provides a promising solution to reduce the level of demand-supply mismatch by leveraging the bidirectional energy-trading capabilities of electric vehicles. In this paper, we propose a secure and efficient V2G energy trading framework by exploring blockchain, contract theory, and edge computing. First, we develop a consortium blockchain-based secure energy trading mechanism for V2G. Then, we consider the information asymmetry scenario, and propose an efficient incentive mechanism based on contract theory. The social welfare optimization problem falls into the category of difference of convex programming and is solved by using the iterative convex-concave procedure algorithm. Next, edge computing has been incorporated to improve the successful probability of block creation. The computational resource allocation problem is modeled as a two-stage: 1) Stackelberg leader-follower game and 2) the optimal strategies are obtained by using the backward induction approach. Finally, the performance of the proposed framework is validated via numerical results and theoretical analysis.
Arbitrary Style Transfer With Style-Attentional Networks

Arbitrary style transfer aims to synthesize a content image with the style of an image to create a third image that has never been seen before. Recent arbitrary style transfer algorithms find it challenging to balance the content structure and the style patterns. Moreover, simultaneously maintaining the global and local style patterns is difficult due to the patch-based mechanism. In this paper, we introduce a novel style-attentional network (SANet) that efficiently and flexibly integrates the local style patterns according to the semantic spatial distribution of the content image. A new identity loss function and multi-level feature embeddings enable our SANet and decoder to preserve the content structure as much as possible while enriching the style patterns. Experimental results demonstrate that our algorithm synthesizes stylized images in real-time that are higher in quality than those produced by the state-of-the-art algorithms.
Iterative Residual Refinement for Joint Optical Flow and Occlusion Estimation

Deep learning approaches to optical flow estimation have seen rapid progress over the recent years. One common trait of many networks is that they refine an initial flow estimate either through multiple stages or across the levels of a coarse-to-fine representation. While leading to more accurate results, the downside of this is an increased number of parameters. Taking inspiration from both classical energy minimization approaches as well as residual networks, we propose an iterative residual refinement (IRR) scheme based on weight sharing that can be combined with several backbone networks. It reduces the number of parameters, improves the accuracy, or even achieves both. Moreover, we show that integrating occlusion prediction and bi-directional flow estimation into our IRR scheme can further boost the accuracy. Our full network achieves state-of-the-art results for both optical flow and occlusion estimation across several standard datasets.
A Survey on Federated Learning for Resource-Constrained IoT Devices

Federated learning (FL) is a distributed machine learning strategy that generates a global model by learning from multiple decentralized edge clients. FL enables on-device training, keeping the client’s local data private, and further, updating the global model based on the local model updates. While FL methods offer several advantages, including scalability and data privacy, they assume there are available computational resources at each edge-device/client. However, the Internet-of-Things (IoT)-enabled devices, e.g., robots, drone swarms, and low-cost computing devices (e.g., Raspberry Pi), may have limited processing ability, low bandwidth and power, or limited storage capacity. In this survey article, we propose to answer this question: how to train distributed machine learning models for resource-constrained IoT devices? To this end, we first explore the existing studies on FL, relative assumptions for distributed implementation using IoT devices, and explore their drawbacks. We then discuss the implementation challenges and issues when applying FL to an IoT environment. We highlight an overview of FL and provide a comprehensive survey of the problem statements and emerging challenges, particularly during applying FL within heterogeneous IoT environments. Finally, we point out the future research directions for scientists and researchers who are interested in working at the intersection of FL and resource-constrained IoT environments.
Frontline Service Technology infusion: conceptual archetypes and future research directions

Purpose Smart technologies and connected objects are rapidly changing the organizational frontline. Yet, our understanding of how these technologies infuse service encounters remains limited. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to update existing classifications of Frontline Service Technology (FST) infusion. Moreover, the authors discuss three promising smart and connected technologies – conversational agents, extended reality (XR) and blockchain technology – and their respective implications for customers, frontline employees and service organizations. Design/methodology/approach This paper uses a conceptual approach integrating existing work on FST infusion with artificial intelligence, robotics, XR and blockchain literature, while also building on insights gathered through expert interviews and focus group conversations with members of two service research centers. Findings The authors define FST and propose a set of FST infusion archetypes at the organizational frontline. Additionally, the authors develop future research directions focused on understanding how conversational agents, XR and blockchain technology will impact service. Originality/value This paper updates and extends existing classifications of FST, while paving the road for further work on FST infusion.
Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation With Maximum Squares Loss

Deep neural networks for semantic segmentation always require a large number of samples with pixel-level labels, which becomes the major difficulty in their real-world applications. To reduce the labeling cost, unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) approaches are proposed to transfer knowledge from labeled synthesized datasets to unlabeled real-world datasets. Recently, some semi-supervised learning methods have been applied to UDA and achieved state-of-the-art performance. One of the most popular approaches in semi-supervised learning is the entropy minimization method. However, when applying the entropy minimization to UDA for semantic segmentation, the gradient of the entropy is biased towards samples that are easy to transfer. To balance the gradient of well-classified target samples, we propose the maximum squares loss. Our maximum squares loss prevents the training process being dominated by easy-to-transfer samples in the target domain. Besides, we introduce the image-wise weighting ratio to alleviate the class imbalance in the unlabeled target domain. Both synthetic-to-real and cross-city adaptation experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach. The code is released at https://github. com/ZJULearning/MaxSquareLoss.
Data-Free Learning of Student Networks

Learning portable neural networks is very essential for computer vision for the purpose that pre-trained heavy deep models can be well applied on edge devices such as mobile phones and micro sensors. Most existing deep neural network compression and speed-up methods are very effective for training compact deep models, when we can directly access the training dataset. However, training data for the given deep network are often unavailable due to some practice problems (\eg privacy, legal issue, and transmission), and the architecture of the given network are also unknown except some interfaces. To this end, we propose a novel framework for training efficient deep neural networks by exploiting generative adversarial networks (GANs). To be specific, the pre-trained teacher networks are regarded as a fixed discriminator and the generator is utilized for derivating training samples which can obtain the maximum response on the discriminator. Then, an efficient network with smaller model size and computational complexity is trained using the generated data and the teacher network, simultaneously. Efficient student networks learned using the proposed Data-Free Learning (DFL) method achieve 92.22% and 74.47% accuracies without any training data on the CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 datasets, respectively. Meanwhile, our student network obtains an 80.56% accuracy on the CelebA benchmark.
Long-Distance Continuous-Variable Quantum Key Distribution over 202.81 km of Fiber

Quantum key distribution provides secure keys resistant to code-breaking quantum computers. The continuous-variable version of quantum key distribution offers the advantages of higher secret key rates in metropolitan areas, as well as the use of standard telecom components that can operate at room temperature. However, the transmission distance of these systems (compared with discrete-variable systems) are currently limited and considered unsuitable for long-distance distribution. Herein, we report the experimental results of long distance continuous-variable quantum key distribution over 202.81 km of ultralow-loss optical fiber by suitably controlling the excess noise and employing highly efficient reconciliation procedures. This record-breaking implementation of the continuous-variable quantum key distribution doubles the previous distance record and shows the road for long-distance and large-scale secure quantum key distribution using room-temperature standard telecom components.
Progressive Layered Extraction (PLE): A Novel Multi-Task Learning (MTL) Model for Personalized Recommendations

Multi-task learning (MTL) has been successfully applied to many recommendation applications. However, MTL models often suffer from performance degeneration with negative transfer due to the complex and competing task correlation in real-world recommender systems. Moreover, through extensive experiments across SOTA MTL models, we have observed an interesting seesaw phenomenon that performance of one task is often improved by hurting the performance of some other tasks. To address these issues, we propose a Progressive Layered Extraction (PLE) model with a novel sharing structure design. PLE separates shared components and task-specific components explicitly and adopts a progressive routing mechanism to extract and separate deeper semantic knowledge gradually, improving efficiency of joint representation learning and information routing across tasks in a general setup. We apply PLE to both complicatedly correlated and normally correlated tasks, ranging from two-task cases to multi-task cases on a real-world Tencent video recommendation dataset with 1 billion samples, and results show that PLE outperforms state-of-the-art MTL models significantly under different task correlations and task-group size. Furthermore, online evaluation of PLE on a large-scale content recommendation platform at Tencent manifests 2.23% increase in view-count and 1.84% increase in watch time compared to SOTA MTL models, which is a significant improvement and demonstrates the effectiveness of PLE. Finally, extensive offline experiments on public benchmark datasets demonstrate that PLE can be applied to a variety of scenarios besides recommendations to eliminate the seesaw phenomenon. PLE now has been deployed to the online video recommender system in Tencent successfully.
Survey on blockchain based smart contracts: Applications, opportunities and challenges

Blockchain is one of the disruptive technical innovation in the recent computing paradigm. Many applications already notoriously hard and complex are fortunate to ameliorate the service with the blessings of blockchain and smart contracts. The decentralized and autonomous execution with in-built transparency of blockchain based smart contracts revolutionize most of the applications with optimum and effective functionality. The paper explores the significant applications which already benefited from the smart contracts. We also highlight the future potential of the blockchain based smart contracts in these applications perspective.
The human side of human-chatbot interaction: A systematic literature review of ten years of research on text-based chatbots

Over the last ten years there has been a growing interest around text-based chatbots, software applications interacting with humans using natural written language. However, despite the enthusiastic market predictions, ‘conversing’ with this kind of agents seems to raise issues that go beyond their current technological limitations, directly involving the human side of interaction. By adopting a Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) lens, in this article we present a systematic literature review of 83 papers that focus on how users interact with text-based chatbots. We map the relevant themes that are recurrent in the last ten years of research, describing how people experience the chatbot in terms of satisfaction, engagement, and trust, whether and why they accept and use this technology, how they are emotionally involved, what kinds of downsides can be observed in human-chatbot conversations, and how the chatbot is perceived in terms of its humanness. On the basis of these findings, we highlight open issues in current research and propose a number of research opportunities that could be tackled in future years.
Secure Multi-Party Computation: Theory, practice and applications

Secure Multi-Party Computation (SMPC) is a generic cryptographic primitive that enables distributed parties to jointly compute an arbitrary functionality without revealing their own private inputs and outputs. Since Yao’s seminal work in 1982, 30 years of research on SMPC has been conducted, proceeding from pure theoretical research into real-world applications. Recently, the increasing prevalence of the newly emerging technologies such as cloud computing, mobile computing and the Internet of Thing has resulted in a re-birth of SMPC’s popularity. This has occurred mainly because, as a generic tool for computing on private data, SMPC has a natural advantage in solving security and privacy issues in these areas. Accordingly, many application-oriented SMPC protocols have been constructed. This paper presents a comprehensive survey on the theoretical and practical aspects of SMPC protocols. Specifically, we start by demonstrating the underlying concepts of SMPC, including its security requirements and basic construction techniques. Then, we present the research advances regarding construction techniques for generic SMPC protocols, and also the cutting-edge approaches to cloud-assisted SMPC protocols. Then, we summarize the concrete application-oriented protocols that are currently available, and finally, we present a discussion of the current literature and conclude this survey.
Towards Rich Feature Discovery With Class Activation Maps Augmentation for Person Re-Identification

The fundamental challenge of small inter-person variation requires Person Re-Identification (Re-ID) models to capture sufficient fine-grained information. This paper proposes to discover diverse discriminative visual cues without extra assistance, e.g., pose estimation, human parsing. Specifically, a Class Activation Maps (CAM) augmentation model is proposed to expand the activation scope of baseline Re-ID model to explore rich visual cues, where the backbone network is extended by a series of ordered branches which share the same input but output complementary CAM. A novel Overlapped Activation Penalty is proposed to force the new branch to pay more attention to the image regions less activated by the old ones, such that spatial diverse visual features can be discovered. The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art results on three person Re-ID benchmarks. Moreover, a visualization approach termed ranking activation map (RAM) is proposed to explicitly interpret the ranking results in the test stage, which gives qualitative validations of the proposed method.
FSA-Net: Learning Fine-Grained Structure Aggregation for Head Pose Estimation From a Single Image

This paper proposes a method for head pose estimation from a single image. Previous methods often predict head poses through landmark or depth estimation and would require more computation than necessary. Our method is based on regression and feature aggregation. For having a compact model, we employ the soft stagewise regression scheme. Existing feature aggregation methods treat inputs as a bag of features and thus ignore their spatial relationship in a feature map. We propose to learn a fine-grained structure mapping for spatially grouping features before aggregation. The fine-grained structure provides part-based information and pooled values. By utilizing learnable and non-learnable importance over the spatial location, different model variants can be generated and form a complementary ensemble. Experiments show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods including both the landmark-free ones and the ones based on landmark or depth estimation. With only a single RGB frame as input, our method even outperforms methods utilizing multi-modality information (RGB-D, RGB-Time) on estimating the yaw angle. Furthermore, the memory overhead of our model is 100 times smaller than those of previous methods.
Self-Supervised Learning of 3D Human Pose Using Multi-View Geometry

Training accurate 3D human pose estimators requires large amount of 3D ground-truth data which is costly to collect. Various weakly or self supervised pose estimation methods have been proposed due to lack of 3D data. Nevertheless, these methods, in addition to 2D ground-truth poses, require either additional supervision in various forms (e.g. unpaired 3D ground truth data, a small subset of labels) or the camera parameters in multiview settings. To address these problems, we present EpipolarPose, a self-supervised learning method for 3D human pose estimation, which does not need any 3D ground-truth data or camera extrinsics. During training, EpipolarPose estimates 2D poses from multi-view images, and then, utilizes epipolar geometry to obtain a 3D pose and camera geometry which are subsequently used to train a 3D pose estimator. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on standard benchmark datasets (i.e. Human3.6M and MPI-INF-3DHP) where we set the new state-of-the-art among weakly/self-supervised methods. Furthermore, we propose a new performance measure Pose Structure Score (PSS) which is a scale invariant, structure aware measure to evaluate the structural plausibility of a pose with respect to its ground truth. Code and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/mkocabas/EpipolarPose.
Video Summarization With Attention-Based Encoder–Decoder Networks

This paper addresses the problem of supervised video summarization by formulating it as a sequence-to-sequence learning problem, where the input is a sequence of original video frames, and the output is a keyshot sequence. Our key idea is to learn a deep summarization network with attention mechanism to mimic the way of selecting the keyshots of human. To this end, we propose a novel video summarization framework named attentive encoder-decoder networks for video summarization (AVS), in which the encoder uses a bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) to encode the contextual information among the input video frames. As for the decoder, two attention-based LSTM networks are explored by using additive and multiplicative objective functions, respectively. Extensive experiments are conducted on two video summarization benchmark datasets, i.e., SumMe and TVSum. The results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed AVS-based approaches against the state-of-the-art approaches, with remarkable improvements on both datasets.
AutoGAN: Neural Architecture Search for Generative Adversarial Networks

Neural architecture search (NAS) has witnessed prevailing success in image classification and (very recently) segmentation tasks. In this paper, we present the first preliminary study on introducing the NAS algorithm to generative adversarial networks (GANs), dubbed AutoGAN. The marriage of NAS and GANs faces its unique challenges. We define the search space for the generator architectural variations and use an RNN controller to guide the search, with parameter sharing and dynamic-resetting to accelerate the process. Inception score is adopted as the reward, and a multi-level search strategy is introduced to perform NAS in a progressive way. Experiments validate the effectiveness of AutoGAN on the task of unconditional image generation. Specifically, our discovered architectures achieve highly competitive performance compared to current state-of-the-art hand-crafted GANs, e.g., setting new state-of-the-art FID scores of 12.42 on CIFAR-10, and 31.01 on STL-10, respectively. We also conclude with a discussion of the current limitations and future potential of AutoGAN. The code is available at https://github.com/TAMU-VITA/AutoGAN.