Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Knock on Wood: Combining Redirected Touching and Physical Props for Tool-Based Interaction in Virtual Reality

When physical props serve as proxies for virtual tools used to manipulate the virtual environment, it is challenging to provide appropriate haptic feedback. Redirected tool-mediated manipulation addresses this challenge by distorting the mapping between physical and virtual tools to provide a sensation of manipulating the virtual environment, when the physical tool comes into contact with another physical prop. For example, a virtual hammer's position can be offset to ensure that physical impacts accompany each strike of a virtual nail. We demonstrate the idea by showing that it can be used to create sensations of impact and resistance when driving a virtual nail into a surface, when tightening a virtual screw, and when sawing through a virtual plank. The results of a user study indicate that the proposed approach is perceived as more realistic than interaction with a single physical prop or controller and no notable detriments to precision were observed.
Efficient Algorithms for Densest Subgraph Discovery on Large Directed Graphs

Given a directed graph G, the directed densest subgraph (DDS) problem refers to the finding of a subgraph from G, whose density is the highest among all the subgraphs of G. The DDS problem is fundamental to a wide range of applications, such as fraud detection, community mining, and graph compression. However, existing DDS solutions suffer from efficiency and scalability problems: on a three-thousand-edge graph, it takes three days for one of the best exact algorithms to complete. In this paper, we develop an efficient and scalable DDS solution. We introduce the notion of [x, y]-core, which is a dense subgraph for G, and show that the densest subgraph can be accurately located through the [x, y]-core with theoretical guarantees. Based on the [x, y]-core, we develop exact and approximation algorithms. We have performed an extensive evaluation of our approaches on eight real large datasets. The results show that our proposed solutions are up to six orders of magnitude faster than the state-of-the-art.
Meta-AR-App: An Authoring Platform for Collaborative Augmented Reality in STEM Classrooms

Augmented Reality (AR) has become a valuable tool for education and training processes. Meanwhile, cloud-based technologies can foster collaboration and other interaction modalities to enhance learning. We combine the cloud capabilities with AR technologies to present Meta-AR-App, an authoring platform for collaborative AR, which enables authoring between instructors and students. Additionally, we introduce a new application of an established collaboration process, the pull-based development model, to enable sharing and retrieving of AR learning content. We customize this model and create two modalities of interaction for the classroom: local (student to student) and global (instructor to class) pull. Based on observations from our user studies, we organize a four-category classroom model which implements our system: Work, Design, Collaboration, and Technology. Further, our system enables an iterative improvement workflow of the class content and enables synergistic collaboration that empowers students to be active agents in the learning process.
Pump‐Color Selective Control of Ultrafast All‐Optical Switching Dynamics in Metaphotonic Devices

Incorporating active materials into metamaterials is expected to yield exciting advancements in the unprecedented versatility of dynamically controlling optical properties, which sheds new light on the future optoelectronics. The exploration of emerging semiconductors into terahertz (THz) meta-atoms potentially allows achieving ultrafast nanodevices driven by various applications, such as biomedical sensing/imaging, ultrawide-band communications and security scanners. However, ultrafast optical switching of THz radiation is currently limited to a single level of tuning speed, which is a main hurdle to achieve multifunctionalities. Here, a hybrid metadevice which can realize the pump-wavelength controlled ultrafast switching response by the functionalization of double photoactive layers is demonstrated experimentally. A whole cycle of electromagnetically induced transparency switching with a half-recovery state changes from 0.78 ns to 8.8 ps as pump wavelength varies from near infrared to near ultraviolet regions. The observed pump-color selective switching speed changing from nanosecond scale to picosecond scale is ascribed to the wavelength-dependent penetration length of Ge and the contrasting defect states between noncrystalline Ge and epitaxial Si layers. It is believed that the schemes regarding pump-color controllable ultrafast switching behavior introduced here can inspire more innovations across the field of ultrafast photonics and can boost the reconfigurable metamaterial applications.
A survey on HHL algorithm: From theory to application in quantum machine learning

The Harrow-Hassidim-Lloyd (HHL) algorithm is a method to solve the quantum linear system of equations that may be found at the core of various scientific applications and quantum machine learning models including the linear regression, support vector machines and recommender systems etc. After reviewing the necessary background on elementary quantum algorithms, we provide detailed account of how HHL is exploited in different quantum machine learning (QML) models, and how it provides the desired quantum speedup in all these models. At the end, we briefly discuss some of the remaining challenges ahead for HHL-based QML models and related methods.
Structure Preserving Generative Cross-Domain Learning

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) casts a light when dealing with insufficient or no labeled data in the target domain by exploring the well-annotated source knowledge in different distributions. Most research efforts on UDA explore to seek a domain-invariant classifier over source supervision. However, due to the scarcity of label information in the target domain, such a classifier has a lack of ground-truth target supervision, which dramatically obstructs the robustness and discrimination of the classifier. To this end, we develop a novel Generative cross-domain learning via Structure-Preserving (GSP), which attempts to transform target data into the source domain in order to take advantage of source supervision. Specifically, a novel cross-domain graph alignment is developed to capture the intrinsic relationship across two domains during target-source translation. Simultaneously, two distinct classifiers are trained to trigger the domain-invariant feature learning both guided with source supervision, one is a traditional source classifier and the other is a source-supervised target classifier. Extensive experimental results on several cross-domain visual benchmarks have demonstrated the effectiveness of our model by comparing with other state-of-the-art UDA algorithms.
NTIRE 2020 Challenge on Image and Video Deblurring

Motion blur is one of the most common degradation artifacts in dynamic scene photography. This paper reviews the NTIRE 2020 Challenge on Image and Video Deblurring. In this challenge, we present the evaluation results from 3 competition tracks as well as the proposed solutions. Track 1 aims to develop single-image deblurring methods focusing on restoration quality. On Track 2, the image deblurring methods are executed on a mobile platform to find the balance of the running speed and the restoration accuracy. Track 3 targets developing video deblurring methods that exploit the temporal relation between input frames. In each competition, there were 163, 135, and 102 registered participants and in the final testing phase, 9, 4, and 7 teams competed. The winning methods demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance on image and video deblurring tasks.
Panoptic-Based Image Synthesis

Conditional image synthesis for generating photorealistic images serves various applications for content editing to content generation. Previous conditional image synthesis algorithms mostly rely on semantic maps, and often fail in complex environments where multiple instances occlude each other. We propose a panoptic aware image synthesis network to generate high fidelity and photorealistic images conditioned on panoptic maps which unify semantic and instance information. To achieve this, we efficiently use panoptic maps in convolution and upsampling layers. We show that with the proposed changes to the generator, we can improve on the previous state-of-the-art methods by generating images in complex instance interaction environments in higher fidelity and tiny objects in more details. Furthermore, our proposed method also outperforms the previous state-of-the-art methods in metrics of mean IoU (Intersection over Union), and detAP (Detection Average Precision).
L2-GCN: Layer-Wise and Learned Efficient Training of Graph Convolutional Networks

Graph convolution networks (GCN) are increasingly popular in many applications, yet remain notoriously hard to train over large graph datasets. They need to compute node representations recursively from their neighbors. Current GCN training algorithms suffer from either high computational costs that grow exponentially with the number of layers, or high memory usage for loading the entire graph and node embeddings. In this paper, we propose a novel efficient layer-wise training framework for GCN (L-GCN), that disentangles feature aggregation and feature transformation during training, hence greatly reducing time and memory complexities. We present theoretical analysis for L-GCN under the graph isomorphism framework, that L-GCN leads to as powerful GCNs as the more costly conventional training algorithm does, under mild conditions. We further propose L^2-GCN, which learns a controller for each layer that can automatically adjust the training epochs per layer in L-GCN. Experiments show that L-GCN is faster than state-of-the-arts by at least an order of magnitude, with a consistent of memory usage not dependent on dataset size, while maintaining comparable prediction performance. With the learned controller, L^2-GCN can further cut the training time in half. Our codes are available at https://github.com/Shen-Lab/L2-GCN.
Data-Free Knowledge Amalgamation via Group-Stack Dual-GAN

Recent advances in deep learning have provided procedures for learning one network to amalgamate multiple streams of knowledge from the pre-trained Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models, thus reduce the annotation cost. However, almost all existing methods demand massive training data, which may be unavailable due to privacy or transmission issues. In this paper, we propose a data-free knowledge amalgamate strategy to craft a well-behaved multi-task student network from multiple single/multi-task teachers. The main idea is to construct the group-stack generative adversarial networks (GANs) which have two dual generators. First one generator is trained to collect the knowledge by reconstructing the images approximating the original dataset utilized for pre-training the teachers. Then a dual generator is trained by taking the output from the former generator as input. Finally we treat the dual part generator as the target network and regroup it. As demonstrated on several benchmarks of multi-label classification, the proposed method without any training data achieves the surprisingly competitive results, even compared with some full-supervised methods.
Human Identification for Activities of Daily Living: A Deep Transfer Learning Approach

Sensor-based home Activities of Daily Living (ADLs) monitoring systems have emerged to monitor elderly people’s self-care ability remotely. However, the unobtrusive, privacy-friendly object motion sensor-based systems face challenges such as scarce labeled data and ADL performer confusion in a multi-resident setting. This study adopts the design science paradigm to develop an innovative deep transfer learning framework for human identification (DTL-HID) to address both challenges. A novel convolutional neural network (CNN) is proposed to automatically extract comprehensive temporal and cross-axial motion patterns for the DTL-HID framework. We rigorously evaluate the DTL-HID framework against state-of-the-art benchmarks (e.g., k Nearest Neighbors, Support Vector Machines, and alternative CNN designs). Results demonstrate our proposed DTL-HID framework can identify the ADL performer accurately even on a small amount of labeled data. We demonstrate a case study and discuss how stakeholders can further apply this approach to unobtrusive smart home monitoring for senior citizens. Beyond demonstrating the framework’s practical utility, we discuss two implications of our design principles to mobile analytics and design science research: (1) extracting temporal and axial local dependencies can capture richer information from multi-axial time-series data and (2) transferring knowledge learned on a relevant source domain with sufficient data can improve the performance of the desired task on the target domain with scarce data.
15 Keypoints Is All You Need

Pose-tracking is an important problem that requires identifying unique human pose-instances and matching them temporally across different frames in a video. However, existing pose-tracking methods are unable to accurately model temporal relationships and require significant computation, often computing the tracks offline. We present an efficient multi-person pose-tracking method, KeyTrack that only relies on keypoint information without using any RGB or optical flow to locate and track human keypoints in real-time. KeyTrack is a top-down approach that learns spatio-temporal pose relationships by modeling the multi-person pose-tracking problem as a novel Pose Entailment task using a Transformer based architecture. Furthermore, KeyTrack uses a novel, parameter-free, keypoint refinement technique that improves the keypoint estimates used by the Transformers. We achieve state-of-the-art results on PoseTrack'17 and PoseTrack'18 benchmarks while using only a fraction of the computation used by most other methods for computing the tracking information.
Predictive Autoscaling of Microservices Hosted in Fog Microdata Center

Fog computing provides microdata center (MDC) facilities closer to the users and applications, which help to overcome the application latency and response time concerns. However, guaranteeing specific service-level objectives (SLOs) for the applications running on the MDC requires automatic scaling of allocated resources by efficiently utilizing the available infrastructure capacity. In this article, we propose a novel predictive autoscaling method for microservices running on the fog MDC to satisfy the application response time SLO. Initially, our proposed approach uses a reactive rule-based autoscaling method to gather the training dataset for building the predictive autoscaling model. The proposed approach is efficient, as it can learn the predictive autoscaling model using an increasing synthetic workload. The learned predictive autoscaling model is used to manage the application resources serving different realistic workloads effectively. Our experimental evaluation using two synthetic and three realistic workloads for two benchmark microservice applications on a real MDC shows excellent performance compared to the existing state-of-the-art baseline rule-based autoscaling method. The proposed autoscaling method yields 75.51% reduction in the number of rejected requests and 77.53% fewer number of SLO violations compared to the baseline autoscaling methods by using only 9.20% additional data center resources at the fog layer.
CloudStrike: Chaos Engineering for Security and Resiliency in Cloud Infrastructure

Most cyber-attacks and data breaches in cloud infrastructure are due to human errors and misconfiguration vulnerabilities. Cloud customer-centric tools are imperative for mitigating these issues, however existing cloud security models are largely unable to tackle these security challenges. Therefore, novel security mechanisms are imperative, we propose Risk-driven Fault Injection (RDFI) techniques to address these challenges. RDFI applies the principles of chaos engineering to cloud security and leverages feedback loops to execute, monitor, analyze and plan security fault injection campaigns, based on a knowledge-base. The knowledge-base consists of fault models designed from secure baselines, cloud security best practices and observations derived during iterative fault injection campaigns. These observations are helpful for identifying vulnerabilities while verifying the correctness of security attributes (integrity, confidentiality and availability). Furthermore, RDFI proactively supports risk analysis and security hardening efforts by sharing security information with security mechanisms. We have designed and implemented the RDFI strategies including various chaos engineering algorithms as a software tool: CloudStrike. Several evaluations have been conducted with CloudStrike against infrastructure deployed on two major public cloud infrastructure: Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform. The time performance linearly increases, proportional to increasing attack rates. Also, the analysis of vulnerabilities detected via security fault injection has been used to harden the security of cloud resources to demonstrate the effectiveness of the security information provided by CloudStrike. Therefore, we opine that our approaches are suitable for overcoming contemporary cloud security issues.
Self-Supervised Domain-Aware Generative Network for Generalized Zero-Shot Learning

Generalized Zero-Shot Learning (GZSL) aims at recognizing both seen and unseen classes by constructing correspondence between visual and semantic embedding. However, existing methods have severely suffered from the strong bias problem, where unseen instances in target domain tend to be recognized as seen classes in source domain. To address this issue, we propose an end-to-end Self-supervised Domain-aware Generative Network (SDGN) by integrating self-supervised learning into feature generating model for unbiased GZSL. The proposed SDGN model enjoys several merits. First, we design a cross-domain feature generating module to synthesize samples with high fidelity based on class embeddings, which involves a novel target domain discriminator to preserve the domain consistency. Second, we propose a self-supervised learning module to investigate inter-domain relationships, where a set of anchors are introduced as a bridge between seen and unseen categories. In the shared space, we pull the distribution of target domain away from source domain, and obtain domain-aware features with high discriminative power for both seen and unseen classes. To our best knowledge, this is the first work to introduce self-supervised learning into GZSL as a learning guidance. Extensive experimental results on five standard benchmarks demonstrate that our model performs favorably against state-of-the-art GZSL methods.
Adversarial Texture Optimization From RGB-D Scans

Realistic color texture generation is an important step in RGB-D surface reconstruction, but remains challenging in practice due to inaccuracies in reconstructed geometry, misaligned camera poses, and view-dependent imaging artifacts. In this work, we present a novel approach for color texture generation using a conditional adversarial loss obtained from weakly-supervised views. Specifically, we propose an approach to produce photorealistic textures for approximate surfaces, even from misaligned images, by learning an objective function that is robust to these errors. The key idea of our approach is to learn a patch-based conditional discriminator which guides the texture optimization to be tolerant to misalignments. Our discriminator takes a synthesized view and a real image, and evaluates whether the synthesized one is realistic, under a broadened definition of realism. We train the discriminator by providing as `real' examples pairs of input views and their misaligned versions - so that the learned adversarial loss will tolerate errors from the scans. Experiments on synthetic and real data under quantitative or qualitative evaluation demonstrate the advantage of our approach in comparison to state of the art (see Figure 1, right). Our code is publicly available <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sup> with video demonstration <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> .
DeFeat-Net: General Monocular Depth via Simultaneous Unsupervised Representation Learning

In the current monocular depth research, the dominant approach is to employ unsupervised training on large datasets, driven by warped photometric consistency. Such approaches lack robustness and are unable to generalize to challenging domains such as nighttime scenes or adverse weather conditions where assumptions about photometric consistency break down. We propose DeFeat-Net (Depth & Feature network), an approach to simultaneously learn a cross-domain dense feature representation, alongside a robust depth-estimation framework based on warped feature consistency. The resulting feature representation is learned in an unsupervised manner with no explicit ground-truth correspondences required. We show that within a single domain, our technique is comparable to both the current state of the art in monocular depth estimation and supervised feature representation learning. However, by simultaneously learning features, depth and motion, our technique is able to generalize to challenging domains, allowing DeFeat-Net to outperform the current state-of-the-art with around 10% reduction in all error measures on more challenging sequences such as nighttime driving.
A machine learning-based approach to enhancing social media marketing

Social media (SM) represent beneficial channels for marketers, business promoters and consumers. To acquire continuous revenues and more active customers, key business players should understand the behaviour and purchase preferences of buyers. To predict the buying decisions of purchasers, data about purchase intentions and desires have to be extracted with the help of data mining techniques. The purpose of this paper is to examine social media data analytics using machine learning tools; this new approach for developing a social media marketing strategy employs the Waikato Environment for Knowledge Analysis (WEKA). WEKA is compared with other algorithms of interest and found to outperform its peers, especially with regard to parameters such as precision, recall, and F-measure, indicating that WEKA performs better than other approaches.
Real Image Denoising Based on Multi-Scale Residual Dense Block and Cascaded U-Net with Block-Connection

Benefiting from the recent real image dataset, learning- based approaches have achieved good performance for real-image denoising. To further improve the performance for Bayer raw data denoising, this paper introduces two new networks, which are multi-scale residual dense network (MRDN) and multi-scale residual dense cascaded U-Net with block-connection (MCU-Net). Both networks are built upon a newly designed multi-scale residual dense block (MRDB), and MCU-Net uses MRDB to connect the encoder and decoder of the U-Net. To better exploit the multi-scale feature of the images, the MRDB adds another branch of atrous spatial pyramid pooling (ASPP) based on residual dense block (RDB). Compared to the skip connection, the block-connection using MRDB can adaptively transform the features of the encoder and transfer them to the decoder of the U-Net. In addition, a novel noise permutation algorithm is introduced to avoid model overfitting. The superior performance of these new networks in removing noise within Bayer images has been demonstrated by comparison results on the SIDD benchmark, and the top ranking of SSIM in the NTIRE 2020 Challenge on Real Image Denoising - Track1: rawRGB.