Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Abstraction-Based Outlier Detection for Image Data

Data plays an important role in all stages of training, and usage of machine learning algorithms. Outliers are the samples in data that are generated by a “different mechanism” and belong to unexpected patterns that do not conform to normal behaviour. Outlier detection techniques try to deal with such undesirable events. There have been exceptional success of deep learning over classical methods in computer vision. In recent years a number of works employed the representation learning ability of deep autoencoders or Generative Adversarial Networks for outlier detection. Basically, methods are based on plugging representation techniques to outlier detection methods or directly reported employing reconstruction error as an outlier score. The error distributions of inliers and outliers may be still significantly overlapped. This could be associated with variation of samples inside the class, or cases with high outliers ratios, etc. In these cases, simply thresholding reconstruction errors may lead to misclassification. Although the produced representation is perhaps effective in representing the common features of the normal data, it is not necessarily effective in distinguishing outliers from inliers. We present a method that is based on constructing new features using convolutional variational autoencoder (VAE) and generate abstraction based on these features. To identify anomaly detection we tested two scenarios: utilizing VAE itself as well as using abstractions to train an additional architecture. Results are presented in the form of AUC-ROC using four benchmark datasets.
Face Aging with Conditional Generative Adversarial Network Guided by Ranking-CNN

As time elapses, the feature of human face will change more or less, which is referred to as face aging, varying from person to person. Face aging has great research value in the fields of age-invariant face recognition and entertainment in modern society. However, due to the difficulty of collecting face images at different ages for each person, face aging remains a difficult task, which aims to synthesize face images at target ages. In recent years, with the help of remarkable generative capacity, methods based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have sprung up. However, existing GAN-based methods only take age labels as generative condition, completely ignoring the age-related ordinal information. In this paper, we propose a GAN model constrained by Ranking-CNN, which can provide more stringent age constraints for the generator. Through qualitative and quantitative experiments, we show that our method can generate more accurate aging face images.
Adequate Digital Competence

This paper explores how digital competence is conceptualized in recent revisions in the curriculum for Swedish compulsory school. Four themes are identified based on a thematic content analysis of the revisions in the subject descriptions: use of digital tools and media, programming, critical awareness and responsibility. The distribution of the thematic revisions differs among the subjects, but the most dominating theme, permeating all the subjects, concerns the tool-oriented use of digital tools and media. This strong dominance of operational perspective tends to narrow the conceptualization compared to international definitions and frameworks of digital competence.
Adaptively Lossy Image Compression for Onboard Processing

More efficient image-compression codecs are an emerging requirement for spacecraft because increasingly complex, onboard image sensors can rapidly saturate downlink bandwidth of communication transceivers. While these codecs reduce transmitted data volume, many are compute-intensive and require rapid processing to sustain sensor data rates. Emerging next-generation small satellite (SmallSat) computers provide compelling computational capability to enable more onboard processing and compression than previously considered. For this research, we apply two compression algorithms for deployment on modern flight hardware: (1) end-to-end, neural-network-based, image compression (CNN-JPEG); and (2) adaptive image compression through feature-point detection (FPD-JPEG). These algorithms rely on intelligent data-processing pipelines that adapt to sensor data to compress it more effectively, ensuring efficient use of limited downlink bandwidths. The first algorithm, CNN-JPEG, employs a hybrid approach adapted from literature combining convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and JPEG; however, we modify and tune the training scheme for satellite imagery to account for observed training instabilities. This hybrid CNN-JPEG approach shows 23.5% better average peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and 33.5% better average structural similarity index (SSIM) versus standard JPEG on a dataset collected on the Space Test Program – Houston 5 (STP-H5-CSP) mission onboard the International Space Station (ISS). For our second algorithm, we developed a novel adaptive image-compression pipeline based upon JPEG that leverages the Oriented FAST and Rotated BRIEF (ORB) feature-point detection algorithm to adaptively tune the compression ratio to allow for a tradeoff between PSNR/SSIM and combined file size over a batch of STP-H5-CSP images. We achieve a less than 1% drop in average PSNR and SSIM while reducing the combined file size by 29.6% compared to JPEG using a static quality factor (QF) of 90.
Incomplete Label Multiple Instance Multiple Label Learning

With increasing data volumes, the bottleneck in obtaining data for training a given learning task is the cost of manually labeling instances within the data. To alleviate this issue, various reduced label settings have been considered including semi-supervised learning, partial- or incomplete-label learning, multiple-instance learning, and active learning. Here, we focus on multiple-instance multiple-label learning with missing bag labels. Little research has been done for this challenging yet potentially powerful variant of incomplete supervision learning. We introduce a novel discriminative probabilistic model for missing labels in multiple-instance multiple-label learning. To address inference challenges, we introduce an efficient implementation of the EM algorithm for the model. Additionally, we consider an alternative inference approach that relies on maximizing the label-wise marginal likelihood of the proposed model instead of the joint likelihood. Numerical experiments on benchmark datasets illustrate the robustness of the proposed approach. In particular, comparison to state-of-the-art methods shows that our approach introduces a significantly smaller decrease in performance when the proportion of missing labels is increased.
TranSlider: Transfer Ensemble Learning from Exploitation to Exploration

In transfer learning, what and where to transfer has been widely studied. Nevertheless, the learned transfer strategies are at high risk of over-fitting, especially when only a few annotated instances are available in the target domain. In this paper, we introduce the concept of transfer ensemble learning, a new direction to tackle the over-fitting of transfer strategies. Intuitively, models with different transfer strategies offer various perspectives on what and where to transfer. Therefore a core problem is to search these diversely transferred models for ensemble so as to achieve better generalization. Towards this end, we propose the Transferability Slider (TranSlider) for transfer ensemble learning. By decreasing the transferability, we obtain a spectrum of base models ranging from pure exploitation of the source model to unconstrained exploration for the target domain. Furthermore, the manner of decreasing transferability with parameter sharing guarantees fast optimization at no additional training cost. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments with various analyses, which demonstrate that TranSlider achieves the state-of-the-art on comprehensive benchmark datasets.
Analytic hierarchy process‐based prioritization framework for vendor's reliability challenges in global software development

Abstract The concept of global software development was adopted by software organizations for the purpose of delivering quality software products at a reduced cost. Software reliability became one of the eminent challenges in the global software development. The main objective of this research paper is to develop a classification of the challenging factors in the global software development process faced by vendor organizations. The classification of the challenges depends on the data gathered through systematic literature review and implementation of the analytic hierarchy process (AHP). A total of 18 challenges were explored through systematic literature review and mapped into five categories, that is, capability, reliance, delivery, management, and distinction. The explored issues played a major role for assisting the researcher and designer for mitigating the challenges during “AHP based prioritization framework for Vendor's Reliability challenges in Global Software Development”. Taking the AHP approach, we tried to fill this research gap by exploring and prioritizing the challenges that could negatively impact the vendor reliability of a specific organization. The classification of the explored challenges provided a framework that was used to deal with the issues associated with software reliability in the global software environment, which provided the vital role for the success of software organizations.
Permutation Enhances Classical Communication Assisted by Entangled States

We give a capacity formula for the classical communication over a noisy quantum channel, when local operations and global permutations allowed in the encoding and bipartite states preshared between the sender and the receiver. The two endpoints of this formula are the Holevo capacity (without entanglement assistance) and the entanglement assisted capacity (with unlimited entanglement assistance). What's more, we show that the capacity satisfies the strong converse property and thus the formula serves as a sharp dividing line between achievable and unachievable rates of communication. We prove that the difference between the assisted capacity and the Holevo capacity is upper bounded by the discord of formation of the preshared state. As examples, we derive analytically the classical capacity of various quantum channels of interests. Our result witnesses the power of random permutation in classical communication, whenever entanglement assistance is available.
Self-supervised Representation Learning on Document Images

This work analyses the impact of self-supervised pre-training on document images in the context of document image classification. While previous approaches explore the effect of self-supervision on natural images, we show that patch-based pre-training performs poorly on document images because of their different structural properties and poor intra-sample semantic information. We propose two context-aware alternatives to improve performance on the Tobacco-3482 image classification task. We also propose a novel method for self-supervision, which makes use of the inherent multi-modality of documents (image and text), which performs better than other popular self-supervised methods, including supervised ImageNet pre-training, on document image classification scenarios with a limited amount of data.
Automatic Validation of Textual Attribute Values in E-commerce Catalog by Learning with Limited Labeled Data

Product catalogs are valuable resources for eCommerce website. In the catalog, a product is associated with multiple attributes whose values are short texts, such as product name, brand, functionality and flavor. Usually individual retailers self-report these key values, and thus the catalog information unavoidably contains noisy facts. It is very important to validate the correctness of these values in order to improve shopper experiences and enable more effective product recommendation. Due to the huge volume of products, an effective automatic validation approach is needed. In this paper, we propose to develop an automatic validation approach that verifies the correctness of textual attribute values for products. This can be formulated as a task as cross-checking a textual attribute value against product profile, which is a short textual description of the product on eCommerce website. Although existing deep neural network models have shown success in conducting cross-checking between two pieces of texts, their success has to be dependent upon a large set of quality labeled data, which are hard to obtain in this validation task: products span a variety of categories. Due to the category difference, annotation has to be done on all the categories, which is impossible to achieve in real practice.
Maximizing Cumulative User Engagement in Sequential Recommendation

To maximize cumulative user engagement (e.g. cumulative clicks) in sequential recommendation, it is often needed to tradeoff two potentially conflicting objectives, that is, pursuing higher immediate user engagement (e.g., click-through rate) and encouraging user browsing (i.e., more items exposured). Existing works often study these two tasks separately, thus tend to result in sub-optimal results. In this paper, we study this problem from an online optimization perspective, and propose a flexible and practical framework to explicitly tradeoff longer user browsing length and high immediate user engagement. Specifically, by considering items as actions, user's requests as states and user leaving as an absorbing state, we formulate each user's behavior as a personalized Markov decision process (MDP), and the problem of maximizing cumulative user engagement is reduced to a stochastic shortest path (SSP) problem. Meanwhile, with immediate user engagement and quit probability estimation, it is shown that the SSP problem can be efficiently solved via dynamic programming. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Moreover, this approach is deployed at a large E-commerce platform, achieved over 7% improvement of cumulative clicks.
Confidence Estimation Using Machine Learning in Immersive Learning Environments

As the development of Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality (VR/AR) technology rapidly advances, learning in an artificial immersive environment becomes increasingly feasible. Such emerging technology not only facilitates and promotes an efficient learning process, but also reduces the cost of access to learning materials and environments. Current research mainly focuses on the development of immersive learning environments and the adaptive learning methods based on interactions between trainees and the environment. However, valuable human biometric data available in immersive environments, such as eye gaze and controller pose, have not been explored and utilized to help understand the affective state of the trainees. In this paper, we propose a machine-learning based research framework to estimate trainees' confidence about their decisions in immersive learning environments. Using this framework, we designed an experiment to collect biometric data from a multiple-choice question and answer session in an immersive learning environment. This includes collecting answers from 10 participants on 35 questions and their self-reported confidence in their answers. A Long Short-Term Memory neural network model was used to analyze the data and estimate the confidence with 85.6% accuracy.
Advances in Recommender Systems

The tutorial focuses on two major themes of recent advances in recommender systems: Part A: Recommendations in a Marketplace: Multi-sided marketplaces are steadily emerging as valuable ecosystems in many applications (e.g. Amazon, AirBnb, Uber), wherein the platforms have customers not only on the demand side (e.g. users), but also on the supply side (e.g. retailer). This tutorial focuses on designing search & recommendation frameworks that power such multi-stakeholder platforms. We discuss multi-objective ranking/recommendation techniques, discuss different ways in which stakeholders specify their objectives, highlight user specific characteristics (e.g. user receptivity) which could be leveraged when developing joint optimization modules and finally present a number of real world case-studies of such multi-stakeholder platforms.
Toward Unbiased Facial Expression Recognition in the Wild via Cross-Dataset Adaptation

Despite various success in computer vision with facial images (e.g., face detection, recognition, and generation), facial expression recognition is still a challenging problem yet to be solved. This is because of simple but fundamental bottlenecks: 1) no global agreement on different facial expressions, 2) significant dataset biases that prevent cross-dataset analysis for a large-scale study, and 3) high class imbalance in in-the-wild datasets that causes inconsistency in predicting expressions in images using a machine learning algorithm. To tackle these issues, we propose a novel Deep Learning approach via adaptive cross-dataset scheme. We combine multiple in-the-wild datasets to secure sufficient training samples while minimizing dataset bias using ideas of reversal gradients to retain generality. For this, we introduce a flexible objective function that can control for skewed label distributions in the dataset. Incorporating these ideas, together with the ResNet pipeline as a backbone, we carried extensive experiments to validate our ideas using three independent in-the-wild facial expression datasets, which first confirmed bias from different datasets and yielded improved performance on facial expression recognition using the multi-site dataset.
A2C: Attention-Augmented Contrastive Learning for State Representation Extraction

Reinforcement learning (RL) faces a series of challenges, including learning efficiency and generalization. The state representation used to train RL is one of the important factors causing these challenges. In this paper, we explore providing a more efficient state representation for RL. Contrastive learning is used as the representation extraction method in our work. We propose an attention mechanism implementation and extend an existing contrastive learning method by embedding the attention mechanism. Finally an attention-augmented contrastive learning method called A2C is obtained. As a result, using the state representation from A2C, the robot achieves better learning efficiency and generalization than those using state-of-the-art representations. Moreover, our attention mechanism is proven to be able to calculate the correlation of arbitrary distance among pixels, which is conducive to capturing more accurate obstacle information. What is more, we remove the attention mechanism from A2C. It is shown that the rewards available for the attention-removed A2C are reduced by more than 70%, which indicates the important role of the attention mechanism.
Deep Learning-based Quantitative Steganalysis to Detect Motion Vector Embedding of HEVC Videos

Generally, the purpose of a steganalysis algorithm is to establish the presence of secret messages in the stego data. However, quantitative steganalyzers can reveal more information about the secret communication by estimating the exact volume of embedded messages. Quantitative steganalysis is a crucial step for breaking secret codes in many practical scenarios. This work concerns about the quantitative steganalysis of videos. Most video steganographical algorithms embed secret messages by modifying the values of motion vector in the compressed domain. We propose a general framework for constructing video quantitative steganalyzers that are able to detect the embedding of motion vectors based on features learned by deep convolutional neural networks. Considering that video structure is quite different from that of image, we focus on the construction of input data matrix for deep convolutional neural network and the robustness of the detection network against different bitrates. Because videos at different embedding rates have different steganalysis features, we use multiple models to extract features for the construction of feature vector. Experimental results have validated the proposed method. Our deep learning-based steganalyzer obtained satisfactory estimation accuracy on testing HEVC videos at multiple embedding rates under different video bitrates.
Model-Centered Assurance for Autonomous Systems

The functions of an autonomous system can generally be partitioned into those concerned with perception and those concerned with action. Perception builds and maintains an internal model of the world (i.e., the system’s environment) that is used to plan and execute actions to accomplish a goal established by human supervisors. Accordingly, assurance decomposes into two parts: a) ensuring that the model is an accurate representation of the world as it changes through time and b) ensuring that the actions are safe (and effective), given the model. Both perception and action may employ AI, including machine learning (ML), and these present challenges to assurance. However, it is usually feasible to guard the actions with traditionally engineered and assured monitors, and thereby ensure safety, given the model. Thus, the model becomes the central focus for assurance. We propose an architecture and methods to ensure the accuracy of models derived from sensors whose interpretation uses AI and ML. Rather than derive the model from sensors bottom-up, we reverse the process and use the model to predict sensor interpretation. Small prediction errors indicate the world is evolving as expected and the model is updated accordingly. Large prediction errors indicate surprise, which may be due to errors in sensing or interpretation, or unexpected changes in the world (e.g., a pedestrian steps into the road). The former initiate error masking or recovery, while the latter requires revision to the model. Higher-level AI functions assist in diagnosis and execution of these tasks. Although this two-level architecture where the lower level does “predictive processing” and the upper performs more reflective tasks, both focused on maintenance of a world model, is derived by engineering considerations, it also matches a widely accepted theory of human cognition.
Validation Framework for Aspectual Requirements Engineering (ValFAR)

Aspect-Oriented Requirements Engineering (AORE) extends the existing requirements engineering approaches to support the identification and handling of crosscutting concerns. Crosscutting concerns are considered as potential aspects and can lead to the phenomenal "tyranny of the dominant decomposition". Requirements-level aspects are responsible for producing scattered and tangled descriptions of requirements in the requirements document. Requirements validation artifact is an essential task in software development. This task ensures that requirements are correct and valid in terms of completeness and consistency, hence, reducing the development cost, maintenance and establish an approximately correct estimate of effort and completion time of the project. In this paper, we present a validation framework for aspectual requirements that can be used with AORE approaches to facilitate the validation of the resulting crosscutting relationships and aspects. The proposed framework comprises a high-level and low-level validation. The high-level validation is to validate the concerns with stakeholders, whereas the low-level validation validates the aspectual requirement by developers using a checklist. The approach has been evaluated using a case study. The results demonstrate that the proposed framework is feasible and acceptable.