Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
ICT Diffusion, Foreign Direct Investment and Inclusive Growth in Sub-Saharan Africa

This study examines the joint effects of ICT diffusion (composed of access, usage and skills), and foreign direct investment (FDI) on inclusive growth in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). The study draws on data from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators, and the Global Consumption and Income Project for the period 1980–2019 for the analysis. The study provides evidence robust to several specifications from the ordinary least squares and dynamic system GMM estimation techniques to show that: (1) unconditionally, both FDI and ICT diffusion induce inclusive growth in SSA; (2) compared to its direct effect, ICT diffusion is remarkable in fostering shared growth in SSA in the presence of FDI, and (3) relative to ICT access and ICT usage, ICT skills is more effective for enhancing inclusive growth in SSA. Overall, FDI modulates our ICT dynamics to engender positive synergy effects on inclusive growth. Policy recommendations are provided in line with the implementation of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) Agreement and the projected rise in FDI to SSA from 2022.
Influence-Balanced Loss for Imbalanced Visual Classification

In this paper, we propose a balancing training method to address problems in imbalanced data learning. To this end, we derive a new loss used in the balancing training phase that alleviates the influence of samples that cause an overfitted decision boundary. The proposed loss efficiently improves the performance of any type of imbalance learning methods. In experiments on multiple benchmark data sets, we demonstrate the validity of our method and reveal that the proposed loss outperforms the state-of-the-art cost-sensitive loss methods. Furthermore, since our loss is not restricted to a specific task, model, or training method, it can be easily used in combination with other recent resampling, meta-learning, and cost-sensitive learning methods for class-imbalance problems. Our code is made available at https://github.com/pseulki/IB-Loss.
Deep reinforcement learning in computer vision: a comprehensive survey

Deep reinforcement learning augments the reinforcement learning framework and utilizes the powerful representation of deep neural networks. Recent works have demonstrated the remarkable successes of deep reinforcement learning in various domains including finance, medicine, healthcare, video games, robotics, and computer vision. In this work, we provide a detailed review of recent and state-of-the-art research advances of deep reinforcement learning in computer vision. We start with comprehending the theories of deep learning, reinforcement learning, and deep reinforcement learning. We then propose a categorization of deep reinforcement learning methodologies and discuss their advantages and limitations. In particular, we divide deep reinforcement learning into seven main categories according to their applications in computer vision, i.e. (i) landmark localization (ii) object detection; (iii) object tracking; (iv) registration on both 2D image and 3D image volumetric data (v) image segmentation; (vi) videos analysis; and (vii) other applications. Each of these categories is further analyzed with reinforcement learning techniques, network design, and performance. Moreover, we provide a comprehensive analysis of the existing publicly available datasets and examine source code availability. Finally, we present some open issues and discuss future research directions on deep reinforcement learning in computer vision.
RADIATE: A Radar Dataset for Automotive Perception in Bad Weather

Datasets for autonomous cars are essential for the development and benchmarking of perception systems. However, most existing datasets are captured with camera and LiDAR sensors in good weather conditions. In this paper, we present the RAdar Dataset In Adverse weaThEr (RADIATE), aiming to facilitate research on object detection, tracking and scene understanding using radar sensing for safe autonomous driving. RADIATE includes 3 hours of annotated radar images with more than 200K labelled road actors in total, on average about 4.6 instances per radar image. It covers 8 different categories of actors in a variety of weather conditions (e.g., sun, night, rain, fog and snow) and driving scenarios (e.g., parked, urban, motorway and suburban), representing different levels of challenge. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first public radar dataset which provides high-resolution radar images on public roads with a large amount of road actors labelled. The data collected in adverse weathers, e.g., fog and snowfall, is unique. Some baseline results of radar based object detection and recognition are given to show that the use of radar data is promising for automotive applications in bad weather, where vision and LiDAR fail. RADIATE also has stereo images, 32-channel LiDAR and GPS data, directed at other applications such as sensor fusion, localisation and mapping. The public dataset can be accessed at http://pro.hw.ac.uk/radiate/.
Multi-perspective social recommendation method with graph representation learning

Social recommender systems (SRS) aim to study how social relations influence users’ choices and how to use them for better learning users embeddings. However, the diversity of social relationships, which is instructive to the propagation of social influence, has been rarely explored. In this paper, we propose a graph convolutional network based representation learning method, namely multi-perspective social recommendation (MPSR), to construct hierarchical user preferences and assign friends’ influences with different levels of trust from varying perspectives. We further utilize the attributes of items to partition and excavate users’ explicit preferences and employ complementary perspective modeling to learn implicit preferences of users. To measure the trust degree of friends from different perspectives, the statistical information of users’ historical behavior is utilized to construct multi-perspective social networks. Experimental results on two public datasets of Yelp and Ciao demonstrate that the MPSR significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. Further detailed analysis verifies the importance of mining explicit characteristics of users and the necessity for diverse social relationships, which show the rationality and effectiveness of the proposed model. The source Python code will be available upon request.
Self supervised contrastive learning for digital histopathology

Unsupervised learning has been a long-standing goal of machine learning and is especially important for medical image analysis, where the learning can compensate for the scarcity of labeled datasets. A promising subclass of unsupervised learning is self-supervised learning, which aims to learn salient features using the raw input as the learning signal. In this work, we tackle the issue of learning domain-specific features without any supervision to improve multiple task performances that are of interest to the digital histopathology community. We apply a contrastive self-supervised learning method to digital histopathology by collecting and pretraining on 57 histopathology datasets without any labels. We find that combining multiple multi-organ datasets with different types of staining and resolution properties improves the quality of the learned features. Furthermore, we find using more images for pretraining leads to a better performance in multiple downstream tasks, albeit there are diminishing returns as more unlabeled images are incorporated into the pretraining. Linear classifiers trained on top of the learned features show that networks pretrained on digital histopathology datasets perform better than ImageNet pretrained networks, boosting task performances by more than 28% in F1 scores on average. Interestingly, we did not observe a consistent correlation between the pretraining dataset site or the organ versus the downstream task (e.g., pretraining with only breast images does not necessarily lead to a superior downstream task performance for breast-related tasks). These findings may also be useful when applying newer contrastive techniques to histopathology data. Pretrained PyTorch models are made publicly available at https://github.com/ozanciga/self-supervised-histopathology.
A Systematic Review of Federated Learning in the Healthcare Area: From the Perspective of Data Properties and Applications

Recent advances in deep learning have shown many successful stories in smart healthcare applications with data-driven insight into improving clinical institutions’ quality of care. Excellent deep learning models are heavily data-driven. The more data trained, the more robust and more generalizable the performance of the deep learning model. However, pooling the medical data into centralized storage to train a robust deep learning model faces privacy, ownership, and strict regulation challenges. Federated learning resolves the previous challenges with a shared global deep learning model using a central aggregator server. At the same time, patient data remain with the local party, maintaining data anonymity and security. In this study, first, we provide a comprehensive, up-to-date review of research employing federated learning in healthcare applications. Second, we evaluate a set of recent challenges from a data-centric perspective in federated learning, such as data partitioning characteristics, data distributions, data protection mechanisms, and benchmark datasets. Finally, we point out several potential challenges and future research directions in healthcare applications.
Partial FC: Training 10 Million Identities on a Single Machine

Face recognition has been an active and vital topic among computer vision community for a long time. Previous researches mainly focus on loss functions used for facial feature extraction network, among which the improvements of softmax-based loss functions greatly promote the performance of face recognition. However, the contradiction between the drastically increasing number of face identities and the shortage of GPU memory is gradually becoming irreconcilable. In this work, we theoretically analyze the upper limit of model parallelism in face recognition in the first place. Then we propose a load-balanced sparse distributed classification training method, Partial FC, which is capable of using a machine with only 8 Nvidia Tesla V100 GPUs to implement training on a face recognition data set with up to 29 million IDs. Furthermore, we are able to train on data set with 100 million IDs in 64 RTX2080Ti GPUs. We have verified the effectiveness of Partial FC in 8 mainstream face recognition trainsets, and find that Partial FC is effective in all face recognition training sets. The code of this paper has been made available at https://github.com/deepinsight/insightface/tree/master/recognition/partial_fc.
Managers' understanding of artificial intelligence in relation to marketing financial services: insights from a cross-country study

Purpose Given that managers play a crucial role in developing and deploying AI for marketing financial services, this study was aimed at better understanding their awareness regarding AI and the challenges they are facing in providing the attendant technologies, as well as highlighting key stakeholders and their collaborative efforts in providing financial services. Design/methodology/approach Exploratory, inductive research design. The data was gathered through semi-structured interviews with 47 bank managers in both developed and developing countries, including the United Kingdom, Canada, Nigeria and Vietnam. Findings Managers are aware of the prospects of AI and are making efforts to address AI as a business need but find that there often exist certain challenges in accelerating AI adoption. The study also presents a conceptual framework of AI in relation to financial service marketing, which captures and highlights the interactions among the customers, banks and external stakeholders, as well as the regulators. Research limitations/implications Banks must understand their business objectives, the available resources and the needs of their customers. Managers should keep the ethical implications of their working relationships in mind when selecting a team or collaborating with partners. In addition, managers should be trained and assisted in comprehending AI in relation to financial services, while the regulators must be involved in the development of AI for financial service marketing. Finally, it is critical to communicate the prospects for AI to consumers. Originality/value This study provides empirical insight into the opportunities, prospects and challenges pertaining to the use of AI in the area of financial service marketing. It also specifically calls into question certain preconceptions regarding AI and its role in financial services, the chatbots adopted for financial service delivery and the role of marketing managers in developing AI.
Evolving kernel extreme learning machine for medical diagnosis via a disperse foraging sine cosine algorithm

Kernel extreme learning machine (KELM) has been widely used in the fields of classification and identification since it was proposed. As the parameters in the KELM model have a crucial impact on performance, they must be optimized before the model can be applied in practical areas. In this study, to improve optimization performance, a new parameter optimization strategy is proposed, based on a disperse foraging sine cosine algorithm (DFSCA), which is utilized to force some portions of search agents to explore other potential regions. Meanwhile, DFSCA is integrated into KELM to establish a new machine learning model named DFSCA-KELM. Firstly, using the CEC2017 benchmark suite, the exploration and exploitation capabilities of DFSCA were demonstrated. Secondly, evaluation of the model DFSCA-KELM on six medical datasets extracted from the UCI machine learning repository for medical diagnosis proved the effectiveness of the proposed model. At last, the model DFSCA-KELM was applied to solve two real medical cases, and the results indicate that DFSCA-KELM can also deal with practical medical problems effectively. Taken together, these results show that the proposed technique can be regarded as a promising tool for medical diagnosis.
SocialLGN: Light graph convolution network for social recommendation

Graph Neural Networks have been applied in recommender systems to learn the representation of users and items from a user-item graph. In the state-of-the-art, there are two major challenges in applying Graph Neural Networks to social recommendation: (i) how to accurately learn the representation of users and items from the user-item interaction graph and social graph, and (ii) based on the fact that each user is represented simultaneously by the two graphs, how to integrate the user representations learned from these two graphs. Aiming at addressing these challenges, this paper proposes a new social recommendation system called SocialLGN. In SocialLGN, the representation of each user and item is propagated in the user-item interaction graph with light graph convolutional layers; in the meantime, the user’s representation is propagated in the social graph. Based on this, a graph fusion operation is designed to aggregate user representations during propagation. The weighted sum is applied to combine the representations learned by each layer. Comprehensive experiments are conducted on two real-world datasets, and the result shows that the proposed SocialLGN outperforms the SOTA method, especially in handling the cold-start problem. Our PyTorch implemented model is available via https://github.com/leo0481/SocialLGN.
Autonomous Pilot of Unmanned Surface Vehicles: Bridging Path Planning and Tracking

Autonomous pilot is crucial in integrally promoting the autonomy of an unmanned surface vehicle (USV). However, the integration mechanism of decision and control is still unclear within the entire autonomy. In this paper, by organically bridging path planning and tracking, an autonomous pilot framework with waypoints generation, path smoothing and policy guidance of a USV in congested waters is established, for the first time. Incorporating elite and diversity operations into the genetic algorithm (GA), an elite-duplication GA (EGA) strategy is devised to optimally generate sparse waypoints in a constrained space. The B-spline technique is further deployed to make flexibly smooth interpolation facilitating path smoothing supported by optimal sparse-waypoints. Seamlessly bridged by the parametric smooth path, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) technique is resorted to continuously extract in-depth pilotage policies, i.e., mappings from path tracking errors, collision risks and control constraints to continuous control forces/torques. Eventually, the entire spline-bridged EGA-DRL (SED) framework merits autonomous global-pilotage and local-reaction in an organically modular manner. Comprehensive validations and comparisons in various real-world geographies demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed SED autonomous pilot framework.
Differential Privacy for Deep and Federated Learning: A Survey

Users’ privacy is vulnerable at all stages of the deep learning process. Sensitive information of users may be disclosed during data collection, during training, or even after releasing the trained learning model. Differential privacy (DP) is one of the main approaches proven to ensure strong privacy protection in data analysis. DP protects the users’ privacy by adding noise to the original dataset or the learning parameters. Thus, an attacker could not retrieve the sensitive information of an individual involved in the training dataset. In this survey paper, we analyze and present the main ideas based on DP to guarantee users’ privacy in deep and federated learning. In addition, we illustrate all types of probability distributions that satisfy the DP mechanism, with their properties and use cases. Furthermore, we bridge the gap in the literature by providing a comprehensive overview of the different variants of DP, highlighting their advantages and limitations. Our study reveals the gap between theory and application, accuracy, and robustness of DP. Finally, we provide several open problems and future research directions.
FBI: A Federated Learning-Based Blockchain-Embedded Data Accumulation Scheme Using Drones for Internet of Things

This letter presents a federated learning-basd data-accumulation scheme that combines drones and blockchain for remote regions where Internet of Things devices face network scarcity and potential cyber threats. The scheme contains a two-phase authentication mechanism in which requests are first validated using a cuckoo filter, followed by a timestamp nonce. Secure accumulation is achieved by validating models using a Hampel filter and loss checks. To increase the privacy of the model, differential privacy is employed before sharing. Finally, the model is stored in the blockchain after consent is obtained from mining nodes. Experiments are performed in a proper environment, and the results confirm the feasibility of the proposed scheme.
ID-Reveal: Identity-aware DeepFake Video Detection

A major challenge in DeepFake forgery detection is that state-of-the-art algorithms are mostly trained to detect a specific fake method. As a result, these approaches show poor generalization across different types of facial manipulations, e.g., from face swapping to facial reenactment. To this end, we introduce ID-Reveal, a new approach that learns temporal facial features, specific of how a person moves while talking, by means of metric learning coupled with an adversarial training strategy. The advantage is that we do not need any training data of fakes, but only train on real videos. Moreover, we utilize high-level semantic features, which enables robustness to widespread and disruptive forms of post-processing. We perform a thorough experimental analysis on several publicly available benchmarks. Compared to state of the art, our method improves generalization and is more robust to low-quality videos, that are usually spread over social networks. In particular, we obtain an average improvement of more than 15% in terms of accuracy for facial reenactment on high compressed videos.
A union of deep learning and swarm-based optimization for 3D human action recognition

Human Action Recognition (HAR) is a popular area of research in computer vision due to its wide range of applications such as surveillance, health care, and gaming, etc. Action recognition based on 3D skeleton data allows simplistic, cost-efficient models to be formed making it a widely used method. In this work, we propose DSwarm-Net, a framework that employs deep learning and swarm intelligence-based metaheuristic for HAR that uses 3D skeleton data for action classification. We extract four different types of features from the skeletal data namely: Distance, Distance Velocity, Angle, and Angle Velocity, which capture complementary information from the skeleton joints for encoding them into images. Encoding the skeleton data features into images is an alternative to the traditional video-processing approach and it helps in making the classification task less complex. The Distance and Distance Velocity encoded images have been stacked depth-wise and fed into a Convolutional Neural Network model which is a modified version of Inception-ResNet. Similarly, the Angle and Angle Velocity encoded images have been stacked depth-wise and fed into the same network. After training these models, deep features have been extracted from the pre-final layer of the networks, and the obtained feature representation is optimized by a nature-inspired metaheuristic, called Ant Lion Optimizer, to eliminate the non-informative or misleading features and to reduce the dimensionality of the feature set. DSwarm-Net has been evaluated on three publicly available HAR datasets, namely UTD-MHAD, HDM05, and NTU RGB+D 60 achieving competitive results, thus confirming the superiority of the proposed model compared to state-of-the-art models.
Learning What Not to Segment: A New Perspective on Few-Shot Segmentation

Recently few-shot segmentation (FSS) has been extensively developed. Most previous works strive to achieve generalization through the meta-learning framework derived from classification tasks; however, the trained models are biased towards the seen classes instead of being ideally class-agnostic, thus hindering the recognition of new concepts. This paper proposes a fresh and straightforward insight to alleviate the problem. Specifically, we apply an additional branch (base learner) to the conventional FSS model (meta learner) to explicitly identify the targets of base classes, i.e., the regions that do not need to be segmented. Then, the coarse results output by these two learners in parallel are adaptively integrated to yield precise segmentation prediction. Considering the sensitivity of meta learner, we further introduce an adjustment factor to estimate the scene differences between the input image pairs for facilitating the model ensemble forecasting. The substantial performance gains on PASCAL-5 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">i</sup> and COCO-20 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">i</sup> verify the effectiveness, and surprisingly, our versatile scheme sets a new state-of-the-art even with two plain learners. Moreover, in light of the unique nature of the proposed approach, we also extend it to a more realistic but challenging setting, i.e., generalized FSS, where the pixels of both base and novel classes are required to be determined. The source code is available at github.com/chunbolang/BAM.