Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Teachers' digital competence to assist students with functional diversity: Identification of factors through logistic regression methods

Abstract We are experiencing a serious health crisis due to COVID‐19 that has a major impact on the field of education. The educational system therefore needs to be updated and innovated, with the addition of digital resources, to adapt the teaching and learning processes to students with disabilities. To meet the goal of high‐quality education, teachers must have adequate digital competence to face the educational demands that are placed on them. Therefore, the purposes of this study are: to know the teachers' knowledge about digital resources to support students with disabilities (O1); at each educational stage (O2), identify the variables that have a significant impact on the acquisition of teacher competence (O3); propose a selection of useful ICT resources for each type of disability (O4). An ex post facto design was used with 1194 teachers from Andalusia (Spain). The results showed the medium‐low level of the teaching staff, especially in the higher education stage. In addition, gender, motivation, attitude and having students with special needs are determining factors in the development of teacher knowledge. The results highlight the urgent need for teachers to be trained in digital resources. We hope that the range of resources proposed in this study will help teachers enhance their teaching practice. Practitioner notes What we already know about this topic Teachers have to find and adapt educational technology to achieve a higher level of success in students with disabilities. The use of ICT resources by teachers acts as a bridge to promote learning in students with disabilities. What this paper adds Identification of those predictors that significantly influence the acquisition of digital competence in teaching staff at various stages of education: gender, educational stage, motivation, attitude towards technologies and having students with specific educational support needs. A proposal of didactic applications is provided to address the different types of functional diversity. Implications for practice and/or policy It is essential that training plans on digital competence are established to assist students with functional diversity in their different learning stages. In this sense, personalised training itineraries or TMOOCs can be of major assistance. Expansion of the study sample (macro level) to identify digital factors, which affect the acquisition of the digital competence of the teaching staff to support their students' disabilities. Change regarding the type of diagnosis through self‐perception tests, such as those presented by these models, and subsequent work in other fields such as e‐portfolios of evidence or instruments in the form of problem solving.
BVI-DVC: A Training Database for Deep Video Compression

Deep learning methods are increasingly being applied in the optimisation of video compression algorithms and can achieve significantly enhanced coding gains, compared to conventional approaches. Such approaches often employ Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) which are trained on databases with relatively limited content coverage. In this paper, a new extensive and representative video database, BVI-DVC, is presented for training CNN-based video compression systems, with specific emphasis on machine learning tools that enhance conventional coding architectures, including spatial resolution and bit depth up-sampling, post-processing and in-loop filtering. BVI-DVC contains 800 sequences at various spatial resolutions from 270p to 2160p and has been evaluated on ten existing network architectures for four different coding tools. Experimental results show that this database produces significant improvements in terms of coding gains over three existing (commonly used) image/video training databases under the same training and evaluation configurations. The overall additional coding improvements by using the proposed database for all tested coding modules and CNN architectures are up to 10.3% based on the assessment of PSNR and 8.1% based on VMAF.
Alleviating data sparsity problem in time-aware recommender systems using a reliable rating profile enrichment approach

Recommender systems use intelligent algorithms to learn a user’s preferences and provide them relevant suggestions. Lack of sufficient ratings – also known as data sparsity problem – often results in poor recommendation performance. The existing recommendation methods have mainly focused on designing recommenders with high accuracy without paying much attention to the reliability of the recommendations. On the other hand, the users’ preferences may vary over time and considering the time factor in the design process is crucial, which has been largely ignored in most of the existing recommenders. To deal with these issues, a novel recommendation method is proposed in this paper which incorporates temporal reliability and confidence measures into the recommendation process. First, the effectiveness of the users’ rating is measured using a probabilistic approach and ineffective rating profiles are enriched by adding some implicit ratings to them. The quality of the predictions is evaluated using a temporal reliability measure taking into account the changes of users’ preferences over time. Then, the ratings with low reliability values are recalculated using a novel procedure, which updates the target user’s neighborhood by removing ineffective users. This leads to a temporal confidence measure that is used to update the neighborhood to provide more reliable and accurate recommendations. The superiority of the proposed method over state-of-the-art recommendation methods is shown by conducting extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets.
Kalman Filter: Historical Overview and Review of Its Use in Robotics 60 Years after Its Creation

Due to its widespread application in the robotics field, the Kalman filter has received increased attention from researchers. This work reviews some of the modifications conducted on to this algorithm over the last years. Problems such as the consistency, convergence, and accuracy of the filter are also dealt with. Sixty years after its creation, the Kalman filter is still used in autonomous navigation processes, robot control, and trajectory tracking, among other activities. The filter is not only restricted to robotics but is also present in different fields, such as economics and medicine. In addition, the characteristics of each modification on this filter are analyzed and compared.
Predicting the dynamic process and model parameters of the vector optical solitons in birefringent fibers via the modified PINN

A modified physics-informed neural network is used to predict the dynamics of optical pulses including one-soliton, two-soliton, and rogue wave based on the coupled nonlinear Schr\"odinger equation in birefringent fibers. At the same time, the elastic collision process of the mixed bright-dark soliton is predicted. Compared the predicted results with the exact solution, the modified physics-informed neural network method is proven to be effective to solve the coupled nonlinear Schr\"odinger equation. Moreover, the dispersion coefficients and nonlinearity coefficients of the coupled nonlinear Schrodinger equation can be learned by modified physics-informed neural network. This provides a reference for us to use deep learning methods to study the dynamic characteristics of solitons in optical fibers.
An empirical study of the impact of masks on face recognition

Face recognition has a wide range of applications like video surveillance, security, access control, etc. Over the past decade, the field of face recognition has matured and grown at par with the latest advancements in technology, particularly deep learning. Convolution Neural Networks have surpassed human accuracy in Face Recognition on popular evaluation tests such as LFW. However, most existing models evaluate their performance with an assumption of the availability of full facial information. The COVID-19 pandemic has laid forth challenges to this assumption, and to the performance of existing methods and leading-edge algorithms in the field of face recognition. This is in the wake of an explosive increase in the number of people wearing face masks. The reduced amount of facial information available to a recognition system from a masked face impacts their discrimination ability. In this context, we design and conduct a series of experiments comparing the masked face recognition performances of CNN architectures available in literature and exploring possible alterations in loss functions, architectures, and training methods that can enable existing methods to fully extract and leverage the limited facial information available in a masked face. We evaluate existing CNN-based face recognition systems for their performance against datasets composed entirely of masked faces, in contrast to the existing standard evaluations where masked or occluded faces are a rare occurrence. The study also presents evidence denoting an increased impact of network depth on performance compared to standard face recognition. Our observations indicate that substantial performance gains can be achieved by the introduction of masked faces in the training set. The study also inferred that various parameter settings determined suitable for standard face recognition are not ideal for masked face recognition. Through empirical analysis we derived new value recommendations for these parameters and settings.
Mobile‐fog‐cloud assisted deep reinforcement learning and blockchain‐enable IoMT system for healthcare workflows

Abstract The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) is increasingly being used to secure blockchain technology to operate healthcare applications in a distributed network. The applications are mobile and can move from one place to another with different wireless connectivity. However, there are a lot of challenges that are investigated further. For instance, dynamic content values changed during mobile applications during any business goal. The workflow healthcare applications are complex as compared to coarse‐grained and fine‐grained workload in IoMT. In this article, the study analyzed offloading and scheduling problems for healthcare workflows in IoMT fog‐cloud network. Therefore, the study considered the problem as an offloading and scheduling problem formulated deep reinforcement learning as Markov problem. The study devises the novel deep reinforcement learning and blockchain‐enabled system, consisting of multi‐criteria offloading based on deep reinforcement learning policies and blockchain task scheduling with task sequencing and research matching methods for healthcare workloads in the IoMT system. The simulation results suggested strategies that reduced the communication and computation time for each application in the system.
Query Adaptive Few-Shot Object Detection with Heterogeneous Graph Convolutional Networks

Few-shot object detection (FSOD) aims to detect never-seen objects using few examples. This field sees recent improvement owing to the meta-learning techniques by learning how to match between the query image and few-shot class examples, such that the learned model can generalize to few-shot novel classes. However, currently, most of the meta-learning-based methods perform parwise matching between query image regions (usually proposals) and novel classes separately, therefore failing to take into account multiple relationships among them. In this paper, we propose a novel FSOD model using heterogeneous graph convolutional networks. Through efficient message passing among all the proposal and class nodes with three different types of edges, we could obtain context-aware proposal features and query-adaptive, multiclass-enhanced prototype representations for each class, which could help promote the pairwise matching and improve final FSOD accuracy. Extensive experimental results show that our proposed model, denoted as QA-FewDet, outperforms the current state-of-the-art approaches on the PASCAL VOC and MSCOCO FSOD benchmarks under different shots and evaluation metrics.
Measuring and Improving Consistency in Pretrained Language Models

Abstract Consistency of a model—that is, the invariance of its behavior under meaning-preserving alternations in its input—is a highly desirable property in natural language processing. In this paper we study the question: Are Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) consistent with respect to factual knowledge? To this end, we create ParaRel🤘, a high-quality resource of cloze-style query English paraphrases. It contains a total of 328 paraphrases for 38 relations. Using ParaRel🤘, we show that the consistency of all PLMs we experiment with is poor— though with high variance between relations. Our analysis of the representational spaces of PLMs suggests that they have a poor structure and are currently not suitable for representing knowledge robustly. Finally, we propose a method for improving model consistency and experimentally demonstrate its effectiveness.1
AI-Assisted Edge Vision for Violence Detection in IoT-Based Industrial Surveillance Networks

Analyzing surveillance videos is mandatory for the public and industrial security. Overwhelming growth in computer vision fields has been made to automate the surveillance system in terms of human activity recognition, such as behavior analysis and violence detection (VD). However, it is challenging to detect and analyze the violent scenes intelligently to fulfill the notion of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT)-based surveillance buoyed by constrained resources to reduce computational power. To tackle this challenge, in this article, an artificial intelligence enabled IIoT-based framework with VD-Network (VD-Net) is proposed. First, the input video frames are passed to light-weight convolutional neural network model for important information collection including humans or suspicious objects such as knives/guns. Upon suspicious object detection, an alert is generated as an earlier VD in IIoT network while the information is shared with concern departments. Only the frames with objects are forwarded to cloud for detail investigation where features are extracted using convolutional long short-term memory (ConvLSTM). The latter from ConvLSTM is propagated to gated recurrent unit for final VD. The conducted experiments and ablation study on the existing surveillance and nonsurveillance datasets empirically validate the effectiveness of the proposed VD-Net by improving 3.9% increase in the accuracy compared with the state-of-the-art VD methods.
TransPath: Transformer-Based Self-supervised Learning for Histopathological Image Classification

A large-scale labeled dataset is a key factor for the success of supervised deep learning in histopathological image analysis. However, exhaustive annotation requires a careful visual inspection by pathologists, which is extremely time-consuming and labor-intensive. Self-supervised learning (SSL) can alleviate this issue by pre-training models under the supervision of data itself, which generalizes well to various downstream tasks with limited annotations. In this work, we propose a hybrid model (TransPath) which is pre-trained in an SSL manner on massively unlabeled histopathological images to discover the inherent image property and capture domain-specific feature embedding. The TransPath can serve as a collaborative local-global feature extractor, which is designed by combining a convolutional neural network (CNN) and a modified transformer architecture. We propose a token-aggregating and excitation (TAE) module which is placed behind the self-attention of the transformer encoder for capturing more global information. We evaluate the performance of pre-trained TransPath by fine-tuning it on three downstream histopathological image classification tasks. Our experimental results indicate that TransPath outperforms state-of-the-art vision transformer networks, and the visual representations generated by SSL on domain-relevant histopathological images are more transferable than the supervised baseline on ImageNet. Our code and pre-trained models will be available at https://github.com/Xiyue-Wang/TransPath.
Probabilistic Monocular 3D Human Pose Estimation with Normalizing Flows

3D human pose estimation from monocular images is a highly ill-posed problem due to depth ambiguities and occlusions. Nonetheless, most existing works ignore these ambiguities and only estimate a single solution. In contrast, we generate a diverse set of hypotheses that represents the full posterior distribution of feasible 3D poses. To this end, we propose a normalizing flow based method that exploits the deterministic 3D-to-2D mapping to solve the ambiguous inverse 2D-to-3D problem. Additionally, uncertain detections and occlusions are effectively modeled by incorporating uncertainty information of the 2D detector as condition. Further keys to success are a learned 3D pose prior and a generalization of the best-of-M loss. We evaluate our approach on the two benchmark datasets Human3.6M and MPI-INF-3DHP, outperforming all comparable methods in most metrics. The implementation is available on GitHub <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sup> .
Convolution-Free Medical Image Segmentation Using Transformers

Like other applications in computer vision, medical image segmentation and his email address have been most successfully addressed using deep learning models that rely on the convolution operation as their main building block. Convolutions enjoy important properties such as sparse interactions, weight sharing, and translation equivariance. These properties give convolutional neural networks (CNNs) a strong and useful inductive bias for vision tasks. However, the convolution operation also has important shortcomings: it performs a fixed operation on every test image regardless of the content and it cannot efficiently model long-range interactions. In this work we show that a network based on self-attention between neighboring patches and without any convolution operations can achieve better results. Given a 3D image block, our network divides it into \(n^3\) 3D patches, where \(n=3 \text { or } 5\) and computes a 1D embedding for each patch. The network predicts the segmentation map for the center patch of the block based on the self-attention between these patch embeddings. We show that the proposed model can achieve higher segmentation accuracies than a state of the art CNN. For scenarios with very few labeled images, we propose methods for pre-training the network on large corpora of unlabeled images. Our experiments show that with pre-training the advantage of our proposed network over CNNs can be significant when labeled training data is small.
Disentangle Your Dense Object Detector

Deep learning-based dense object detectors have achieved great success in the past few years and have been applied to numerous multimedia applications such as video understanding. However, the current training pipeline for dense detectors is compromised to lots of conjunctions that may not hold. In this paper, we investigate three such important conjunctions: 1) only samples assigned as positive in classification head are used to train the regression head; 2) classification and regression share the same input feature and computational fields defined by the parallel head architecture; and 3) samples distributed in different feature pyramid layers are treated equally when computing the loss. We first carry out a series of pilot experiments to show disentangling such conjunctions can lead to persistent performance improvement. Then, based on these findings, we propose Disentangled Dense Object Detector (DDOD), in which simple and effective disentanglement mechanisms are designed and integrated into the current state-of-the-art dense object detectors. Extensive experiments on MS COCO benchmark show that our approach can lead to 2.0~mAP, 2.4~mAP and 2.2~mAP absolute improvements on RetinaNet, FCOS, and ATSS baselines with negligible extra overhead. Notably, our best model reaches 55.0 mAP on the COCOtest-dev set and 93.5 AP on the hard subset of WIDER FACE, achieving new state-of-the-art performance on these two competitive benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/zehuichen123/DDOD.
STST: Spatial-Temporal Specialized Transformer for Skeleton-based Action Recognition

Skeleton-based action recognition has been widely investigated considering their strong adaptability to dynamic circumstances and complicated backgrounds. To recognize different actions from skeleton sequences, it is essential and crucial to model the posture of the human represented by the skeleton and its changes in the temporal dimension. However, most of the existing works treat skeleton sequences in the temporal and spatial dimension in the same way, ignoring the difference between the temporal and spatial dimension in skeleton data which is not an optimal way to model skeleton sequences. The posture represented by the skeleton in each frame is proposed to be modeled individually. Meanwhile, capturing the movement of the entire skeleton in the temporal dimension is needed. So, we designed Spatial Transformer Block and Directional Temporal Transformer Block for modeling skeleton sequences in spatial and temporal dimensions respectively. Due to occlusion/sensor/raw video, etc., there are noises on both temporal and spatial dimensions in the extracted skeleton data reducing the recognition capabilities of models. To adapt to this imperfect information condition, we propose a multi-task self-supervised learning method by providing confusing samples in different situations to improve the robustness of our model. Combining the above design, we propose our Spatial-Temporal Specialized Transformer~(STST) and conduct experiments with our model on the SHREC, NTU-RGB+D, and Kinetics-Skeleton. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the improved performances and analysis of the proposed method.
Attention-based dynamic user modeling and Deep Collaborative filtering recommendation

Deep learning (DL) techniques have been widely used in recommender systems for user modeling and matching function learning based on historical interaction matrix. However, existing DL-based recommendation methods usually perform static user preference modeling by using historical interacted items of the user. In this article, we present a time-aware deep CF framework which contains two stages: dynamic user preference modeling based on attention mechanism and matching score prediction based on DL. In the first stage, short-term user preferences are modeled by the time-aware attention mechanism that fully considered the predicted item, the recent interacted items and their interaction time. The resulting short-term preferences are combined with long-term preferences for dynamic user preference modeling. In the second stage, high-order user-item feature interactions are learned by two types of DL models, Deep Matrix Factorization (DMF) and Multiple-Layer Perception (MLP), and the feature interaction vectors of the two models are fused in the last layer of the model to predict the matching score. Extensive experiments on five datasets indicate that our method is superior to the existing time-aware and DL-based recommendation methods in top-k recommendations significantly and consistently.