Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Transfer Reinforcement Learning across Homotopy Classes

The ability for robots to transfer their learned knowledge to new tasks -- where data is scarce -- is a fundamental challenge for successful robot learning. While fine-tuning has been well-studied as a simple but effective transfer approach in the context of supervised learning, it is not as well-explored in the context of reinforcement learning. In this work, we study the problem of fine-tuning in transfer reinforcement learning when tasks are parameterized by their reward functions, which are known beforehand. We conjecture that fine-tuning drastically underperforms when source and target trajectories are part of different homotopy classes. We demonstrate that fine-tuning policy parameters across homotopy classes compared to fine-tuning within a homotopy class requires more interaction with the environment, and in certain cases is impossible. We propose a novel fine-tuning algorithm, Ease-In-Ease-Out fine-tuning, that consists of a relaxing stage and a curriculum learning stage to enable transfer learning across homotopy classes. Finally, we evaluate our approach on several robotics-inspired simulated environments and empirically verify that the Ease-In-Ease-Out fine-tuning method can successfully fine-tune in a sample-efficient way compared to existing baselines.
Template-Free Try-on Image Synthesis via Semantic-guided Optimization

The virtual try-on task is so attractive that it has drawn considerable attention in the field of computer vision. However, presenting the three-dimensional (3D) physical characteristic (e.g., pleat and shadow) based on a 2D image is very challenging. Although there have been several previous studies on 2D-based virtual try-on work, most 1) required user-specified target poses that are not user-friendly and may not be the best for the target clothing, and 2) failed to address some problematic cases, including facial details, clothing wrinkles and body occlusions. To address these two challenges, in this paper, we propose an innovative template-free try-on image synthesis (TF-TIS) network. The TF-TIS first synthesizes the target pose according to the user-specified in-shop clothing. Afterward, given an in-shop clothing image, a user image, and a synthesized pose, we propose a novel model for synthesizing a human try-on image with the target clothing in the best fitting pose. The qualitative and quantitative experiments both indicate that the proposed TF-TIS outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, especially for difficult cases.
Robust Single-step Adversarial Training with Regularizer

High cost of training time caused by multi-step adversarial example generation is a major challenge in adversarial training. Previous methods try to reduce the computational burden of adversarial training using single-step adversarial example generation schemes, which can effectively improve the efficiency but also introduce the problem of catastrophic overfitting, where the robust accuracy against Fast Gradient Sign Method (FGSM) can achieve nearby 100\% whereas the robust accuracy against Projected Gradient Descent (PGD) suddenly drops to 0\% over a single epoch. To address this problem, we propose a novel Fast Gradient Sign Method with PGD Regularization (FGSMPR) to boost the efficiency of adversarial training without catastrophic overfitting. Our core idea is that single-step adversarial training can not learn robust internal representations of FGSM and PGD adversarial examples. Therefore, we design a PGD regularization term to encourage similar embeddings of FGSM and PGD adversarial examples. The experiments demonstrate that our proposed method can train a robust deep network for L$_\infty$-perturbations with FGSM adversarial training and reduce the gap to multi-step adversarial training.
Unification of drags and confluence of drag rewriting

Drags are a recent, natural generalization of terms which admit arbitrary cycles. A key aspect of drags is that they can be equipped with a composition operator so that rewriting amounts to replace a drag by another in a composition. In this paper, we develop a unification algorithm for drags that allows to check the local confluence property of a set of drag rewrite rules.
Adaptively Sparse Regularization for Blind Image Restoration

Image quality is the basis of image communication and understanding tasks. Due to the blur and noise effects caused by imaging, transmission and other processes, the image quality is degraded. Blind image restoration is widely used to improve image quality, where the main goal is to faithfully estimate the blur kernel and the latent sharp image. In this study, based on experimental observation and research, an adaptively sparse regularized minimization method is originally proposed. The high-order gradients combine with low-order ones to form a hybrid regularization term, and an adaptive operator derived from the image entropy is introduced to maintain a good convergence. Extensive experiments were conducted on different blur kernels and images. Compared with existing state-of-the-art blind deblurring methods, our method demonstrates superiority on the recovery accuracy.
Equational reasoning for non-determinism monad: the case of Spark  aggregation

As part of the author's studies on equational reasoning for monadic programs, this report focus on non-determinism monad. We discuss what properties this monad should satisfy, what additional operators and notations can be introduced to facilitate equational reasoning about non-determinism, and put them to the test by proving a number of properties in our example problem inspired by the author's previous work on proving properties of Spark aggregation.
Value dominants of figurative-sensual communication in the library professional space

The article considers the transformational changes in the modern library environment, in which digital media content is the main source of information and communication. The tendencies in the studies of the axiological sphere of library science, namely the observance of the humanistic aspect of the activities of libraries as a center of science, education, culture, and communication, are highlighted. A decrease in the general intellectual level of users against the background of informatization of society has been noted, which requires improvement in the nature and types of information, as well as methods for obtaining and using it. The need to organize communication in libraries, to provide people with the opportunity to realize their need for it, was stated. It is noted that the figurative-sensual means of library communication are associated with communication at the interpersonal and intercultural levels. Library targeted activities related to art expand the users area of interest, help them to better understand the phenomena of reality and themselves. The ability to interact in the process of communication, to apply the skills of influencing dialogic action is recognized as a necessary component of the professional activity of librarians. Library dialogue is the universal means of establishing contacts and consolidating people. &#x0D; The value aspects of figurative-sensual communication in servicing the modern user with libraries are investigated. The role of values in the vital activity of youth and society is substantiated. Currently, there is a transformation of information needs and value orientations in the library sector. It is noted that the formation of a harmoniously developed personality without the intellectual and aesthetic impact of the speech element of speech interaction is impossible. It is provided for deeping attention to the problem of recognizing and highlighting the value dominants of figurative-sensual communication in the modern library space.
French model of higher education in library and information: cognitive and organizational features

The article looks into the history of the French library and information higher education system's origin and its current state of functioning. The study pays attention to its place in the world system of library and information training, and determines the features of cognitive and organizational components. It is noted the French model of higher education in information traditionally to train specialists for libraries, archives and documentation centers within one specialty. The specifics of the librarian-documentary specialist's degree training in French universities is considered, as well as the profiles of their master's programs are characterized. The article analyses the current vectors of library and information specialists' training in the most authoritative specialized institution of higher education in France — the National School of Library and Information Sciences (ENSSIB — École nationale supérieure des sciences de l'information et des bibliothèques). The latter offers double degree programs focused on conjuncture specializations in demand in the information market. The study determines the peculiarities of the master educational programs' cognitive component and characterizes the key competencies that students acquire during their mastering. For Ukraine, the emphasis is placed on promising innovations of the French model of library and information specialists training, which should be implemented within a single integrated 029 "Information, Library and Archival Studies specialty".
PAC-Bayes Bounds on Variational Tempered Posteriors for Markov Models

Datasets displaying temporal dependencies abound in science and engineering applications, with Markov models representing a simplified and popular view of the temporal dependence structure. In this paper, we consider Bayesian settings that place prior distributions over the parameters of the transition kernel of a Markov model, and seeks to characterize the resulting, typically intractable, posterior distributions. We present a PAC-Bayesian analysis of variational Bayes (VB) approximations to tempered Bayesian posterior distributions, bounding the model risk of the VB approximations. Tempered posteriors are known to be robust to model misspecification, and their variational approximations do not suffer the usual problems of over confident approximations. Our results tie the risk bounds to the mixing and ergodic properties of the Markov data generating model. We illustrate the PAC-Bayes bounds through a number of example Markov models, and also consider the situation where the Markov model is misspecified.
InMoDeGAN: Interpretable Motion Decomposition Generative Adversarial  Network for Video Generation

In this work, we introduce an unconditional video generative model, InMoDeGAN, targeted to (a) generate high quality videos, as well as to (b) allow for interpretation of the latent space. For the latter, we place emphasis on interpreting and manipulating motion. Towards this, we decompose motion into semantic sub-spaces, which allow for control of generated samples. We design the architecture of InMoDeGAN-generator in accordance to proposed Linear Motion Decomposition, which carries the assumption that motion can be represented by a dictionary, with related vectors forming an orthogonal basis in the latent space. Each vector in the basis represents a semantic sub-space. In addition, a Temporal Pyramid Discriminator analyzes videos at different temporal resolutions. Extensive quantitative and qualitative analysis shows that our model systematically and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the VoxCeleb2-mini and BAIR-robot datasets w.r.t. video quality related to (a). Towards (b) we present experimental results, confirming that decomposed sub-spaces are interpretable and moreover, generated motion is controllable.
Humanistic and educational principles of the past in the context of modern problems of culture and education (reflections on L.U. Zvonareva’s book “Opening the gates of scholarship: the life and work of Simeon Polotsky”)

The characteristics of the monograph about the outstanding writer, philosopher, teacher S. Polotsky are presented primarily from the point of view of the relevance and significance of the positions of the educator for modern culture and pedagogy. The importance of an interdisciplinary approach reflecting the needs of the humanities of the information society for research activities is emphasized.
Hop-Hop Relation-aware Graph Neural Networks

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are widely used in graph representation learning. However, most GNN methods are designed for either homogeneous or heterogeneous graphs. In this paper, we propose a new model, Hop-Hop Relation-aware Graph Neural Network (HHR-GNN), to unify representation learning for these two types of graphs. HHR-GNN learns a personalized receptive field for each node by leveraging knowledge graph embedding to learn relation scores between the central node's representations at different hops. In neighborhood aggregation, our model simultaneously allows for hop-aware projection and aggregation. This mechanism enables the central node to learn a hop-wise neighborhood mixing that can be applied to both homogeneous and heterogeneous graphs. Experimental results on five benchmarks show the competitive performance of our model compared to state-of-the-art GNNs, e.g., up to 13K faster in terms of time cost per training epoch on large heterogeneous graphs.
An End-to-End Document-Level Neural Discourse Parser Exploiting  Multi-Granularity Representations

Document-level discourse parsing, in accordance with the Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST), remains notoriously challenging. Challenges include the deep structure of document-level discourse trees, the requirement of subtle semantic judgments, and the lack of large-scale training corpora. To address such challenges, we propose to exploit robust representations derived from multiple levels of granularity across syntax and semantics, and in turn incorporate such representations in an end-to-end encoder-decoder neural architecture for more resourceful discourse processing. In particular, we first use a pre-trained contextual language model that embodies high-order and long-range dependency to enable finer-grain semantic, syntactic, and organizational representations. We further encode such representations with boundary and hierarchical information to obtain more refined modeling for document-level discourse processing. Experimental results show that our parser achieves the state-of-the-art performance, approaching human-level performance on the benchmarked RST dataset.
HI-Net: Hyperdense Inception 3D UNet for Brain Tumor Segmentation

The brain tumor segmentation task aims to classify tissue into the whole tumor (WT), tumor core (TC), and enhancing tumor (ET) classes using multimodel MRI images. Quantitative analysis of brain tumors is critical for clinical decision making. While manual segmentation is tedious, time-consuming, and subjective, this task is at the same time very challenging to automatic segmentation methods. Thanks to the powerful learning ability, convolutional neural networks (CNNs), mainly fully convolutional networks, have shown promising brain tumor segmentation. This paper further boosts the performance of brain tumor segmentation by proposing hyperdense inception 3D UNet (HI-Net), which captures multi-scale information by stacking factorization of 3D weighted convolutional layers in the residual inception block. We use hyper dense connections among factorized convolutional layers to extract more contexual information, with the help of features reusability. We use a dice loss function to cope with class imbalances. We validate the proposed architecture on the multi-modal brain tumor segmentation challenges (BRATS) 2020 testing dataset. Preliminary results on the BRATS 2020 testing set show that achieved by our proposed approach, the dice (DSC) scores of ET, WT, and TC are 0.79457, 0.87494, and 0.83712, respectively.
One for More: Selecting Generalizable Samples for Generalizable ReID  Model

Current training objectives of existing person Re-IDentification (ReID) models only ensure that the loss of the model decreases on selected training batch, with no regards to the performance on samples outside the batch. It will inevitably cause the model to over-fit the data in the dominant position (e.g., head data in imbalanced class, easy samples or noisy samples). %We call the sample that updates the model towards generalizing on more data a generalizable sample. The latest resampling methods address the issue by designing specific criterion to select specific samples that trains the model generalize more on certain type of data (e.g., hard samples, tail data), which is not adaptive to the inconsistent real world ReID data distributions. Therefore, instead of simply presuming on what samples are generalizable, this paper proposes a one-for-more training objective that directly takes the generalization ability of selected samples as a loss function and learn a sampler to automatically select generalizable samples. More importantly, our proposed one-for-more based sampler can be seamlessly integrated into the ReID training framework which is able to simultaneously train ReID models and the sampler in an end-to-end fashion. The experimental results show that our method can effectively improve the ReID model training and boost the performance of ReID models.
Complex Relation Extraction: Challenges and Opportunities

Relation extraction aims to identify the target relations of entities in texts. Relation extraction is very important for knowledge base construction and text understanding. Traditional binary relation extraction, including supervised, semi-supervised and distant supervised ones, has been extensively studied and significant results are achieved. In recent years, many complex relation extraction tasks, i.e., the variants of simple binary relation extraction, are proposed to meet the complex applications in practice. However, there is no literature to fully investigate and summarize these complex relation extraction works so far. In this paper, we first report the recent progress in traditional simple binary relation extraction. Then we summarize the existing complex relation extraction tasks and present the definition, recent progress, challenges and opportunities for each task.
TAP: Text-Aware Pre-training for Text-VQA and Text-Caption

In this paper, we propose Text-Aware Pre-training (TAP) for Text-VQA and Text-Caption tasks. These two tasks aim at reading and understanding scene text in images for question answering and image caption generation, respectively. In contrast to the conventional vision-language pre-training that fails to capture scene text and its relationship with the visual and text modalities, TAP explicitly incorporates scene text (generated from OCR engines) in pre-training. With three pre-training tasks, including masked language modeling (MLM), image-text (contrastive) matching (ITM), and relative (spatial) position prediction (RPP), TAP effectively helps the model learn a better aligned representation among the three modalities: text word, visual object, and scene text. Due to this aligned representation learning, even pre-trained on the same downstream task dataset, TAP already boosts the absolute accuracy on the TextVQA dataset by +5.4%, compared with a non-TAP baseline. To further improve the performance, we build a large-scale dataset based on the Conceptual Caption dataset, named OCR-CC, which contains 1.4 million scene text-related image-text pairs. Pre-trained on this OCR-CC dataset, our approach outperforms the state of the art by large margins on multiple tasks, i.e., +8.3% accuracy on TextVQA, +8.6% accuracy on ST-VQA, and +10.2 CIDEr score on TextCaps.
Anyonic Partial Transpose I: Quantum Information Aspects

A basic diagnostic of entanglement in mixed quantum states is known as the partial transpose and the corresponding entanglement measure is called the logarithmic negativity. Despite the great success of logarithmic negativity in characterizing bosonic many-body systems, generalizing the partial transpose to fermionic systems remained a technical challenge until recently when a new definition that accounts for the Fermi statistics was put forward. In this paper, we propose a way to generalize the partial transpose to anyons with (non-Abelian) fractional statistics based on the apparent similarity between the partial transpose and the braiding operation. We then define the anyonic version of the logarithmic negativity and show that it satisfies the standard requirements such as monotonicity to be an entanglement measure. In particular, we elucidate the properties of the anyonic logarithmic negativity by computing it for a toy density matrix of a pair of anyons within various categories. We conjecture that the subspace of states with a vanishing logarithmic negativity is a set of measure zero in the entire space of anyonic states, in contrast with the ordinary qubit systems where this subspace occupies a finite volume. We prove this conjecture for multiplicity-free categories.
Robust Instance Segmentation through Reasoning about Multi-Object  Occlusion

Analyzing complex scenes with Deep Neural Networks is a challenging task, particularly when images contain multiple objects that partially occlude each other. Existing approaches to image analysis mostly process objects independently and do not take into account the relative occlusion of nearby objects. In this paper, we propose a deep network for multi-object instance segmentation that is robust to occlusion and can be trained from bounding box supervision only. Our work builds on Compositional Networks, which learn a generative model of neural feature activations to locate occluders and to classify objects based on their non-occluded parts. We extend their generative model to include multiple objects and introduce a framework for efficient inference in challenging occlusion scenarios. In particular, we obtain feed-forward predictions of the object classes and their instance and occluder segmentations. We introduce an Occlusion Reasoning Module (ORM) that locates erroneous segmentations and estimates the occlusion order to correct them. The improved segmentation masks are, in turn, integrated into the network in a top-down manner to improve the image classification. Our experiments on the KITTI INStance dataset (KINS) and a synthetic occlusion dataset demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our model at multi-object instance segmentation under occlusion. Code is publically available at https://github.com/XD7479/Multi-Object-Occlusion.
SSGD: A safe and efficient method of gradient descent

With the vigorous development of artificial intelligence technology, various engineering technology applications have been implemented one after another. The gradient descent method plays an important role in solving various optimization problems, due to its simple structure, good stability and easy implementation. In multi-node machine learning system, the gradients usually need to be shared. Shared gradients are generally unsafe. Attackers can obtain training data simply by knowing the gradient information. In this paper, to prevent gradient leakage while keeping the accuracy of model, we propose the super stochastic gradient descent approach to update parameters by concealing the modulus length of gradient vectors and converting it or them into a unit vector. Furthermore, we analyze the security of super stochastic gradient descent approach. Our algorithm can defend against attacks on the gradient. Experiment results show that our approach is obviously superior to prevalent gradient descent approaches in terms of accuracy, robustness, and adaptability to large-scale batches.