Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
DenseRaC: Joint 3D Pose and Shape Estimation by Dense Render-and-Compare

We present DenseRaC, a novel end-to-end framework for jointly estimating 3D human pose and body shape from a monocular RGB image. Our two-step framework takes the body pixel-to-surface correspondence map (i.e., IUV map) as proxy representation and then performs estimation of parameterized human pose and shape. Specifically, given an estimated IUV map, we develop a deep neural network optimizing 3D body reconstruction losses and further integrating a render-and-compare scheme to minimize differences between the input and the rendered output, i.e., dense body landmarks, body part masks, and adversarial priors. To boost learning, we further construct a large-scale synthetic dataset (MOCA) utilizing web-crawled Mocap sequences, 3D scans and animations. The generated data covers diversified camera views, human actions and body shapes, and is paired with full ground truth. Our model jointly learns to represent the 3D human body from hybrid datasets, mitigating the problem of unpaired training data. Our experiments show that DenseRaC obtains superior performance against state of the art on public benchmarks of various human-related tasks.
A Novel Unsupervised Camera-Aware Domain Adaptation Framework for Person Re-Identification

Unsupervised cross-domain person re-identification (Re-ID) faces two key issues. One is the data distribution discrepancy between source and target domains, and the other is the lack of discriminative information in target domain. From the perspective of representation learning, this paper proposes a novel end-to-end deep domain adaptation framework to address them. For the first issue, we highlight the presence of camera-level sub-domains as a unique characteristic in person Re-ID, and develop a “camera-aware” domain adaptation method via adversarial learning. With this method, the learned representation reduces distribution discrepancy not only between source and target domains but also across all cameras. For the second issue, we exploit the temporal continuity in each camera of target domain to create discriminative information. This is implemented by dynamically generating online triplets within each batch, in order to maximally take advantage of the steadily improved representation in training process. Together, the above two methods give rise to a new unsupervised domain adaptation framework for person Re-ID. Extensive experiments and ablation studies conducted on benchmark datasets demonstrate its superiority and interesting properties.
Performance Evaluation of Blockchain Systems: A Systematic Survey

Blockchain has been envisioned to be a disruptive technology with potential for applications in various industries. As more and more different blockchain platforms have emerged, it is essential to assess their performance in different use cases and scenarios. In this paper, we conduct a systematic survey on the blockchain performance evaluation by categorizing all reviewed solutions into two general categories, namely, empirical analysis and analytical modelling. In the empirical analysis, we comparatively review the current empirical blockchain evaluation methodologies, including benchmarking, monitoring, experimental analysis and simulation. In analytical modelling, we investigate the stochastic models applied to performance evaluation of mainstream blockchain consensus algorithms. Through contrasting, comparison and grouping different methods together, we extract important criteria that can be used for selecting the most suitable evaluation technique for optimizing the performance of blockchain systems based on their identified bottlenecks. Finally, we conclude the survey by presenting a list of possible directions for future research.
Customers’ intention to use robot-serviced restaurants in Korea: relationship of coolness and MCI factors

Purpose This study aims to empirically test a theoretical model by defining customers’ intention to use services of restaurant robots, which are rapidly developing in Korea. The proposed model incorporates three stages: coolness, motivated consumer innovativeness (MCI) and the theory of planned behaviour. Design/methodology/approach A total of 420 questionnaires were issued. The results were analysed to verify the reliability and validity of the measured variables. Structural equation modelling was used to test the research hypotheses. Findings The results showed that hedonically motivated consumer innovativeness (hMCI) and socially motivated consumer innovativeness (sMCI) have positive effects on attitude and are enhanced by attractiveness, utility, subcultural appeal and originality. However, the relationship between MCI and attitude differed among age groups. Practical implications The results revealed that sensory elements of robot services improve customer attitudes towards the use of robots in restaurants. This is a key finding that restaurant marketers should consider, because non-face-to-face services are becoming increasingly important in the current COVID-19 context. Originality/value This study analysed the relationship between coolness, MCI and the theory of planned behaviour in the context of robot-serviced restaurants and how the relationship between MCIs and attitude differed among the young and older customers. Practical implications are suggested.
Time to reality check the promises of machine learning-powered precision medicine

Machine learning methods, combined with large electronic health databases, could enable a personalised approach to medicine through improved diagnosis and prediction of individual responses to therapies. If successful, this strategy would represent a revolution in clinical research and practice. However, although the vision of individually tailored medicine is alluring, there is a need to distinguish genuine potential from hype. We argue that the goal of personalised medical care faces serious challenges, many of which cannot be addressed through algorithmic complexity, and call for collaboration between traditional methodologists and experts in medical machine learning to avoid extensive research waste.
Deep learning-based object detection in low-altitude UAV datasets: A survey

Deep learning-based object detection solutions emerged from computer vision has captivated full attention in recent years. The growing UAV market trends and interest in potential applications such as surveillance, visual navigation, object detection, and sensors-based obstacle avoidance planning have been holding good promises in the area of deep learning. Object detection algorithms implemented in deep learning framework have rapidly became a method for processing of moving images captured from drones. The primary objective of the paper is to provide a comprehensive review of the state of the art deep learning based object detection algorithms and analyze recent contributions of these algorithms to low altitude UAV datasets. The core focus of the studies is low-altitude UAV datasets because relatively less contribution was seen in the literature when compared with standard or remote-sensing based datasets. The paper discusses the following algorithms: Faster RCNN, Cascade RCNN, R-FCN etc. into two-stage, YOLO and its variants, SSD, RetinaNet into one-stage and CornerNet, Objects as Point etc. under advanced stages in deep learning based detectors. Further, one-two and advanced stages of detectors are studied in detail focusing on low-altitude UAV datasets. The paper provides a broad summary of low altitude datasets along with their respective literature in detection algorithms for the potential use of researchers. Various research gaps and challenges for object detection and classification in UAV datasets that need to deal with for improving the performance are also listed.
Beating the Fundamental Rate-Distance Limit in a Proof-of-Principle Quantum Key Distribution System

With the help of quantum key distribution (QKD), two distant peers are able to share information-theoretically secure key bits. Increasing key rate is ultimately significant for the applications of QKD in lossy channel. However, it has proved that there is a fundamental rate-distance limit, named linear bound, which limits the performance of all existing repeaterless protocols and realizations. Surprisingly, a recently proposed protocol, called twin-field (TF) QKD can beat linear bound with no need of quantum repeaters. Here, we present the first implementation of TF-QKD protocol and demonstrate its advantage of beating linear bound at the channel distance of 300 km. In our experiment, a modified TF-QKD protocol which does not assume phase post-selection is considered, and thus higher key rate than the original one is expected. After well controlling the phase evolution of the twin fields travelling hundreds of kilometers of optical fibres, the implemented system achieves high-visibility single-photon interference, and allows stable and high-rate measurement-device-independent QKD. Our experimental demonstration and results confirm the feasibility of the TF-QKD protocol and its prominent superiority in long distance key distribution services.
Efficient learning of quantum noise

Noise is the central obstacle to building large-scale quantum computers. Quantum systems with sufficiently uncorrelated and weak noise could be used to solve computational problems that are intractable with current digital computers. There has been substantial progress towards engineering such systems. However, continued progress depends on the ability to characterize quantum noise reliably and efficiently with high precision. Here we describe such a protocol and report its experimental implementation on a 14-qubit superconducting quantum architecture. The method returns an estimate of the effective noise and can detect correlations within arbitrary sets of qubits. We show how to construct a quantum noise correlation matrix allowing the easy visualization of correlations between all pairs of qubits, enabling the discovery of long-range two-qubit correlations in the 14 qubit device that had not previously been detected. Our results are the first implementation of a provably rigorous and comprehensive diagnostic protocol capable of being run on state of the art devices and beyond. These results pave the way for noise metrology in next-generation quantum devices, calibration in the presence of crosstalk, bespoke quantum error-correcting codes, and customized fault-tolerance protocols that can greatly reduce the overhead in a quantum computation.
Pose2Mesh: Graph Convolutional Network for 3D Human Pose and Mesh Recovery from a 2D Human Pose

Most of the recent deep learning-based 3D human pose and mesh estimation methods regress the pose and shape parameters of human mesh models, such as SMPL and MANO, from an input image. The first weakness of these methods is the overfitting to image appearance, due to the domain gap between the training data captured from controlled settings such as a lab, and in-the-wild data in inference time. The second weakness is that the estimation of the pose parameters is quite challenging due to the representation issues of 3D rotations. To overcome the above weaknesses, we propose Pose2Mesh, a novel graph convolutional neural network (GraphCNN)-based system that estimates the 3D coordinates of human mesh vertices directly from the 2D human pose. The 2D human pose as input provides essential human body articulation information without image appearance. Also, the proposed system avoids the representation issues, while fully exploiting the mesh topology using GraphCNN in a coarse-to-fine manner. We show that our Pose2Mesh significantly outperforms the previous 3D human pose and mesh estimation methods on various benchmark datasets. The codes are publicly available( https://github.com/hongsukchoi/Pose2Mesh_RELEASE ).
The cryptocurrency uncertainty index

We have developed and made available a new Cryptocurrency Uncertainty Index (UCRY) based on news coverage. Our UCRY Index captures two types of uncertainty: that of the price of cryptocurrency (UCRY Price) and uncertainty of cryptocurrency policy (UCRY Policy). We show that the constructed index exhibits distinct movements around major events in cryptocurrency space. We suggest that this index captures uncertainty beyond Bitcoin, and can be used for academic, policy, and practice-driven research.
General Multi-label Image Classification with Transformers

Multi-label image classification is the task of predicting a set of labels corresponding to objects, attributes or other entities present in an image. In this work we propose the Classification Transformer (C-Tran), a general framework for multi-label image classification that leverages Transformers to exploit the complex dependencies among visual features and labels. Our approach consists of a Transformer encoder trained to predict a set of target labels given an input set of masked labels, and visual features from a convolutional neural network. A key ingredient of our method is a label mask training objective that uses a ternary encoding scheme to represent the state of the labels as positive, negative, or unknown during training. Our model shows state-of-the-art performance on challenging datasets such as COCO and Visual Genome. Moreover, because our model explicitly represents the label state during training, it is more general by allowing us to produce improved results for images with partial or extra label annotations during inference. We demonstrate this additional capability in the COCO, Visual Genome, News-500, and CUB image datasets.
HyperNeRF

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) are able to reconstruct scenes with unprecedented fidelity, and various recent works have extended NeRF to handle dynamic scenes. A common approach to reconstruct such non-rigid scenes is through the use of a learned deformation field mapping from coordinates in each input image into a canonical template coordinate space. However, these deformation-based approaches struggle to model changes in topology, as topological changes require a discontinuity in the deformation field, but these deformation fields are necessarily continuous. We address this limitation by lifting NeRFs into a higher dimensional space, and by representing the 5D radiance field corresponding to each individual input image as a slice through this "hyper-space". Our method is inspired by level set methods, which model the evolution of surfaces as slices through a higher dimensional surface. We evaluate our method on two tasks: (i) interpolating smoothly between "moments", i.e., configurations of the scene, seen in the input images while maintaining visual plausibility, and (ii) novel-view synthesis at fixed moments. We show that our method, which we dub HyperNeRF , outperforms existing methods on both tasks. Compared to Nerfies, HyperNeRF reduces average error rates by 4.1% for interpolation and 8.6% for novel-view synthesis, as measured by LPIPS. Additional videos, results, and visualizations are available at hypernerf.github.io.
TransPose: Keypoint Localization via Transformer

While CNN-based models have made remarkable progress on human pose estimation, what spatial dependencies they capture to localize keypoints remains unclear. In this work, we propose a model called Trans-Pose, which introduces Transformer for human pose estimation. The attention layers built in Transformer enable our model to capture long-range relationships efficiently and also can reveal what dependencies the predicted key-points rely on. To predict keypoint heatmaps, the last attention layer acts as an aggregator, which collects contributions from image clues and forms maximum positions of keypoints. Such a heatmap-based localization approach via Transformer conforms to the principle of Activation Maximization [19]. And the revealed dependencies are image-specific and fine-grained, which also can provide evidence of how the model handles special cases, e.g., occlusion. The experiments show that TransPose achieves 75.8 AP and 75.0 AP on COCO validation and test-dev sets, while being more lightweight and faster than mainstream CNN architectures. The TransPose model also transfers very well on MPII benchmark, achieving superior performance on the test set when fine-tuned with small training costs. Code and pre-trained models are publicly available <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sup> .
Selection of Rich Model Steganalysis Features Based on Decision Rough Set &lt;inline-formula&gt; &lt;tex-math notation="LaTeX"&gt;$\alpha$ &lt;/tex-math&gt; &lt;/inline-formula&gt;-Positive Region Reduction

Steganography detection based on Rich Model features is a hot research direction in steganalysis. However, rich model features usually result a large computation cost. To reduce the dimension of steganalysis features and improve the efficiency of steganalysis algorithm, differing from previous works that normally proposed new feature extraction algorithm, this paper proposes a general steganalysis feature selection method based on decision rough set α-positive region reduction. First, it is pointed out that decision rough set α-positive region reduction is suitable for steganalysis feature selection. Second, a quantization method of attribute separability is proposed to measure the separability of steganalysis feature components. Third, steganalysis feature components selection algorithm based on decision rough set α-positive region reduction is given; thus, stego images can be detected by the selected feature. The proposed method can significantly reduce the feature dimensions and maintain detection accuracy. Based on the BOSSbase-1.01 image database of 10000 images, a series of feature selection experiments are carried on two kinds of typical rich model features (35263-D J+SRM feature and 17000-D GFR feature). The results show that even though these two kinds of features are reduced to approximately 8000-D, the detection performance of steganalysis algorithms based on the selected features are also maintained with that of original features, which will remarkably improve the efficiency of feature extraction and stego image detection.
Low-Rank Sparse Subspace for Spectral Clustering

Traditional graph clustering methods consist of two sequential steps, i.e., constructing an affinity matrix from the original data and then performing spectral clustering on the resulting affinity matrix. This two-step strategy achieves optimal solution for each step separately, but cannot guarantee that it will obtain the globally optimal clustering results. Moreover, the affinity matrix directly learned from the original data will seriously affect the clustering performance, since high-dimensional data are usually noisy and may contain redundancy. To address the above issues, this paper proposes a Low-rank Sparse Subspace (LSS) clustering method via dynamically learning the affinity matrix from low-dimensional space of the original data. Specifically, we learn a transformation matrix to project the original data to their low-dimensional space, by conducting feature selection and subspace learning in the sample self-representation framework. Then, we utilize the rank constraint and the affinity matrix directly obtained from the original data to construct a dynamic and intrinsic affinity matrix. Moreover, each of these three matrices is updated iteratively while fixing the other two. In this way, the affinity matrix learned from the low-dimensional space is the final clustering results. Extensive experiments are conducted on both synthetic and real datasets to show that our proposed LSS method outperforms the state-of-the-art clustering methods.
A wearable sensor-based activity prediction system to facilitate edge computing in smart healthcare system

An increase in world population along with elderly people is causing fast rises in healthcare costs. Technologies (e.g., Internet-of-Things, Edge-of-Things, and Cloud-of-Things) in healthcare systems are going through a transformation where health monitoring of people is possible without hospitalization. The advancement of sensing technologies helps to make it possible to develop smart systems to monitor human behaviors continuously. In this work, a wearable sensor-based system is proposed for activity prediction using Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) on an edge device (i.e., personal computer or laptop). The input data of the system are obtained from multiple wearable healthcare sensors such as electrocardiography (ECG), magnetometer, accelerometer and gyroscope sensors. Then, an RNN is trained based on the features. The trained RNN is used for predicting the activities. The system has been compared against the conventional approaches on a publicly available standard dataset. The experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms other traditional methods. Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) in the edge device is utilized to take the advantage of fast computation of experimental data.
Variational quantum state diagonalization

Abstract Variational hybrid quantum-classical algorithms are promising candidates for near-term implementation on quantum computers. In these algorithms, a quantum computer evaluates the cost of a gate sequence (with speedup over classical cost evaluation), and a classical computer uses this information to adjust the parameters of the gate sequence. Here we present such an algorithm for quantum state diagonalization. State diagonalization has applications in condensed matter physics (e.g., entanglement spectroscopy) as well as in machine learning (e.g., principal component analysis). For a quantum state ρ and gate sequence U , our cost function quantifies how far $$U\rho U^\dagger$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mrow> <mml:mi>U</mml:mi> <mml:mi>ρ</mml:mi> <mml:msup> <mml:mrow> <mml:mi>U</mml:mi> </mml:mrow> <mml:mrow> <mml:mo>†</mml:mo> </mml:mrow> </mml:msup> </mml:mrow> </mml:math> is from being diagonal. We introduce short-depth quantum circuits to quantify our cost. Minimizing this cost returns a gate sequence that approximately diagonalizes ρ . One can then read out approximations of the largest eigenvalues, and the associated eigenvectors, of ρ . As a proof-of-principle, we implement our algorithm on Rigetti’s quantum computer to diagonalize one-qubit states and on a simulator to find the entanglement spectrum of the Heisenberg model ground state.
Time-aware distributed service recommendation with privacy-preservation

As a promising way to extract insightful information from massive data, service recommendation has gained ever-increasing attentions in both academic and industrial areas. Recently, the Locality-Sensitive Hashing (LSH) technique is introduced into service recommendation to pursue high recommendation efficiency and the capability of privacy-preservation, especially when the historical service quality (QoS) data used to make recommendation decisions are distributed across different platforms. However, existing LSH-based service recommendation approaches often face the following challenge: they often assume that the QoS data for service recommendation are static and unique, without considering the influence of dynamic context (e.g., time) on QoS. In view of this challenge, we extend the traditional LSH technique to incorporate the time factor and further propose a novel time-aware and privacy-preserving service recommendation approach based on LSH. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on a large-scale real-world dataset, i.e., WS-DREAM, to validate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposal. The experiment results show that our approach achieves a good tradeoff between recommendation accuracy and efficiency while guaranteeing privacy-preservation.