Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
BSFCDet: Bidirectional Spatial–Semantic Fusion Network Coupled with Channel Attention for Object Detection in Satellite Images

Due to the increasing maturity of deep learning and remote sensing technology, the performance of object detection in satellite images has significantly improved and plays an important role in military reconnaissance, urban planning, and agricultural monitoring. However, satellite images have challenges such as small objects, multiscale objects, and complex backgrounds. To solve these problems, a lightweight object detection model named BSFCDet is proposed. First, fast spatial pyramid pooling (SPPF-G) is designed for feature fusion to enrich the spatial information of small targets. Second, a three-layer bidirectional feature pyramid network (BiFPN-G) is suggested to integrate the deep feature’s semantic information with the shallow feature’s spatial information, thus improving the scale adaptability of the model. Third, a novel efficient channel attention (ECAM) is proposed to reduce background interference. Last, a new residual block (Resblock_M) is constructed to balance accuracy and speed. BSFCDet achieves high detection performance while satisfying real-time performance, according to experimental results.
An Approach for 3D Modeling of the Regular Relief Surface Topography Formed by a Ball Burnishing Process Using 2D Images and Measured Profilograms

Advanced in the present paper is an innovative approach for three-dimensional modeling of the regular relief topography formed via a ball burnishing process. The proposed methodology involves capturing a greyscale image of and profile measuring the surface topography in two perpendicular directions using a stylus method. A specially developed algorithm further identifies the best match between the measured profile segment and a row or column from the captured topography image by carrying out a signal correlation assessment based on an appropriate similarity metric. To ensure accurate scaling, the image pixel grey levels are scaled with a factor calculated as being the larger ratio between the ultimate heights of the measured profilograms and the more perfectly matched image row/column. Nine different similarity metrics were tested to determine the best performing model. The developed approach was evaluated for eight distinct types of fully and partially regular reliefs, and the results reveal that the best-scaled 3D topography models are produced for the fully regular reliefs with much greater heights. Following a thorough analysis of the results obtained, at the end of the paper, we draw some conclusions and discuss potential future work.
Hiding Information in Digital Images Using Ant Algorithms

Stenographic methods are closely related to the security and confidentiality of communications, which have always been essential domains of human life. Steganography itself is a science dedicated to the process of hiding information in public communication channels. Its main idea is to use digital files or even communication protocols as a medium inside which data are hidden. The present research aims to investigate the applicability of ant algorithms in steganography and evaluate the effectiveness of this approach. Ant systems could be employed both in spatial and frequency-based image steganography. The combination of frequency domain and optimization method to increase robustness is used, and an integer wavelet transform is performed on the host image. ACO optimization is used to find the optimal coefficients describing where to hide the data. The other method utilizes ACO to determine the optimal pixel locations for embedding secret data in the cover image. ACO is also used to detect complex regions of the cover image. Afterward, the least-significant-bits (LSB) substitution is used to hide secret information in the detected complex regions' pixels. Our study focuses on optimizing two mutually exclusive features of steganograms-high capacity and low distortion. An attempt was made to use ant systems to select areas of digital images that allow the greatest amount of information to be hidden with the least loss of image quality. The effect of variants of the ant system and its parameters on the quality of the results obtained was also investigated, and the final effectiveness of the proposed method was evaluated. The results of the experiments were compared with those published in related articles. The proposed procedures proved to be effective and allowed the embedding of large amounts of data with relatively little impact on image quality.
Optical flow for particle images with optimization based on a priori knowledge of the flow

Abstract This paper proposes a new optical flow (OF) method for particle image velocimetry applications. The proposed method is based on the use of an a priori sparse knowledge of the flow. A particular insight is given to the optimization derivation based on an image-independent method. Two alternatives are introduced. The first one uses particle-tracking velocimetry estimates as subpixel information to describe the finest velocity scales. The expected true displacements related to the motion of the individual particles are used as anchors for the optimization procedure when the density of the particles is large enough. Alternatively, the second method solves the well-known median problem based on new image-independent functions in areas of low particle density. Studies have been carried out on synthetic images to characterize the error and analyze the impact of image parameters (particle density, particle size, or noise) on the methods. The new methods are compared with a reference method against synthetic data: two Lamb-Oseen vortex rings and a 3D Turbulent Homogeneous and Isotropic flow. The results show that the performances of the new method exceed those of the reference method in almost all tested cases, except for images with particles of relatively small size. It is notably shown that the new method is less dependent on the particle density and the noise embedded in the images than other OF estimators.
Speaker identification in courtroom contexts – Part II: Investigation of bias in individual listeners’ responses

In "Speaker identification in courtroom contexts - Part I" individual listeners made speaker-identification judgements on pairs of recordings which reflected the conditions of the questioned-speaker and known-speaker recordings in a real case. The recording conditions were poor, and there was a mismatch between the questioned-speaker condition and the known-speaker condition. No contextual information that could potentially bias listeners' responses was included in the experiment condition - it was decontextualized with respect to case circumstances and with respect to other evidence that could be presented in the context of a case. Listeners' responses exhibited a bias in favour of the different-speaker hypothesis. It was hypothesized that the bias was due to the poor and mismatched recording conditions. The present research compares speaker-identification performance between: (1) listeners under the original Part I experiment condition, (2) listeners who were informed ahead of time that the recording conditions would make the recordings sound more different from one another than had they both been high-quality recordings, and (3) listeners who were presented with high-quality versions of the recordings. Under all experiment conditions, there was a substantial bias in favour of the different-speaker hypothesis. The bias in favour of the different-speaker hypothesis therefore appears not to be due to the poor and mismatched recording conditions.
Robust Word Vectors: Context-Informed Embeddings for Noisy Texts

We suggest a new language-independent architecture of robust word vectors (RoVe). It is designed to alleviate the issue of typos and misspellings, common in almost any user-generated content, which hinder automatic text processing. Our model is morphologically motivated, which allows it to deal with unseen word forms in morphologically rich languages. We present the results on a number of natural language processing (NLP) tasks and languages for a variety of related architectures and show that the proposed architecture is robust to typos.
Recovering Word Forms by Context for Morphologically Rich Languages

In this work, we focus on “sentence-level unlemmatization,” the task of generating a grammatical sentence given a lemmatized one; this task is usually easy to do for humans but may present problems for machine learning models. We treat this setting as a machine translation problem and, as a first try, apply a sequence-to-sequence model to the texts of Russian Wikipedia articles, evaluate the effect of the different training sets sizes quantitatively and achieve the BLUE score of 67, 3 using the largest training set available. We discuss preliminary results and flaws of traditional machine translation evaluation methods for this task and suggest directions for future research.
Improving Classification Robustness for Noisy Texts with Robust Word Vectors

Text classification is a fundamental task in natural language processing, and with a huge and rapidly growing body of research devoted to it. However, there has been little work on investigating noise robustness for the developed approaches. In this work, we are bridging this gap, introducing results on noise robustness testing of modern text classification architectures for English and Russian languages. We benchmark the CharCNN and SentenceCNN models and introduce a new model, called RoVe (Robust Vectors), that we show to be the most robust to noise.
Fast Image Classification Algorithms Based on Sequential Analysis

This work is devoted to fast image recognition techniques based on statistical sequential analysis. We examine the possibility to sequentially process principal components and organize a convolutional neural network with early exits. We pay special attention to sequentially learning a multi-task lightweight neural network model in order to predict several facial attributes (age, gender, and ethnicity) based on preliminary training on the face classification task. We specifically note that the entire above-mentioned model should be fine-tuned in order to deal with the emotion recognition problem. Experimental evaluation on several datasets demonstrates that the proposed approach has high accuracy and very low running time and space complexity compared to known state-of-the-art methods.
Named Entity Recognition in Russian Using Multi-Task LSTM-CRF

Named entity recognition (NER) is aimed at obtaining the important information from the unstructured data presented in the form of natural language texts. In this work, we investigate the efficiency of modern multi-task NER approaches on Russian language corpora by employing several different NER datasets and a dataset of part-of-speech (POS) tags. We apply a state-of-the-art neural architecture based on bidirectional LSTMs and conditional random fields. Convolutional neural networks were utilized to learn character-level features. We carry out extensive experimental evaluation over three standard datasets of news articles written in Russian. The proposed multi-task model achieve state-of-the-art results with an F1 score of 88.04% on Gareev’s dataset and an F1 score of 99.49% on Person-1000 dataset.
Improved prototypical network for active few-shot learning

Different from deep learning with large scale supervision, few-shot learning aims to learn the samples’ characteristics from few labeled examples. Apparently, few-shot learning is more in line with the visual cognitive mechanism of the human brain. In recent years, few-shot learning has attracted more researchers’ attention. They all assume that each category only contains a few labeled samples and without unlabeled samples during the few-shot training. However, in reality, each visual categories also includes some unlabeled samples which store rich semantic information. Labeling all unlabeled samples is time-consuming and laborious. Therefore, we combine the few-shot learning and active learning together, and propose an active few-shot learning model (AC-FSL) based on prototype network. This model includes two core modules: few-shot classification module and loss prediction module. The former is used for classification task under few labeled samples, while the latter is applied to choose some unlabeled samples of high value for labeling, and then assist for the few-shot classification task. We conduct extensive experiments on two image benchmark datasets. The results show that the proposed model AC-FSL can effectively improve the classification performance of current methods on few-shot setting.
The weight distribution of codes over finite chain rings

In this work, we determine new linear equations for the weight distribution of linear codes over finite chain rings. The identities are determined by counting the number of some special submatrices of the parity-check matrix of the code. Thanks to these relations we are able to compute the full weight distribution of codes with small Singleton defects, such as MDS, MDR and AMDR codes.
Longshot: Indexing Growing Databases Using MPC and Differential Privacy

In this work, we propose Longshot, a novel design for secure outsourced database systems that supports ad-hoc queries through the use of secure multi-party computation and differential privacy. By combining these two techniques, we build and maintain data structures (i.e., synopses, indexes, and stores) that improve query execution efficiency while maintaining strong privacy and security guarantees. As new data records are uploaded by data owners, these data structures are continually updated by Longshot using novel algorithms that leverage bounded information leakage to minimize the use of expensive cryptographic protocols. Furthermore, Long-shot organizes the data structures as a hierarchical tree based on when the update occurred, allowing for update strategies that provide logarithmic error over time. Through this approach, Longshot introduces a tunable three-way trade-off between privacy, accuracy, and efficiency. Our experimental results confirm that our optimizations are not only asymptotic improvements but also observable in practice. In particular, we see a 5x efficiency improvement to update our data structures even when the number of updates is less than 200. Moreover, the data structures significantly improve query runtimes over time, about ~10 3 x faster compared to the baseline after 20 updates.
BASE: Bridging the Gap between Cost and Latency for Query Optimization

Some recent works have shown the advantages of reinforcement learning (RL) based learned query optimizers. These works often use the cost (i.e., the estimation of cost model) or the latency (i.e., execution time) as guidance signals for training their learned models. However, cost-based learning underperforms in latency and latency-based learning is time-intensive. In order to bypass such a dilemma, researchers attempt to transfer a learned value network from the cost domain to the latency domain. We recognize critical insights in cost/latency-based training, prompting us to transfer the reward function rather than the value network. Based on this idea, we propose a two-stage RL-based framework, BASE , to bridge the gap between cost and latency. After learning a policy based on cost signals in its first stage, BASE formulates transferring the reward function as a variant of inverse reinforcement learning. Intuitively, BASE learns to calibrate the reward function and updates the policy regarding the calibrated one in a mutually-improved manner. Extensive experiments exhibit the superiority of BASE on two benchmark datasets: Our optimizer outperforms traditional DBMS, using 30% less training time than SOTA methods. Meanwhile, our approach can enhance the efficiency of other learning-based optimizers.
Learning and Deducing Temporal Orders

This paper studies how to determine temporal orders on attribute values in a set of tuples that pertain to the same entity, in the absence of complete timestamps. We propose a creator-critic framework to learn and deduce temporal orders by combining deep learning and rule-based deduction, referred to as GATE (Get the lATEst). The creator of GATE trains a ranking model via deep learning, to learn temporal orders and rank attribute values based on correlations among the attributes. The critic then validates the temporal orders learned and deduces more ranked pairs by chasing the data with currency constraints; it also provides augmented training data as feedback for the creator to improve the ranking in the next round. The process proceeds until the temporal order obtained becomes stable. Using real-life and synthetic datasets, we show that GATE is able to determine temporal orders with F -measure above 80%, improving deep learning by 7.8% and rule-based methods by 34.4%.
An Experimental Evaluation of Process Concept Drift Detection

Process mining provides techniques to learn models from event data. These models can be descriptive (e.g., Petri nets) or predictive (e.g., neural networks). The learned models offer operational support to process owners by conformance checking, process enhancement, or predictive monitoring. However, processes are frequently subject to significant changes, making the learned models outdated and less valuable over time. To tackle this problem, Process Concept Drift (PCD) detection techniques are employed. By identifying when the process changes occur, one can replace learned models by relearning, updating, or discounting pre-drift knowledge. Various techniques to detect PCDs have been proposed. However, each technique's evaluation focuses on different evaluation goals out of accuracy, latency, versatility, scalability, parameter sensitivity, and robustness. Furthermore, the employed evaluation techniques and data sets differ. Since many techniques are not evaluated against more than one other technique, this lack of comparability raises one question: How do PCD detection techniques compare against each other? With this paper, we propose, implement, and apply a unified evaluation framework for PCD detection. We do this by collecting evaluation goals and evaluation techniques together with data sets. We derive a representative sample of techniques from a taxonomy for PCD detection. The implemented techniques and proposed evaluation framework are provided in a publicly available repository. We present the results of our experimental evaluation and observe that none of the implemented techniques works well across all evaluation goals. However, the results indicate future improvement points of algorithms and guide practitioners.
Computing Graph Edit Distance via Neural Graph Matching

Graph edit distance (GED) computation is a fundamental NP-hard problem in graph theory. Given a graph pair ( G 1 , G 2 ), GED is defined as the minimum number of primitive operations converting G 1 to G 2 . Early studies focus on search-based inexact algorithms such as A*-beam search, and greedy algorithms using bipartite matching due to its NP-hardness. They can obtain a sub-optimal solution by constructing an edit path (the sequence of operations that converts G 1 to G 2 ). Recent studies convert the GED between a given graph pair ( G 1 , G 2 ) into a similarity score in the range (0, 1) by a well designed function. Then machine learning models (mostly based on graph neural networks) are applied to predict the similarity score. They achieve a much higher numerical precision than the sub-optimal solutions found by classical algorithms. However, a major limitation is that these machine learning models cannot generate an edit path. They treat the GED computation as a pure regression task to bypass its intrinsic complexity, but ignore the essential task of converting G 1 to G 2 . This severely limits the interpretability and usability of the solution. In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning framework that solves the GED problem in a two-step manner: 1) The proposed graph neural network GEDGNN is in charge of predicting the GED value and a matching matrix; and 2) A post-processing algorithm based on k -best matching is used to derive k possible node matchings from the matching matrix generated by GEDGNN. The best matching will finally lead to a high-quality edit path. Extensive experiments are conducted on three real graph data sets and synthetic power-law graphs to demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework. Compared to the best result of existing GNN-based models, the mean absolute error (MAE) on GED value prediction decreases by 4.9% ~ 74.3%. Compared to the state-of-the-art searching algorithm Noah, the MAE on GED value based on edit path reduces by 53.6% ~ 88.1%.
Collective Grounding: Applying Database Techniques to Grounding Templated Models

The process of instantiating, or "grounding", a first-order model is a fundamental component of reasoning in logic. It has been widely studied in the context of theorem proving, database theory, and artificial intelligence. Within the relational learning community, the concept of grounding has been expanded to apply to models that use more general templates in the place of first-order logical formulae. In order to perform inference, grounding of these templates is required for instantiating a distribution over possible worlds. However, because of the complex data dependencies stemming from instantiating generalized templates with interconnected data, grounding is often the key computational bottleneck to relational learning. While we motivate our work in the context of relational learning, similar issues arise in probabilistic databases, particularly those that do not make strong tuple independence assumptions. In this paper, we investigate how key techniques from relational database theory can be utilized to improve the computational efficiency of the grounding process. We introduce the notion of collective grounding which treats logical programs not as a collection of independent rules, but instead as a joint set of interdependent workloads that can be shared. We introduce the theoretical concept of collective grounding, the components necessary in a collective grounding system, implementations of these components, and show how to use database theory to speed up these components. We demonstrate collective groundings effectiveness on seven popular datasets, and show up to a 70% reduction in runtime using collective grounding. Our results are fully reproducible and all code, data, and experimental scripts are included.