Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Counting on the variety of modules over the quantum plane

Let $\zeta$ be a fixed nonzero element in a finite field $\mathbb F_q$ with $q$ elements. In this article, we count the number of pairs $(A,B)$ of $n\times n$ matrices over $\mathbb F_q$ satisfying $AB=\zeta BA$ by giving a generating function. This generalizes a generating function of Feit and Fine that counts pairs of commuting matrices. Our result can be also viewed as the point count of the variety of modules over the quantum plane $xy=\zeta yx$, whose geometry was described by Chen and Lu.
On-device Real-time Hand Gesture Recognition

We present an on-device real-time hand gesture recognition (HGR) system, which detects a set of predefined static gestures from a single RGB camera. The system consists of two parts: a hand skeleton tracker and a gesture classifier. We use MediaPipe Hands as the basis of the hand skeleton tracker, improve the keypoint accuracy, and add the estimation of 3D keypoints in a world metric space. We create two different gesture classifiers, one based on heuristics and the other using neural networks (NN).
Automatic Hand Sign Recognition: Identify Unusuality through Latent Cognizance

Sign language is a main communication channel among hearing disability community. Automatic sign language transcription could facilitate better communication and understanding between hearing disability community and hearing majority. As a recent work in automatic sign language transcription has discussed, effectively handling or identifying a non-sign posture is one of the key issues. A non-sign posture is a posture unintended for sign reading and does not belong to any valid sign. A non-sign posture may arise during sign transition or simply from an unaware posture. Confidence ratio has been proposed to mitigate the issue. Confidence ratio is simple to compute and readily available without extra training. However, confidence ratio is reported to only partially address the problem. In addition, confidence ratio formulation is susceptible to computational instability. This article proposes alternative formulations to confidence ratio, investigates an issue of non-sign identification for Thai Finger Spelling recognition, explores potential solutions and has found a promising direction. Not only does this finding address the issue of non-sign identification, it also provide some insight behind a well-learned inference machine, revealing hidden meaning and new interpretation of the underlying mechanism. Our proposed methods are evaluated and shown to be effective for non-sign detection.
FC2T2: The Fast Continuous Convolutional Taylor Transform with Applications in Vision and Graphics

Series expansions have been a cornerstone of applied mathematics and engineering for centuries. In this paper, we revisit the Taylor series expansion from a modern Machine Learning perspective. Specifically, we introduce the Fast Continuous Convolutional Taylor Transform (FC2T2), a variant of the Fast Multipole Method (FMM), that allows for the efficient approximation of low dimensional convolutional operators in continuous space. We build upon the FMM which is an approximate algorithm that reduces the computational complexity of N-body problems from O(NM) to O(N+M) and finds application in e.g. particle simulations. As an intermediary step, the FMM produces a series expansion for every cell on a grid and we introduce algorithms that act directly upon this representation. These algorithms analytically but approximately compute the quantities required for the forward and backward pass of the backpropagation algorithm and can therefore be employed as (implicit) layers in Neural Networks. Specifically, we introduce a root-implicit layer that outputs surface normals and object distances as well as an integral-implicit layer that outputs a rendering of a radiance field given a 3D pose. In the context of Machine Learning, $N$ and $M$ can be understood as the number of model parameters and model evaluations respectively which entails that, for applications that require repeated function evaluations which are prevalent in Computer Vision and Graphics, unlike regular Neural Networks, the techniques introduce in this paper scale gracefully with parameters. For some applications, this results in a 200x reduction in FLOPs compared to state-of-the-art approaches at a reasonable or non-existent loss in accuracy.
Improving the quality of generative models through Smirnov transformation

Solving the convergence issues of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) is one of the most outstanding problems in generative models. In this work, we propose a novel activation function to be used as output of the generator agent. This activation function is based on the Smirnov probabilistic transformation and it is specifically designed to improve the quality of the generated data. In sharp contrast with previous works, our activation function provides a more general approach that deals not only with the replication of categorical variables but with any type of data distribution (continuous or discrete). Moreover, our activation function is derivable and therefore, it can be seamlessly integrated in the backpropagation computations during the GAN training processes. To validate this approach, we evaluate our proposal against two different data sets: a) an artificially rendered data set containing a mixture of discrete and continuous variables, and b) a real data set of flow-based network traffic data containing both normal connections and cryptomining attacks. To evaluate the fidelity of the generated data, we analyze both their results in terms of quality measures of statistical nature and also regarding the use of these synthetic data to feed a nested machine learning-based classifier. The experimental results evince a clear outperformance of the GAN network tuned with this new activation function with respect to both a naïve mean-based generator and a standard GAN. The quality of the data is so high that the generated data can fully substitute real data for training the nested classifier without a fall in the obtained accuracy. This result encourages the use of GANs to produce high-quality synthetic data that are applicable in scenarios in which data privacy must be guaranteed.
3D-OOCS: Learning Prostate Segmentation with Inductive Bias

Despite the great success of convolutional neural networks (CNN) in 3D medical image segmentation tasks, the methods currently in use are still not robust enough to the different protocols utilized by different scanners, and to the variety of image properties or artefacts they produce. To this end, we introduce OOCS-enhanced networks, a novel architecture inspired by the innate nature of visual processing in the vertebrates. With different 3D U-Net variants as the base, we add two 3D residual components to the second encoder blocks: on and off center-surround (OOCS). They generalise the ganglion pathways in the retina to a 3D setting. The use of 2D-OOCS in any standard CNN network complements the feedforward framework with sharp edge-detection inductive biases. The use of 3D-OOCS also helps 3D U-Nets to scrutinise and delineate anatomical structures present in 3D images with increased accuracy.We compared the state-of-the-art 3D U-Nets with their 3D-OOCS extensions and showed the superior accuracy and robustness of the latter in automatic prostate segmentation from 3D Magnetic Resonance Images (MRIs). For a fair comparison, we trained and tested all the investigated 3D U-Nets with the same pipeline, including automatic hyperparameter optimisation and data augmentation.
Enabling a Programming Environment for an Experimental Ion Trap Quantum Testbed

Ion trap quantum hardware promises to provide a computational advantage over classical computing for specific problem spaces while also providing an alternative hardware implementation path to cryogenic quantum systems as typified by IBM's quantum hardware. However, programming ion trap systems currently requires both strategies to mitigate high levels of noise and also tools to ease the challenge of programming these systems with pulse- or gate-level operations. This work focuses on improving the state-of-the-art for quantum programming of ion trap testbeds through the use of a quantum language specification, QCOR, and by demonstrating multi-level optimizations at the language, intermediate representation, and hardware backend levels. We implement a new QCOR/XACC backend to target a general ion trap testbed and then demonstrate the usage of multi-level optimizations to improve circuit fidelity and to reduce gate count. These techniques include the usage of a backend-specific numerical optimizer and physical gate optimizations to minimize the number of native instructions sent to the hardware. We evaluate our compiler backend using several QCOR benchmark programs, finding that on present testbed hardware, our compiler backend maintains the number of two-qubit native operations but decreases the number of single-qubit native operations by 1.54 times compared to the previous compiler regime. For projected testbed hardware upgrades, our compiler sees a reduction in two-qubit native operations by 2.40 times and one-qubit native operations by 6.13 times.
The Golden Rule as a Heuristic to Measure the Fairness of Texts Using Machine Learning

In this paper we present a natural language programming framework to consider how the fairness of acts can be measured. For the purposes of the paper, a fair act is defined as one that one would be accepting of if it were done to oneself. The approach is based on an implementation of the golden rule (GR) in the digital domain. Despite the GRs prevalence as an axiom throughout history, no transfer of this moral philosophy into computational systems exists. In this paper we consider how to algorithmically operationalise this rule so that it may be used to measure sentences such as: the boy harmed the girl, and categorise them as fair or unfair. A review and reply to criticisms of the GR is made. A suggestion of how the technology may be implemented to avoid unfair biases in word embeddings is made - given that individuals would typically not wish to be on the receiving end of an unfair act, such as racism, irrespective of whether the corpus being used deems such discrimination as praiseworthy.
Sparsely Changing Latent States for Prediction and Planning in Partially Observable Domains

A common approach to prediction and planning in partially observable domains is to use recurrent neural networks (RNNs), which ideally develop and maintain a latent memory about hidden, task-relevant factors. We hypothesize that many of these hidden factors in the physical world are constant over time, changing only sparsely. To study this hypothesis, we propose Gated $L_0$ Regularized Dynamics (GateL0RD), a novel recurrent architecture that incorporates the inductive bias to maintain stable, sparsely changing latent states. The bias is implemented by means of a novel internal gating function and a penalty on the $L_0$ norm of latent state changes. We demonstrate that GateL0RD can compete with or outperform state-of-the-art RNNs in a variety of partially observable prediction and control tasks. GateL0RD tends to encode the underlying generative factors of the environment, ignores spurious temporal dependencies, and generalizes better, improving sampling efficiency and overall performance in model-based planning and reinforcement learning tasks. Moreover, we show that the developing latent states can be easily interpreted, which is a step towards better explainability in RNNs.
Platform tailored co-design of gate-based quantum simulation

The utility of near-term quantum computers and simulators is likely to rely upon software-hardware co-design, with error-aware algorithms and protocols optimized for the platforms they are run on. Here, we show how knowledge of noise in a system can be exploited to improve the design of gate-based quantum simulation algorithms. We concretely demonstrate this co-design in the context of a trapped ion quantum simulation of the dynamics of a Heisenberg spin model. Specifically, we derive a theoretical noise model describing unitary gate errors due to heating of the ions' collective motion, finding that the temporal correlations in the noise induce an optimal gate depth. We then illustrate how tailored feedforward control can be used to mitigate unitary gate errors and improve the simulation outcome. Our results provide a practical guide to the co-design of gate-based quantum simulation algorithms.
Aggregation as Unsupervised Learning and its Evaluation

Regression uses supervised machine learning to find a model that combines several independent variables to predict a dependent variable based on ground truth (labeled) data, i.e., tuples of independent and dependent variables (labels). Similarly, aggregation also combines several independent variables to a dependent variable. The dependent variable should preserve properties of the independent variables, e.g., the ranking or relative distance of the independent variable tuples, and/or represent a latent ground truth that is a function of these independent variables. However, ground truth data is not available for finding the aggregation model. Consequently, aggregation models are data agnostic or can only be derived with unsupervised machine learning approaches. We introduce a novel unsupervised aggregation approach based on intrinsic properties of unlabeled training data, such as the cumulative probability distributions of the single independent variables and their mutual dependencies. We present an empirical evaluation framework that allows assessing the proposed approach against other aggregation approaches from two perspectives: (i) how well the aggregation output represents properties of the input tuples, and (ii) how well can aggregated output predict a latent ground truth. To this end, we use data sets for assessing supervised regression approaches that contain explicit ground truth labels. However, the ground truth is not used for deriving the aggregation models, but it allows for the assessment from a perspective (ii). More specifically, we use regression data sets from the UCI machine learning repository and benchmark several data-agnostic and unsupervised approaches for aggregation against ours. The benchmark results indicate that our approach outperforms the other data-agnostic and unsupervised aggregation approaches. It is almost on par with linear regression.
Confounds and Overestimations in Fake Review Detection: Experimentally Controlling for Product-Ownership and Data-Origin

The popularity of online shopping is steadily increasing. At the same time, fake product reviewsare published widely and have the potential to affect consumer purchasing behavior. In response,previous work has developed automated methods for the detection of deceptive product reviews.However, studies vary considerably in terms of classification performance, and many use data thatcontain potential confounds, which makes it difficult to determine their validity. Two possibleconfounds are data-origin (i.e., the dataset is composed of more than one source) and productownership (i.e., reviews written by individuals who own or do not own the reviewed product). Inthe present study, we investigate the effect of both confounds for fake review detection. Using anexperimental design, we manipulate data-origin, product ownership, review polarity, and veracity.Supervised learning analysis suggests that review veracity (60.26 - 69.87%) is somewhat detectablebut reviews additionally confounded with product-ownership (66.19 - 74.17%), or with data-origin(84.44 - 86.94%) are easier to classify. Review veracity is most easily classified if confounded withproduct-ownership and data-origin combined (87.78 - 88.12%), suggesting overestimations of thetrue performance in other work. These findings are moderated by review polarity.
Meta Guided Metric Learner for Overcoming Class Confusion in Few-Shot Road Object Detection

Localization and recognition of less-occurring road objects have been a challenge in autonomous driving applications due to the scarcity of data samples. Few-Shot Object Detection techniques extend the knowledge from existing base object classes to learn novel road objects given few training examples. Popular techniques in FSOD adopt either meta or metric learning techniques which are prone to class confusion and base class forgetting. In this work, we introduce a novel Meta Guided Metric Learner (MGML) to overcome class confusion in FSOD. We re-weight the features of the novel classes higher than the base classes through a novel Squeeze and Excite module and encourage the learning of truly discriminative class-specific features by applying an Orthogonality Constraint to the meta learner. Our method outperforms State-of-the-Art (SoTA) approaches in FSOD on the India Driving Dataset (IDD) by upto 11 mAP points while suffering from the least class confusion of 20% given only 10 examples of each novel road object. We further show similar improvements on the few-shot splits of PASCAL VOC dataset where we outperform SoTA approaches by upto 5.8 mAP accross all splits.
Facial Emotion Recognition: A multi-task approach using deep learning

Facial Emotion Recognition is an inherently difficult problem, due to vast differences in facial structures of individuals and ambiguity in the emotion displayed by a person. Recently, a lot of work is being done in the field of Facial Emotion Recognition, and the performance of the CNNs for this task has been inferior compared to the results achieved by CNNs in other fields like Object detection, Facial recognition etc. In this paper, we propose a multi-task learning algorithm, in which a single CNN detects gender, age and race of the subject along with their emotion. We validate this proposed methodology using two datasets containing real-world images. The results show that this approach is significantly better than the current State of the art algorithms for this task.
Generating synthetic transactional profiles

Financial institutions use clients' payment transactions in numerous banking applications. Transactions are very personal and rich in behavioural patterns, often unique to individuals, which make them equivalent to personally identifiable information in some cases. In this paper, we generate synthetic transactional profiles using machine learning techniques with the goal to preserve both data utility and privacy. A challenge we faced was to deal with sparse vectors due to the few spending categories a client uses compared to all the ones available. We measured data utility by calculating common insights used by the banking industry on both the original and the synthetic data-set. Our approach shows that neural network models can generate valuable synthetic data in such context. Finally, we tried privacy-preserving techniques and observed its effect on models' performances.
The Optimal Error Resilience of Interactive Communication Over Binary Channels

In interactive coding, Alice and Bob wish to compute some function $f$ of their individual private inputs $x$ and $y$. They do this by engaging in a non-adaptive (fixed order, fixed length) protocol to jointly compute $f(x,y)$. The goal is to do this in an error-resilient way, such that even given some fraction of adversarial corruptions to the protocol, both parties still learn $f(x,y)$. In this work, we study the optimal error resilience of such a protocol in the face of adversarial bit flip or erasures. While the optimal error resilience of such a protocol over a large alphabet is well understood, the situation over the binary alphabet has remained open. In this work, we resolve this problem of determining the optimal error resilience over binary channels. In particular, we construct protocols achieving $\frac16$ error resilience over the binary bit flip channel and $\frac12$ error resilience over the binary erasure channel, for both of which matching upper bounds are known. We remark that the communication complexity of our binary bit flip protocol is polynomial in the size of the inputs, and the communication complexity of our binary erasure protocol is linear in the size of the minimal noiseless protocol computing $f$.
Domain Agnostic Few-Shot Learning For Document Intelligence

Few-shot learning aims to generalize to novel classes with only a few samples with class labels. Research in few-shot learning has borrowed techniques from transfer learning, metric learning, meta-learning, and Bayesian methods. These methods also aim to train models from limited training samples, and while encouraging performance has been achieved, they often fail to generalize to novel domains. Many of the existing meta-learning methods rely on training data for which the base classes are sampled from the same domain as the novel classes used for meta-testing. However, in many applications in the industry, such as document classification, collecting large samples of data for meta-learning is infeasible or impossible. While research in the field of the cross-domain few-shot learning exists, it is mostly limited to computer vision. To our knowledge, no work yet exists that examines the use of few-shot learning for classification of semi-structured documents (scans of paper documents) generated as part of a business workflow (forms, letters, bills, etc.). Here the domain shift is significant, going from natural images to the semi-structured documents of interest. In this work, we address the problem of few-shot document image classification under domain shift. We evaluate our work by extensive comparisons with existing methods. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method shows consistent improvements on the few-shot classification performance under domain shift.
Improved Strongly Polynomial Algorithms for Deterministic MDPs, 2VPI Feasibility, and Discounted All-Pairs Shortest Paths

We revisit the problem of finding optimal strategies for deterministic Markov Decision Processes (DMDPs), and a closely related problem of testing feasibility of systems of $m$ linear inequalities on $n$ real variables with at most two variables per inequality (2VPI). We give a randomized trade-off algorithm solving both problems and running in $\tilde{O}(nmh+(n/h)^3)$ time using $\tilde{O}(n^2/h+m)$ space for any parameter $h\in [1,n]$. In particular, using subquadratic space we get $\tilde{O}(nm+n^{3/2}m^{3/4})$ running time, which improves by a polynomial factor upon all the known upper bounds for non-dense instances with $m=O(n^{2-\epsilon})$. Moreover, using linear space we match the randomized $\tilde{O}(nm+n^3)$ time bound of Cohen and Megiddo [SICOMP'94] that required $\tilde{\Theta}(n^2+m)$ space. Additionally, we show a new algorithm for the Discounted All-Pairs Shortest Paths problem, introduced by Madani et al. [TALG'10], that extends the DMDPs with optional end vertices. For the case of uniform discount factors, we give a deterministic algorithm running in $\tilde{O}(n^{3/2}m^{3/4})$ time, which improves significantly upon the randomized bound $\tilde{O}(n^2\sqrt{m})$ of Madani et al.