Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Density-Aware Curriculum Learning for Crowd Counting

Recently, crowd counting draws much attention on account of its significant meaning in congestion control, public safety, and ecological surveys. Although the performance is improved dramatically due to the development of deep learning, the scales of these networks also become larger and more complex. Moreover, a large model also entails more time to train for better performance. To tackle these problems, this article first constructs a lightweight model, which is composed of an image feature encoder and a simple but effective decoder, called the pixel shuffle decoder (PSD). PSD ends with a pixel shuffle operator, which can display more density information without increasing the number of convolutional layers. Second, a density-aware curriculum learning (DCL) training strategy is designed to fully tap the potential of crowd counting models. DCL gives each predicted pixel a weight to determine its predicting difficulty and provides guidance on obtaining better generalization. Experimental results exhibit that PSD can achieve outstanding performance on most mainstream datasets while training under the DCL training framework. Besides, we also conduct some experiments about adopting DCL on existing typical crowd counters, and the results show that they all obtain new better performance than before, which further validates the effectiveness of our method.
Attention-Based Sign Language Recognition Network Utilizing Keyframe Sampling and Skeletal Features

Sign language recognition(SLR) is a multidisciplinary research topic in pattern recognition and computer vision.Due to large amount of data from the continuous frames of sign language videos, selecting representative data to eliminate irrelevant information has always been a challenging problem in data preprocessing of sign language samples.In recent years, skeletal data emerged as a new type of data but received insufficient attention.Meanwhile, due to the increasing diversity of sign language features, making full use of them has also been an important research topic.In this paper, we improve keyframecentered clips(KCC) sampling to get a new kind of sampling method called optimized keyframe-centered clips(OptimKCC) sampling to select key actions from sign language videos.Besides, we design a new kind of skeletal feature called Multi-Plane Vector Relation(MPVR) to describe the video samples.Finally, combined with the attention mechanism, we also use Attention-Based networks to distribute weights to the temporal features and the spatial features extracted from skeletal data.We implement comparison experiments on our own and the public sign language dataset under the Signer-Independent and the Signer-Dependent circumstances to show the advantages of our methods.
A Deep Hybrid Model for Recommendation by jointly leveraging ratings, reviews and metadata information

Although matrix factorization (MF) based collaborative filtering (CF) and deep learning approaches have achieved great success, there is still much room for improvement in recommender systems. Most of the existing approaches mainly adopt product ratings, reviews or content features in order to predict unknown rating for a user–item pair. In the discourse matter, some recent works attempted to obtain better latent representations of users and items by integrating different multi-source data, however, the heterogeneity of data is still a problem deserving study. Such models usually face two issues: (1) They extract the representations in a static and independent manner, thus ignoring the correlations between latent features learned from different information sources. (2) There is no unified framework that can mutually learn latent features from different sources such as ratings, reviews and meta-data of users, items and reviews. In the proposed model, called A Deep Hybrid Model for Recommendation (DHMR), we propose a joint deep model for learning higher-order non-linear latent feature interactions from reviews and metadata information. Further, we incorporate user–item interactions (from user–item ratings matrix) adopting MF model into the neural network. Thus, the proposed model consists of two parallel neural networks and an MF based model that are integrated by the attention and MLP layers at the top, learning lower-order (linear and non-linear) feature interactions of users and items separately and higher-order non-linear feature interactions jointly. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that DHMR significantly outperforms state-of-the-art recommendation models.
Multimodal Sensor Fusion for Low-Power Wearable Human Motion Tracking Systems in Sports Applications

This paper presents a prototype human motion tracking system for wearable sports applications.It can be particularly applicable for tracking human motion during executing certain strength training exercises, such as the barbell squat, where an inappropriate technique could result in an injury.The key novelty of the proposed system is twofold.Firstly, it is an inside-out, multimodal, motion tracker that incorporates two complementary sensor modalities, i.e. a camera and an inertial motion sensor, as well as two externally-mounted points of reference.Secondly, it incorporates a novel multimodal sensor fusion algorithm which uses the complementary nature of vision and inertial sensor modalities to perform a computationally efficient 3-Dimensional (3-D) pose detection of the wearable device.The 3-D pose is determined by fusing information about the two external reference points captured by the camera together with the orientation angles captured by the inertial motion sensor.The accuracy of the prototype was experimentally validated in laboratory conditions.The main findings are as follows.The Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) in 3-D position calculation was 36.7 mm and 13.6 mm in the static and mobile cases, respectively.Whereas the static case was aimed at determining the system's performance at all 3-D poses within the work envelope, the mobile case was used to determine the error in tracking human motion that is involved in the barbell squat, i.e. a mainly repeated vertical motion pattern.
Supervised kernel density estimation K-means

K-means is a well-known unsupervised-learning algorithm. It assigns data points to k clusters, the centers of which are termed centroids. However, these centroids have a structure usually represented by a list of quantized vectors, so that kernel density estimation models can better represent complex data distributions. This paper proposes a k-means-based supervised-learning clustering method termed supervised kernel-density-estimation k-means. The proposed approach uses kernel density estimation for class examples inside each cluster to obtain a better representation of the data distribution. The algorithm constructs an initial model using supervised k-means with an equal seed distribution among the classes so that a balance between majority and minority classes is achieved. We also incorporate incremental semi-supervised learning into the proposed method. Experiments were conducted using publicly available benchmark datasets. The results demonstrated that, compared with state-of-the-art supervised methods, the proposed algorithm, which can also perform incremental semi-supervised learning, achieved highly satisfactory performance.
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Let p>3 and consider a prime power q=ph. We completely characterize permutation polynomials of Fq2 of the type fa,b(X)=X(1+aXq(q−1)+bX2(q−1))∈Fq2[X]. In particular, using connections with algebraic curves over finite fields, we show that the already known sufficient conditions are also necessary.
Learning to segment images with classification labels

Two of the most common tasks in medical imaging are classification and segmentation. Either task requires labeled data annotated by experts, which is scarce and expensive to collect. Annotating data for segmentation is generally considered to be more laborious as the annotator has to draw around the boundaries of regions of interest, as opposed to assigning image patches a class label. Furthermore, in tasks such as breast cancer histopathology, any realistic clinical application often includes working with whole slide images, whereas most publicly available training data are in the form of image patches, which are given a class label. We propose an architecture that can alleviate the requirements for segmentation-level ground truth by making use of image-level labels to reduce the amount of time spent on data curation. In addition, this architecture can help unlock the potential of previously acquired image-level datasets on segmentation tasks by annotating a small number of regions of interest. In our experiments, we show using only one segmentation-level annotation per class, we can achieve performance comparable to a fully annotated dataset.
Efficient Discrete Feature Encoding for Variational Quantum Classifier

Recent days have witnessed significant interests in applying quantum-enhanced techniques for solving machine learning tasks in, e.g., classification, regression, and recommender systems. Variational methods that use quantum resources of imperfect quantum devices with the help of classical computing techniques are popular for supervised learning. Variational Quantum Classification (VQC) is one of such variational methods with possible quantum advantage in using quantum-enhanced features that are hard to compute by classical methods. Its performance depends on the mapping of classical features into quantum-enhanced feature space. Although there have been many quantum-mapping functions proposed so far, there is little discussion on efficient mapping of discrete features, such as, race, gender, marriage status and others that are often significant for classifying datasets of interest. We first introduce the use of Quantum Random Access Coding (QRAC) to map such discrete features efficiently into limited number of qubits for VQC. We numerically show that QRAC can help speeding up the training of VQC by reducing its parameters via reduction on the number of qubits for the mapping. We confirm the effectiveness of the QRAC in VQC by experimenting on classification of healthcare datasets with both simulators and real quantum devices.
How People Are Influenced by Deceptive Tactics in Everyday Charts and Graphs

Background: Visualizations are used to communicate data about important political, social, environmental, and health topics to a wide range of audiences; however, perceptions of graphs as objective conduits of factual data make them an easy means for spreading misinformation. Research questions: 1. Are people deceived by common deceptive tactics or exaggerated titles used in data visualizations about non-controversial topics? 2. Does a person's previous data visualization coursework mitigate the extent to which they are deceived by deceptive tactics used in data visualizations? 3. What parts of data visualizations (title, shape, data labels) do people use to answer questions about the information being presented in data visualizations? Literature review: Although scholarship from psychology, human-computer interaction, and computer science has examined how data visualizations are processed by readers, scholars have not adequately researched how susceptible people are to a range of deceptive tactics used in data visualizations, especially when paired with textual content. Methodology: Participants (n = 329) were randomly assigned to view one of four treatments for four different graph types (bar, line, pie, and bubble) and then asked to answer a question about each graph. Participants were asked to rank the ease with which they read each graph and comment on what they used to respond to the question about each graph. Results/Discussion: Results show that deceptive tactics caused participants to misinterpret information in the deceptive versus control visualizations across all graph types. Neither graph titles nor previous coursework impacted responses for any of the graphs. Qualitative responses illuminate people's perceptions of graph readability and what information they use to read different types of graphs. Conclusions: Recommendations are made to improve data visualization instruction, including critically examining software defaults and the ease with which people give agency over to software when preparing data visualizations. Avenues of future research are discussed.
Facial Expression Rendering in Medical Training Simulators: Current Status and Future Directions

Recent technological advances in robotic sensing and actuation methods have prompted development of a range of new medical training simulators with multiple feedback modalities. Learning to interpret facial expressions of a patient during medical examinations or procedures has been one of the key focus areas in medical training. This article reviews facial expression rendering systems in medical training simulators that have been reported to date. Facial expression rendering approaches in other domains are also summarized to incorporate the knowledge from those works into developing systems for medical training simulators. Classifications and comparisons of medical training simulators with facial expression rendering are presented, and important design features, merits and limitations are outlined. Medical educators, students and developers are identified as the three key stakeholders involved with these systems and their considerations and needs are presented. Physical-virtual (hybrid) approaches provide multimodal feedback, present accurate facial expression rendering, and can simulate patients of different age, gender and ethnicity group; makes it more versatile than virtual and physical systems. The overall findings of this review and proposed future directions are beneficial to researchers interested in initiating or developing such facial expression rendering systems in medical training simulators.
Reinforced Axial Refinement Network for Monocular 3D Object Detection

Monocular 3D object detection aims to extract the 3D position and properties of objects from a 2D input image. This is an ill-posed problem with a major difficulty lying in the information loss by depth-agnostic cameras. Conventional approaches sample 3D bounding boxes from the space and infer the relationship between the target object and each of them, however, the probability of effective samples is relatively small in the 3D space. To improve the efficiency of sampling, we propose to start with an initial prediction and refine it gradually towards the ground truth, with only one 3d parameter changed in each step. This requires designing a policy which gets a reward after several steps, and thus we adopt reinforcement learning to optimize it. The proposed framework, Reinforced Axial Refinement Network (RAR-Net), serves as a post-processing stage which can be freely integrated into existing monocular 3D detection methods, and improve the performance on the KITTI dataset with small extra computational costs.
Privacy-Preserving Computation Offloading for Parallel Deep Neural Networks Training

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have brought significant performance improvements to various real-life applications. However, a DNN training task commonly requires intensive computing resources and a huge data collection, which makes it hard for personal devices to carry out the entire training, especially for mobile devices. The federated learning concept has eased this situation. However, it is still an open problem for individuals to train their own DNN models at an affordable price. In this article, we propose an alternative DNN training strategy for resource-limited users. With the help of an untrusted server, end users can offload their DNN training tasks to the server in a privacy-preserving manner. To this end, we study the possibility of the separation of a DNN. Then we design a differentially private activation algorithm for end users to ensure the privacy of the offloading after model separation. Furthermore, to meet the rising demand for federated learning, we extend the offloading solution to parallel DNN models training with a secure model weights aggregation scheme for the privacy concern. Experimental results prove the feasibility of computation offloading solutions for DNN models in both solo and parallel modes.
Racist and Sexist Hate Speech Detection: Literature Review

Hate speech has always existed; yet, the widespread use of the Internet and social media platforms has led to the exponential rise and spread of hate speech creating a pressing need to make social media platforms a safe place for minority groups, while preserving the freedom of speech. Sexist and racist hate speech are two common forms of hate speech in social media platforms and for which researchers have introduced many detection models. This paper aims to provide a survey of sexist and racist hate speech detection approaches with a focus on three different aspects; namely, available datasets, features exploited, and machine learning models.
DRGraph: An Efficient Graph Layout Algorithm for Large-scale Graphs by Dimensionality Reduction

Efficient layout of large-scale graphs remains a challenging problem: the force-directed and dimensionality reduction-based methods suffer from high overhead for graph distance and gradient computation. In this paper, we present a new graph layout algorithm, called DRGraph, that enhances the nonlinear dimensionality reduction process with three schemes: approximating graph distances by means of a sparse distance matrix, estimating the gradient by using the negative sampling technique, and accelerating the optimization process through a multi-level layout scheme. DRGraph achieves a linear complexity for the computation and memory consumption, and scales up to large-scale graphs with millions of nodes. Experimental results and comparisons with state-of-the-art graph layout methods demonstrate that DRGraph can generate visually comparable layouts with a faster running time and a lower memory requirement.
Hierarchical Independence Thresholding for learning Bayesian network classifiers

Bayesian networks are powerful tools for knowledge representation and inference under conditions of uncertainty. However, learning an optimal Bayesian network classifier (BNC) is an NP-hard problem since its topology complexity increases exponentially with the number of attributes. Researchers proposed to apply information-theoretic criteria to measure conditional dependence, and independence assumptions are introduced implicitly or explicitly to simplify the network topology of BNC. In this paper, we clarify the mapping relationship between conditional mutual information and local topology, and then illustrate that informational independence does not correspond to probabilistic independence, the criterion of probabilistic independence does not necessarily hold for the independence topology. A novel framework of semi-naive Bayesian operation, called Hierarchical Independence Thresholding (HIT), is presented to efficiently identify informational conditional independence and probabilistic conditional independence by applying an adaptive thresholding method, redundant edges will be filtered out and the learned topology will fit the data better. Extensive experimental evaluation on 58 publicly available datasets reveals that when HIT is applied to BNCs (such as tree augmented Naive Bayes or k-dependence Bayesian classifier), the final BNCs achieve competitive classification performance compared to state-of-the-art learners such as Random Forest and Logistic regression.
Scene mover

We propose a novel approach for automatically generating a move plan for scene arrangement. 1 Given a scene like an apartment with many furniture objects, to transform its layout into another layout, one would need to determine a collision-free move plan. It could be challenging to design this plan manually because the furniture objects may block the way of each other if not moved properly; and there is a large complex search space of move action sequences that grow exponentially with the number of objects. To tackle this challenge, we propose a learning-based approach to generate a move plan automatically. At the core of our approach is a Monte Carlo tree that encodes possible states of the layout, based on which a search is performed to move a furniture object appropriately in the current layout. We trained a policy neural network embedded with a LSTM module for estimating the best actions to take in the expansion step and simulation step of the Monte Carlo tree search process. Leveraging the power of deep reinforcement learning, the network learned how to make such estimations through millions of trials of moving objects. We demonstrated our approach for moving objects under different scenarios and constraints. We also evaluated our approach on synthetic and real-world layouts, comparing its performance with that of humans and other baseline approaches.
Discriminability Distillation in Group Representation Learning

Learning group representation is a commonly concerned issue in tasks where the basic unit is a group, set, or sequence. Previously, the research community tries to tackle it by aggregating the elements in a group based on an indicator either defined by humans such as the quality and saliency, or generated by a black box such as the attention score. This article provides a more essential and explicable view. We claim the most significant indicator to show whether the group representation can be benefited from one of its element is not the quality or an inexplicable score, but the discriminability w.r.t. the model. We explicitly design the discrimiability using embedded class centroids on a proxy set. We show the discrimiability knowledge has good properties that can be distilled by a light-weight distillation network and can be generalized on the unseen target set. The whole procedure is denoted as discriminability distillation learning (DDL). The proposed DDL can be flexibly plugged into many group-based recognition tasks without influencing the original training procedures. Comprehensive experiments on various tasks have proven the effectiveness of DDL for both accuracy and efficiency. Moreover, it pushes forward the state-of-the-art results on these tasks by an impressive margin.
End-to-end LDA-based automatic weak signal detection in web news

An extremely competitive business environment requires every company to monitor its competitors and anticipate future opportunities and risks, creating a dire need for competitive intelligence. In response to this need, foresight study became a prominent field, especially the concept of weak signal detection. This research area has been widely studied for its utility, but it is limited by the need of human expert judgments on these signals. Moreover, the increase in the volume of information on the Internet through blogs and web news has made the detection process difficult, which has created a need for automation. Recent studies have attempted topic modeling techniques, specifically latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), for automating the weak signal detection process; however, these approaches do not cover all parts of the process. In this study, we propose a fully automatic LDA-based weak signal detection method, consisting of two filtering functions: the weakness function aimed at filtering topics, which potentially contains weak signals, and the potential warning function, which helps to extract only early warning signs from the previously filtered topics. We took this approach with a famous daily web news dataset, and we could detect the risk of the COVID19 pandemic at an early stage.