Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Enhancing Social Recommendation With Adversarial Graph Convolutional Networks

Social recommender systems are expected to improve recommendation quality by incorporating social information when there is little user-item interaction data. However, recent reports from industry show that social recommender systems consistently fail in practice. According to the negative findings, the failure is attributed to: (1) A majority of users only have a very limited number of neighbors in social networks and can hardly benefit from social relations; (2) Social relations are noisy but they are indiscriminately used; (3) Social relations are assumed to be universally applicable to multiple scenarios while they are actually multi-faceted and show heterogeneous strengths in different scenarios. Most existing social recommendation models only consider the homophily in social networks and neglect these drawbacks. In this paper we propose a deep adversarial framework based on graph convolutional networks (GCN) to address these problems. Concretely, for (1) and (2), a GCN-based autoencoder is developed to augment the relation data by encoding high-order and complex connectivity patterns, and meanwhile is optimized subject to the constraint of reconstructing the social profile to guarantee the validity of the identified neighborhood. After obtaining enough purified social relations for each user, a GCN-based attentive social recommendation module is designed to address (3) by capturing the heterogeneous strengths of social relations. Finally, we adopt adversarial training to unify all the components by playing a Minimax game and ensure a coordinated effort to enhance recommendation performance. Extensive experiments on multiple open datasets demonstrate the superiority of our framework and the ablation study confirms the importance and effectiveness of each component.
Cascade Graph Neural Networks for RGB-D Salient Object Detection

In this paper, we study the problem of salient object detection (SOD) for RGB-D images using both color and depth information. A major technical challenge in performing salient object detection from RGB-D images is how to fully leverage the two complementary data sources. Current works either simply distill prior knowledge from the corresponding depth map for handling the RGB-image or blindly fuse color and geometric information to generate the coarse depth-aware representations, hindering the performance of RGB-D saliency detectors. In this work, we introduce Cascade Graph Neural Networks (Cas-Gnn), a unified framework which is capable of comprehensively distilling and reasoning the mutual benefits between these two data sources through a set of cascade graphs, to learn powerful representations for RGB-D salient object detection. Cas-Gnn processes the two data sources individually and employs a novel Cascade Graph Reasoning (CGR) module to learn powerful dense feature embeddings, from which the saliency map can be easily inferred. Contrast to the previous approaches, the explicitly modeling and reasoning of high-level relations between complementary data sources allows us to better overcome challenges such as occlusions and ambiguities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Cas-Gnn achieves significantly better performance than all existing RGB-D SOD approaches on several widely-used benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/LA30/Cas-Gnn.
Yao.jl: Extensible, Efficient Framework for Quantum Algorithm Design

We introduce Yao, an extensible, efficient open-source framework for quantum algorithm design. Yao features generic and differentiable programming of quantum circuits. It achieves state-of-the-art performance in simulating small to intermediate-sized quantum circuits that are relevant to near-term applications. We introduce the design principles and critical techniques behind Yao. These include the quantum block intermediate representation of quantum circuits, a builtin automatic differentiation engine optimized for reversible computing, and batched quantum registers with GPU acceleration. The extensibility and efficiency of Yao help boost innovation in quantum algorithm design.
Applications of near-term photonic quantum computers: software and algorithms

Gaussian Boson Sampling (GBS) is a near-term platform for photonic quantum computing. Recent efforts have led to the discovery of GBS algorithms with applications to graph-based problems, point processes, and molecular vibronic spectra in chemistry. The development of dedicated quantum software is a key enabler in permitting users to program devices and implement algorithms. In this work, we introduce a new applications layer for the Strawberry Fields photonic quantum computing library. The applications layer provides users with the necessary tools to design and implement algorithms using GBS with only a few lines of code. This paper serves a dual role as an introduction to the software, supported with example code, and also a review of the current state of the art in GBS algorithms.
Quantum Computation Based on Quantum Adiabatic Bifurcations of Kerr-Nonlinear Parametric Oscillators

Quantum computers with Kerr-nonlinear parametric oscillators (KPOs) have recently been proposed by the author and others. Quantum computation using KPOs is based on quantum adiabatic bifurcations of the KPOs, which lead to quantum superpositions of coherent states, such as Schrödinger cat states. Therefore, these quantum computers are referred to as “quantum bifurcation machines (QbMs)”. QbMs can be used for quantum adiabatic optimization and universal quantum computation. Superconducting circuits with Josephson junctions, Josephson parametric oscillators (JPOs) in particular, are promising for physical implementation of KPOs. Thus, KPOs and QbMs offer not only a new path toward the realization of quantum bits (qubits) and quantum computers, but also a new application of JPOs. Here we theoretically explain the physics of KPOs and QbMs, comparing them with their dissipative counterparts. Their physical implementations with superconducting circuits are also presented.
Federated Learning for Open Banking

Open banking enables individual customers to own their banking data, which provides fundamental support for the boosting of a new ecosystem of data marketplaces and financial services. In the near future, it is foreseeable to have decentralized data ownership in the finance sector using federated learning. This is a just-in-time technology that can learn intelligent models in a decentralized training manner. The most attractive aspect of federated learning is its ability to decompose model training into a centralized server and distributed nodes without collecting private data. This kind of decomposed learning framework has great potential to protect users’ privacy and sensitive data. Therefore, federated learning combines naturally with an open banking data marketplaces. This chapter will discuss the possible challenges for applying federated learning in the context of open banking, and the corresponding solutions have been explored as well.
BAFFLE : Blockchain Based Aggregator Free Federated Learning

A key aspect of Federated Learning (FL) is the requirement of a centralized aggregator to maintain and update the global model. However, in many cases orchestrating a centralized aggregator might be infeasible due to numerous operational constraints. In this paper, we introduce BAFFLE, an aggregator free, blockchain driven, FL environment that is inherently decentralized. BAFFLE leverages Smart Contracts (SC) to coordinate the round delineation, model aggregation and update tasks in FL. BAFFLE boosts computational performance by decomposing the global parameter space into distinct chunks followed by a score and bid strategy. In order to characterize the performance of BAFFLE, we conduct experiments on a private Ethereum network and use the centralized and aggregator driven methods as our benchmark. We show that BAFFLE significantly reduces the gas costs for FL on the blockchain as compared to a direct adaptation of the aggregator based method. Our results also show that BAFFLE achieves high scalability and computational efficiency while delivering similar accuracy as the benchmark methods.
Improving Multispectral Pedestrian Detection by Addressing Modality Imbalance Problems

Multispectral pedestrian detection is capable of adapting to insufficient illumination conditions by leveraging color-thermal modalities. On the other hand, it is still lacking of in-depth insights on how to fuse the two modalities effectively. Compared with traditional pedestrian detection, we find multispectral pedestrian detection suffers from modality imbalance problems which will hinder the optimization process of dual-modality network and depress the performance of detector. Inspired by this observation, we propose Modality Balance Network (MBNet) which facilitates the optimization process in a much more flexible and balanced manner. Firstly, we design a novel Differential Modality Aware Fusion (DMAF) module to make the two modalities complement each other. Secondly, an illumination aware feature alignment module selects complementary features according to the illumination conditions and aligns the two modality features adaptively. Extensive experimental results demonstrate MBNet outperforms the state-of-the-arts on both the challenging KAIST and CVC-14 multispectral pedestrian datasets in terms of the accuracy and the computational efficiency. Code is available at https://github.com/CalayZhou/MBNet .
Barriers to the Large-Scale Adoption of a COVID-19 Contact Tracing App in Germany: Survey Study

During the COVID-19 pandemic, one way to reduce further transmissions of SARS-CoV-2 is the widespread use of contact tracing apps. Such apps keep track of proximity contacts and warn contacts of persons who tested positive for an infection.In this study, we analyzed potential barriers to the large-scale adoption of the official contact tracing app that was introduced in Germany on June 16, 2020.Survey data were collected from 3276 adults during the week the app was introduced using an offline-recruited, probability-based online panel of the general adult population in Germany.We estimate that 81% of the population aged 18 to 77 years possess the devices and ability to install the official app and that 35% are also willing to install and use it. Potential spreaders show high access to devices required to install the app (92%) and high ability to install the app (91%) but low willingness (31%) to correctly adopt the app, whereas for vulnerable groups, the main barrier is access (62%).The findings suggest a pessimistic view on the effectiveness of app-based contact tracing to contain the COVID-19 pandemic. We recommend targeting information campaigns at groups with a high potential to spread the virus but who are unwilling to install and correctly use the app, in particular men and those aged between 30 and 59 years. In addition, vulnerable groups, in particular older individuals and those in lower-income households, may be provided with equipment and support to overcome their barriers to app adoption.
How to Correctly Detect Face-Masks for COVID-19 from Visual Information?

The new Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has seriously affected the world. By the end of November 2020, the global number of new coronavirus cases had already exceeded 60 million and the number of deaths 1,410,378 according to information from the World Health Organization (WHO). To limit the spread of the disease, mandatory face-mask rules are now becoming common in public settings around the world. Additionally, many public service providers require customers to wear face-masks in accordance with predefined rules (e.g., covering both mouth and nose) when using public services. These developments inspired research into automatic (computer-vision-based) techniques for face-mask detection that can help monitor public behavior and contribute towards constraining the COVID-19 pandemic. Although existing research in this area resulted in efficient techniques for face-mask detection, these usually operate under the assumption that modern face detectors provide perfect detection performance (even for masked faces) and that the main goal of the techniques is to detect the presence of face-masks only. In this study, we revisit these common assumptions and explore the following research questions: (i) How well do existing face detectors perform with masked-face images? (ii) Is it possible to detect a proper (regulation-compliant) placement of facial masks? and iii) How useful are existing face-mask detection techniques for monitoring applications during the COVID-19 pandemic? To answer these and related questions we conduct a comprehensive experimental evaluation of several recent face detectors for their performance with masked-face images. Furthermore, we investigate the usefulness of multiple off-the-shelf deep-learning models for recognizing correct face-mask placement. Finally, we design a complete pipeline for recognizing whether face-masks are worn correctly or not and compare the performance of the pipeline with standard face-mask detection models from the literature. To facilitate the study, we compile a large dataset of facial images from the publicly available MAFA and Wider Face datasets and annotate it with compliant and non-compliant labels. The annotation dataset, called Face-Mask-Label Dataset (FMLD), is made publicly available to the research community.
Human pose estimation and its application to action recognition: A survey

Human pose estimation aims at predicting the poses of human body parts in images or videos. Since pose motions are often driven by some specific human actions, knowing the body pose of a human is critical for action recognition. This survey focuses on recent progress of human pose estimation and its application to action recognition. We attempt to provide a comprehensive review of recent bottom-up and top-down deep human pose estimation models, as well as how pose estimation systems can be used for action recognition. Thanks to the availability of commodity depth sensors like Kinect and its capability for skeletal tracking, there has been a large body of literature on 3D skeleton-based action recognition, and there are already survey papers such as [1] about this topic. In this survey, we focus on 2D skeleton-based action recognition where the human poses are estimated from regular RGB images instead of depth images. We summarize the performance of recent action recognition methods that use pose estimated from color images as input, then show that there is much room for improvements in this direction.
Task Scheduling for Multi-Cloud Computing Subject to Security and Reliability Constraints

The rise of multi-cloud systems has been spurred. For safety-critical missions, it is important to guarantee their security and reliability. To address trust constraints in a heterogeneous multi-cloud environment, this work proposes a novel scheduling method called matching and multi-round allocation (MMA) to optimize the makespan and total cost for all submitted tasks subject to security and reliability constraints. The method is divided into two phases for task scheduling. The first phase is to find the best matching candidate resources for the tasks to meet their preferential demands including performance, security, and reliability in a multi-cloud environment; the second one iteratively performs multiple rounds of re-allocating to optimize tasks execution time and cost by minimizing the variance of the estimated completion time. The proposed algorithm, the modified cuckoo search (MCS), hybrid chaotic particle search (HCPS), modified artificial bee colony (MABC), max-min, and min-min algorithms are implemented in CloudSim to create simulations. The simulations and experimental results show that our proposed method achieves shorter makespan, lower cost, higher resource utilization, and better trade-off between time and economic cost. It is more stable and efficient.
Gradient Statistics Aware Power Control for Over-the-Air Federated Learning

Federated learning (FL) is a promising technique that enables many edge devices to train a machine learning model collaboratively in wireless networks. By exploiting the superposition nature of wireless waveforms, over-the-air computation (AirComp) can accelerate model aggregation and hence facilitate communication-efficient FL. Due to channel fading, power control is crucial in AirComp. Prior works assume that the signals to be aggregated from each device, i.e., local gradients have identical statistics. In FL, however, gradient statistics vary over both training iterations and feature dimensions, and are unknown in advance. This paper studies the power control problem for over-the-air FL by taking gradient statistics into account. The goal is to minimize the aggregation error by optimizing the transmit power at each device subject to average power constraints. We obtain the optimal policy in closed form when gradient statistics are given. Notably, we show that the optimal transmit power is continuous and monotonically decreases with the squared multivariate coefficient of variation (SMCV) of gradient vectors. We then propose a method to estimate gradient statistics with negligible communication cost. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed gradient-statistics-aware power control achieves higher test accuracy than the existing schemes for a wide range of scenarios.
Machine learning in oral squamous cell carcinoma: Current status, clinical concerns and prospects for future—A systematic review

Oral cancer can show heterogenous patterns of behavior. For proper and effective management of oral cancer, early diagnosis and accurate prediction of prognosis are important. To achieve this, artificial intelligence (AI) or its subfield, machine learning, has been touted for its potential to revolutionize cancer management through improved diagnostic precision and prediction of outcomes. Yet, to date, it has made only few contributions to actual medical practice or patient care. This study provides a systematic review of diagnostic and prognostic application of machine learning in oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC) and also highlights some of the limitations and concerns of clinicians towards the implementation of machine learning-based models for daily clinical practice. We searched OvidMedline, PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) databases from inception until February 2020 for articles that used machine learning for diagnostic or prognostic purposes of OSCC. Only original studies that examined the application of machine learning models for prognostic and/or diagnostic purposes were considered. Independent extraction of articles was done by two researchers (A.R. & O.Y) using predefine study selection criteria. We used the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA) in the searching and screening processes. We also used Prediction model Risk of Bias Assessment Tool (PROBAST) for assessing the risk of bias (ROB) and quality of included studies. A total of 41 studies were published to have used machine learning to aid in the diagnosis/or prognosis of OSCC. The majority of these studies used the support vector machine (SVM) and artificial neural network (ANN) algorithms as machine learning techniques. Their specificity ranged from 0.57 to 1.00, sensitivity from 0.70 to 1.00, and accuracy from 63.4 % to 100.0 % in these studies. The main limitations and concerns can be grouped as either the challenges inherent to the science of machine learning or relating to the clinical implementations. Machine learning models have been reported to show promising performances for diagnostic and prognostic analyses in studies of oral cancer. These models should be developed to further enhance explainability, interpretability, and externally validated for generalizability in order to be safely integrated into daily clinical practices. Also, regulatory frameworks for the adoption of these models in clinical practices are necessary.
Experts, Errors, and Context: A Large-Scale Study of Human Evaluation for Machine Translation

Human evaluation of modern high-quality machine translation systems is a difficult problem, and there is increasing evidence that inadequate evaluation procedures can lead to erroneous conclusions. While there has been considerable research on human evaluation, the field still lacks a commonly-accepted standard procedure. As a step toward this goal, we propose an evaluation methodology grounded in explicit error analysis, based on the Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM) framework. We carry out the largest MQM research study to date, scoring the outputs of top systems from the WMT 2020 shared task in two language pairs using annotations provided by professional translators with access to full document context. We analyze the resulting data extensively, finding among other results a substantially different ranking of evaluated systems from the one established by the WMT crowd workers, exhibiting a clear preference for human over machine output. Surprisingly, we also find that automatic metrics based on pre-trained embeddings can outperform human crowd workers. We make our corpus publicly available for further research.
Amnesic Probing: Behavioral Explanation with Amnesic Counterfactuals

Abstract A growing body of work makes use of probing in order to investigate the working of neural models, often considered black boxes. Recently, an ongoing debate emerged surrounding the limitations of the probing paradigm. In this work, we point out the inability to infer behavioral conclusions from probing results, and offer an alternative method that focuses on how the information is being used, rather than on what information is encoded. Our method, Amnesic Probing, follows the intuition that the utility of a property for a given task can be assessed by measuring the influence of a causal intervention that removes it from the representation. Equipped with this new analysis tool, we can ask questions that were not possible before, for example, is part-of-speech information important for word prediction? We perform a series of analyses on BERT to answer these types of questions. Our findings demonstrate that conventional probing performance is not correlated to task importance, and we call for increased scrutiny of claims that draw behavioral or causal conclusions from probing results.1
Two-Fold Personalized Feedback Mechanism for Social Network Consensus by Uninorm Interval Trust Propagation

A two-fold personalized feedback mechanism is established for consensus reaching in social network group decision-making (SN-GDM). It consists of two stages: 1) generating the trusted recommendation advice for individuals and 2) producing a a personalized adoption coefficient for reducing unnecessary adjustment costs. A uninorm interval-valued trust propagation operator is developed to obtain an indirect trust relationship, which is used to generate personalized recommendation advice based on the principle of "a recommendation being more acceptable the higher the level of trust it derives from." An optimization model is built to minimize the total adjustment cost of reaching consensus by determining the personalized feedback adoption coefficient based on individuals' consensus levels. Consequently, the proposed two-fold personalized feedback mechanism achieves a balance between group consensus and individual personality. An example to demonstrate how the proposed two-fold personalized feedback mechanism works is included, which is also used to show its rationality by comparing it with the traditional feedback mechanism in group decision making (GDM).