Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
PointFlow: Flowing Semantics Through Points for Aerial Image Segmentation

Aerial Image Segmentation is a particular semantic segmentation problem and has several challenging characteristics that general semantic segmentation does not have. There are two critical issues: The one is an extremely foreground-background imbalanced distribution, and the other is multiple small objects along with the complex background. Such problems make the recent dense affinity context modeling perform poorly even compared with baselines due to over-introduced background context. To handle these problems, we propose a point-wise affinity propagation module based on the Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) framework, named PointFlow. Rather than dense affinity learning, a sparse affinity map is generated upon selected points between the adjacent features, which reduces the noise introduced by the background while keeping efficiency. In particular, we design a dual point matcher to select points from the salient area and object boundaries, respectively. Experimental results on three different aerial segmentation datasets suggest that the proposed method is more effective and efficient than state-of-the-art general semantic segmentation methods. Especially, our methods achieve the best speed and accuracy trade-off on three aerial benchmarks. Further experiments on three general semantic segmentation datasets prove the generality of our method. Code and models are made available (https://github.com/lxtGH/PFSegNets).
Distributed Machine Learning for Wireless Communication Networks: Techniques, Architectures, and Applications

Distributed machine learning (DML) techniques, such as federated learning, partitioned learning, and distributed reinforcement learning, have been increasingly applied to wireless communications. This is due to improved capabilities of terminal devices, explosively growing data volume, congestion in the radio interfaces, and increasing concern of data privacy. The unique features of wireless systems, such as large scale, geographically dispersed deployment, user mobility, and the massive amount of data, give rise to new challenges in the design of DML techniques. There is a clear gap in the existing literature that the DML techniques are yet to be systematically reviewed for their applicability to wireless systems. This survey bridges the gap by providing a contemporary and comprehensive survey of DML techniques with a focus on wireless networks. Specifically, we review the latest applications of DML in power control, spectrum management, user association, and edge cloud computing. The optimality, accuracy, convergence rate, computation cost, and communication overhead of DML are analyzed. We also discuss the potential adversarial attacks faced by DML applications, and describe state-of-the-art countermeasures to preserve privacy and security. Last but not least, we point out a number of key issues yet to be addressed, and collate potentially interesting and challenging topics for future research.
Unsupervised Real-world Image Super Resolution via Domain-distance Aware Training

These days, unsupervised super-resolution (SR) is soaring due to its practical and promising potential in real scenarios. The philosophy of off-the-shelf approaches lies in the augmentation of unpaired data, i.e. first generating synthetic low-resolution (LR) images ${\mathcal{Y}^g}$ corresponding to real-world high-resolution (HR) images ${\mathcal{X}^r}$ in the real-world LR domain ${\mathcal{Y}^r}$, and then utilizing the pseudo pairs $\left\{ {{\mathcal{Y}^g},{\mathcal{X}^r}} \right\}$ for training in a supervised manner. Unfortunately, since image translation itself is an extremely challenging task, the SR performance of these approaches is severely limited by the domain gap between generated synthetic LR images and real LR images. In this paper, we propose a novel domain-distance aware super-resolution (DASR) approach for unsupervised real-world image SR. The domain gap between training data (e.g. ${\mathcal{Y}^g}$) and testing data (e.g. ${\mathcal{Y}^r}$) is addressed with our domain-gap aware training and domain-distance weighted supervision strategies. Domain-gap aware training takes additional benefit from real data in the target domain while domain-distance weighted supervision brings forward the more rational use of labeled source domain data. The proposed method is validated on synthetic and real datasets and the experimental results show that DASR consistently outperforms state-of-the-art unsupervised SR approaches in generating SR outputs with more realistic and natural textures. Codes are available at https://github.com/ShuhangGu/DASR.
Learning From a Complementary-Label Source Domain: Theory and Algorithms

In unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA), a classifier for the target domain is trained with massive true-label data from the source domain and unlabeled data from the target domain. However, collecting true-label data in the source domain can be expensive and sometimes impractical. Compared to the true label (TL), a complementary label (CL) specifies a class that a pattern does not belong to, and hence, collecting CLs would be less laborious than collecting TLs. In this article, we propose a novel setting where the source domain is composed of complementary-label data, and a theoretical bound of this setting is provided. We consider two cases of this setting: one is that the source domain only contains complementary-label data [completely complementary UDA (CC-UDA)] and the other is that the source domain has plenty of complementary-label data and a small amount of true-label data [partly complementary UDA (PC-UDA)]. To this end, a complementary label adversarial network (CLARINET) is proposed to solve CC-UDA and PC-UDA problems. CLARINET maintains two deep networks simultaneously, with one focusing on classifying the complementary-label source data and the other taking care of the source-to-target distributional adaptation. Experiments show that CLARINET significantly outperforms a series of competent baselines on handwritten digit-recognition and object-recognition tasks.
A Distributed and Robust Security-Constrained Economic Dispatch Algorithm Based on Blockchain

Distributed optimization algorithms for security-constrained economic dispatch (SCED) problems have been the subject of significant research interest in recent years. However, existing distributed SCED algorithms can be ineffective in the presence of malicious participants and inefficient in the absence of a coordinator. On the other hand, blockchain, an emerging technique known as the trust machine, has not shown its potential to address the above challenges in state-of-the-art literature. This paper proposes a blockchain-based distributed SCED algorithm. Using blockchain to form a coordination committee and enable balance among committee members, the proposed method allows the use of hierarchical SCED algorithms in the absence of a coordinator and can disable malicious participants. Numerical results show the robustness and necessity of the proposed blockchain-based SCED algorithm, by comparing the SCED results with and without blockchain.
Real-Time Quantized Image Super-Resolution on Mobile NPUs, Mobile AI 2021 Challenge: Report

Image super-resolution is one of the most popular computer vision problems with many important applications to mobile devices. While many solutions have been proposed for this task, they are usually not optimized even for common smartphone AI hardware, not to mention more constrained smart TV platforms that are often supporting INT8 inference only. To address this problem, we introduce the first Mobile AI challenge, where the target is to develop an end-to-end deep learning-based image super-resolution solutions that can demonstrate a real-time performance on mobile or edge NPUs. For this, the participants were provided with the DIV2K dataset and trained quantized models to do an efficient 3X image upscaling. The runtime of all models was evaluated on the Synaptics VS680 Smart Home board with a dedicated NPU capable of accelerating quantized neural networks. The proposed solutions are fully compatible with all major mobile AI accelerators and are capable of reconstructing Full HD images under 40-60 ms while achieving high fidelity results. A detailed description of all models developed in the challenge is provided in this paper.
End-to-End Light Field Spatial Super-Resolution Network Using Multiple Epipolar Geometry

Light Field (LF) cameras are considered to have many potential applications since angular and spatial information is captured simultaneously. However, the limited spatial resolution has brought lots of difficulties in developing related applications and becomes the main bottleneck of LF cameras. In this paper, an end-to-end learning-based method is proposed to simultaneously reconstruct all view images in LFs with higher spatial resolution. Based on the epipolar geometry, view images in one LF are first grouped into several image stacks and fed into different network branches to learn sub-pixel details for each view image. Since LFs have dense sampling in angular domain, sub-pixel details in multiple spatial directions are learned from corresponding angular directions in multiple branches, respectively. Then, sub-pixel details from different directions are further integrated to generate global high-frequency residual details. Combined with the spatially upsampled LF, the final LF with high spatial resolution is obtained. Experimental results on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in both visual and numerical evaluations. We also implement the proposed method on LFs with different angular resolution and experiments show that the proposed method achieves superior results than others, especially for LFs with small angular resolution. Furthermore, since the epipolar geometry is fully considered, the proposed network shows good performances in preserving the inherent epipolar property in LF images.
Health Recommender Systems: Systematic Review

Health recommender systems (HRSs) offer the potential to motivate and engage users to change their behavior by sharing better choices and actionable knowledge based on observed user behavior.We aim to review HRSs targeting nonmedical professionals (laypersons) to better understand the current state of the art and identify both the main trends and the gaps with respect to current implementations.We conducted a systematic literature review according to the PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) guidelines and synthesized the results. A total of 73 published studies that reported both an implementation and evaluation of an HRS targeted to laypersons were included and analyzed in this review.Recommended items were classified into four major categories: lifestyle, nutrition, general health care information, and specific health conditions. The majority of HRSs use hybrid recommendation algorithms. Evaluations of HRSs vary greatly; half of the studies only evaluated the algorithm with various metrics, whereas others performed full-scale randomized controlled trials or conducted in-the-wild studies to evaluate the impact of HRSs, thereby showing that the field is slowly maturing. On the basis of our review, we derived five reporting guidelines that can serve as a reference frame for future HRS studies. HRS studies should clarify who the target user is and to whom the recommendations apply, what is recommended and how the recommendations are presented to the user, where the data set can be found, what algorithms were used to calculate the recommendations, and what evaluation protocol was used.There is significant opportunity for an HRS to inform and guide health actions. Through this review, we promote the discussion of ways to augment HRS research by recommending a reference frame with five design guidelines.
Weakly Supervised Video Salient Object Detection

Significant performance improvement has been achieved for fully-supervised video salient object detection with the pixel-wise labeled training datasets, which are time-consuming and expensive to obtain. To relieve the burden of data annotation, we present the first weakly super-vised video salient object detection model based on relabeled “fixation guided scribble annotations”. Specifically, an "Appearance-motion fusion module" and bidirectional ConvLSTM based framework are proposed to achieve effective multi-modal learning and long-term temporal context modeling based on our new weak annotations. Further, we design a novel foreground-background similarity loss to further explore the labeling similarity across frames. A weak annotation boosting strategy is also introduced to boost our model performance with a new pseudo-label generation technique. Extensive experimental results on six benchmark video saliency detection datasets illustrate the effectiveness of our solution <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sup> .
Cross-Domain Adaptive Clustering for Semi-Supervised Domain Adaptation

In semi-supervised domain adaptation, a few labeled samples per class in the target domain guide features of the remaining target samples to aggregate around them. However, the trained model cannot produce a highly discriminative feature representation for the target domain because the training data is dominated by labeled samples from the source domain. This could lead to disconnection between the labeled and unlabeled target samples as well as misalignment between unlabeled target samples and the source domain. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called Cross-domain Adaptive Clustering to address this problem. To achieve both inter-domain and intra-domain adaptation, we first introduce an adversarial adaptive clustering loss to group features of unlabeled target data into clusters and perform cluster-wise feature alignment across the source and target domains. We further apply pseudo labeling to unlabeled samples in the target domain and retain pseudo-labels with high confidence. Pseudo labeling expands the number of "labeled" samples in each class in the target domain, and thus produces a more robust and powerful cluster core for each class to facilitate adversarial learning. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets, including DomainNet, Office-Home and Office, demonstrate that our proposed approach achieves the state-of-the-art performance in semi-supervised domain adaptation.
Decoupled Dynamic Filter Networks

Convolution is one of the basic building blocks of CNN architectures. Despite its common use, standard convolution has two main shortcomings: Content-agnostic and Computation-heavy. Dynamic filters are content-adaptive, while further increasing the computational overhead. Depth-wise convolution is a lightweight variant, but it usually leads to a drop in CNN performance or requires a larger number of channels. In this work, we propose the Decoupled Dynamic Filter (DDF) that can simultaneously tackle both of these shortcomings. Inspired by recent advances in attention, DDF decouples a depth-wise dynamic filter into spatial and channel dynamic filters. This decomposition considerably reduces the number of parameters and limits computational costs to the same level as depth-wise convolution. Meanwhile, we observe a significant boost in performance when replacing standard convolution with DDF in classification networks. ResNet50 / 101 get improved by 1.9% and 1.3% on the top-1 accuracy, while their computational costs are reduced by nearly half. Experiments on the detection and joint upsampling networks also demonstrate the superior performance of the DDF upsampling variant (DDF-Up) in comparison with standard convolution and specialized content-adaptive layers. The project page with code is available <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sup> .
Hybrid recommendation system combined content-based filtering and collaborative prediction using artificial neural network

Recommendation systems are information filtering tools that present items to users based on their preferences and behavior, for example, suggestions about scientific papers or music a user might like. Based on what we said and with the development of computer science that has started to take an interest in big data and how it is used to discover user interest, we have found a lot of research going on in the area of recommendation and there are powerful systems available. In the unsupervised learning domain, this paper introduces a novel method for creating a hybrid recommender framework that combines Collaborative Filtering with Content Based Approach and Self-Organizing Map neural network technique. By testing our system on a subset of the Movies Database, we demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy and precision, as well as improving the efficiency of the traditional Collaborative Filtering methodology.
Blockchain-based Initiatives: Current state and challenges

Blockchain is considered a distributed ledger that can transact securely and trustfully without involving any third party. It has caused a lot of interest in various sectors, like government, finance, banking, etc. Blockchain technology is suitable for areas where multiple data storage and transaction types generally require the third party to authenticate the transactions involving transaction cost and authentication issues. In this paper, various aspects of Blockchain technology applications in public concern sectors have been analyzed in detail. This paper also reviews the multiple case studies and implementations of Blockchain technology in these sectors and their current status that provide a detailed insight into all the aspects of its application. This paper finally comes up with various implementation requirements in Government, Health, Finance, Economics, and Energy. Further, it identifies the challenges in successfully implementing Blockchain technology in these mentioned sectors to provide a reference for future deployments.
Fisher Information in Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum Applications

The recent advent of noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices, especially near-term quantum computers, has sparked extensive research efforts concerned with their possible applications. At the forefront of the considered approaches are variational methods that use parametrized quantum circuits. The classical and quantum Fisher information are firmly rooted in the field of quantum sensing and have proven to be versatile tools to study such parametrized quantum systems. Their utility in the study of other applications of noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices, however, has only been discovered recently. Hoping to stimulate more such applications, this article aims to further popularize classical and quantum Fisher information as useful tools for near-term applications beyond quantum sensing. We start with a tutorial that builds an intuitive understanding of classical and quantum Fisher information and outlines how both quantities can be calculated on near-term devices. We also elucidate their relationship and how they are influenced by noise processes. Next, we give an overview of the core results of the quantum sensing literature and proceed to a comprehensive review of recent applications in variational quantum algorithms and quantum machine learning.
Unsupervised Multi-Source Domain Adaptation for Person Re-Identification

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) methods for person re-identification (re-ID) aim at transferring re-ID knowledge from labeled source data to unlabeled target data. Although achieving great success, most of them only use limited data from a single-source domain for model pre-training, making the rich labeled data insufficiently exploited. To make full use of the valuable labeled data, we introduce the multi-source concept into UDA person re-ID field, where multiple source datasets are used during training. However, because of domain gaps, simply combining different datasets only brings limited improvement. In this paper, we try to address this problem from two perspectives, i.e. domain-specific view and domain-fusion view. Two constructive modules are proposed, and they are compatible with each other. First, a rectification domain-specific batch normalization (RDSBN) module is explored to simultaneously reduce domain-specific characteristics and increase the distinctiveness of person features. Second, a graph convolutional network (GCN) based multi-domain information fusion (MDIF) module is developed, which minimizes domain distances by fusing features of different domains. The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art UDA person re-ID methods by a large margin, and even achieves comparable performance to the supervised approaches without any post-processing techniques.
An Evaluation of Anomaly Detection and Diagnosis in Multivariate Time Series

Several techniques for multivariate time series anomaly detection have been proposed recently, but a systematic comparison on a common set of datasets and metrics is lacking. This article presents a systematic and comprehensive evaluation of unsupervised and semisupervised deep-learning-based methods for anomaly detection and diagnosis on multivariate time series data from cyberphysical systems. Unlike previous works, we vary the model and post-processing of model errors, i.e., the scoring functions independently of each other, through a grid of ten models and four scoring functions, comparing these variants to state-of-the-art methods. In time-series anomaly detection, detecting anomalous events is more important than detecting individual anomalous time points. Through experiments, we find that the existing evaluation metrics either do not take events into account or cannot distinguish between a good detector and trivial detectors, such as a random or an all-positive detector. We propose a new metric to overcome these drawbacks, namely, the composite F-score (Fc1), for evaluating time-series anomaly detection. Our study highlights that dynamic scoring functions work much better than static ones for multivariate time series anomaly detection, and the choice of scoring functions often matters more than the choice of the underlying model. We also find that a simple, channel-wise model-the univariate fully connected auto-encoder, with the dynamic Gaussian scoring function emerges as a winning candidate for both anomaly detection and diagnosis, beating state-of-the-art algorithms.