Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
HybrUR: A Hybrid Physical-Neural Solution for Unsupervised Underwater Image Restoration

Robust vision restoration of underwater images remains a challenge. Owing to the lack of well-matched underwater and in-air images, unsupervised methods based on the cyclic generative adversarial framework have been widely investigated in recent years. However, when using an end-to-end unsupervised approach with only unpaired image data, mode collapse could occur, and the color correction of the restored images is usually poor. In this paper, we propose a data- and physics-driven unsupervised architecture to perform underwater image restoration from unpaired underwater and in-air images. For effective color correction and quality enhancement, an underwater image degeneration model must be explicitly constructed based on the optically unambiguous physics law. Thus, we employ the Jaffe-McGlamery degeneration theory to design a generator and use neural networks to model the process of underwater visual degeneration. Furthermore, we impose physical constraints on the scene depth and degeneration factors for backscattering estimation to avoid the vanishing gradient problem during the training of the hybrid physical-neural model. Experimental results show that the proposed method can be used to perform high-quality restoration of unconstrained underwater images without supervision. On multiple benchmarks, the proposed method outperforms several state-of-the-art supervised and unsupervised approaches. We demonstrate that our method yields encouraging results in real-world applications.
A historical perspective of biomedical explainable AI research

The black-box nature of most artificial intelligence (AI) models encourages the development of explainability methods to engender trust into the AI decision-making process. Such methods can be broadly categorized into two main types: post hoc explanations and inherently interpretable algorithms. We aimed at analyzing the possible associations between COVID-19 and the push of explainable AI (XAI) to the forefront of biomedical research. We automatically extracted from the PubMed database biomedical XAI studies related to concepts of causality or explainability and manually labeled 1,603 papers with respect to XAI categories. To compare the trends pre- and post-COVID-19, we fit a change point detection model and evaluated significant changes in publication rates. We show that the advent of COVID-19 in the beginning of 2020 could be the driving factor behind an increased focus concerning XAI, playing a crucial role in accelerating an already evolving trend. Finally, we present a discussion with future societal use and impact of XAI technologies and potential future directions for those who pursue fostering clinical trust with interpretable machine learning models.
Task-Oriented Compression Framework for Remote Sensing Satellite Data Transmission

High-ratio image compression has always been a hotspot for remote sensing satellite image transmission. Especially for a resource-limited environment on board, image compression plays an important role in data storage and transmission. This article proposes a novel method for integrating information extraction network and image compression network into a comprehensive compression framework in order to achieve high-ratio image codec. To reconstruct region-of-interest (ROI) latent representations, we propose a latent feature selection (LFS) module. Some of the channel representations are removed according to the spatial location of the background, but the channel representations of ROI are entirely retained. To effectively validate the performance of our method, we conduct extensive experiments on multiple datasets. The experimental results show that the proposed framework is better at satellite data compression than traditional codecs.
Blockchain-based Federated Learning Technique for Privacy Preservation and Security of Smart Electronic Health Records

This study introduces a blockchain-based lightweight encryption strategy with federated learning to address the scalability and trust concerns of electronic health records (EHR). After implementing lightweight encryption, the EHR data is stored in a decentralized cloud system. The importance of protecting the privacy and security of distant patients’ health records is explored. Now that stakeholders have a secure portal and cloud data is inaccessible, assaults on electronic healthcare records should decrease. The study guarantees full encryption throughout the whole conversation with federated learning. Deprived of the essential for a trusted third party, the system sets up active smart contracts at runtime between the sensor and the data user to facilitate the transfer of EHR data. To ensure that the data is private between the owner and user during the contract’s execution, it employs a very effective proxy re-encryption mechanism with federated learning. To examine the performance of the proposed system, it has been built and deployed on an Ethereum-based testbed. It is observed that the PSNR and MSE of the proposed model are 39 (1.07×) and 229.6 (1.02×) respectively. The entropy of the image is assessed to be 7.8 for the proposed model. This is also compared with existing algorithms and proved to be a secured model.
How to Cite R and R Packages

I teach R to a lot of scientists, those that are new to science (i.e. students)as well as more established scientists, new to R.I find that after all their struggles of dealing with dates,or remembering where to put the comma, they’re so grateful to actual have an analysis,that they often forget or aren’t aware of the next steps.
A study of dealing class imbalance problem with machine learning methods for code smell severity detection using PCA-based feature selection technique

Abstract Detecting code smells may be highly helpful for reducing maintenance costs and raising source code quality. Code smells facilitate developers or researchers to understand several types of design flaws. Code smells with high severity can cause significant problems for the software and may cause challenges for the system's maintainability. It is quite essential to assess the severity of the code smells detected in software, as it prioritizes refactoring efforts. The class imbalance problem also further enhances the difficulties in code smell severity detection. In this study, four code smell severity datasets (Data class, God class, Feature envy, and Long method) are selected to detect code smell severity. In this work, an effort is made to address the issue of class imbalance, for which, the Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE) class balancing technique is applied. Each dataset's relevant features are chosen using a feature selection technique based on principal component analysis. The severity of code smells is determined using five machine learning techniques: K-nearest neighbor, Random forest, Decision tree, Multi-layer Perceptron, and Logistic Regression. This study obtained the 0.99 severity accuracy score with the Random forest and Decision tree approach with the Long method code smell. The model's performance is compared based on its accuracy and three other performance measurements (Precision, Recall, and F-measure) to estimate severity classification models. The impact of performance is also compared and presented with and without applying SMOTE. The results obtained in the study are promising and can be beneficial for paving the way for further studies in this area.
A deep learning approach for transgender and gender diverse patient identification in electronic health records

Although accurate identification of gender identity in the electronic health record (EHR) is crucial for providing equitable health care, particularly for transgender and gender diverse (TGD) populations, it remains a challenging task due to incomplete gender information in structured EHR fields.Using TGD identification as a case study, this research uses NLP and deep learning to build an accurate patient gender identity predictive model, aiming to tackle the challenges of identifying relevant patient-level information from EHR data and reducing annotation work.This study included adult patients in a large healthcare system in Boston, MA, between 4/1/2017 to 4/1/2022. To identify relevant information from massive clinical notes, we compiled a list of gender-related keywords through expert curation, literature review, and expansion via a fine-tuned BioWordVec model. This keyword list was used to pre-screen potential TGD individuals and create two datasets for model training, testing, and validation. Dataset I was a balanced dataset that contained clinician-confirmed TGD patients and cases without keywords. Dataset II contained cases with keywords. The performance of the deep learning model was compared to traditional machine learning and rule-based algorithms.The final keyword list consists of 109 keywords, of which 58 (53.2%) were expanded by the BioWordVec model. Dataset I contained 3,150 patients (50% TGD) while Dataset II contained 200 patients (90% TGD). On Dataset I the deep learning model achieved a F1 score of 0.917, sensitivity of 0.854, and a precision of 0.980; and on Dataset II a F1 score of 0.969, sensitivity of 0.967, and precision of 0.972. The deep learning model significantly outperformed rule-based algorithms.This is the first study to show that deep learning-integrated NLP algorithms can accurately identify gender identity using EHR data. Future work should leverage and evaluate additional diverse data sources to generate more generalizable algorithms.
Multi-Layer Scene Representation from Composed Focal Stacks

Multi-layer images are a powerful scene representation for high-performance rendering in virtual/augmented reality (VR/AR). The major approach to generate such images is to use a deep neural network trained to encode colors and alpha values of depth certainty on each layer using registered multi-view images. A typical network is aimed at using a limited number of nearest views. Therefore, local noises in input images from a user-navigated camera deteriorate the final rendering quality and interfere with coherency over view transitions. We propose to use a focal stack composed of multi-view inputs to diminish such noises. We also provide theoretical analysis for ideal focal stacks to generate multi-layer images. Our results demonstrate the advantages of using focal stacks in coherent rendering, memory footprint, and AR-supported data capturing. We also show three applications of imaging for VR.
Promptify: Text-to-Image Generation through Interactive Prompt Exploration with Large Language Models

Text-to-image generative models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in generating high-quality images based on textual prompts. However, crafting prompts that accurately capture the user's creative intent remains challenging. It often involves laborious trial-and-error procedures to ensure that the model interprets the prompts in alignment with the user's intention. To address these challenges, we present Promptify, an interactive system that supports prompt exploration and refinement for text-to-image generative models. Promptify utilizes a suggestion engine powered by large language models to help users quickly explore and craft diverse prompts. Our interface allows users to organize the generated images flexibly, and based on their preferences, Promptify suggests potential changes to the original prompt. This feedback loop enables users to iteratively refine their prompts and enhance desired features while avoiding unwanted ones. Our user study shows that Promptify effectively facilitates the text-to-image workflow, allowing users to create visually appealing images on their first attempt while requiring significantly less cognitive load than a widely-used baseline tool.
End-to-End Autonomous Navigation Based on Deep Reinforcement Learning with a Survival Penalty Function

An end-to-end approach to autonomous navigation that is based on deep reinforcement learning (DRL) with a survival penalty function is proposed in this paper. Two actor–critic (AC) frameworks, namely, deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) and twin-delayed DDPG (TD3), are employed to enable a nonholonomic wheeled mobile robot (WMR) to perform navigation in dynamic environments containing obstacles and for which no maps are available. A comprehensive reward based on the survival penalty function is introduced; this approach effectively solves the sparse reward problem and enables the WMR to move toward its target. Consecutive episodes are connected to increase the cumulative penalty for scenarios involving obstacles; this method prevents training failure and enables the WMR to plan a collision-free path. Simulations are conducted for four scenarios—movement in an obstacle-free space, in a parking lot, at an intersection without and with a central obstacle, and in a multiple obstacle space—to demonstrate the efficiency and operational safety of our method. For the same navigation environment, compared with the DDPG algorithm, the TD3 algorithm exhibits faster numerical convergence and higher stability in the training phase, as well as a higher task execution success rate in the evaluation phase.
Combatting SARS-CoV-2 With Digital Contact Tracing and Notification: Navigating Six Points of Failure

Digital contact tracing and notification were initially hailed as promising strategies to combat SARS-CoV-2; however, in most jurisdictions, they did not live up to their promise. To avert a given transmission event, both parties must have adopted the technology, it must detect the contact, the primary case must be promptly diagnosed, notifications must be triggered, and the secondary case must change their behavior to avoid the focal tertiary transmission event. If we approximate these as independent events, achieving a 26% reduction in the effective reproduction number Rt would require an 80% success rate at each of these 6 points of failure. Here, we review the 6 failure rates experienced by a variety of digital contact tracing and contact notification schemes, including Singapore’s TraceTogether, India’s Aarogya Setu, and leading implementations of the Google Apple Exposure Notification system. This leads to a number of recommendations, for example, that the narrative be framed in terms of user autonomy rather than user privacy, and that tracing/notification apps be multifunctional and integrated with testing, manual contact tracing, and the gathering of critical scientific data.
Wearable Eye-Tracking System for Synchronized Multimodal Data Acquisition

Eye-tracking technology is extensively utilized in affective computing research, enabling the investigation of emotional responses through the analysis of eye movements. Integration of eye-tracking with other modalities, allows for the collection of multimodal data, leading to a more comprehensive understanding of emotions and their relationship with physiological responses. This paper presents a novel head-mounted eye-tracking system for multimodal data acquisition with a completely redesigned structure and improved performance. We propose a novel method for pupil-fitting with high efficiency and robustness based on deep learning and RANSAC, which gets better performance of pupil segmentation when it is partially occluded, and build a 3D model to obtain gaze points. Existing eye trackers for multi-modal synchronous data collection either have limited device support or suffer from significant synchronization delays. Our proposed hard real-time synchronization mechanism implements microsecond level latency with low cost, which facilitates multimodal analysis for affective computing research. The uniquely designed exterior effectively reduces facial occlusion, making it more comfortable for the wearer while facilitating the capture of facial expressions.
Actor Prioritized Experience Replay

A widely-studied deep reinforcement learning (RL) technique known as Prioritized Experience Replay (PER) allows agents to learn from transitions sampled with non-uniform probability proportional to their temporal-difference (TD) error. Although it has been shown that PER is one of the most crucial components for the overall performance of deep RL methods in discrete action domains, many empirical studies indicate that it considerably underperforms off-policy actor-critic algorithms. We theoretically show that actor networks cannot be effectively trained with transitions that have large TD errors. As a result, the approximate policy gradient computed under the Q-network diverges from the actual gradient computed under the optimal Q-function. Motivated by this, we introduce a novel experience replay sampling framework for actor-critic methods, which also regards issues with stability and recent findings behind the poor empirical performance of PER. The introduced algorithm suggests a new branch of improvements to PER and schedules effective and efficient training for both actor and critic networks. An extensive set of experiments verifies our theoretical findings, showing that our method outperforms competing approaches and achieves state-of-the-art results over the standard off-policy actor-critic algorithms.
Fuzzy-based Deep Attributed Graph Clustering

Attributed graph clustering is a fundamental, yet challenging, task for studying underlying network structures. Recently, a variety of graph representation learning models have been proposed to effectively infer the node embeddings, which are then incorporated into conventional clustering techniques to identify meaningful clusters. While these models tend to preserve node proximities, which reflect the similarity between nodes in both structural and attribute dimensions, for representation learning, they generally overlook the crucial dependencies between node embeddings and the resulting clusters. To overcome this problem, we propose a novel fuzzy-based deep attributed graph clustering model, namely FDAGC, which is capable of achieving the task in a purely unsupervised and end-to-end manner without additionally incorporating conventional clustering techniques. In particular, FDAGC first encodes network structures and node attributes into a compact representation with graph convolution. A reconstruction error is then estimated to minimize the information loss during network message-passing. Besides, we utilize a self-monitoring training strategy to optimize node embeddings, thus improving the cluster cohesion by guiding them towards cluster centers. In the training phase, our expectations about resulting clusters are explicitly incorporated into the optimization of FDAGC via the concept of fuzzy clustering, thus leading to more accurate clustering by coupling the dependency between graph representation learning and attributed graph clustering. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the superior performance of FDAGC in terms of several evaluation metrics, such as Accuracy, Normalized Mutual Information, F1-score and Adjusted Rand Index, on six real-world attributed graphs with different scales.
Modified prairie dog optimization algorithm for global optimization and constrained engineering problems.

The prairie dog optimization (PDO) algorithm is a metaheuristic optimization algorithm that simulates the daily behavior of prairie dogs. The prairie dog groups have a unique mode of information exchange. They divide into several small groups to search for food based on special signals and build caves around the food sources. When encountering natural enemies, they emit different sound signals to remind their companions of the dangers. According to this unique information exchange mode, we propose a randomized audio signal factor to simulate the specific sounds of prairie dogs when encountering different foods or natural enemies. This strategy restores the prairie dog habitat and improves the algorithm's merit-seeking ability. In the initial stage of the algorithm, chaotic tent mapping is also added to initialize the population of prairie dogs and increase population diversity, even use lens opposition-based learning strategy to enhance the algorithm's global exploration ability. To verify the optimization performance of the modified prairie dog optimization algorithm, we applied it to 23 benchmark test functions, IEEE CEC2014 test functions, and six engineering design problems for testing. The experimental results illustrated that the modified prairie dog optimization algorithm has good optimization performance.
Empirical Study of Zero-Shot NER with ChatGPT

Large language models (LLMs) exhibited powerful capability in various natural language processing tasks. This work focuses on exploring LLM performance on zero-shot information extraction, with a focus on the ChatGPT and named entity recognition (NER) task. Inspired by the remarkable reasoning capability of LLM on symbolic and arithmetic reasoning, we adapt the prevalent reasoning methods to NER and propose reasoning strategies tailored for NER. First, we explore a decomposed question-answering paradigm by breaking down the NER task into simpler subproblems by labels. Second, we propose syntactic augmentation to stimulate the model’s intermediate thinking in two ways: syntactic prompting, which encourages the model to analyze the syntactic structure itself, and tool augmentation, which provides the model with the syntactic information generated by a parsing tool. Besides, we adapt self-consistency to NER by proposing a two-stage majority voting strategy, which first votes for the most consistent mentions, then the most consistent types. The proposed methods achieve remarkable improvements for zero-shot NER across seven benchmarks, including Chinese and English datasets, and on both domain-specific and general-domain scenarios. In addition, we present a comprehensive analysis of the error types with suggestions for optimization directions. We also verify the effectiveness of the proposed methods on the few-shot setting and other LLMs.
Application of blockchain in supply chain finance

Small, medium and micro enterprises have the problem of difficult and expensive financing. As the main source of financing for small, medium and micro enterprises, supply chain finance has become more urgent in the process of transformation and upgrading under the requirements of the digital era. With the widespread use of digital technologies such as blockchain in the financial field, technological empowerment and platformization are increasingly emphasized and valued. This article conducts a comprehensive and systematic review of the literature on blockchain applications in corporate financing from theoretical perspectives, research methods and other dimensions, revealing the research progress of blockchain applications in direct financing, bank credit, supply chain finance and other scenarios. The similarities and differences between domestic and international literature were further compared. Finally, this article constructs the problems existing in the application of blockchain in supply chain finance, puts forward policy suggestions, and provides a reference for future research on this topic.