Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Weakly Supervised 3D Object Detection from Point Clouds

A crucial task in scene understanding is 3D object detection, which aims to detect and localize the 3D bounding boxes of objects belonging to specific classes. Existing 3D object detectors heavily rely on annotated 3D bounding boxes during training, while these annotations could be expensive to obtain and only accessible in limited scenarios. Weakly supervised learning is a promising approach to reducing the annotation requirement, but existing weakly supervised object detectors are mostly for 2D detection rather than 3D. In this work, we propose VS3D, a framework for weakly supervised 3D object detection from point clouds without using any ground truth 3D bounding box for training. First, we introduce an unsupervised 3D proposal module that generates object proposals by leveraging normalized point cloud densities. Second, we present a cross-modal knowledge distillation strategy, where a convolutional neural network learns to predict the final results from the 3D object proposals by querying a teacher network pretrained on image datasets. Comprehensive experiments on the challenging KITTI dataset demonstrate the superior performance of our VS3D in diverse evaluation settings. The source code and pretrained models are publicly available at https://github.com/Zengyi-Qin/Weakly-Supervised-3D-Object-Detection.
Does financial inclusion enhance economic growth? Empirical evidence from the <scp>IsDB</scp> member countries

Abstract This innovative study examines the effect of financial inclusion measured by financial inclusion index (FII) on the economic growth of the Islamic Development Bank (IsDB) member countries. The data were collected on different elements of financial inclusion and economic growth for the period 2000–2016. To draw multi‐dimensional results, we have set up the panel data for 45 countries, and we estimated the generalized method of moments (GMM), two‐stage least squares (2SLS), panel vector autoregressive (VAR) and panel Granger causality tests. Based on the results of dynamic panel estimations, we find that FII has a positive effect on economic growth. The findings of Granger causality analysis reveals a bi‐directional causality of FII indicators with economic growth and a unidirectional causality between the FII and economic growth. Therefore, it suggests that the financial inclusion index has a positive effect on the economic growth in IsDB member countries. These findings recommend that the policymakers should consider financial inclusion as a driver of the economic growth in the long run. The empirical findings have useful policy insights for the IsDB member countries.
CRSSC: Salvage Reusable Samples from Noisy Data for Robust Learning

Due to the existence of label noise in web images and the high memorization capacity of deep neural networks, training deep fine-grained (FG) models directly through web images tends to have an inferior recognition ability. In the literature, to alleviate this issue, loss correction methods try to estimate the noise transition matrix, but the inevitable false correction would cause severe accumulated errors. Sample selection methods identify clean ("easy") samples based on the fact that small losses can alleviate the accumulated errors. However, "hard" and mislabeled examples that can both boost the robustness of FG models are also dropped. To this end, we propose a certainty-based reusable sample selection and correction approach, termed as CRSSC, for coping with label noise in training deep FG models with web images. Our key idea is to additionally identify and correct reusable samples, and then leverage them together with clean examples to update the networks. We demonstrate the superiority of the proposed approach from both theoretical and experimental perspectives.
Deep Structural Contour Detection

Object contour detection is the fundamental and preprocessing step for multimedia applications such as icon generation, object segmentation, and tracking. The quality of contour prediction is of great importance in these applications since it affects the subsequent process. In this work, we aim to develop a high-performance contour detection system. We first propose a novel yet very effective loss function for contour detection. The proposed loss function is capable of penalizing the distance of contour-structure similarity between each pair of prediction and ground-truth. Moreover, to better distinguishing object contours and background textures, we introduce a novel convolutional encoder-decoder network. Within the network, we present a hyper module that captures dense connections among high-level features and produces effective semantic information. Then the information is progressively propagated and fused with low-level features. We conduct extensive experiments on the BSDS500 and Multi-Cue datasets, the results show significant improvement against the state-of-the-art competitors. We further demonstrate the benefit of our DSCD method for crowd counting.
NHP: Neural Hypergraph Link Prediction

Link prediction insimple graphs is a fundamental problem in which new links between vertices are predicted based on the observed structure of the graph. However, in many real-world applications, there is a need to model relationships among vertices that go beyond pairwise associations. For example, in a chemical reaction, relationship among the reactants and products is inherently higher-order. Additionally, there is a need to represent the direction from reactants to products. Hypergraphs provide a natural way to represent such complex higher-order relationships. Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) has recently emerged as a powerful deep learning-based approach for link prediction over simple graphs. However, their suitability for link prediction in hypergraphs is underexplored -- we fill this gap in this paper and propose Neural Hyperlink Predictor (NHP). NHP adapts GCNs for link prediction in hypergraphs. We propose two variants of NHP -- NHP-U and NHP-D -- for link prediction over undirected and directed hypergraphs, respectively. To the best of our knowledge, NHP-D is the first-ever method for link prediction over directed hypergraphs. An important feature of NHP is that it can also be used for hyperlinks in which dissimilar vertices interact (e.g. acids reacting with bases). Another attractive feature of NHP is that it can be used to predict unseen hyperlinks at test time (inductive hyperlink prediction). Through extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets, we show NHP's effectiveness.
Resource Allocation in Mobility-Aware Federated Learning Networks: A Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach

Federated learning allows mobile devices, i.e., workers, to use their local data to collaboratively train a global model required by the model owner. Federated learning thus addresses the privacy issues of traditional machine learning. However, federated learning faces the energy constraints of the workers and the high network resource cost due to the fact that a number of global model transmissions may be required to achieve the target accuracy. To address the energy constraint, a power beacon can be used that recharges energy to the workers. However, the model owner may need to pay an energy cost to the power beacon for the energy recharge. To address the high network resource cost, the model owner can use a WiFi channel, called default channel, for the global model transmissions. However, communication interruptions may occur due to the instability of the default channel quality. For this, special channels such as LTE channels can be used, but this incurs channel cost. As such, the problem of the model owner is to decide amounts of energy recharged to the workers and to choose channels used to transmit its global model to the workers to maximize the number of global model transmissions while minimizing the energy and channel costs. This is challenging for the model owner under the uncertainty of the channel, energy and mobility states of the workers. In this paper, we thus propose to employ the Deep Q-Network (DQN) that enables the model owner to find the optimal decisions on the energy and the channels without any a priori network knowledge. Simulation results show that the proposed DQN always achieves better performance compared to the conventional algorithms.
Nuclear Segmentation in Histopathological Images Using Two-Stage Stacked U-Nets With Attention Mechanism

Nuclei segmentation is a fundamental but challenging task in histopathological image analysis. One of the main problems is the existence of overlapping regions which increases the difficulty of independent nuclei separation. In this study, to solve the segmentation of nuclei and overlapping regions and to address these challenges, we introduce a nuclei segmentation method based on two-stage learning framework consisting of two connected Stacked U-Nets. In the first stage, a Stacked U-Nets is utilized to predict pixel-wise segmentation of nuclei. The output binary map together with RGB values of the original images are concatenated as the input of the second stage of Stacked U-Nets. Due to the sizable imbalance of overlapping and background regions, the first network is trained with cross-entropy loss while second network is trained with focal loss. We applied the method on two publicly available datasets and achieved state-of-art performance for nuclei segmentation - mean Aggregated Jaccard Index (AJI) results were 0.5965 and 0.6270, and F1 scores were 0.8247 and 0.8250, respectively; our method also segmented the overlapping regions between nuclei, with average AJI = 0.3254. The proposed two-stage learning framework outperforms many current segmentation methods and the consistent good segmentation performance on images from different organs indicate the generalized adaptability of our approach.
Deep Multimodal Transfer Learning for Cross-Modal Retrieval

Cross-modal retrieval (CMR) enables flexible retrieval experience across different modalities (e.g., texts versus images), which maximally benefits us from the abundance of multimedia data. Existing deep CMR approaches commonly require a large amount of labeled data for training to achieve high performance. However, it is time-consuming and expensive to annotate the multimedia data manually. Thus, how to transfer valuable knowledge from existing annotated data to new data, especially from the known categories to new categories, becomes attractive for real-world applications. To achieve this end, we propose a deep multimodal transfer learning (DMTL) approach to transfer the knowledge from the previously labeled categories (source domain) to improve the retrieval performance on the unlabeled new categories (target domain). Specifically, we employ a joint learning paradigm to transfer knowledge by assigning a pseudolabel to each target sample. During training, the pseudolabel is iteratively updated and passed through our model in a self-supervised manner. At the same time, to reduce the domain discrepancy of different modalities, we construct multiple modality-specific neural networks to learn a shared semantic space for different modalities by enforcing the compactness of homoinstance samples and the scatters of heteroinstance samples. Our method is remarkably different from most of the existing transfer learning approaches. To be specific, previous works usually assume that the source domain and the target domain have the same label set. In contrast, our method considers a more challenging multimodal learning situation where the label sets of the two domains are different or even disjoint. Experimental studies on four widely used benchmarks validate the effectiveness of the proposed method in multimodal transfer learning and demonstrate its superior performance in CMR compared with 11 state-of-the-art methods.
Optimization and acceleration of convolutional neural networks: A survey

Convolutional neural networks (CNN) is a specialized case of artificial neural networks(ANN) and finds its application in computer vision and parallel distributed computing for processing of massive amount of data generated by sensors and to meet the power constraints of IOT devices. Recent advancements in parameter optimization, regularization techniques, improvement in activation functions, corresponding loss functions, advancements in the coted the research of Convolutonal Neural Network’s(CNN’s) in past few years. Training of neural networks is cumbersome and takes a lot of time can take days or even weeks. This limits the application of Convolutional Neural Network(CNN) in real time research fields where computational speed is of utmost importance. Thus there is a need for appropriate and enhanced computational speed to meet the requirements of these real time applications.This paper describes CNN in detail summarizes architectural evolution of CNN from 1998 to 2019. Three types of strategies have been explained to enhance the computational speed of CNN at algorithmic level and implementation level. This paper gives detailed insight about computation speed acceleration using Stochastic Gradient Decent(SGD) optimization, Fast convolution and exploiting parallelism challenges in CNN posed by these techniques and recent advancements.The paper also includes detailed view of different framework usage while implementing fast convolution or parallelism techniques. The ultimate aim of the paper to explore all such recent techniques by which we can accelerate the training speed of the CNN’s without compromising the accuracy.
Improving End-to-End Sequential Recommendations with Intent-aware Diversification

Sequential recommenders that capture users' dynamic intents by modeling sequential behavior, are able to accurately recommend items to users. Previous studies on sequential recommendations (SRs) mostly focus on optimizing the recommendation accuracy, thus ignoring the diversity of recommended items. Many existing methods for improving the diversity of recommended items are not applicable to SRs because they assume that user intents are static and rely on post-processing the list of recommended items to promote diversity. We consider both accuracy and diversity by reformulating SRs as a list generation task, and propose an integrated approach with an end-to-end neural model, called intent-aware diversified sequential recommendation (IDSR). Specifically, we introduce an implicit intent mining (IIM) module for SR to capture multiple user intents reflected in sequences of user behavior. We design an intent-aware diversity promoting (IDP) loss function to supervise the learning of the IIM module and guide the model to take diversity into account during training. Extensive experiments on four datasets show that IDSR significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of recommendation diversity while yielding comparable or superior recommendation accuracy.
Video anomaly detection with multi-scale feature and temporal information fusion

Video anomaly detection is a challenging task because of the uncertainty of abnormal events. The current method based on predictive frames has obtained better detection results compared with the previous reconstruction or hand-crafted methods. In current prediction methods, the characteristics considered previously are only of a single scale, and the time constraint information is not fully used. In our work, we proposed a new framework structure to achieve better abnormality detection rate. To address the objects of different scales in each video frame, we considered extracting the characteristics of different receptive fields to encode more spatial information. At the same time, we added temporal constraints to the network instead of using time-consuming optical flow information, and we completed the memory of temporal features through a ConvGRU module. Furthermore, while distinguishing abnormal events, we also considered temporal information and spatial information so that our framework could fully combine spatio-temporal information to correctly distinguish abnormal events from normal events. We obtained excellent results on three datasets, thus demonstrating the effectiveness of our method.
The development of Gaussian process regression for effective regional post‐earthquake building damage inference

Abstract Post‐earthquake reconnaissance survey of structural damage is an effective way of documenting and understanding the impact of earthquakes on structures. This article aims at providing an efficient data‐based framework that reduces the required time for reconnaissance missions and predicts the damage intensities for every building in the affected region. We hypothesize that a joint selection of necessary structural and earthquake parameters along with sparse damage observations are sufficient to train a supervised learning algorithm and accurately infer the damage for other buildings in the region. Gaussian process regression is employed to prove the hypothesis for probabilistic inference of different damage indices. The algorithm performs efficiently by selecting a set of diverse and representative buildings for damage observations using K‐medoids clustering. To validate the hypothesis and the proposed method, the algorithm framework is implemented on two severe earthquake simulation testbeds. The impacts of different building and ground motion variables on the damage inference performance are discussed. Furthermore, the effectiveness of observation sampling by clustering in the post‐earthquake damage inference is compared with random sampling.
Discriminative manifold random vector functional link neural network for rolling bearing fault diagnosis

Random vector functional link neural network (RVFLNN) is an effective and powerful neural network model, and it has been commonly used for various engineering applications. In this paper, an improved RVFLNN model called discriminative manifold RVFLNN (DMRVFLNN) is proposed and applied for rolling bearing fault diagnosis, which has the following outstanding characteristics. First, DMRVFLNN relaxes the strict one-hot label matrix into a soft label matrix to fully exploit the interclass discriminative information and simultaneously enlarge the distances between interclass samples. Second, a within-class similarity graph based on manifold learning is designed for DMRVFLNN to force interclass samples to keep close together as far as possible. In the construction process of the within-class similarity graph, cosine distance is used to measure the distances between samples to enhance its robustness. Moreover, we design an effective update method solution for DMRVFLNN with a closed-form solution in each iteration. Two rolling bearing datasets are used to verify the fault diagnosis performance, and the experimental results prove the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method for rolling bearing fault diagnosis.
Orchestrating product provenance story: When IOTA ecosystem meets electronics supply chain space

"Trustworthy data" is the fuel for ensuring transparent traceability, precise decision-making, and cogent coordination in the supply chain (SC) space. However, the disparate data silos act as a trade barrier in orchestrating the provenance of product story starting from the transformation of raw materials into the circuit board to the assembling of electronic components into end products available on the store shelf for customers. Therefore, to bridge the fragmented siloed information across global supply chain partners, the diffusion of blockchain (BC) as one of the advanced distributed ledger technology (DLT) takeover the on-premise legacy systems. Nevertheless, the challenging constraints of blockchain including scalability, accessing off-line data, fee-less microtransactions and many more lead to the third wave of blockchain called IOTA. In this paper, we propose a framework for supporting provenance in the electronic supply chain (ECS) by using permissioned IOTA ledger. Realizing the crucial requirement of trustworthy data, we use Masked Authenticated Messaging (MAM) channel provided by IOTA that allows the SC players to procure distributed information while keeping confidential trade flows, tamper-proof data, and fine-grained accessibility rights. To identify operational disruption, we devise a transparent product ledger through transaction data and consignment information to keep track of the complete product journey at each intermediary step during SC processes. Furthermore, we evaluate the secure provenance data construction time for varying payload size.
One-Shot Neural Architecture Search: Maximising Diversity to Overcome Catastrophic Forgetting

One-shot neural architecture search (NAS) has recently become mainstream in the NAS community because it significantly improves computational efficiency through weight sharing. However, the supernet training paradigm in one-shot NAS introduces catastrophic forgetting, where each step of the training can deteriorate the performance of other architectures that contain partially-shared weights with current architecture. To overcome this problem of catastrophic forgetting, we formulate supernet training for one-shot NAS as a constrained continual learning optimization problem such that learning the current architecture does not degrade the validation accuracy of previous architectures. The key to solving this constrained optimization problem is a novelty search based architecture selection (NSAS) loss function that regularizes the supernet training by using a greedy novelty search method to find the most representative subset. We applied the NSAS loss function to two one-shot NAS baselines and extensively tested them on both a common search space and a NAS benchmark dataset. We further derive three variants based on the NSAS loss function, the NSAS with depth constrain (NSAS-C) to improve the transferability, and NSAS-G and NSAS-LG to handle the situation with a limited number of constraints. The experiments on the common NAS search space demonstrate that NSAS and it variants improve the predictive ability of supernet training in one-shot NAS with remarkable and efficient performance on the CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet datasets. The results with the NAS benchmark dataset also confirm the significant improvements these one-shot NAS baselines can make.