Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
TRQ3DNet: A 3D Quasi-Recurrent and Transformer Based Network for Hyperspectral Image Denoising

We propose a new deep neural network termed TRQ3DNet which combines convolutional neural network (CNN) and transformer for hyperspectral image (HSI) denoising. The network consists of two branches. One is built by 3D quasi-recurrent blocks, including convolution and quasi-recurrent pooling operation. Specifically, the 3D convolution can extract the spatial correlation within a band, and spectral correlation between different bands, while the quasi-recurrent pooling operation is able to exploit global correlation along the spectrum. The other branch is composed of a series of Uformer blocks. The Uformer block uses window-based multi-head self-attention (W-MSA) mechanism and the locally enhanced feed-forward network (LeFF) to exploit the global and local spatial features. To fuse the features extracted by the two branches, we develop a bidirectional integration bridge (BI bridge) for better preserving the image feature information. Experimental results on synthetic and real HSI data show the superiority of our proposed network. For example, in the case of Gaussian noise with sigma 70, the PSNR value of our method significantly increases about 0.8 compared with other state-of-the-art methods.
The Role of ML, AI and 5G Technology in Smart Energy and Smart Building Management

With the help of machine learning, many tasks can be automated. The use of computers and mobile devices in “intelligent” buildings may make tasks such as controlling the indoor climate, monitoring security, and performing routine maintenance much easier. Intelligent buildings employ the Internet of Things to establish connections among the many components that make up the structure. As the notion of the Internet of Things (IoT) gains attraction, smart grids are being integrated into larger networks. The IoT is an integral part of smart grids since it enables beneficial services that improve the experience for everyone inside and individuals are protected because of tried-and-true life support systems. The reason for installing Internet of Things gadgets in smart structures is the primary focus of this investigation. In this context, the infrastructure behind IoT devices and their component units is of the highest concern.
Multimodal Conditional Image Synthesis with Product-of-Experts GANs

Existing conditional image synthesis frameworks generate images based on user inputs in a single modality, such as text, segmentation, or sketch. They do not allow users to simultaneously use inputs in multiple modalities to control the image synthesis output. This reduces their practicality as multimodal inputs are more expressive and complement each other. To address this limitation, we propose the Product-of-Experts Generative Adversarial Networks (PoE-GAN) framework, which can synthesize images conditioned on multiple input modalities or any subset of them, even the empty set. We achieve this capability with a single trained model. PoE-GAN consists of a product-of-experts generator and a multimodal multiscale projection discriminator. Through our carefully designed training scheme, PoE-GAN learns to synthesize images with high quality and diversity. Besides advancing the state of the art in multimodal conditional image synthesis, PoE-GAN also outperforms the best existing unimodal conditional image synthesis approaches when tested in the unimodal setting. The project website is available at this link .
A Comprehensive Survey on Aquila Optimizer

Aquila Optimizer (AO) is a well-known nature-inspired optimization algorithm (NIOA) that was created in 2021 based on the prey grabbing behavior of Aquila. AO is a population-based NIOA that has demonstrated its effectiveness in the field of complex and nonlinear optimization in a short period of time. As a result, the purpose of this study is to provide an updated survey on the topic. This survey accurately reports on the designed enhanced AO variations and their applications. In order to properly assess AO, a rigorous comparison between AO and its peer NIOAs is conducted over mathematical benchmark functions. The experimental results show the AO provides competitive outcomes.
nnFormer: Volumetric Medical Image Segmentation via a 3D Transformer

Transformer, the model of choice for natural language processing, has drawn scant attention from the medical imaging community. Given the ability to exploit long-term dependencies, transformers are promising to help atypical convolutional neural networks to learn more contextualized visual representations. However, most of recently proposed transformer-based segmentation approaches simply treated transformers as assisted modules to help encode global context into convolutional representations. To address this issue, we introduce nnFormer (i.e., not-another transFormer), a 3D transformer for volumetric medical image segmentation. nnFormer not only exploits the combination of interleaved convolution and self-attention operations, but also introduces local and global volume-based self-attention mechanism to learn volume representations. Moreover, nnFormer proposes to use skip attention to replace the traditional concatenation/summation operations in skip connections in U-Net like architecture. Experiments show that nnFormer significantly outperforms previous transformer-based counterparts by large margins on three public datasets. Compared to nnUNet, the most widely recognized convnet-based 3D medical segmentation model, nnFormer produces significantly lower HD95 and is much more computationally efficient. Furthermore, we show that nnFormer and nnUNet are highly complementary to each other in model ensembling. Codes and models of nnFormer are available at https://git.io/JSf3i.
A Graph Based Image Interpretation Method Using A Priori Qualitative Inclusion and Photometric Relationships

This paper presents a method for recovering and identifying image regions from an initial oversegmentation using qualitative knowledge of its content. Compared to recent works favoring spatial information and quantitative techniques, our approach focuses on simple a priori qualitative inclusion and photometric relationships such as “region A is included in region B”, “the intensity of region A is lower than the one of region B” or “regions A and B depict similar intensities” (photometric uncertainty). The proposed method is based on a two steps' inexact graph matching approach. The first step searches for the best subgraph isomorphism candidate between expected regions and a subset of regions resulting from the initial oversegmentation. Then, remaining segmented regions are progressively merged with appropriate already matched regions, while preserving the coherence with a priori declared relationships. Strengths and weaknesses of the method are studied on various images (grayscale and color), with various initial oversegmentation algorithms (k-means, meanshift, quickshift). Results show the potential of the method to recover, in a reasonable runtime, expected regions, a priori described in a qualitative manner. For further evaluation and comparison purposes, a Python opensource package implementing the method is provided, together with the specifically built experimental database.
Improving Domain-Specific Classification by Collaborative Learning with Adaptation Networks

For unsupervised domain adaptation, the process of learning domain-invariant representations could be dominated by the labeled source data, such that the specific characteristics of the target domain may be ignored. In order to improve the performance in inferring target labels, we propose a targetspecific network which is capable of learning collaboratively with a domain adaptation network, instead of directly minimizing domain discrepancy. A clustering regularization is also utilized to improve the generalization capability of the target-specific network by forcing target data points to be close to accumulated class centers. As this network learns and specializes to the target domain, its performance in inferring target labels improves, which in turn facilitates the learning process of the adaptation network. Therefore, there is a mutually beneficial relationship between these two networks. We perform extensive experiments on multiple digit and object datasets, and the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed approach is presented and verified on multiple visual adaptation benchmarks, e.g., we improve the state-ofthe-art on the task of MNIST→SVHN from 76.5% to 84.9% without specific augmentation.
Moving-Tolerant Augmented Reality Surgical Navigation System Using Autostereoscopic Three-Dimensional Image Overlay

Augmented reality (AR) surgical navigation systems based on image overlay have been used in minimally invasive surgery. However, conventional systems still suffer from a limited viewing zone, a shortage of intuitive three-dimensional (3D) image guidance and cannot be moved freely. To fuse the 3-D overlay image with the patient in situ, it is essential to track the overlay device while it is moving. A direct line-of-sight should be maintained between the optical markers and the tracker camera. In this study, we propose a moving-tolerant AR surgical navigation system using autostereoscopic image overlay, which can avoid the use of the optical tracking system during the intraoperative period. The system captures binocular image sequences of environmental change in the operation room to locate the overlay device, rather than tracking the device directly. Therefore, it is no longer required to maintain a direct line-of-sight between the tracker and the tracked devices. The movable range of the system is also not limited by the scope of the tracker camera. Computer simulation experiments demonstrate the reliability of the proposed moving-tolerant AR surgical navigation system. We also fabricate a computer-generated integral photography-based 3-D overlay AR system to validate the feasibility of the proposed moving-tolerant approach. Qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that the proposed system can always fuse the 3-D image with the patient, thus, increasing the feasibility and reliability of traditional 3-D overlay image AR surgical navigation systems.
Neuroimaging Retrieval via Adaptive Ensemble Manifold Learning for Brain Disease Diagnosis

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative and non-curable disease, with serious cognitive impairment, such as dementia. Clinically, it is critical to study the disease with multi-source data in order to capture a global picture of it. In this respect, an adaptive ensemble manifold learning (AEML) algorithm is proposed to retrieve multi-source neuroimaging data. Specifically, an objective function based on manifold learning is formulated to impose geometrical constraints by similarity learning. The complementary characteristics of various sources of brain disease data for disorder discovery are investigated by tuning weights from ensemble learning. In addition, a generalized norm is explicitly explored for adaptive sparseness degree control. The proposed AEML algorithm is evaluated by the public AD neuroimaging initiative database. Results obtained from the extensive experiments demonstrate that our algorithm outperforms the traditional methods.
Nonparametric Dimension Reduction via Maximizing Pairwise Separation Probability

In this brief, we propose a novel nonparametric supervised linear dimension reduction (SLDR) algorithm that extracts the features by maximizing the pairwise separation probability. The separation probability, as a new class separability measure, describes the generalization accuracy when we use the obtained features to train a linear classifier. Obtaining high-quality features, the proposed method avoids the overlaps between classes that are close to each other in the input space and improves the subsequent classification performance. Experiments on benchmark data sets show the superiority of the proposed algorithm over some other state-of-the-art SLDR methods.
Contrasting Exploration in Parameter and Action Space: A Zeroth-Order Optimization Perspective

Black-box optimizers that explore in parameter space have often been shown to outperform more sophisticated action space exploration methods developed specifically for the reinforcement learning problem. We examine these black-box methods closely to identify situations in which they are worse than action space exploration methods and those in which they are superior. Through simple theoretical analyses, we prove that complexity of exploration in parameter space depends on the dimensionality of parameter space, while complexity of exploration in action space depends on both the dimensionality of action space and horizon length. This is also demonstrated empirically by comparing simple exploration methods on several model problems, including Contextual Bandit, Linear Regression and Reinforcement Learning in continuous control.
Privacy-Preserving User Profile Matching in Social Networks

In this paper, we consider a scenario where a user queries a user profile database, maintained by a social networking service provider, to identify users whose profiles match the profile specified by the querying user. A typical example of this application is online dating. Most recently, an online dating website, Ashley Madison, was hacked, which resulted in a disclosure of a large number of dating user profiles. This data breach has urged researchers to explore practical privacy protection for user profiles in a social network. In this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving solution for profile matching in social networks by using multiple servers. Our solution is built on homomorphic encryption and allows a user to find out matching users with the help of multiple servers without revealing to anyone the query and the queried user profiles in clear. Our solution achieves user profile privacy and user query privacy as long as at least one of the multiple servers is honest. Our experiments demonstrate that our solution is practical.
The Effect of Network Width on Stochastic Gradient Descent and Generalization: an Empirical Study

We investigate how the final parameters found by stochastic gradient descent are influenced by over-parameterization. We generate families of models by increasing the number of channels in a base network, and then perform a large hyper-parameter search to study how the test error depends on learning rate, batch size, and network width. We find that the optimal SGD hyper-parameters are determined by a noise which is a function of the batch size, learning rate, and initialization conditions. In the absence of batch normalization, the optimal normalized noise scale is directly proportional to width. Wider networks, with their higher optimal noise scale, also achieve higher test accuracy. These observations hold for MLPs, ConvNets, and ResNets, and for two different parameterization schemes (Standard and NTK). We observe a similar trend with batch normalization for ResNets. Surprisingly, since the largest stable learning rate is bounded, the largest batch size consistent with the optimal normalized noise scale decreases as the width increases.
Secure Cloud Storage Service Using Bloom Filters for the Internet of Things

Today, the Internet of Things (IoT) is used for convenience in everyday life in many areas.Owing to the fact that the data collected from the IoT are generated in large quantities, cloud computing is inevitably used to store and analyze the data.However, cloud storage is not owned by the user, so it is unreliable.Verifying the integrity of data collected in an IoT environment and stored in a cloud has two problems: a large amount of data needs to be verified, and the data verification should be done directly on the IoT device.Many methods for data integrity verification use trusted third parties and devices that provide sufficient resources.However, it is difficult to directly apply existing research to the IoT devices that have limited resources.This paper proposes a secure cloud storage service for an IoT environment that is based on a provable data possession model and uses Bloom filters.The experimental results showed that the proposed method saves time and has no significant differences in the verification rate with existing methods, even though the Bloom filter causes false positives.Therefore, the proposed service can effectively process a large amount of data generated in an IoT environment.
Dense adaptive cascade forest: a self-adaptive deep ensemble for classification problems

Recent researches have shown that deep forest ensemble achieves a considerable increase in classification accuracy compared with the general ensemble learning methods, especially when the training set is small. In this paper, we take advantage of deep forest ensemble and introduce the dense adaptive cascade forest (daForest). Our model has a better performance than the original cascade forest with three major features: First, we apply SAMME.R boosting algorithm to improve the performance of the model. It guarantees the improvement as the number of layers increases. Second, our model connects each layer to the subsequent ones in a feed-forward fashion, which enhances the capability of the model to resist performance degeneration. Third, we add a hyper-parameter optimization layer before the first classification layer, making our model spend less time to set up and find the optimal hyper-parameters. Experimental results show that daForest performs significantly well and, in some cases, even outperforms neural networks and achieves state-of-the-art results.
Toward SLAs Guaranteed Scalable VDC Provisioning in Cloud Data Centers

Cloud computing has been a cost-efficient paradigm for deploying various applications in datacenters in recent years. Therefore, efficient provisioning for virtual data center (VDC) requests from different service providers (SPs) over physical data centers plays a vital role in improving the quality of service (QoS) and reducing the operational cost of SPs. Therefore, a significant attention has been paid for the VDC provisioning problem. However, few approaches have been proposed for the problem of reliable VDC embedding across multiple data centers, as most of them only consider the problem of VDC mapping within a single data center. In this paper, we study the problem of QoS-aware VDC provisioning across multiple data centers, such that the total bandwidth consumption in the inter-data center backbone network is minimized while satisfying the reliability requirement of each VDC request. We formulate this problem as a mathematical optimization problem by using integer linear programming (ILP) and propose an efficient heuristic algorithm called reliable VDC embedding (RVDCE) algorithm to solve this NP-hard problem. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm performs better in terms of blocking ratio, CPU resource consumption, and bandwidth consumption of backbone network than the existing solution. In addition, this paper has also incorporated integrated security to minimize security vulnerabilities seen in other similar approaches. Apart from demonstrating how to resolve security challenges in our VDC proposal, cost calculations have been implemented to demonstrate the robustness, resiliency, validity, and effectiveness of the VDC provisioning solution for cloud computing.
ThreatZoom

Increasing the variety and quantity of cyber threats becoming the evident that traditional human-in-loop approaches are no longer sufficient to keep systems safe. To address this momentous moot point, forward-thinking pioneers propose new cyber security strategy using automation to build a more efficient and cheaper defense. Associating large number of unpatchable CVEs (vulnerability descriptions) generated everyday to appropriate CWE (weakness) and CAPEC (attack pattern) can be used to automatically infer the expected impact and corresponding mitigation course of actions for that new CVE. Routinely, adversary exploits a vulnerability to trigger a cyber attack where this vulnerability results from a product or system weakness. Hence, finding a common system weakness associated with a vulnerability within a particular product can help to identifying the software, system, or architecture flaw and the potential attack impacts. This identification leads to prevent, detect, and mitigate those flaws. On the other hand, after recognizing the cause and the effect of a vulnerability, discovering the procedural-oriented description of the attack to create behavioral observables for detection and mitigation is necessary that can be derived from CAPEC and ATTCK. Mapping the CWE to CAPEC and ATTCK which provides pre-TTP and post-TTP respectively where TTP stands for Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures. Having all CWE, CAPEC, and ATTCK in one hand enables us to find corresponding mitigation for each one. On the other hand, extracting threat actions provided by each of these concepts leads to find another type of mitigation coming from Critical Security Controls (CSC).
Fuzzi: a three-level logic for differential privacy

Curators of sensitive datasets sometimes need to know whether queries against the data are differentially private . Two sorts of logics have been proposed for checking this property: (1) type systems and other static analyses, which fully automate straightforward reasoning with concepts like “program sensitivity” and “privacy loss,” and (2) full-blown program logics such as apRHL (an approximate, probabilistic, relational Hoare logic), which support more flexible reasoning about subtle privacy-preserving algorithmic techniques but offer only minimal automation. We propose a three-level logic for differential privacy in an imperative setting and present a prototype implementation called Fuzzi. Fuzzi’s lowest level is a general-purpose logic; its middle level is apRHL; and its top level is a novel sensitivity logic adapted from the linear-logic-inspired type system of Fuzz, a differentially private functional language. The key novelty is a high degree of integration between the sensitivity logic and the two lower-level logics: the judgments and proofs of the sensitivity logic can be easily translated into apRHL; conversely, privacy properties of key algorithmic building blocks can be proved manually in apRHL and the base logic, then packaged up as typing rules that can be applied by a checker for the sensitivity logic to automatically construct privacy proofs for composite programs of arbitrary size. We demonstrate Fuzzi’s utility by implementing four different private machine-learning algorithms and showing that Fuzzi’s checker is able to derive tight sensitivity bounds.
Non-asymptotic Analysis of Biased Stochastic Approximation Scheme.

Stochastic approximation (SA) is a key method used in statistical learning. Recently, its non-asymptotic convergence analysis has been considered in many papers. However, most of the prior analyses are made under restrictive assumptions such as unbiased gradient estimates and convex objective function, which significantly limit their applications to sophisticated tasks such as online and reinforcement learning. These restrictions are all essentially relaxed in this work. In particular, we analyze a general SA scheme to minimize a non-convex, smooth objective function. We consider update procedure whose drift term depends on a state-dependent Markov chain and the mean field is not necessarily of gradient type, covering approximate second-order method and allowing asymptotic bias for the one-step updates. We illustrate these settings with the online EM algorithm and the policy-gradient method for average reward maximization in reinforcement learning.