Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
EduQG: A Multi-Format Multiple-Choice Dataset for the Educational Domain

Natural language processing technology has made significant progress in recent years, fuelled by increasingly powerful general language models. This has also inspired a sizeable body of work targeted specifically towards the educational domain, where the creation of questions (both for assessment and practice) is a laborious/expensive effort. Thus, automatic Question-Generation (QG) solutions have been proposed and studied. Yet, according to a recent survey of the educational QG community’s progress, a common baseline dataset unifying multiple domains and question forms (e.g., multiple choice vs. fill-the-gap), including readily available baseline models to compare against, is largely missing. This is the gap we aim to fill with this paper. In particular, we introduce a high-quality dataset in the educational domain, containing over 3,000 entries, comprising (i) multiple-choice questions, (ii) the corresponding answers (including distractors), and (iii) associated passages from the course material used as sources for the questions. Each question is phrased in two forms, normal and cloze (i.e., fill-the-gap), and correct answers are linked to source documents with sentence-level annotations. Thus, our versatile dataset can be used for both question and distractor generation, as well as to explore new challenges such as question format conversion. Furthermore, 903 questions are accompanied by their cognitive complexity level as per Bloom’s taxonomy. All questions have been generated by educational experts rather than crowd workers to ensure they are maintaining educational and learning standards. Our analysis and experiments suggest distinguishable differences between our dataset and commonly used ones for question generation for educational purposes. We believe this new dataset can serve as a valuable resource for research and evaluation in the educational domain. The dataset and baselines are made available to support further research in question generation for education (https://github.com/hadif ar/question-generation).
ID-Care: A Model for Sharing Wide Healthcare Data

All over the world, there is a lot of patient health data in different locations such as hospitals, clinics, insurance companies, and other organizations. In this sense, global identification of the patient has emerged as an everyday healthcare challenge. Governments and institutions have to prioritize satisfactory, quick, and integrated decision-making in a wide, dispersed, and global environment because of unexpected challenges like pandemics or threats. In the current scientific literature, some of the existing challenges include support for a standard global unique identification that considers privacy issues, the combination of multiple technological biometry implementations, and personal documents. Thus, we propose a decentralized software model based on blockchain and smart contracts that includes privacy, global unique person identification supporting multiple combinations of documents, and biometric data using the Global Standards 1 - GS1 healthcare industry standard. Furthermore, we defined a methodology to evaluate a hypothetical use case of this model where an integrated and standard global health data sharing personal identification is crucial. For this, we implemented the proposed model in a global-wide continent location through cloud machines, fog computing, and blockchain considering the unique patient data identification and evaluate a use case scenario based on the top 5 most globally visited tourist destinations (France, Spain, the United States of America, China, and Italy), with an approach based on this model. The results show that using a model for a global id for healthcare can help reduce costs, time, and efforts, especially in the context of health threats, where agility and financial support must be prioritized.
Adaptive Search-and-Training for Robust and Efficient Network Pruning

Both network pruning and neural architecture search (NAS) can be interpreted as techniques to automate the design and optimization of artificial neural networks. In this paper, we challenge the conventional wisdom of training before pruning by proposing a joint search-and-training approach to learn a compact network directly from scratch. Using pruning as a search strategy, we advocate three new insights for network engineering: 1) to formulate adaptive search as a cold start strategy to find a compact subnetwork on the coarse scale; and 2) to automatically learn the threshold for network pruning; 3) to offer flexibility to choose between efficiency and robustness. More specifically, we propose an adaptive search algorithm in the cold start by exploiting the randomness and flexibility of filter pruning. The weights associated with the network filters will be updated by ThreshNet, a flexible coarse-to-fine pruning method inspired by reinforcement learning. In addition, we introduce a robust pruning strategy leveraging the technique of knowledge distillation through a teacher-student network. Extensive experiments on ResNet and VGGNet have shown that our proposed method can achieve a better balance in terms of efficiency and accuracy and notable advantages over current state-of-the-art pruning methods in several popular datasets, including CIFAR10, CIFAR100, and ImageNet. The code associate with this paper is available at: https://see.xidian.edu.cn/faculty/wsdong/Projects/AST-NP.htm.
Performance Improvement on Traditional Chinese Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems With Reinforcement Learning and Regularized Dropout Technique

The development of conversational voice assistant applications has been in full swing around the world.This paper aims to develop traditional Chinese multi-domain task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems.It is typically implemented using pipeline approach, where submodules are optimized independently, resulting in inconsistencies with each other.Instead, this paper implements end-to-end multi-domain TOD models using pre-trained deep neural networks (DNNs).This allows us to integrate all the submodules into one single DNN model to solve the inconsistencies.Data shortages are common in conversational natural language processing (NLP) tasks using DNN models.In this regard, dropout regularization has been widely used to improve overfitting caused by insufficient training dataset.However, the randomness it introduces leads to non-negligible discrepancies between training and inference.On the other hand, pre-trained language models have successfully provided effective regularization for NLP tasks.An inherent disadvantage is that fine-tuning the pre-trained language model suffers from exposure bias and loss-evaluation mismatch.To this end, we propose a reinforcement learning (RL) approach to address both issues.Furthermore, we adopt a method called regularized dropout (R-Drop) to improve the inconsistency in dropout layers of DNNs.Experimental results show that both our proposed RL approach and the R-Drop technique can significantly improve the joint target accuracy (JGA) score and combined score of traditional Chinese TOD system in tasks of dialogue state tracking (DST) and end-to-end sentence prediction, respectively.
Path Planning for Mobile Robot Considering Turnabouts on Narrow Road by Deep Q-Network

This paper proposes a path planning method for a nonholonomic mobile robot that takes turnabouts on a narrow road. A narrow road is any space in which the robot cannot move without turning around. Conventional path planning techniques ignore turnabout points and directions determined by environmental data, which might result in collisions or deadlocks on a narrow road. The proposed method uses the Deep Q-network (DQN) to obtain a control strategy for path planning on narrow roads. In the simulation, the robot learned the optimal velocity commands that maximized the long-term reward. The reward is designed to reach a target with a smaller change in robot velocity and fewer turnabouts. The success rate and the number of turnabouts in the simulation and experiment were used to evaluate the trained model. According to simulation and environmental data, the proposed strategy enables the robot to travel on narrow roads. Additionally, these outcomes demonstrate comparable performance on a number of roadways that are not part of the learning environments, supporting the robustness of the trained model.
Compared-neighborhood based image dehazing for improved visibility

Image hazing is the degradation of photographic quality due to light attenuation by mist or suspended particles. This paper presents solutions to two shortcomings of existing haze-removal techniques. One shortcoming is that pixels often get zeroed out in the dehazing process, which suppresses edges and features. The other is that the assumption of homogeneity of features and properties in input images during dehazing reduces the resolution of features and textures. A solution that considers how feature and edge visibility, which are primarily disrupted by noise, is provided. This noise is responsible for the lack of distinction between local and global pixel neighborhoods. An attenuation coefficient that helps to minimize pixel distortion is proposed. This coefficient is sensitive to local relative pixel intensity and prevents the pixels from being zeroed out in the context of certain local or global neighborhoods. The proposed technique is implemented via the existing dual-stream network based on a CNN with the block-greedy algorithm. The qualitative and quantitative evaluation based on 117 images shows 75% improvement in haze density ζ, 90% increase in edge visibility e, and 150% improvement in the peak-signal-to-noise ratio (PNR), and 95% increase in structural similarity index measure (SSIM) compared to the original hazed image. These show a remarkable improvement compared to the existing state-of-the-art methods. The shortcoming is a need for color improvement, which can be studied further in future studies.
Edge-Labeled and Node-Aggregated Graph Neural Networks for Few-Shot Relation Classification

Relation classification as a core technique for building knowledge graphs becomes a critical task in natural language processing. The fact that humans can learn by summarizing and generalizing limited knowledge motivates scholars to explore few-shot learning. Graph neural networks provide a method to measure the distance between nodes, which improves the model effect in the problem of few-shot relation classification. However, graph neural network methods focus only on node information and ignore edge information which implies inter-class and intra-class relations. This paper proposes edge-labeled and node-aggregated graph neural networks (ENGNNs) for few-shot relation classification: edge labels are encoded and used for node information aggregation. In addition, a process of semi-supervised learning is designed to discover a better solution for one-shot learning. Compared with previous methods, experimental results show that the proposed ENGNN model improves the performance of the graph neural network on the FewRel dataset.
TPDNet: Texture-Guided Phase-to-DEPTH Networks to Repair Shadow-Induced Errors for Fringe Projection Profilometry

This paper proposes a phase-to-depth deep learning model to repair shadow-induced errors for fringe projection profilometry (FPP). The model comprises two hourglass branches that extract information from texture images and phase maps and fuses the information from the two branches by concatenation and weights. The input of the proposed model contains texture images, masks, and unwrapped phase maps, and the ground truth is the depth map from CAD models. A loss function was chosen to consider image details and structural similarity. The training data contain 1200 samples in the verified virtual FPP system. After training, we conduct experiments on the virtual and real-world scanning data, and the results support the model’s effectiveness. The mean absolute error and the root mean squared error are 1.0279 mm and 1.1898 mm on the validation dataset. In addition, we analyze the influence of ambient light intensity on the model’s performance. Low ambient light limits the model’s performance as the model cannot extract valid information from the completely dark shadow regions in texture images. The contribution of each branch network is also investigated. Features from the texture-dominant branch are leveraged as guidance to remedy shadow-induced errors. Information from the phase-dominant branch network makes accurate predictions for the whole object. Our model provides a good reference for repairing shadow-induced errors in the FPP system.
Overcoming the Legal Barriers to the Implementation of Smart Contracts in the Construction Industry: The Emergence of a Practice and Research Agenda

The construction industry is one of the most critical sectors of the global economy, contributing significantly to economic growth and job creation [...]
BlockEdge: A Privacy-Aware Secured Edge Computing Framework Using Blockchain for Industry 4.0

Edge computing has its application in a lot of areas now, but with the increasing popularity and benefits, it suffers from some challenges such as data privacy and security. Intruder attacks should be prevented and only authentic users should have access to data storage. Most of the authentication techniques apply some trusted entity to undergo the process. Users and servers both have to be registered in the trusted entity to get permission of authenticating other users. In this scenario, the entire system depends on a single trusted entity; so, a single point of failure can cause the failure of the total system, and scalability issues are there also. To address these issues remaining in the existing systems, in this paper, a decentralized approach has been discussed which is capable of eliminating the concept of a single trusted entity by introducing a blockchain paradigm in edge computing where every time a user or server wants to enter the system, it does not have to register itself manually, but the authentication process is carried out throughout the scheme automatically. Experimental results and performance analysis prove that the proposed architecture is definitely beneficial and it outperforms the existing ones in the concerned domain.
Syllable-Based Multi-POSMORPH Annotation for Korean Morphological Analysis and Part-of-Speech Tagging

Various research approaches have attempted to solve the length difference problem between the surface form and the base form of words in the Korean morphological analysis and part-of-speech (POS) tagging task. The compound POS tagging method is a popular approach, which tackles the problem using annotation tags. However, a dictionary is required for the post-processing to recover the base form and to dissolve the ambiguity of compound POS tags, which degrades the system performance. In this study, we propose a novel syllable-based multi-POSMORPH annotation method to solve the length difference problem within one framework, without using a dictionary for the post-processing. A multi-POSMORPH tag is created by combining POS tags and morpheme syllables for the simultaneous POS tagging and morpheme recovery. The model is implemented with a two-layer transformer encoder, which is lighter than the existing models based on large language models. Nonetheless, the experiments demonstrate that the performance of the proposed model is comparable to, or better than, that of previous models.
Classification of Bugs in Cloud Computing Applications Using Machine Learning Techniques

In software development, the main problem is recognizing the security-oriented issues within the reported bugs due to their unacceptable failure rate to provide satisfactory reliability on customer and software datasets. The misclassification of bug reports has a direct impact on the effectiveness of the bug prediction model. The misclassification issue surely compromises the accuracy of the system. Manually reviewing bug reports is necessary to solve this problem, but doing so takes a lot of time and is tiresome for developers and testers. This paper proposes a novel hybrid approach based on natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning. To address these issues, the intended outcomes are multi-class supervised classification and bug prioritization using supervised classifiers. After being collected, the dataset was prepared for vectorization, subjected to exploratory data analysis, and preprocessed. The feature extraction and selection methods used for a bag of words are TF-IDF and word2vec. Machine learning models are created after the dataset has undergone a full transformation. This study proposes, develops, and assesses four classifiers: multinomial Naive Bayes, decision tree, logistic regression, and random forest. The hyper-parameters of the models are tuned, and it is concluded that random forest outperformed with a 91.73% test and 100% training accuracy. The SMOTE technique was used to balance the highly imbalanced dataset, which was initially created for the justified classification. The comparison between balanced and imbalanced dataset models clearly showed the importance of the balanced dataset in classification as it outperformed in all experiments.
Generative Adversarial Networks for Cyber Threat Hunting in Ethereum Blockchain

Ethereum blockchain has shown great potential in providing the next generation of the decentralized platform beyond crypto payments. Recently, it has attracted researchers and industry players to experiment with developing various Web3 applications for the Internet of Things (IoT), Defi, Metaverse, and many more. Although Ethereum provides a secure platform for developing decentralized applications, it is not immune to security risks and has been a victim of numerous cyber attacks. Adversarial attacks are a new cyber threat to systems that have been rising. Adversarial attacks can disrupt and exploit decentralized applications running on the Ethereum platform by creating fake accounts and transactions. Detecting adversarial attacks is challenging because the fake materials (e.g., accounts and transactions) as malicious payloads are similar to benign data. This article proposes a model using Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) and Deep Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) for cyber threat hunting in the Ethereum blockchain. Firstly, we employ GAN to generate fake transactions using genuine Ethereum transactions as the first phase of the proposed model. Then in the second phase, we utilize bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) to identify adversarial transactions in a hunting exercise. The results of the first phase evaluation show that the GAN can generate transactions identical to the actual Ethereum transactions with an accuracy of 82.51%. Also, the results of the second phase show 99.98% accuracy in identifying adversarial transactions.
Quaternionic quantum automata

Quaternionic quantum theory is a generalization of the standard complex quantum theory. Inspired by this, we study the quaternionic quantum computation using quaternions. We first develop a theory of quaternionic quantum automata as a model of quaternionic quantum computation. Quaternionic quantum automata also can be seen as an extension of complex quantum automata. Then we introduce some operations of quaternionic quantum automata and establish some of their basic properties.
Geometrical attacks resilient statistical watermark decoder using polar harmonic Fourier moments

This paper presents a new robust multiplicative watermark detector. Due to the strong robustness against various attacks, polar harmonic Fourier moment (PHFM) magnitudes are used as the employed watermark carrier. The distribution of PHFM magnitudes is highly non-Gaussian and can be properly modeled by a heavy-tailed probability density function (PDF). In this paper, we proved that Weibull distribution can suitably fit the distribution of PHFM magnitudes, and based on this, we presented a statistics-based watermark decoder by using the Weibull as a prior for the PHFM magnitudes. In watermark embedding, a multiplicative manner was used to embed watermark information in PHFM magnitudes of the highest entropy blocks to achieve better robustness and imperceptibility. In watermark detection, we developed a Weibull distribution-based statistical watermark decoder, which uses the maximum likelihood (ML) decision rule. Compared with Bessel K form (BKF), Cauchy, and generalized Gaussian (GG)-based decoders, the Weibull-based decoder demonstrates stronger robustness. In addition, the proposed watermark decoder is more robust against geometrical and common image processing attacks than existing statistical watermark decoders.
Episodic task agnostic contrastive training for multi-task learning

Learning knowledge from different tasks to improve the general learning performance is crucial for designing an efficient algorithm. In this work, we tackle the Multi-task Learning (MTL) problem, where the learner extracts the knowledge from different tasks simultaneously with limited data. Previous works have been designing the MTL models by taking advantage of the transfer learning techniques, requiring the knowledge of the task index, which is not realistic in many practical scenarios. In contrast, we consider the scenario that the task index is not explicitly known, under which the features extracted by the neural networks are task agnostic. To learn the task agnostic invariant features, we implement model agnostic meta-learning by leveraging the episodic training scheme to capture the common features across tasks. Apart from the episodic training scheme, we further implemented a contrastive learning objective to improve the feature compactness for a better prediction boundary in the embedding space. We conduct extensive experiments on several benchmarks compared with several recent strong baselines to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The results showed that our method provides a practical solution for real-world scenarios, where the task index is agnostic to the learner and can outperform several strong baselines, achieving state-of-the-art performances.
9 × 4 = 6 × 6: Understanding the Quantum Solution to Euler’s Problem of 36 Officers

The famous combinatorial problem of Euler concerns an arrangement of $36$ officers from six different regiments in a $6 \times 6$ square array. Each regiment consists of six officers each belonging to one of six ranks. The problem, originating from Saint Petersburg, requires that each row and each column of the array contains only one officer of a given rank and given regiment. Euler observed that such a configuration does not exist. In recent work, we constructed a solution to a quantum version of this problem assuming that the officers correspond to quantum states and can be entangled. In this paper, we explain the solution which is based on a partition of 36 officers into nine groups, each with four elements. The corresponding quantum states are locally equivalent to maximally entangled two-qubit states, hence each officer is entangled with at most three out of his $35$ colleagues. The entire quantum combinatorial design involves $9$ Bell bases in nine complementary $4$-dimensional subspaces.