Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
A risky large group emergency decision-making method based on topic sentiment analysis

This study proposes a decision-making method based on topic sentiment analysis to address the problem of completely data-driven attribute information acquisition and risk control of the intuitionistic fuzzy preference in large group emergency decision-making. First, Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic mining is applied to rank public topics and construct an emergency sentiment dictionary for topic sentiment analysis. The attribute system structure and weight information of large group emergency decision-making can be obtained by transforming the high-concern topic sentiment value. Second, with the public attention attribute and public attribute preference as references for large group emergency decision-making, risk measurement under the intuitionistic fuzzy preference model is based on risk credibility. The risk–consensus feedback mechanism of large group emergency decision-making is designed to obtain the high-consensus and low-risk alternative. Finally, the applicability and effectiveness of the method are demonstrated using a case study involving a serious explosion accident.
A Deep Learning Framework for Leukemia Cancer Detection in Microscopic Blood Samples Using Squeeze and Excitation Learning

Leukemia is a fatal category of cancer-related disease that affects individuals of all ages, including children and adults, and is a significant cause of death worldwide. Particularly, it is associated with White Blood Cells (WBC), which is accompanied by a rise in the number of immature lymphocytes and cause damage to the bone marrow and/or blood. Therefore, a rapid and reliable cancer diagnosis is a critical requirement for successful therapy to raise survival rates. Currently, a manual analysis of blood samples obtained through microscopic images is done to diagnose this disease, which is often very slow, time-consuming, and less accurate. Furthermore, in microscopic analysis, the appearance and shape of leukemic cells seem very similar to normal cells which make detection more difficult. In the past decades, deep learning utilizing Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) has provided state-of-the-art approaches for image classification problems; however, there is still a gap to improve their efficacy, learning procedure, and performance. Therefore, in this research study, we proposed a new variant of deep learning algorithm to diagnose leukemia disease by analyzing the microscopic images of blood samples. The proposed deep learning architecture emphasizes the channel associations on all levels of feature representation by incorporating the squeeze and excitation learning that recursively performs recalibration on channel-wise feature outputs by modeling channel interdependencies explicitly. In addition, the incorporation of the squeeze-and-excitation process enhances the feature discriminability of leukemic and normal cells, and strategically assists in exposing informative features of leukemia cells while suppressing less valuable ones as well as improving feature representational power of deep learning algorithm. We show that piling these learning operations of squeeze and excite together in a deep learning model can improve the performance of the model in diagnosing leukemia from microscopic images based on blood samples of patients. Furthermore, an extensive set of experiments are performed on both cropped cells and full-size microscopic images as well as with data augmentation to address the problem of fewer data and to further boost their performance. The proposed model is tested on two publicly available datasets of blood samples of leukemia patients, namely, ALL_IDB1 and ALL_IDB2. The suggested deep learning model exhibits good results and can be utilized to make a reliable computer-aided diagnosis for leukemia cancer.
Scaling End-to-End Models for Large-Scale Multilingual ASR

Building ASR models across many languages is a challenging multi-task learning problem due to large variations and heavily unbalanced data. Existing work has shown positive transfer from high resource to low resource languages. However, degradations on high resource languages are commonly observed due to interference from the heterogeneous multilingual data and reduction in per-language capacity. We conduct a capacity study on a 15-language task, with the amount of data per language varying from 7.6K to 53.5K hours. We adopt GShard [1] to efficiently scale up to 10B parameters. Empirically, we find that (1) scaling the number of model parameters is an effective way to solve the capacity bottleneck - our 500M-param model already outperforms monolingual baselines and scaling it to 1B and 10B brought further quality gains; (2) larger models are not only more data efficient, but also more efficient in terms of training cost as measured in TPU days - the 1B-param model reaches the same accuracy at 34% of training time as the 500M-param model; (3) given a fixed capacity budget, adding depth works better than width and large encoders do better than large decoders; (4) with continuous training, they can be adapted to new languages and domains.
Aggregation Service for Federated Learning: An Efficient, Secure, and More Resilient Realization

Federated learning has recently emerged as a paradigm promising the benefits of harnessing rich data from diverse sources to train high quality models, with the salient features that training datasets never leave local devices. Only model updates are locally computed and shared for aggregation to produce a global model. While federated learning greatly alleviates the privacy concerns as opposed to learning with centralized data, sharing model updates still poses privacy risks. In this paper, we present a system design which offers efficient protection of individual model updates throughout the learning procedure, allowing clients to only provide obscured model updates while a cloud server can still perform the aggregation. Our federated learning system first departs from prior works by supporting lightweight encryption and aggregation, and resilience against drop-out clients with no impact on their participation in future rounds. Meanwhile, prior work largely overlooks bandwidth efficiency optimization in the ciphertext domain and the support of security against an actively adversarial cloud server, which we also fully explore in this paper and provide effective and efficient mechanisms. Extensive experiments over several benchmark datasets (MNIST, CIFAR-10, and CelebA) show our system achieves accuracy comparable to the plaintext baseline, with practical performance.
Learning upper patch attention using dual-branch training strategy for masked face recognition

In the context of pandemic, COVID-19, recognition of masked face images is a challenging problem, as most of the facial components become invisible. By utilizing prior information that mask-occlusion is located in the lower half of the face, we propose a dual-branch training strategy to guide the model to focus on the upper half of the face to extract robust features for Masked face recognition (MFR). During training, the features learned at the intermediate layers of the global branch are fed to our proposed attention module, named Upper Patch Attention (UPA), which acts as a local branch. Both branches are jointly optimized to enhance the feature extraction from non-occluded regions. We also propose a self-attention module, which integrates into the backbone network to enhance the interaction between the channels and spatial locations in the learning process. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-masked face datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
Underwater image enhancement using adaptive color restoration and dehazing

Underwater images captured by optical cameras can be degraded by light attenuation and scattering, which leads to deteriorated visual image quality. The technique of underwater image enhancement plays an important role in a wide range of subsequent applications such as image segmentation and object detection. To address this issue, we propose an underwater image enhancement framework which consists of an adaptive color restoration module and a haze-line based dehazing module. First, we employ an adaptive color restoration method to compensate the deteriorated color channels and restore the colors. The color restoration module consists of three steps: background light estimation, color recognition, and color compensation. The background light estimation determines the image is blueish or greenish, and the compensation is applied in red-green or red-blue channels. Second, the haze-line technique is employed to remove the haze and enhance the image details. Experimental results show that the proposed method can restore the color and remove the haze at the same time, and it also outperforms several state-of-the-art methods on three publicly available datasets. Moreover, experiments on an underwater object detection dataset show that the proposed underwater image enhancement method is able to improve the accuracy of the subsequent underwater object detection framework.
Behavioural antecedents to blockchain implementation in agrifood supply chain management: A thematic analysis

Despite its perceived utility, several companies and managers continue to hold reservations about blockchain implementation in supply chain management. To elucidate the causes, we examine the behavioural and organisational antecedents that influence the adoption of blockchain technology in supply chain management. To do this, we undertake thematic analysis on blockchain-related agri-food business news and expert opinions from the Ovid database's Agricola section. Four themes are central to our model: organisational adoption strategies, technical advantages, environmental obstacles, and implementation intention. Using these themes, we build a thematic map and derive three propositions about the role of behavioural antecedents to blockchain implementation intention in supply chains, thus substantiating Behavioural Reasoning Theory (BRT) and Technology Organisation and Environment (TOE) theory's core arguments. Our findings elucidate novel factors influencing blockchain adoption in supply chains. More specifically, we show that managers who consider the technological benefits associated with blockchain capacity are able to provide stakeholders with new opportunities and embrace adoption strategies such as product launch and partnership formation while also considering environmental and contextual barriers such as market fragmentation, scarcity of research, and regulatory restrictions.
Explainable machine learning in image classification models: An uncertainty quantification perspective

The poor explainability of deep learning models has hindered their adoption in safety and quality-critical applications. This paper focuses on image classification models and aims to enhance the explainability of deep learning models through the development of an uncertainty quantification-based framework. The proposed methodology consists of three major steps. In the first step, we adopt dropout-based Bayesian neural network to characterize the structure and parameter uncertainty inherent in deep learning models, propagate and represent such uncertainties to the model prediction as a distribution. Next, we employ entropy as a quantitative indicator to measure the uncertainty in model prediction, and develop an Empirical Cumulative Distribution Function (ECDF)-based approach to determine an appropriate threshold value for the purpose of deciding when to accept or reject the model prediction. Secondly, in the cases with high model prediction uncertainty, we combine the prediction difference analysis (PDA) approach with dropout-based Bayesian neural network to quantify the uncertainty in pixel-wise feature importance, and identify the locations in the input image that highly correlate with the model prediction uncertainty. In the third step, we develop a robustness-based design optimization formulation to enhance the relevance between input features and model prediction, and leverage a differential evolution approach to optimize the pixels in the input image with high uncertainty in feature importance. Experimental studies in MNIST and CIFAR-10 image classifications are included to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in increasing the explainability of deep learning models.
Reinforcement Learning over Sentiment-Augmented Knowledge Graphs towards Accurate and Explainable Recommendation

Explainable recommendation has gained great attention in recent years. A lot of work in this research line has chosen to use the knowledge graphs (KG) where relations between entities can serve as explanations. However, existing studies have not considered sentiment on relations in KG, although there can be various types of sentiment on relations worth considering (e.g., a user's satisfaction on an item). In this paper, we propose a novel recommendation framework based on KG integrated with sentiment analysis for more accurate recommendation as well as more convincing explanations. To this end, we first construct a Sentiment-Aware Knowledge Graph (namely, SAKG) by analyzing reviews and ratings on items given by users. Then, we perform item recommendation and reasoning over SAKG through our proposed Sentiment-Aware Policy Learning (namely, SAPL) based on a reinforcement learning strategy. To enhance the explainability for end-users, we further developed an interactive user interface presenting textual explanations as well as a collection of reviews related with the discovered sentiment. Experimental results on three real-world datasets verified clear improvements on both the accuracy of recommendation and the quality of explanations.
An Interactive and Dynamic Search-Based Approach to Software Refactoring Recommendations

Successful software products evolve through a process of continual change. However, this process may weaken the design of the software and make it unnecessarily complex, leading to significantly reduced productivity and increased fault-proneness. Refactoring improves the software design while preserving overall functionality and behavior, and is an important technique in managing the growing complexity of software systems. Most of the existing work on software refactoring uses either an entirely manual or a fully automated approach. Manual refactoring is time-consuming, error-prone and unsuitable for large-scale, radical refactoring. On the other hand, fully automated refactoring yields a static list of refactorings which, when applied, leads to a new and often hard to comprehend design. Furthermore, it is difficult to merge these refactorings with other changes performed in parallel by developers. In this paper, we propose a refactoring recommendation approach that dynamically adapts and interactively suggests refactorings to developers and takes their feedback into consideration. Our approach uses NSGA-II to find a set of good refactoring solutions that improve software quality while minimizing the deviation from the initial design. These refactoring solutions are then analyzed to extract interesting common features between them such as the frequently occurring refactorings in the best non-dominated solutions. Based on this analysis, the refactorings are ranked and suggested to the developer in an interactive fashion as a sequence of transformations. The developer can approve, modify or reject each of the recommended refactorings, and this feedback is then used to update the proposed rankings of recommended refactorings. After a number of introduced code changes and interactions with the developer, the interactive NSGA-II algorithm is executed again on the new modified system to repair the set of refactoring solutions based on the new changes and the feedback received from the developer. We evaluated our approach on a set of eight open source systems and two industrial projects provided by an industrial partner. Statistical analysis of our experiments shows that our dynamic interactive refactoring approach performed significantly better than four existing search-based refactoring techniques and one fully-automated refactoring tool not based on heuristic search.
Fast-CLOCs: Fast Camera-LiDAR Object Candidates Fusion for 3D Object Detection

When compared to single modality approaches, fusion-based object detection methods often require more complex models to integrate heterogeneous sensor data, and use more GPU memory and computational resources. This is particularly true for camera-LiDAR based multimodal fusion, which may require three separate deep-learning networks and/or processing pipelines that are designated for the visual data, LiDAR data, and for some form of a fusion framework. In this paper, we propose Fast Camera-LiDAR Object Candidates (Fast-CLOCs) fusion network that can run high-accuracy fusion-based 3D object detection in near real-time. Fast-CLOCs operates on the output candidates before Non-Maximum Suppression (NMS) of any 3D detector, and adds a lightweight 3D detector-cued 2D image detector (3D-Q-2D) to extract visual features from the image domain to improve 3D detections significantly. The 3D detection candidates are shared with the proposed 3D-Q-2D image detector as proposals to reduce the network complexity drastically. The superior experimental results of our Fast-CLOCs on the challenging KITTI and nuScenes datasets illustrate that our Fast-CLOCs outperforms state-of-the-art fusion-based 3D object detection approaches. We will release the code upon publication.
Renewable energy sources from the perspective of blockchain integration: From theory to application

Renewable Energy (RE) decentralisation has become a means towards energy sustainability due to the revolution in blockchain technology. RE sources have undergone remarkable growth as a result of the privatisation of the energy industry and the boost in incentives and policy initiatives on energy. As supply and demand are affected by a sudden change in weather conditions, a new set of challenges in how electricity systems are managed and operated have emerged. Therefore, a level of flexibility measures for safety and stability is required. Blockchain as an emerging technology is regarded as an essential technological landscape affecting nearly every transaction done over the internet. However, its role in RE is still unclear. Therefore, this study comprehensively explores the theory of blockchain and its status in the RE space. The review revealed that the integration of blockchain technology into RE has received significant attention over the years, which is an indication that existing blockchain research on energy is more focused on RE, as a way of addressing the many challenges in its evolution process, and providing sustainable solutions to replace energy from fossil fuels.
Distributional Robustness Loss for Long-tail Learning

Real-world data is often unbalanced and long-tailed, but deep models struggle to recognize rare classes in the presence of frequent classes. To address unbalanced data, most studies try balancing the data, the loss, or the classifier to reduce classification bias towards head classes. Far less attention has been given to the latent representations learned with unbalanced data. We show that the feature extractor part of deep networks suffers greatly from this bias. We propose a new loss based on robustness theory, which encourages the model to learn high-quality representations for both head and tail classes. While the general form of the robustness loss may be hard to compute, we further derive an easy-to-compute upper bound that can be minimized efficiently. This procedure reduces representation bias towards head classes in the feature space and achieves new SOTA results on CIFAR100-LT, ImageNet-LT, and iNaturalist long-tail benchmarks. We find that training with robustness increases recognition accuracy of tail classes while largely maintaining the accuracy of head classes. The new robustness loss can be combined with various classifier balancing techniques and can be applied to representations at several layers of the deep model.
Mean Shift for Self-Supervised Learning

Most recent self-supervised learning (SSL) algorithms learn features by contrasting between instances of images or by clustering the images and then contrasting between the image clusters. We introduce a simple mean-shift algorithm that learns representations by grouping images together without contrasting between them or adopting much of prior on the structure or number of the clusters. We simply "shift" the embedding of each image to be close to the "mean" of the neighbors of its augmentation. Since the closest neighbor is always another augmentation of the same image, our model will be identical to BYOL when using only one nearest neighbor instead of 5 used in our experiments. Our model achieves 72.4% on ImageNet linear evaluation with ResNet50 at 200 epochs outperforming BYOL. Also, our method outperforms the SOTA by a large margin when using weak augmentations only, facilitating adoption of SSL for other modalities. Our code is available here: https://github.com/UMBCvision/MSF
On Feature Decorrelation in Self-Supervised Learning

In self-supervised representation learning, a common idea behind most of the state-of-the-art approaches is to enforce the robustness of the representations to predefined augmentations. A potential issue of this idea is the existence of completely collapsed solutions (i.e., constant features), which are typically avoided implicitly by carefully chosen implementation details. In this work, we study a relatively concise framework containing the most common components from recent approaches. We verify the existence of complete collapse and discover another reachable collapse pattern that is usually overlooked, namely dimensional collapse. We connect dimensional collapse with strong correlations between axes and consider such connection as a strong motivation for feature decorrelation (i.e., standardizing the covariance matrix). The gains from feature decorrelation are verified empirically to highlight the importance and the potential of this insight.
Learning of Visual Relations: The Devil is in the Tails

Significant effort has been recently devoted to modeling visual relations. This has mostly addressed the design of architectures, typically by adding parameters and increasing model complexity. However, visual relation learning is a long-tailed problem, due to the combinatorial nature of joint reasoning about groups of objects. Increasing model complexity is, in general, illsuited for long-tailed problems due to their tendency to overfit. In this paper, we explore an alternative hypothesis, denoted the Devil is in the Tails. Under this hypothesis, better performance is achieved by keeping the model simple but improving its ability to cope with long-tailed distributions. To test this hypothesis, we devise a new approach for training visual relationships models, which is inspired by state-of-the-art long-tailed recognition literature. This is based on an iterative decoupled training scheme, denoted Decoupled Training for Devil in the Tails (DT2). DT2 employs a novel sampling approach, Alternating Class-Balanced Sampling (ACBS), to capture the interplay between the long-tailed entity and predicate distributions of visual relations. Results show that, with an extremely simple architecture, DT2-ACBS significantly out-performs much more complex state-of-the-art methods on scene graph generation tasks. This suggests that the development of sophisticated models must be considered in tandem with the long-tailed nature of the problem.