Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Towards More Realistic Human Motion Prediction With Attention to Motion Coordination

Joint relation modeling is a curial component in human motion prediction. Most existing methods rely on skeletal-based graphs to build the joint relations, where local interactive relations between joint pairs are well learned. However, the motion coordination, a global joint relation reflecting the simultaneous cooperation of all joints, is usually weakened because it is learned from part to whole progressively and asynchronously. Thus, the final predicted motions usually appear unrealistic. To tackle this issue, we learn a medium, called coordination attractor (CA), from the spatiotemporal features of motion to characterize the global motion features, which is subsequently used to build new relative joint relations. Through the CA, all joints are related simultaneously, and thus the motion coordination of all joints can be better learned. Based on this, we further propose a novel joint relation modeling module, Comprehensive Joint Relation Extractor (CJRE), to combine this motion coordination with the local interactions between joint pairs in a unified manner. Additionally, we also present a Multi-timescale Dynamics Extractor (MTDE) to extract enriched dynamics from the raw position information for effective prediction. Extensive experiments show that the proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both short- and long-term predictions on H3.6M, CMU-Mocap, and 3DPW.
A novel hybrid methodology for computing semantic similarity between sentences through various word senses

In the area of natural language processing, measuring sentence similarity is an essential problem. Searching for semantic meaning in natural language is a related issue. The task of measuring sentence similarity is to find semantic symmetry in two sentences, not matter how they are arranged. It is important to measure the similarity of sentences accurately. To compute the similarity between sentences, existing methods have been constructed from approaches for large texts. Since these methods work in very high-dimensional spaces, they are inefficient, require human input, and are not flexible enough for some applications. In this study, we propose a hybrid method (HydMethod) which considers not only semantic information including lexical databases, word embeddings, and corpus statistics, but also implied word order information. With lexical databases, our method models human common sense knowledge, and that knowledge can then be adapted to be used in different domains with the incorporation of corpus statistics. Therefore, the methodology is applicable across several domains. As part of our experiments, we used two standard datasets - Pilot Short Text Semantic Similarity Benchmark and MS paraphrase - in order to demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed method. As a result, the proposed method outperforms the existing approaches when tested on these two datasets, giving the highest correlation value for both word and sentence similarity. Moreover, it achieves a maximum of 32% higher increase than only using word vector or WorldNet based methodology. With Rubenstein and Goodenough word & sentence pairs, our algorithm's similarity measure shows a high Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.8953.
BLT: Bidirectional Layout Transformer for Controllable Layout Generation

Creating visual layouts is a critical step in graphic design. Automatic generation of such layouts is essential for scalable and diverse visual designs. To advance conditional layout generation, we introduce BLT, a bidirectional layout transformer. BLT differs from previous work on transformers in adopting non-autoregressive transformers. In training, BLT learns to predict the masked attributes by attending to surrounding attributes in two directions. During inference, BLT first generates a draft layout from the input and then iteratively refines it into a high-quality layout by masking out low-confident attributes. The masks generated in both training and inference are controlled by a new hierarchical sampling policy. We verify the proposed model on six benchmarks of diverse design tasks. Experimental results demonstrate two benefits compared to the state-of-the-art layout transformer models. First, our model empowers layout transformers to fulfill controllable layout generation. Second, it achieves up to 10x speedup in generating a layout at inference time than the layout transformer baseline. Code is released at https://shawnkx.github.io/blt .
Assessing the Significance and Impact of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in Placement of Advertisements

Customer is the king of the market, and each of them has different tastes and Preferences. Nowadays, personalization has become a challenge for the company. Companies use different promotional techniques where they can gain more and more potential customers. Although the trend of digital marketing that most companies have adopted in their working flow is witnessed presently, this poses a challenge for the companies to develop competitive intelligence. In order to tackle this challenge, companies need to look for newer ways. So the next big trend in Marketing is going to be Artificial intelligence which has acted as a revolution and provides real-time data analysis of the customers. It helps in targeting the right audience at the right time with the right content. The main motive of doing this research is to help companies articulate the importance of AI & ML in the placements of Ads and branding of their products to identify the opportunities available in the market before their competitors. Also, think about the possible implications of AI & ML in marketing where humans and machines can work together in the near future. The application of AI in marketing may be vast, but this paper has very limited scope to the benefits of AI & ML in the advertising of a product or service rather than using traditional marketing methods.
Towards an Ontology-Based Recommender System for the Vehicle Sales Area

In the vehicle sales area, a recommender system (RS) allows vehicle items to be displayed and selected replied on the parameters that are the most relevant to specific users-buyers. In other words, users-buyers can meet with vehicle items suited to their profile, preferences, or interests. Therefore, users will not spend much time searching and retrieving what corresponds to their needs and capacities, as well as against the ever-growing volume of information in the application. In this paper, we realize the analysis of the characteristics of users-buyers and vehicle items in vehicle recommendations. As a result, we propose our approach for building a RS based on ontologies in the vehicle sales area.
Evolution-Driven Randomized Graph Convolutional Networks

Randomized neural networks (NNs), such as random vector functional link (RVFL) and extreme learning machine (ELM), have been widely applied in various classification problems owing to their computational efficiency and universal approximation capability. However, such approaches are designed for regular Euclidean data and lack the ability to generalize to complex structured data. Moreover, their randomly generated parameters often lead to a suboptimal decision boundary with a growing requirement of hidden neurons. In this article, we first propose a plain framework, termed randomized graph convolutional networks (RGCNs), to generalize the classic randomized NNs to the non-Euclidean domain. Then, a hybrid framework called evolution-driven RGCN (EvoRGCN) is presented by using adaptive differential evolution with novelty search strategy to seek the globally optimal graph embedding for the plain RGCN. Finally, we recast the classic ELM and RVFL under the proposed frameworks, resulting in four novel semi-supervised models, including the plain models [i.e., graph convolutional extreme learning machines (GCELMs) and graph convolutional RVFL (GCRVFL)] and the optimized models (i.e., O-GCELM and O-GCRVFL). We show that our approaches are the natural generalization of the traditional randomized NNs in the non-Euclidean domain. Furthermore, our approaches not only retain the advantages of the classic approaches but also enable them to handle graph data. We compare our approaches against many existing methods across regular datasets and graph benchmarks, demonstrating that the proposed approaches dramatically outperform the compared methods with better generalization ability and robustness. Particularly, we quantitatively show the performance ranking of different randomized NNs, i.e., O-GCRVFL <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$&gt; $ </tex-math></inline-formula> O-GCELM <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\approx $ </tex-math></inline-formula> GCRVFL <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$&gt; $ </tex-math></inline-formula> GCELM <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\approx $ </tex-math></inline-formula> RVFL <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$&gt; $ </tex-math></inline-formula> ELM.
Modeling and State Estimation of Linear Destination-Constrained Dynamic Systems

Goal-guided behavior and destination-directed motion appear in a wide range of human activities and physical processes. Taking advantage of such predictive information can produce better system models and state estimates. This paper focuses on modeling and filtering issues of linear dynamic systems with linear destination constraints. We examine deficiencies of the existing destination constrained (DC) estimation methods. Basically, they resort to post-treatment by imposing destination constraints on updated states only. Viewing destination constraints as an attribute implicit of the state evolution, we propose to incorporate the destination constraints accordingly, particularly on the predictive distribution of the whole state sequence. We construct a congruous DC dynamic model by sufficiently refining the relaxed dynamics with the destination constraint using the state augmentation technique, and analyze its characterization and properties. Next, for the proposed DC model, we develop an optimal DC state estimator and describe its properties. Finally, in the context of aerial surveillance, the superiority of the proposed estimator to existing DC estimators is verified by simulation results, and the effectiveness of the proposed DC dynamic model is demonstrated using real data.
Multistage Curvature-Guided Network for Progressive Single Image Reflection Removal

Thanks to the powerful learning capability, deep neural networks (DNNs) have acquired broad applications in single image reflection removal. The DNN-based algorithms relax the constraints of specific priors and learn to generate visually pleasant background layers from massive training data. However, most of them employ a single network structure to recover both the semantic information and local details of the background, which may lead to obvious reflection residue or even failure. To mitigate this deficiency, in this work, we propose a Multi-stage Curvature-guided De-Reflection Network (MCDRNet), which combines multiple network architectures in a unified framework to progressively reconstruct the background layer and refine the fine-grained details. Our framework consists of three stages, where the encoder-decoders are exploited in the first two stages to recover the semantic components of background layers with lower scales and a variant ResNet is applied in the last stage to refine the background details with the original input resolution. In the first two stages, to introduce the structural guidance for the reflection removal, we cascade another decoder branch to restore the curvature map of the background. In addition, at the end of the first two stages, instead of directly passing the intermediate estimates to the next stage, we propose a Non-local Attention Module (NAM) to augment and transmit the features from decoders. Extensive experimental results on several public datasets demonstrate that the proposed MCDRNet outperforms the state-of-the-art methods quantitatively and generates visually better reflection removal results. The source code and pre-trained models are available at <uri xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://github.com/NamecantbeNULL/MCDRNet</uri> .
Read before Generate! Faithful Long Form Question Answering with Machine Reading

Long-form question answering (LFQA) aims to generate a paragraph-length answer for a given question.While current work on LFQA using large pre-trained model for generation are effective at producing fluent and somewhat relevant content, one primary challenge lies in how to generate a faithful answer that has less hallucinated content.We propose a new end-to-end framework that jointly models answer generation and machine reading.The key idea is to augment the generation model with fine-grained, answer-related salient information which can be viewed as an emphasis on faithful facts.State-of-the-art results on two LFQA datasets, ELI5 and MS MARCO, demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, in comparison with strong baselines on automatic and human evaluation metrics.A detailed analysis further proves the competency of our methods in generating fluent, relevant, and more faithful answers.
Multi-Granularity Collaborative Decision With Cognitive Networking in Intelligent Transportation Systems

Cognitive networking is a valuable enabler to improve the capability of intelligent transportation system (ITS) by analyzing and utilizing the heterogeneous traffic information. However, the significant increase in the amount of decision-making tasks makes it difficult to guarantee real-time performance of decision response. This paper focuses on the problem of the quality and real-time assurance of collaborative decision-making response in large-scale ITS during multi-task parallelism execution. First, a collaborative decision architecture with cognitive networking is developed, which introduces the advanced 6G communication technology to enhance information interaction capability of vehicle-road-cloud collaboration, and lays the foundation for multi-task real-time decision-making with inevitable fuzzy information in the perception process. Then, a multi-task parallel multi-granularity collaborative decision model (MPMCD) is designed to improve knowledge discovery ability for decision-making process by building multi-granularity information structures. An AI-driven cognitive networking collaborative decision-making (ACNCD) algorithm is further proposed based on MPMCD model to support multi-task parallel vehicle-road-cloud collaborative real-time decision. Extensive simulation experiments are carried out to evaluate ACNCD algorithm in terms of several performance criteria including decision response time, accuracy, and accident rate. The obtained results show that the comprehensive decision-making performance of ACNCD outperforms other relevant existing algorithms.
Hate Speech in the Political Discourse on Social Media: Disparities Across Parties, Gender, and Ethnicity

Social media has become an indispensable channel for political communication. However, the political discourse is increasingly characterized by hate speech, which affects not only the reputation of individual politicians but also the functioning of society at large. In this work, we empirically analyze how the amount of hate speech in replies to posts from politicians on Twitter depends on personal characteristics, such as their party affiliation, gender, and ethnicity. For this purpose, we employ Twitter’s Historical API to collect every tweet posted by members of the 117th U. S. Congress for an observation period of more than six months. Additionally, we gather replies for each tweet and use machine learning to predict the amount of hate speech they embed. Subsequently, we implement hierarchical regression models to analyze whether politicians with certain characteristics receive more hate speech. We find that tweets are particularly likely to receive hate speech in replies if they are authored by (i) persons of color from the Democratic party, (ii) white Republicans, and (iii) women. Furthermore, our analysis reveals that more negative sentiment (in the source tweet) is associated with more hate speech (in replies). However, the association varies across parties: negative sentiment attracts more hate speech for Democrats (vs. Republicans). Altogether, our empirical findings imply significant differences in how politicians are treated on social media depending on their party affiliation, gender, and ethnicity.
An Effective Baseline for Robustness to Distributional Shift

Refraining from confidently predicting when faced with categories of inputs different from those seen during training is an important requirement for the safe deployment of deep learning systems. While simple to state, this has been a particularly challenging problem in deep learning, where models often end up making overconfident predictions in such situations. In this work, we present a simple, but highly effective approach to deal with out-of-distribution detection that uses the principle of abstention: when encountering a sample from an unseen class, the desired behavior is to abstain from predicting. Our approach uses a network with an extra abstention class and is trained on a dataset that is augmented with an uncurated set that consists of a large number of out-of-distribution (OoD) samples that are assigned the label of the abstention class; the model is then trained to learn an effective discriminator between in and out-of-distribution samples. We compare this relatively simple approach against a wide variety of more complex methods that have been proposed both for out-of-distribution detection as well as uncertainty modeling in deep learning, and empirically demonstrate its effectiveness on a wide variety of of benchmarks and deep architectures for image recognition and text classification, often outperforming existing approaches by significant margins. Given the simplicity and effectiveness of this method, we propose that this approach be used as a new additional baseline for future work in this domain.
Enabling Traceable and Verifiable Multi-User Forward Secure Searchable Encryption in Hybrid Cloud

Forward secure searchable encryption (FSSE) scheme allows one data user to search on encrypted databases while resisting the file injection attack. The data utilization can be further improved by extending the single-user scenario to the multi-user scenario. However, there are some issues needed to be considered when a data owner shares data with multiple data users. First, the public cloud server can not be completely trusted as it may be dishonest returning incorrect or incomplete results. Second, authorized users may trade their private keys for financial benefit. To our knowledge, state-of-the-art searchable encryption schemes only consider part of the following desirable features: the verifiability of results, the resistance to file injection attacks, the traceability and revocation of malicious users who abuse their private keys in the multi-user setting. Based on these motivations, we first propose enabling traceable and verifiable multi-user FSSE, which achieves the above functionalities. Besides, we carry out the security proof which demonstrates that our scheme can meet the requirements of security. We also assess the performance from theoretical analysis and experimental analysis, which shows that compared with other similar schemes, our scheme has richer functionalities with comparable efficiency.
Philippine Eagle Optimization Algorithm

We propose the Philippine Eagle Optimization Algorithm (PEOA), which is a meta-heuristic and population-based search algorithm inspired by the territorial hunting behavior of the Philippine Eagle. From an initial random population of eagles in a given search space, the best eagle is selected and undergoes a local food search using the interior point method as its means of exploitation. The population is then divided into three subpopulations, and each subpopulation is assigned an operator which aids in the exploration. Once the respective operators are applied, the new eagles with improved function values replace the older ones. The best eagle of the population is then updated and conducts a local food search again. These steps are done iteratively, and the food searched by the final best eagle is the optimal solution of the search space. PEOA is tested on 20 optimization test functions with different modality, separability, and dimension properties. The performance of PEOA is compared to 13 other optimization algorithms. To further validate the effectiveness of PEOA, it is also applied to image reconstruction in electrical impedance tomography and parameter identification in a neutral delay differential equation model. Numerical results show that PEOA can obtain accurate solutions to various functions and problems. PEOA proves to be the most computationally inexpensive algorithm relative to the others examined, while also helping promote the critically endangered Philippine Eagle.
WATCH: Two-stage Discrete Cross-media Hashing

Due to the explosive growth of multimedia data in recent years, cross-media hashing (CMH) approaches have recently received increasing attention. To learn the hash codes, most existing supervised CMH algorithms employ the strict binary label information, which has small margins between the incorrect labels (0) and the true labels (1), increasing the risk of classification error. Besides, most existing CMH approaches are one-stage algorithms, in which the hash functions and binary codes can be learned simultaneously, complicating the optimization. To avoid NP-hard optimization, many approaches utilize a relaxation strategy. However, this optimisation trick may cause large quantization errors. To address this, we present a novel tWo-stAge discreTe Cross-media Hashing method based on smooth matrix factorization and label relaxation, named WATCH. The proposed WATCH controls the margins adaptively by the novel label relaxation strategy. This innovation reduces the quantization error significantly. Besides, WATCH is a two-stage model. In stage 1, we employ a discrete smooth matrix factorization model. Then, the hash codes can be generated discretely, reducing the large quantization loss greatly. In stage 2, we adopt an effective hash function learning strategy, which produces more effective hash functions. Comprehensive experiments on several datasets demonstrate that WATCH outperforms some state-of-the-art methods.