Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Deep reinforcement learning for drone navigation using sensor data

Abstract Mobile robots such as unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) can be used for surveillance, monitoring and data collection in buildings, infrastructure and environments. The importance of accurate and multifaceted monitoring is well known to identify problems early and prevent them escalating. This motivates the need for flexible, autonomous and powerful decision-making mobile robots. These systems need to be able to learn through fusing data from multiple sources. Until very recently, they have been task specific. In this paper, we describe a generic navigation algorithm that uses data from sensors on-board the drone to guide the drone to the site of the problem. In hazardous and safety-critical situations, locating problems accurately and rapidly is vital. We use the proximal policy optimisation deep reinforcement learning algorithm coupled with incremental curriculum learning and long short-term memory neural networks to implement our generic and adaptable navigation algorithm. We evaluate different configurations against a heuristic technique to demonstrate its accuracy and efficiency. Finally, we consider how safety of the drone could be assured by assessing how safely the drone would perform using our navigation algorithm in real-world scenarios.
Intelligent Fault Diagnosis of Multichannel Motor–Rotor System Based on Multimanifold Deep Extreme Learning Machine

Nowadays, the measurement technology of multichannel information fusion provides a solid research foundation for digital and intelligent fault diagnosis of mechatronics equipment. To implement the rapid fusion of multichannel data and intelligent diagnosis, a new fault diagnosis method for multichannel motor-rotor system via multimanifold deep extreme learning machine (MDELM) algorithm is first proposed in this article. Specifically, the designed MDELM algorithm is divided into two main components: 1) unsupervised self-taught feature extraction via the designed extreme learning machine based-modified sparse filtering feature extractor; 2) semisupervised fault classification via the designed MELM classifier with multimanifold constraints to mine the intraclass and interclass discriminant feature information. Experimental and industrial data from motor-rotor system demonstrates the superiority of the proposed method and algorithms. Compared with other fault diagnosis methods, the proposed MDELM algorithm has better learning efficiency, and it is more suitable for intelligent diagnosis of multichannel data fusion.
Synthesize Then Compare: Detecting Failures and Anomalies for Semantic Segmentation

The ability to detect failures and anomalies are fundamental requirements for building reliable systems for computer vision applications, especially safety-critical applications of semantic segmentation, such as autonomous driving and medical image analysis. In this paper, we systematically study failure and anomaly detection for semantic segmentation and propose a unified framework, consisting of two modules, to address these two related problems. The first module is an image synthesis module, which generates a synthesized image from a segmentation layout map, and the second is a comparison module, which computes the difference between the synthesized image and the input image. We validate our framework on three challenging datasets and improve the state-of-the-arts by large margins, i.e., 6% AUPR-Error on Cityscapes, 7% Pearson correlation on pancreatic tumor segmentation in MSD and 20% AUPR on StreetHazards anomaly segmentation.
Neural Granger Causality

While most classical approaches to Granger causality detection assume linear dynamics, many interactions in real-world applications, like neuroscience and genomics, are inherently nonlinear. In these cases, using linear models may lead to inconsistent estimation of Granger causal interactions. We propose a class of nonlinear methods by applying structured multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) or recurrent neural networks (RNNs) combined with sparsity-inducing penalties on the weights. By encouraging specific sets of weights to be zero-in particular, through the use of convex group-lasso penalties-we can extract the Granger causal structure. To further contrast with traditional approaches, our framework naturally enables us to efficiently capture long-range dependencies between series either via our RNNs or through an automatic lag selection in the MLP. We show that our neural Granger causality methods outperform state-of-the-art nonlinear Granger causality methods on the DREAM3 challenge data. This data consists of nonlinear gene expression and regulation time courses with only a limited number of time points. The successes we show in this challenging dataset provide a powerful example of how deep learning can be useful in cases that go beyond prediction on large datasets. We likewise illustrate our methods in detecting nonlinear interactions in a human motion capture dataset.
Self-Diagnosis and Self-Debiasing: A Proposal for Reducing Corpus-Based Bias in NLP

Abstract ⚠ This paper contains prompts and model outputs that are offensive in nature. When trained on large, unfiltered crawls from the Internet, language models pick up and reproduce all kinds of undesirable biases that can be found in the data: They often generate racist, sexist, violent, or otherwise toxic language. As large models require millions of training examples to achieve good performance, it is difficult to completely prevent them from being exposed to such content. In this paper, we first demonstrate a surprising finding: Pretrained language models recognize, to a considerable degree, their undesirable biases and the toxicity of the content they produce. We refer to this capability as self-diagnosis. Based on this finding, we then propose a decoding algorithm that, given only a textual description of the undesired behavior, reduces the probability of a language model producing problematic text. We refer to this approach as self-debiasing. Self-debiasing does not rely on manually curated word lists, nor does it require any training data or changes to the model’s parameters. While we by no means eliminate the issue of language models generating biased text, we believe our approach to be an important step in this direction.1
A Statistical Study on Parameter Selection of Operators in Continuous State Transition Algorithm

The state transition algorithm (STA) has been emerging as a novel metaheuristic method for global optimization over the past few years. In our previous study, the parameter of transformation operator in continuous STA is kept constant or decreasing itself in a periodical way. In this paper, the optimal parameter selection of operators in continuous STA is taken into consideration. First, a statistical study with four benchmark 2-D functions is conducted to show how these parameters affect the search ability of the STA. Based on the experience gained from the statistical study, then, a new continuous STA with optimal parameter strategy is proposed to accelerate its search process. The proposed STA is successfully applied to 12 benchmarks with 20-D, 30-D, and 50-D space. A comparison with other metaheuristics has also demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Transfer learning in computer vision tasks: Remember where you come from

Fine-tuning pre-trained deep networks is a practical way of benefiting from the representation learned on a large database while having relatively few examples to train a model. This adjustment is nowadays routinely performed so as to benefit of the latest improvements of convolutional neural networks trained on large databases. Fine-tuning requires some form of regularization, which is typically implemented by weight decay that drives the network parameters towards zero. This choice conflicts with the motivation for fine-tuning, as starting from a pre-trained solution aims at taking advantage of the previously acquired knowledge. Hence, regularizers promoting an explicit inductive bias towards the pre-trained model have been recently proposed. This paper demonstrates the versatility of this type of regularizer across transfer learning scenarios. We replicated experiments on three state-of-the-art approaches in image classification, image segmentation, and video analysis to compare the relative merits of regularizers. These tests show systematic improvements compared to weight decay. Our experimental protocol put forward the versatility of a regularizer that is easy to implement and to operate that we eventually recommend as the new baseline for future approaches to transfer learning relying on fine-tuning.
Exploring Complementary Strengths of Invariant and Equivariant Representations for Few-Shot Learning

In many real-world problems, collecting a large number of labeled samples is infeasible. Few-shot learning (FSL) is the dominant approach to address this issue, where the objective is to quickly adapt to novel categories in presence of a limited number of samples. FSL tasks have been predominantly solved by leveraging the ideas from gradient-based meta-learning and metric learning approaches. However, recent works have demonstrated the significance of powerful feature representations with a simple embedding network that can outperform existing sophisticated FSL algorithms. In this work, we build on this insight and propose a novel training mechanism that simultaneously enforces equivariance and invariance to a general set of geometric transformations. Equivariance or invariance has been employed standalone in the previous works; however, to the best of our knowledge, they have not been used jointly. Simultaneous optimization for both of these contrasting objectives allows the model to jointly learn features that are not only independent of the input transformation but also the features that encode the structure of geometric transformations. These complementary sets of features help generalize well to novel classes with only a few data samples. We achieve additional improvements by incorporating a novel self-supervised distillation objective. Our extensive experimentation shows that even without knowledge distillation our proposed method can outperform current state-of-the-art FSL methods on five popular benchmark datasets.
GRF: Learning a General Radiance Field for 3D Representation and Rendering

We present a simple yet powerful neural network that implicitly represents and renders 3D objects and scenes only from 2D observations. The network models 3D geometries as a general radiance field, which takes a set of 2D images with camera poses and intrinsics as input, constructs an internal representation for each point of the 3D space, and then renders the corresponding appearance and geometry of that point viewed from an arbitrary position. The key to our approach is to learn local features for each pixel in 2D images and to then project these features to 3D points, thus yielding general and rich point representations. We additionally integrate an attention mechanism to aggregate pixel features from multiple 2D views, such that visual occlusions are implicitly taken into account. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can generate high-quality and realistic novel views for novel objects, unseen categories and challenging real-world scenes.
Introduction to Scikit-learn

Scikit-learn is a Python library that provides a standard interface for implementing machine learning algorithms. It includes other ancillary functions that are integral to the machine learning pipeline such as data preprocessing steps, data resampling techniques, evaluation parameters, and search interfaces for tuning/optimizing an algorithm’s performance.
Scene Classification for Sports Video Summarization Using Transfer Learning

This paper proposes a novel method for sports video scene classification with the particular intention of video summarization. Creating and publishing a shorter version of the video is more interesting than a full version due to instant entertainment. Generating shorter summaries of the videos is a tedious task that requires significant labor hours and unnecessary machine occupation. Due to the growing demand for video summarization in marketing, advertising agencies, awareness videos, documentaries, and other interest groups, researchers are continuously proposing automation frameworks and novel schemes. Since the scene classification is a fundamental component of video summarization and video analysis, the quality of scene classification is particularly important. This article focuses on various practical implementation gaps over the existing techniques and presents a method to achieve high-quality of scene classification. We consider cricket as a case study and classify five scene categories, i.e., batting, bowling, boundary, crowd and close-up. We employ our model using pre-trained AlexNet Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for scene classification. The proposed method employs new, fully connected layers in an encoder fashion. We employ data augmentation to achieve a high accuracy of 99.26% over a smaller dataset. We conduct a performance comparison against baseline approaches to prove the superiority of the method as well as state-of-the-art models. We evaluate our performance results on cricket videos and compare various deep-learning models, i.e., Inception V3, Visual Geometry Group (VGGNet16, VGGNet19), Residual Network (ResNet50), and AlexNet. Our experiments demonstrate that our method with AlexNet CNN produces better results than existing proposals.
Extending approximate Bayesian computation with supervised machine learning to infer demographic history from genetic polymorphisms using DIYABC Random Forest

Abstract Simulation‐based methods such as approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) are well‐adapted to the analysis of complex scenarios of populations and species genetic history. In this context, supervised machine learning (SML) methods provide attractive statistical solutions to conduct efficient inferences about scenario choice and parameter estimation. The Random Forest methodology (RF) is a powerful ensemble of SML algorithms used for classification or regression problems. Random Forest allows conducting inferences at a low computational cost, without preliminary selection of the relevant components of the ABC summary statistics, and bypassing the derivation of ABC tolerance levels. We have implemented a set of RF algorithms to process inferences using simulated data sets generated from an extended version of the population genetic simulator implemented in DIYABC v2.1.0. The resulting computer package, named DIYABC Random Forest v1.0, integrates two functionalities into a user‐friendly interface: the simulation under custom evolutionary scenarios of different types of molecular data (microsatellites, DNA sequences or SNPs) and RF treatments including statistical tools to evaluate the power and accuracy of inferences. We illustrate the functionalities of DIYABC Random Forest v1.0 for both scenario choice and parameter estimation through the analysis of pseudo‐observed and real data sets corresponding to pool‐sequencing and individual‐sequencing SNP data sets. Because of the properties inherent to the implemented RF methods and the large feature vector (including various summary statistics and their linear combinations) available for SNP data, DIYABC Random Forest v1.0 can efficiently contribute to the analysis of large SNP data sets to make inferences about complex population genetic histories.
Beyond Technical Aspects: How Do Community Smells Influence the Intensity of Code Smells?

Code smells are poor implementation choices applied by developers during software evolution that often lead to critical flaws or failure. Much in the same way, community smells reflect the presence of organizational and socio-technical issues within a software community that may lead to additional project costs. Recent empirical studies provide evidence that community smells are often-if not always-connected to circumstances such as code smells. In this paper we look deeper into this connection by conducting a mixed-methods empirical study of 117 releases from 9 open-source systems. The qualitative and quantitative sides of our mixed-methods study were run in parallel and assume a mutually-confirmative connotation. On the one hand, we survey 162 developers of the 9 considered systems to investigate whether developers perceive relationship between community smells and the code smells found in those projects. On the other hand, we perform a fine-grained analysis into the 117 releases of our dataset to measure the extent to which community smells impact code smell intensity (i.e., criticality). We then propose a code smell intensity prediction model that relies on both technical and community-related aspects. The results of both sides of our mixed-methods study lead to one conclusion: community-related factors contribute to the intensity of code smells. This conclusion supports the joint use of community and code smells detection as a mechanism for the joint management of technical and social problems around software development communities.
Non-Negative Matrix Factorization With Locality Constrained Adaptive Graph

Non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) has recently attracted much attention due to its good interpretation in perception science and widely applications in various fields. In this paper, a novel graph regularized NMF algorithm called NMF with locality constrained adaptive graph (NMF-LCAG) is proposed. Compared with other NMF based algorithms, the proposed NMF-LCAG algorithm has the following advantages: 1) Unlike the traditional NMF method which neglects the geometric information of original data, the proposed algorithm introduces a locality constrained graph to discover the latent manifold structure of the data and 2) Different from most graph regularized NMF algorithms in which the graphs are predefined and kept unchanged during the NMF procedure, two locality constraint terms are employed in our NMF-LCAG to adaptively optimize the graph. Thus, the weight matrix of graph and low dimensional features of data can be simultaneously learned by our algorithm, which makes NMF-LCAG more flexible than other approaches. Moreover, an iterative updating strategy is developed to optimize the objective function of our algorithm and the convergence analysis is also given. Extensive experiments are conducted on four face image databases and three UCI datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed NMF-LCAG algorithm. Compared with some other related algorithms, the proposed NMF-LCAG algorithm can achieve at least 1% ~ 3% accuracy improvement in most cases.
Gradient based hyperparameter optimization in Echo State Networks

Like most machine learning algorithms, Echo State Networks possess several hyperparameters that have to be carefully tuned for achieving best performance. For minimizing the error on a specific task, we present a gradient based optimization algorithm, for the input scaling, the spectral radius, the leaking rate, and the regularization parameter.
Model-based RL in Contextual Decision Processes: PAC bounds and Exponential Improvements over Model-free Approaches

We study the sample complexity of model-based reinforcement learning (henceforth RL) in general contextual decision processes. We design new algorithms for RL with a generic model class and analyze their statistical properties. Our algorithms have sample complexity governed by a new structural parameter called the witness rank, which we show to be small in several settings of interest, including factored MDPs and reactive POMDPs. We also show that the witness rank of a problem is never larger than the recently proposed Bellman rank parameter governing the sample complexity of the model-free algorithm OLIVE (Jiang et al., 2017), the only other provably sample efficient algorithm at this level of generality. Focusing on the special case of factored MDPs, we prove an exponential lower bound for a general class of model-free approaches, including OLIVE, which when combined with our algorithmic results demonstrates exponential separation between model-based and model-free RL in some rich-observation settings.
Floor-SP: Inverse CAD for Floorplans by Sequential Room-Wise Shortest Path

This paper proposes a new approach for automated floorplan reconstruction from RGBD scans, a major milestone in indoor mapping research. The approach, dubbed Floor-SP, formulates a novel optimization problem, where room-wise coordinate descent sequentially solves shortest path problems to optimize the floorplan graph structure. The objective function consists of data terms guided by deep neural networks, consistency terms encouraging adjacent rooms to share corners and walls, and the model complexity term. The approach does not require corner/edge primitive extraction unlike most other methods. We have evaluated our system on production-quality RGBD scans of 527 apartments or houses, including many units with non-Manhattan structures. Qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate a significant performance boost over the current state-of-the-art. Please refer to our project website http://jcchen.me/floor-sp/ for code and data.
New image blind watermarking method based on two-dimensional discrete cosine transform

In this paper, a new image blind watermarking method based on two-dimensional Discrete Cosine Transform (2D-DCT) is presented to realize copyright protection of color image. At first, 2D-DCT is performed on the selected image blocks, and some fixed coefficients in the middle frequency are selected as embedding position of watermark. Then, the watermark embedding and extraction procedure are completed by modifying the relationship of size between the selected middle-frequency coefficients with the proposed rules. The advantages of the presented algorithm include the following two points: 1) the relationship of size between the selected middle-frequency coefficients of 2D-DCT is used to fulfill the process of watermark embedding and extraction; 2) the presented algorithm uses color digital image as carrier image and watermark image, which is not same as most watermarking techniques. In recent years, most of the watermarking algorithms used gray or binary image as watermark. In this presented algorithm, all the digital carrier images are chosen from two public standard image databases, i.e. CVG-UGR and USC-SIPI. A series of simulation results prove that this presented algorithm not only satisfies the invisibility of watermarking algorithm, but also makes good performance of robustness, security and embedding capacity.
Upvoting extremism: Collective identity formation and the extreme right on Reddit

Since the advent of the Internet, right-wing extremists and those who subscribe to extreme right views have exploited online platforms to build a collective identity among the like-minded. Research in this area has largely focused on extremists’ use of websites, forums, and mainstream social media sites, but overlooked in this research has been an exploration of the popular social news aggregation site Reddit. The current study explores the role of Reddit’s unique voting algorithm in facilitating “othering” discourse and, by extension, collective identity formation among members of a notoriously hateful subreddit community, r/The_Donald. The results of the thematic analysis indicate that those who post extreme-right content on r/The_Donald use Reddit’s voting algorithm as a tool to mobilize like-minded members by promoting extreme discourses against two prominent out-groups: Muslims and the Left. Overall, r/The_Donald’s “sense of community” facilitates identity work among its members by creating an environment wherein extreme right views are continuously validated.