Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Priority Branches for Ship Detection in Optical Remote Sensing Images

Much attention is being paid to using high-performance convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in the area of ship detection in optical remoting sensing (ORS) images. However, the problem of false negatives (FNs) caused by side-by-side ships cannot be solved, and the number of false positives (FPs) remains high. This paper uses a DLA-34 network with deformable convolution layers as the backbone. The network has two priority branches: a recall-priority branch for reducing the number of FNs, and a precision-priority branch for reducing the number of FPs. In our single-shot detection method, the recall-priority branch is based on an anchor-free module without non-maximum suppression (NMS), while the precision-priority branch utilizes an anchor-based module with NMS. We perform recall-priority branch functions based on the output part of the CenterNet object detector to precisely predict center points of bounding boxes. The Bidirectional Feature Pyramid Network (BiFPN), combined with the inference part of YOLOv3, is used to improve the precision of precision-priority branch. Finally, the boxes from two branches merge, and we propose priority-based selection (PBS) for choosing the accurate ones. Results show that our proposed method sharply improves the recall rate of side-by-side ships and significantly reduces the number of false alarms. Our method also achieves the best trade-off on our improved version of HRSC2016 dataset, with 95.57% AP at 56 frames per second on an Nvidia RTX-2080 Ti GPU. Compared with the HRSC2016 dataset, not only are our annotations more accurate, but our dataset also contains more images and samples. Our evaluation metrics also included tests on small ships and incomplete forms of ships.
A Unified Sequence-to-Sequence Front-End Model for Mandarin Text-to-Speech Synthesis

In Mandarin text-to-speech (TTS) system, the front-end text processing module significantly influences the intelligibility and naturalness of synthesized speech. Building a typical pipeline-based front-end which consists of multiple individual components requires extensive efforts. In this paper, we proposed a unified sequence-to-sequence front-end model for Mandarin TTS that converts raw texts to linguistic features directly. Compared to the pipeline-based front-end, our unified front-end can achieve comparable performance in polyphone disambiguation and prosody word prediction, and improve intonation phrase prediction by 0.0738 in F1 score. We also implemented the unified front-end with Tacotron and WaveRNN to build a Mandarin TTS system. The synthesized speech by that got a comparable MOS (4.38) with the pipeline-based front-end (4.37) and close to human recordings (4.49).
Sequence-Level Consistency Training for Semi-Supervised End-to-End Automatic Speech Recognition

This paper presents a novel semi-supervised end-to-end automatic speech recognition (ASR) method that employs consistency training with the use of unlabeled data. In consistency training, unlabeled data can be utilized for constraining a model such that it becomes invariant to small deformation. In fact, considering consistency can make the model robust to a variety of input examples. While previous studies have applied consistency training to primitive classification problems, no studies have employed consistency training to tackle sequence-to-sequence generation problems including end-to- end ASR. One problem is that existing consistency training schemes cannot take sequence-level generation consistency into consideration. In this paper, we propose a sequence-level consistency training scheme specialized to handle sequence-to-sequence generation problems. Our key idea is to consider the consistency of the generation function by utilizing beam search decoding results. For semi- supervised learning, we adopt Transformer as the end-to-end ASR model, and SpecAugment as the deformation function in consistency training. Our experiments show that our semi-supervised learning proposal with sequence-level consistency training can efficiently improve ASR performance using unlabeled speech data.
SoK: Differential Privacy as a Causal Property

We present formal models of the associative and causal views of differential privacy. Under the associative view, the possibility of dependencies between data points precludes a simple statement of differential privacy's guarantee as conditioning upon a single changed data point. However, we show that a simple characterization of differential privacy as limiting the effect of a single data point does exist under the causal view, without independence assumptions about data points. We believe this characterization resolves disagreement and confusion in prior work about the consequences of differential privacy. The associative view needing assumptions boils down to the contrapositive of the maxim that correlation doesn't imply causation: differential privacy ensuring a lack of (strong) causation does not imply a lack of (strong) association. Our characterization also opens up the possibility of applying results from statistics, experimental design, and science about causation while studying differential privacy.
SPIDERnet: Attention Network For One-Shot Anomaly Detection In Sounds

We propose a similarity function for one-shot anomaly detection in sounds (ADS) called SPecific anomaly IDentifiER network (SPIDERnet). In ADS systems, since overlooking an anomaly may result in serious incidents, we need to update such systems using an (often only one) overlooked anomalous sample. A previous study proposed the use of memory-based one-shot learning. A problem with this previous method is that it can detect only short anomalous sounds such as collision sounds because its similarity function is based on a naive mean-squared-error between the input and memorized spectrogram. To detect various anomalous sounds, SPIDERnet consists of (i) a neural network-based feature extractor for measuring similarity in embedded space and (ii) attention mechanisms for absorbing time-frequency stretching. Experimental results on two public datasets indicate that SPIDERnet outperforms conventional methods and robustly detects various anomalous sounds.
L-Vector: Neural Label Embedding for Domain Adaptation

We propose a novel neural label embedding (NLE) scheme for the domain adaptation of a deep neural network (DNN) acoustic model with unpaired data samples from source and target domains. With NLE method, we distill the knowledge from a powerful source-domain DNN into a dictionary of label embeddings, or l-vectors, one for each senone class. Each l-vector is a representation of the senone-specific output distributions of the source-domain DNN and is learned to minimize the average L <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sub> , Kullback-Leibler (KL) or symmetric KL distance to the output vectors with the same label through simple averaging or standard back-propagation. During adaptation, the l-vectors serve as the soft targets to train the target-domain model with cross-entropy loss. Without parallel data constraint as in the teacher-student learning, NLE is specially suited for the situation where the paired target-domain data cannot be simulated from the source-domain data. We adapt a 6400 hours multi-conditional US English acoustic model to each of the 9 accented English (80 to 830 hours) and kids' speech (80 hours). NLE achieves up to 14.1% relative word error rate reduction over direct re-training with one-hot labels.
Implementing a Smart Contract PKI

Public key infrastructures (PKIs) provide the foundations for securing Internet communications. Currently, PKIs are operated by centralized authorities, which have been involved in numerous security incidents. Blockchain or smart contract PKIs employ their distributed, fault-tolerant log of transactions to store either all identity records, or, constant-sized data to verify identity records stored off-chain. However, as most of these systems have never been implemented, there is little information regarding their practical implications. In this article, we implement, evaluate, and provide a complete security proof for the smart contract-based PKI of (Patsonakis et al.) on Ethereum. This construction incurs constant-sized storage at the expense of computational complexity. To explore this tradeoff, we propose and implement a second construction which, eliminates the need for trusted setup, preserves its security properties and show that it is the only version with constant-sized state that can be deployed on Ethereum's live chain. We compare these constructions with the simple approach of storing all identity records on the smart contract's state, to illustrate several shortcomings of Ethereum and its cost model. We propose several modifications for fine tuning the model, which should be considered for any smart contract platform like Ethereum so that it may support arbitrary distributed applications.
Performance Analysis of Deep Learning Workloads on Leading-edge Systems

This work examines the performance of leading-edge systems designed for machine learning computing, including the NVIDIA DGX-2, Amazon Web Services (AWS) P3, IBM Power System Accelerated Compute Server AC922, and a consumer-grade Exxact TensorEX TS4 GPU server. Representative deep learning workloads from the fields of computer vision and natural language processing are the focus of the analysis. Performance analysis is performed along with a number of important dimensions. Performance of the communication interconnects and large and high-throughput deep learning models are considered. Different potential use models for the systems as standalone and in the cloud also are examined. The effect of various optimization of the deep learning models and system configurations is included in the analysis.
Graph Construction from Data by Non-Negative Kernel Regression

Data driven graph constructions are often used in machine learning applications. However, learning an optimal graph from data is still a challenging task. K-nearest neighbor and -neighborhood methods are among the most common graph construction methods, due to their computational simplicity, but the choice of parameters such as K and associated with these methods is often ad hoc and lacks a clear interpretation. The main novelty of this paper is to formulate graph construction as the problem of finding a sparse signal approximation in kernel space, and identifying key similarities between methods in signal approximation and existing graph learning methods. We propose non-negative kernel regression (NNK), an improved approach for graph construction with interesting geometric and theoretical properties. We demonstrate experimentally the efficiency of NNK graphs, their robustness to choice of sparsity K and show that they can outperform state of the art graph methods in semi supervised learning tasks.
A3C-GS: Adaptive Moment Gradient Sharing With Locks for Asynchronous Actor–Critic Agents

We propose an asynchronous gradient sharing mechanism for the parallel actor-critic algorithms with improved exploration characteristics. The proposed algorithm (A3C-GS) has the property of automatically diversifying worker policies in the short term for exploration, thereby reducing the need for entropy loss terms. Despite policy diversification, the algorithm converges to the optimal policy in the long term. We show in our analysis that the gradient sharing operation is a composition of two contractions. The first contraction performs gradient computation, while the second contraction is a gradient sharing operation coordinated by locks. From these two contractions, certain short- and long-term properties result. For the short term, gradient sharing induces temporary heterogeneity in policies for performing needed exploration. In the long term, under a suitably small learning rate and gradient clipping, convergence to the optimal policy is theoretically guaranteed. We verify our results with several high-dimensional experiments and compare A3C-GS against other on-policy policy-gradient algorithms. Our proposed algorithm achieved the highest weighted score. Despite lower entropy weights, it performed well in high-dimensional environments that require exploration due to sparse rewards and those that need navigation in 3-D environments for long survival tasks. It consistently performed better than the base asynchronous advantage actor-critic (A3C) algorithm.
Using Personalized Speech Synthesis and Neural Language Generator for Rapid Speaker Adaptation

We propose to use the personalized speech synthesis and the neural language generator to synthesize content relevant personalized speech for rapid speaker adaptation. It has two distinct aspects: First, it relieves the general data sparsity issue in rapid adaptation via making use of additional synthesized personalized speech; Second, it circumvents the obstacle of the explicit labeling error in unsupervised adaptation by converting it to pseudo-supervised adaptation. In this setup, the labeling error is implicitly rendered as less damaging speech distortion in the personalized synthesized speech. This results in significant performance breakthrough in the rapid unsupervised speaker adaptation. We apply the proposed methodology to a speaker adaptation task in a state-of-art speech transcription system. With 1 minute (min) adaptation data, our proposed approach yields 9.19 % or 5.98 % relative word error rate (WER) reduction for the supervised and the unsupervised adaptation, comparing to the negligible gain when adapting only with 1 min original speech. With 10 min adaptation data, it yields 12.53 % or 7.89 % relative WER reduction, doubling the gain of the baseline adaptation. The proposed approach is particularly suitable for unsupervised adaptation.
Speaker Diarization with Session-Level Speaker Embedding Refinement Using Graph Neural Networks

Deep speaker embedding models have been commonly used as a building block for speaker diarization systems; however, the speaker embedding model is usually trained according to a global loss defined on the training data, which could be suboptimal for distinguishing speakers locally in a specific meeting session. In this work we present the first use of graph neural networks (GNNs) for the speaker diarization problem, utilizing a GNN to refine speaker embeddings locally using the structural information between speech segments inside each session. The speaker embeddings extracted by a pre-trained model are remapped into a new embedding space, in which the different speakers within a single session are better separated. The model is trained for linkage prediction in a supervised manner by minimizing the difference between the affinity matrix constructed by the refined embeddings and the ground-truth adjacency matrix. Spectral clustering is then applied on top of the refined embeddings. We show that the clustering performance of the refined speaker embeddings outperforms the original embeddings significantly on both simulated and real meeting data, and our system achieves the state-of-the-art result on the NIST SRE 2000 CALLHOME database.
Time-Frequency Loss for CNN Based Speech Super-Resolution

Speech super-resolution (SR), also called speech bandwidth extension (BWE), aims to increase the sampling rate of a given lower resolution speech signal. Recent years have witnessed the successful application of deep neural networks in time or frequency domains, and deep learning has improved the performance considerably compared with conventional approaches. This paper proposes an autoencoder based fully convolutional neural network (CNN) that merges the information from both time and frequency domains. At the training time, we optimize the CNN using a new time-frequency loss (T-F loss), which combines a time domain loss and a frequency domain loss. The experimental results show that our model trained with the T-F loss achieves significantly better results than other state-of-the-art models, and yields balanced performance in terms of time and frequency metrics.
An Improved MCMC-Based Particle Filter for GPS-Aided SINS In-Motion Initial Alignment

In many practical applications, the initial alignment of the strapdown inertial navigation system (SINS) must be performed under large misalignment angles. However, the error model of SINS in this situation is nonlinear, making it hard to obtain an accurate initial alignment result. Aiming at solving this problem via nonlinear filtering, an improved Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC)-based particle filter (PF) algorithm is designed in this article, which uses a square-root cubature Kalman filter (SCKF), PF, and MCMC algorithm synthetically. The algorithm is dedicated to extract particles from the posterior distribution of the state by the improved MCMC algorithm and avoid the particle degeneration and the particle impoverishment in a PF. This can effectively improve the performance of particle filtering for nonlinear systems. Furthermore, to solve the problem caused by the fixed number of iterations in the typical MCMC algorithm, a novel adaptive approach is introduced according to the maximum mean discrepancy. The simulation and experimental results of GPS-aided SINS in-motion initial alignment show that the proposed algorithm can provide good filtering accuracy and have good real-time performance.
Breaking and (Partially) Fixing Provably Secure Onion Routing

After several years of research on onion routing, Camenisch and Lysyanskaya, in an attempt at rigorous analysis, defined an ideal functionality in the universal composability model, together with properties that protocols have to meet to achieve provable security.A whole family of systems based their security proofs on this work.However, analyzing HORNET and Sphinx, two instances from this family, we show that this proof strategy is broken.We discover a previously unknown vulnerability that breaks anonymity completely, and explain a known one.Both should not exist if privacy is proven correctly.In this work, we analyze and fix the proof strategy used for this family of systems.After proving the efficacy of the ideal functionality, we show how the original properties are flawed and suggest improved, effective properties in their place.Finally, we discover another common mistake in the proofs.We demonstrate how to avoid it by showing our improved properties for one protocol, thus partially fixing the family of provably secure onion routing protocols.‡ This work in parts was carried out while affiliated with TU Dresden.1 according to https://metrics.torproject.org/userstats-relay-country.html 2 Understanding of OR varied in the field.To be compliant with the terms of [8], we understand OR in this work as a free-route Chaumian MixNet [10] without requiring that messages are delayed.This conforms with the understanding of [21] and [16] except that circuits are excluded.
A decentralized application for the traceability process in the pharma industry

With the growth of a global market, new regulations aiming at preventing the fraud of counterfeiting drugs have been released all over the world. In the pharma industry, an innovative technology named serialization is becoming more and more popular as it allows to implement a packaging process based on a hierarchical aggregation. This guarantees that each box entering in the distribution network is marked with a unique identifier for an easy traceability by a central regulatory in charge to follow the life cycle of the product until given to the final patient. In this scenario, the blockchain might offer a breakthrough proposing a decentralized and immutable traceability mechanism able to increase the security of the data and to reduce the success of a fraud attempt. To demonstrate the effectiveness of this technology, in this paper, a DAPP based on the Ethereum blockchain has been coded and tested as prototype in a pharma industry.
A Migration-Based Cuttlefish Algorithm With Short-Term Memory for Optimization Problems

Cuttlefish algorithm (CFA) is a metaheuristic bio-inspired algorithm that mimics the color-changing behavior by the cuttlefish. It is produced by light reflected from different layers of cells and involves two processes, i.e., reflection and visibility. The reflection process simulates the light reflection mechanism, while the visibility process simulates the visible appearance of the matching pattern used by the cuttlefish. There is no cooperation strategy between the solutions of the CFA's sub-populations. The strategy can improve the capabilities of local exploitation and global exploration in terms of solution diversity and quality during the search process. This paper introduces two schemes to improve the performance of the cuttlefish algorithm in continuous optimization problems. Firstly, a migration strategy is employed between the multi-population cuttlefish to increase solutions diversity during the search process. Secondly, one of the exploitation strategies of the standard cuttlefish is replaced with a new exploitation strategy based on short-term memory. The test demonstrates that the proposed algorithm outperforms the standard cuttlefish algorithm. Besides, the performance of the proposed algorithm was investigated using the CEC2013 benchmarking test functions. Comparisons with several state-of-the-art algorithms were performed, and the outcomes indicated that the proposed method offers a competitive performance advantage over the alternatives.
Deep Learning Using Symmetry, FAST Scores, Shape-Based Filtering and Spatial Mapping Integrated with CNN for Large Scale Image Retrieval

This article presents symmetry of sampling, scoring, scaling, filtering and suppression over deep convolutional neural networks in combination with a novel content-based image retrieval scheme to retrieve highly accurate results. For this, fusion of ResNet generated signatures is performed with the innovative image features. In the first step, symmetric sampling is performed on the images from the neighborhood key points. Thereafter, the rotated sampling patterns and pairwise comparisons are performed, which return image smoothing by applying standard deviation. These values of smoothed intensity are calculated as per local gradients. Box filtering adjusts the results of approximation of Gaussian with standard deviation to the lowest scale and suppressed by non-maximal technique. The resulting feature sets are scaled at various levels with parameterized smoothened images. The principal component analysis (PCA) reduced feature vectors are combined with the ResNet generated feature. Spatial color coordinates are integrated with convolutional neural network (CNN) extracted features to comprehensively represent the color channels. The proposed method is experimentally applied on challenging datasets including Cifar-100 (10), Cifar-10 (10), ALOT (250), Corel-10000 (10), Corel-1000 (10) and Fashion (15). The presented method shows remarkable results on texture datasets ALOT with 250 categories and fashion (15). The proposed method reports significant results on Cifar-10 and Cifar-100 benchmarks. Moreover, outstanding results are obtained for the Corel-1000 dataset in comparison with state-of-the-art methods.
Jamming Pattern Recognition Using Spectrum Waterfall: A Deep Learning Method

It is very important for communication equipment to realize the recognition and prediction of jamming signals in a short time. In the communication environment with variable jamming mode and noise, it is very difficult to achieve rapidly jamming recognition. To solve this problem, this paper constructs a spectrum waterfall containing white gaussian noise signals, designs a jamming pattern recognition method based on deep learning, and realizes rapid recognition of jamming patterns and important parameters. Simulation results show that the training process of this method has considerable accuracy and the test process has high recognition rate.