Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Flow supervision for Deformable NeRF

In this paper we present a new method for deformable NeRF that can directly use optical flow as supervision. We overcome the major challenge with respect to the computationally inefficiency of enforcing the flow constraints to the backward deformation field, used by deformable NeRFs. Specifically, we show that inverting the backward deformation function is actually not needed for computing scene flows between frames. This insight dramatically simplifies the problem, as one is no longer constrained to deformation functions that can be analytically inverted. Instead, thanks to the weak assumptions required by our derivation based on the inverse function theorem, our approach can be extended to a broad class of commonly used backward deformation field. We present results on monocular novel view synthesis with rapid object motion, and demonstrate significant improvements over baselines without flow supervision.
The State of Diversity and Inclusion in Apache: A Pulse Check

Diversity and inclusion in open source software (OSS) is a multifaceted concept that arises from differences in contributors' gender, seniority, language, region, and other characteristics. D&I has received growing attention in OSS ecosystems and projects, and various programs have been implemented to foster contributor diversity. However, we do not yet know how the state of D&I is evolving. By understanding the state of D&I in OSS projects, the community can develop new and adjust current strategies to foster diversity among contributors and gain insights into the mechanisms and processes that facilitate the development of inclusive communities. In this paper, we report and compare the results of two surveys of Apache Software Foundation (ASF) contributors conducted over two years (n=624 & n=432), considering a variety of D&I aspects. We see improvements in engagement among those traditionally underrepresented in OSS, particularly those who are in gender minority or not confident in English. Yet, the gender gap in the number of contributors remains. We expect this study to help communities tailor their efforts in promoting D&I in OSS.
Maximum likelihood smoothing estimation in state-space models: An incomplete-information based approach

This paper revisits classical works of Rauch (1963, et al. 1965) and develops a novel method for maximum likelihood (ML) smoothing estimation from incomplete information/data of stochastic state-space systems. Score function and conditional observed information matrices of incomplete data are introduced and their distributional identities are established. Using these identities, the ML smoother $\widehat{x}_{k\vert n}^s =\argmax_{x_k} \log f(x_k,\widehat{x}_{k+1\vert n}^s, y_{0:n}\vert\theta)$, $k\leq n-1$, is presented. The result shows that the ML smoother gives an estimate of state $x_k$ with more adherence of loglikehood having less standard errors than that of the ML state estimator $\widehat{x}_k=\argmax_{x_k} \log f(x_k,y_{0:k}\vert\theta)$, with $\widehat{x}_{n\vert n}^s=\widehat{x}_n$. Recursive estimation is given in terms of an EM-gradient-particle algorithm which extends the work of \cite{Lange} for ML smoothing estimation. The algorithm has an explicit iteration update which lacks in (\cite{Ramadan}) EM-algorithm for smoothing. A sequential Monte Carlo method is developed for valuation of the score function and observed information matrices. A recursive equation for the covariance matrix of estimation error is developed to calculate the standard errors. In the case of linear systems, the method shows that the Rauch-Tung-Striebel (RTS) smoother is a fully efficient smoothing state-estimator whose covariance matrix coincides with the Cram\'er-Rao lower bound, the inverse of expected information matrix. Furthermore, the RTS smoother coincides with the Kalman filter having less covariance matrix. Numerical studies are performed, confirming the accuracy of the main results.
HerA Scheme: Secure Distributed Matrix Multiplication via Hermitian Codes

We consider the problem of secure distributed matrix multiplication (SDMM), where a user has two matrices and wishes to compute their product with the help of $N$ honest but curious servers under the security constraint that any information about either $A$ or $B$ is not leaked to any server. This paper presents a \emph{new scheme} that considers the inner product partition for matrices $A$ and $B$. Our central technique relies on encoding matrices $A$ and $B$ in a Hermitian code and its dual code, respectively. We present the Hermitian Algebraic (HerA) scheme, which employs Hermitian codes and characterizes the partitioning and security capacities given entries of matrices belonging to a finite field with $q^2$ elements. We showcase that this scheme performs the secure distributed matrix multiplication in a significantly smaller finite field and expands security allowances compared to the existing results in the literature.
Analyzing the Effects of CI/CD on Open Source Repositories in GitHub and GitLab

Numerous articles emphasize the benefits of implementing Continuous Integration and Delivery (CI/CD) pipelines in software development. These pipelines are expected to improve the reputation of a project and decrease the number of commits and issues in the repository. Although CI/CD adoption may be slow initially, it is believed to accelerate service delivery and deployment in the long run. This study aims to investigate the impact of CI/CD on commit velocity and issue counts in two open-source repositories, GitLab and GitHub. By analyzing more than 12,000 repositories and recording every commit and issue, it was discovered that CI/CD enhances commit velocity by 141.19 percent, but also increases the number of issues by 321.21 percent.
Are Data-driven Explanations Robust against Out-of-distribution Data?

As black-box models increasingly power high-stakes applications, a variety of data-driven explanation methods have been introduced. Meanwhile, machine learning models are constantly challenged by distributional shifts. A question naturally arises: Are data-driven explanations robust against out-of-distribution data? Our empirical results show that even though predict correctly, the model might still yield unreliable explanations under distributional shifts. How to develop robust explanations against out-of-distribution data? To address this problem, we propose an end-to-end model-agnostic learning framework Distributionally Robust Explanations (DRE). The key idea is, inspired by self-supervised learning, to fully utilizes the inter-distribution information to provide supervisory signals for the learning of explanations without human annotation. Can robust explanations benefit the model's generalization capability? We conduct extensive experiments on a wide range of tasks and data types, including classification and regression on image and scientific tabular data. Our results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly improves the model's performance in terms of explanation and prediction robustness against distributional shifts.
Lipschitzness Effect of a Loss Function on Generalization Performance of Deep Neural Networks Trained by Adam and AdamW Optimizers

The generalization performance of deep neural networks with regard to the optimization algorithm is one of the major concerns in machine learning. This performance can be affected by various factors. In this paper, we theoretically prove that the Lipschitz constant of a loss function is an important factor to diminish the generalization error of the output model obtained by Adam or AdamW. The results can be used as a guideline for choosing the loss function when the optimization algorithm is Adam or AdamW. In addition, to evaluate the theoretical bound in a practical setting, we choose the human age estimation problem in computer vision. For assessing the generalization better, the training and test datasets are drawn from different distributions. Our experimental evaluation shows that the loss function with a lower Lipschitz constant and maximum value improves the generalization of the model trained by Adam or AdamW.
GNNBuilder: An Automated Framework for Generic Graph Neural Network Accelerator Generation, Simulation, and Optimization

There are plenty of graph neural network (GNN) accelerators being proposed. However, they highly rely on users' hardware expertise and are usually optimized for one specific GNN model, making them challenging for practical use. Therefore, in this work, we propose GNNBuilder, the first automated, generic, end-to-end GNN accelerator generation framework. It features four advantages: (1) GNNBuilder can automatically generate GNN accelerators for a wide range of GNN models arbitrarily defined by users; (2) GNNBuilder takes standard PyTorch programming interface, introducing zero overhead for algorithm developers; (3) GNNBuilder supports end-to-end code generation, simulation, accelerator optimization, and hardware deployment, realizing a push-button fashion for GNN accelerator design; (4) GNNBuilder is equipped with accurate performance models of its generated accelerator, enabling fast and flexible design space exploration (DSE). In the experiments, first, we show that our accelerator performance model has errors within $36\%$ for latency prediction and $18\%$ for BRAM count prediction. Second, we show that our generated accelerators can outperform CPU by $6.33\times$ and GPU by $6.87\times$. This framework is open-source, and the code is available at https://github.com/sharc-lab/gnn-builder.
Visibility Aware Human-Object Interaction Tracking from Single RGB Camera

Capturing the interactions between humans and their environment in 3D is important for many applications in robotics, graphics, and vision. Recent works to reconstruct the 3D human and object from a single RGB image do not have consistent relative translation across frames because they assume a fixed depth. Moreover, their performance drops significantly when the object is occluded. In this work, we propose a novel method to track the 3D human, object, contacts between them, and their relative translation across frames from a single RGB camera, while being robust to heavy occlusions. Our method is built on two key insights. First, we condition our neural field reconstructions for human and object on per-frame SMPL model estimates obtained by pre-fitting SMPL to a video sequence. This improves neural reconstruction accuracy and produces coherent relative translation across frames. Second, human and object motion from visible frames provides valuable information to infer the occluded object. We propose a novel transformer-based neural network that explicitly uses object visibility and human motion to leverage neighbouring frames to make predictions for the occluded frames. Building on these insights, our method is able to track both human and object robustly even under occlusions. Experiments on two datasets show that our method significantly improves over the state-of-the-art methods. Our code and pretrained models are available at: https://virtualhumans.mpi-inf.mpg.de/VisTracker
Importance Sampling for Stochastic Gradient Descent in Deep Neural Networks

Stochastic gradient descent samples uniformly the training set to build an unbiased gradient estimate with a limited number of samples. However, at a given step of the training process, some data are more helpful than others to continue learning. Importance sampling for training deep neural networks has been widely studied to propose sampling schemes yielding better performance than the uniform sampling scheme. After recalling the theory of importance sampling for deep learning, this paper reviews the challenges inherent to this research area. In particular, we propose a metric allowing the assessment of the quality of a given sampling scheme; and we study the interplay between the sampling scheme and the optimizer used.
Learning Flow Functions from Data with Applications to Nonlinear Oscillators

We describe a recurrent neural network (RNN) based architecture to learn the flow function of a causal, time-invariant and continuous-time control system from trajectory data. By restricting the class of control inputs to piecewise constant functions, we show that learning the flow function is equivalent to learning the input-to-state map of a discrete-time dynamical system. This motivates the use of an RNN together with encoder and decoder networks which map the state of the system to the hidden state of the RNN and back. We show that the proposed architecture is able to approximate the flow function by exploiting the system's causality and time-invariance. The output of the learned flow function model can be queried at any time instant. We experimentally validate the proposed method using models of the Van der Pol and FitzHugh Nagumo oscillators. In both cases, the results demonstrate that the architecture is able to closely reproduce the trajectories of these two systems. For the Van der Pol oscillator, we further show that the trained model generalises to the system's response with a prolonged prediction time horizon as well as control inputs outside the training distribution. For the FitzHugh-Nagumo oscillator, we show that the model accurately captures the input-dependent phenomena of excitability.
Data inaccuracy quantification and uncertainty propagation for bibliometric indicators

This study introduces an approach to estimate the uncertainty in bibliometric indicator values that is caused by data errors. This approach utilizes Bayesian regression models, estimated from empirical data samples, which are used to predict error-free data. Through direct Monte Carlo simulation -- drawing predicted data from the estimated regression models a large number of times for the same input data -- probability distributions for indicator values can be obtained, which provide the information on their uncertainty due to data errors. It is demonstrated how uncertainty in base quantities, such as the number of publications of a unit of certain document types and the number of citations of a publication, can be propagated along a measurement model into final indicator values. This method can be used to estimate the uncertainty of indicator values due to sources of errors with known error distributions. The approach is demonstrated with simple synthetic examples for instructive purposes and real bibliometric research evaluation data to show its possible application in practice.
Binary self-orthogonal codes which meet the Griesmer bound or have optimal minimum distances

The purpose of this paper is two-fold. First, we characterize the existence of binary self-orthogonal codes meeting the Griesmer bound by employing Solomon-Stiffler codes and some related residual codes. Second, using such a characterization, we determine the exact value of $d_{so}(n,7)$ except for five special cases and the exact value of $d_{so}(n,8)$ except for 41 special cases, where $d_{so}(n,k)$ denotes the largest minimum distance among all binary self-orthogonal $[n, k]$ codes. Currently, the exact value of $d_{so}(n,k)$ $(k \le 6)$ was determined by Shi et al. (2022). In addition, we develop a general method to prove the nonexistence of some binary self-orthogonal codes by considering the residual code of a binary self-orthogonal code.
Coinductive control of inductive data types

We combine the theory of inductive data types with the theory of universal measurings. By doing so, we find that many categories of algebras of endofunctors are actually enriched in the corresponding category of coalgebras of the same endofunctor. The enrichment captures all possible partial algebra homomorphisms, defined by measuring coalgebras. Thus this enriched category carries more information than the usual category of algebras which captures only total algebra homomorphisms. We specify new algebras besides the initial one using a generalization of the notion of initial algebra.
Tackling Hate Speech in Low-resource Languages with Context Experts

Given Myanmars historical and socio-political context, hate speech spread on social media has escalated into offline unrest and violence. This paper presents findings from our remote study on the automatic detection of hate speech online in Myanmar. We argue that effectively addressing this problem will require community-based approaches that combine the knowledge of context experts with machine learning tools that can analyze the vast amount of data produced. To this end, we develop a systematic process to facilitate this collaboration covering key aspects of data collection, annotation, and model validation strategies. We highlight challenges in this area stemming from small and imbalanced datasets, the need to balance non-glamorous data work and stakeholder priorities, and closed data-sharing practices. Stemming from these findings, we discuss avenues for further work in developing and deploying hate speech detection systems for low-resource languages.
Neural spikes as rare events

We consider the information transmission problem in neurons and its possible implications for learning in neural networks. Our approach is based on recent developments in statistical physics and complexity science. We also develop a method to select statistically significant neural responses from the background activity and consider its wider applications. This would support temporal coding theory as a model for neural coding.
Instant Neural Radiance Fields Stylization

We present Instant Neural Radiance Fields Stylization, a novel approach for multi-view image stylization for the 3D scene. Our approach models a neural radiance field based on neural graphics primitives, which use a hash table-based position encoder for position embedding. We split the position encoder into two parts, the content and style sub-branches, and train the network for normal novel view image synthesis with the content and style targets. In the inference stage, we execute AdaIN to the output features of the position encoder, with content and style voxel grid features as reference. With the adjusted features, the stylization of novel view images could be obtained. Our method extends the style target from style images to image sets of scenes and does not require additional network training for stylization. Given a set of images of 3D scenes and a style target(a style image or another set of 3D scenes), our method can generate stylized novel views with a consistent appearance at various view angles in less than 10 minutes on modern GPU hardware. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the validity and superiority of our method.
A Stochastic Bi-Objective Cybersecurity Analyst Scheduling Problem with Preferential Days Off and Upskilling Decisions

With higher shifting rates towards digitalization, companies are more prone to the rising number of cyberattacks. Despite the insufficient supply of experts needed to safeguard the Information and Communications (ICT) system, their retention, upskilling, and skill enhancement have become an additional challenge. The scheduling problem of experts is one among many areas in cybersecurity defence strategies which has attracted some recent concern and contributions from the systems engineering and operation research fraternity. In this work, the scheduling of cybersecurity analysts is studied focusing on the weekly overtime of employees in the pay period while enhancing the employeesâ€™ ability required to analyse the expected number of alerts. Although, a single objective approach is seen in a few articles yet multiple criteria-based analyst scheduling is never attempted. The article features a more generalized scheduling problem of cybersecurity analysts through mixed integer linear program (MILP) optimization. The problem tests a bi-objective formulation and its scalability is analysed. The distinctness observed in the trial runs comes with a few model relaxations and modifications of test instances. Results are witnessed in a tabulated structure satisfying the challenges improvised in cybersecurity analyst scheduling using the additional constraints.
Pengaruh Motivasi Terhadap Hasil Dan Prestasi Belajar Mahasiswa

The students' own encouragement or willingness to attend lectures in accordance with their own wishes, as well as the capacity to identify interests, skills, and restore their lives in the future, are all factors in the motivation of students to attend lectures.The level of humanity at which students accept, reject, and evaluate the knowledge they acquire through the teaching and learning process is called learning achievement.This study aims to determine how motivation influences student performance and learning outcomes.Researchers employ literature reviews from a variety of journals as their method.The study's findings regarding the impact of motivation on student achievement and learning outcomes are accurate.&#x0D;
Superintelligence Safety: A Requirements Engineering Perspective

Under the headline "AI safety", a wide-reaching issue is being discussed, whether in the future some "superhuman artificial intelligence" / "superintelligence" could could pose a threat to humanity. In addition, the late Steven Hawking warned that the rise of robots may be disastrous for mankind. A major concern is that even benevolent superhuman artificial intelligence (AI) may become seriously harmful if its given goals are not exactly aligned with ours, or if we cannot specify precisely its objective function. Metaphorically, this is compared to king Midas in Greek mythology, who expressed the wish that everything he touched should turn to gold, but obviously this wish was not specified precisely enough. In our view, this sounds like requirements problems and the challenge of their precise formulation. (To our best knowledge, this has not been pointed out yet.) As usual in requirements engineering (RE), ambiguity or incompleteness may cause problems. In addition, the overall issue calls for a major RE endeavor, figuring out the wishes and the needs with regard to a superintelligence, which will in our opinion most likely be a very complex software-intensive system based on AI. This may even entail theoretically defining an extended requirements problem.
Classification Analysis of Back propagation-Optimized CNN Performance in Image Processing

This study aims to optimize the performance of the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) in the image classification task by applying data augmentation and fine-tuning techniques to a case study of mammal classification. In this study, we took a fairly complex image classification dataset and used the CNN model as a basis for training and evaluating the performance of the model compared to Back propagation. From this study, the CNN VGG16 architecture optimized with ADAM optimization has been compared with the Back propagation optimization of SGD. We also conducted a literature review on several related studies and basic concepts in CNN, such as convolution, pooling, and fully connected layers. The research methodology involves creating datasets using data augmentation techniques, model training using fine-tuning techniques, and testing model performance using a number of evaluation metrics, including accuracy, precision, and recall. The results of this study indicate that the techniques used have succeeded in improving the performance of the CNN model in complex image classification tasks with accuracy in identifying and monitoring animal species more accurately, with an accuracy of 91.18% for the best model. Model accuracy increased by 2% after applying data augmentation and fine-tuning techniques to the CNN model. These results indicate that the techniques applied in this study can be a good alternative in improving the performance of the CNN model in the image classification task.