Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Detection and Segmentation of Pancreas using Morphological Snakes and Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

Pancreatic cancer is one of the deadliest types of cancer, with 25% of the diagnosed patients surviving for only one year and 6% of them for five. Computed tomography (CT) screening trials have played a key role in improving early detection of pancreatic cancer, which has shown significant improvement in patient survival rates. However, advanced analysis of such images often requires manual segmentation of the pancreas, which is a time-consuming task. Moreover, pancreas presents high variability in shape, while occupying only a very small area of the entire abdominal CT scans, which increases the complexity of the problem. The rapid development of deep learning can contribute to offering robust algorithms that provide inexpensive, accurate, and user-independent segmentation results that can guide the domain experts. This dissertation addresses this task by investigating a two-step approach for pancreas segmentation, by assisting the task with a prior rough localization or detection of pancreas. This rough localization of the pancreas is provided by an estimated probability map and the detection task is achieved by using the YOLOv4 deep learning algorithm. The segmentation task is tackled by a modified U-Net model applied on cropped data, as well as by using a morphological active contours algorithm. For comparison, the U-Net model was also applied on the full CT images, which provide a coarse pancreas segmentation to serve as reference. Experimental results of the detection network on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) dataset and the pancreas tumour task dataset within the Medical Segmentation Decathlon show 50.67% mean Average Precision. The best segmentation network achieved good segmentation results on the NIH dataset, reaching 67.67% Dice score.
Type-Aware Decomposed Framework for Few-Shot Named Entity Recognition

Despite the recent success achieved by several two-stage prototypical networks in few-shot named entity recognition (NER) task, the overdetected false spans at the span detection stage and the inaccurate and unstable prototypes at the type classification stage remain to be challenging problems. In this paper, we propose a novel Type-Aware Decomposed framework, namely TadNER, to solve these problems. We first present a type-aware span filtering strategy to filter out false spans by removing those semantically far away from type names. We then present a type-aware contrastive learning strategy to construct more accurate and stable prototypes by jointly exploiting support samples and type names as references. Extensive experiments on various benchmarks prove that our proposed TadNER framework yields a new state-of-the-art performance. Our code and data will be available at https://github.com/NLPWM-WHU/TadNER.
Encoding Sentence Position in Context-Aware Neural Machine Translation with Concatenation

Context-aware translation can be achieved by processing a concatenation of consecutive sentences with the standard Transformer architecture. This paper investigates the intuitive idea of providing the model with explicit information about the position of the sentences contained in the concatenation window. We compare various methods to encode sentence positions into token representations, including novel methods. Our results show that the Transformer benefits from certain sentence position encoding methods on English to Russian translation if trained with a context-discounted loss (Lupo et al., 2022). However, the same benefits are not observed in English to German. Further empirical efforts are necessary to define the conditions under which the proposed approach is beneficial.
Between Generating Noise and Generating Images: Noise in the Correct Frequency Improves the Quality of Synthetic Histopathology Images for Digital Pathology

Artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques have the promise to revolutionize the field of digital pathology. However, these models demand considerable amounts of data, while the availability of unbiased training data is limited. Synthetic images can augment existing datasets, to improve and validate AI algorithms. Yet, controlling the exact distribution of cellular features within them is still challenging. One of the solutions is harnessing conditional generative adversarial networks that take a semantic mask as an input rather than a random noise. Unlike other domains, outlining the exact cellular structure of tissues is hard, and most of the input masks depict regions of cell types. However, using polygon-based masks introduce inherent artifacts within the synthetic images - due to the mismatch between the polygon size and the single-cell size. In this work, we show that introducing random single-pixel noise with the appropriate spatial frequency into a polygon semantic mask can dramatically improve the quality of the synthetic images. We used our platform to generate synthetic images of immunohistochemistry-treated lung biopsies. We test the quality of the images using a three-fold validation procedure. First, we show that adding the appropriate noise frequency yields 87% of the similarity metrics improvement that is obtained by adding the actual single-cell features. Second, we show that the synthetic images pass the Turing test. Finally, we show that adding these synthetic images to the train set improves AI performance in terms of PD-L1 semantic segmentation performances. Our work suggests a simple and powerful approach for generating synthetic data on demand to unbias limited datasets to improve the algorithms' accuracy and validate their robustness.
ALAN: Autonomously Exploring Robotic Agents in the Real World

Robotic agents that operate autonomously in the real world need to continuously explore their environment and learn from the data collected, with minimal human supervision. While it is possible to build agents that can learn in such a manner without supervision, current methods struggle to scale to the real world. Thus, we propose ALAN, an autonomously exploring robotic agent, that can perform tasks in the real world with little training and interaction time. This is enabled by measuring environment change, which reflects object movement and ignores changes in the robot position. We use this metric directly as an environment-centric signal, and also maximize the uncertainty of predicted environment change, which provides agent-centric exploration signal. We evaluate our approach on two different real-world play kitchen settings, enabling a robot to efficiently explore and discover manipulation skills, and perform tasks specified via goal images. Website at https://robo-explorer.github.io/
3D-aware Blending with Generative NeRFs

Image blending aims to combine multiple images seamlessly. It remains challenging for existing 2D-based methods, especially when input images are misaligned due to differences in 3D camera poses and object shapes. To tackle these issues, we propose a 3D-aware blending method using generative Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF), including two key components: 3D-aware alignment and 3D-aware blending. For 3D-aware alignment, we first estimate the camera pose of the reference image with respect to generative NeRFs and then perform 3D local alignment for each part. To further leverage 3D information of the generative NeRF, we propose 3D-aware blending that directly blends images on the NeRF's latent representation space, rather than raw pixel space. Collectively, our method outperforms existing 2D baselines, as validated by extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations with FFHQ and AFHQ-Cat.
The Ungar Games

Let $L$ be a finite lattice. An Ungar move sends an element $x\in L$ to the meet of $\{x\}\cup T$, where $T$ is a subset of the set of elements covered by $x$. We introduce the following Ungar game. Starting at the top element of $L$, two players -- Atniss and Eeta -- take turns making nontrivial Ungar moves; the first player who cannot do so loses the game. Atniss plays first. We say $L$ is an Atniss win (respectively, Eeta win) if Atniss (respectively, Eeta) has a winning strategy in the Ungar game on $L$. We first prove that the number of principal order ideals in the weak order on $S_n$ that are Eeta wins is $O(0.95586^nn!)$. We then consider a broad class of intervals in Young's lattice that includes all principal order ideals, and we characterize the Eeta wins in this class; we deduce precise enumerative results concerning order ideals in rectangles and type-$A$ root posets. We also characterize and enumerate principal order ideals in Tamari lattices that are Eeta wins. Finally, we conclude with some open problems and a short discussion of the computational complexity of Ungar games.
Imitation from Observation With Bootstrapped Contrastive Learning

Imitation from observation (IfO) is a learning paradigm that consists of training autonomous agents in a Markov Decision Process (MDP) by observing expert demonstrations without access to its actions. These demonstrations could be sequences of environment states or raw visual observations of the environment. Recent work in IfO has focused on this problem in the case of observations of low-dimensional environment states, however, access to these highly-specific observations is unlikely in practice. In this paper, we adopt a challenging, but more realistic problem formulation, learning control policies that operate on a learned latent space with access only to visual demonstrations of an expert completing a task. We present BootIfOL, an IfO algorithm that aims to learn a reward function that takes an agent trajectory and compares it to an expert, providing rewards based on similarity to agent behavior and implicit goal. We consider this reward function to be a distance metric between trajectories of agent behavior and learn it via contrastive learning. The contrastive learning objective aims to closely represent expert trajectories and to distance them from non-expert trajectories. The set of non-expert trajectories used in contrastive learning is made progressively more complex by bootstrapping from roll-outs of the agent learned through RL using the current reward function. We evaluate our approach on a variety of control tasks showing that we can train effective policies using a limited number of demonstrative trajectories, greatly improving on prior approaches that consider raw observations.
Probabilistic Circuits That Know What They Don't Know

Probabilistic circuits (PCs) are models that allow exact and tractable probabilistic inference. In contrast to neural networks, they are often assumed to be well-calibrated and robust to out-of-distribution (OOD) data. In this paper, we show that PCs are in fact not robust to OOD data, i.e., they don't know what they don't know. We then show how this challenge can be overcome by model uncertainty quantification. To this end, we propose tractable dropout inference (TDI), an inference procedure to estimate uncertainty by deriving an analytical solution to Monte Carlo dropout (MCD) through variance propagation. Unlike MCD in neural networks, which comes at the cost of multiple network evaluations, TDI provides tractable sampling-free uncertainty estimates in a single forward pass. TDI improves the robustness of PCs to distribution shift and OOD data, demonstrated through a series of experiments evaluating the classification confidence and uncertainty estimates on real-world data.
Improving Out-of-Distribution Generalization of Neural Rerankers with Contextualized Late Interaction

Recent progress in information retrieval finds that embedding query and document representation into multi-vector yields a robust bi-encoder retriever on out-of-distribution datasets. In this paper, we explore whether late interaction, the simplest form of multi-vector, is also helpful to neural rerankers that only use the [CLS] vector to compute the similarity score. Although intuitively, the attention mechanism of rerankers at the previous layers already gathers the token-level information, we find adding late interaction still brings an extra 5% improvement in average on out-of-distribution datasets, with little increase in latency and no degradation in in-domain effectiveness. Through extensive experiments and analysis, we show that the finding is consistent across different model sizes and first-stage retrievers of diverse natures and that the improvement is more prominent on longer queries.
Exploiting Features and Logits in Heterogeneous Federated Learning

Due to the rapid growth of IoT and artificial intelligence, deploying neural networks on IoT devices is becoming increasingly crucial for edge intelligence. Federated learning (FL) facilitates the management of edge devices to collaboratively train a shared model while maintaining training data local and private. However, a general assumption in FL is that all edge devices are trained on the same machine learning model, which may be impractical considering diverse device capabilities. For instance, less capable devices may slow down the updating process because they struggle to handle large models appropriate for ordinary devices. In this paper, we propose a novel data-free FL method that supports heterogeneous client models by managing features and logits, called Felo; and its extension with a conditional VAE deployed in the server, called Velo. Felo averages the mid-level features and logits from the clients at the server based on their class labels to provide the average features and logits, which are utilized for further training the client models. Unlike Felo, the server has a conditional VAE in Velo, which is used for training mid-level features and generating synthetic features according to the labels. The clients optimize their models based on the synthetic features and the average logits. We conduct experiments on two datasets and show satisfactory performances of our methods compared with the state-of-the-art methods.
Large Scale Real-World Multi-Person Tracking

This paper presents a new large scale multi-person tracking dataset -- \texttt{PersonPath22}, which is over an order of magnitude larger than currently available high quality multi-object tracking datasets such as MOT17, HiEve, and MOT20 datasets. The lack of large scale training and test data for this task has limited the community's ability to understand the performance of their tracking systems on a wide range of scenarios and conditions such as variations in person density, actions being performed, weather, and time of day. \texttt{PersonPath22} dataset was specifically sourced to provide a wide variety of these conditions and our annotations include rich meta-data such that the performance of a tracker can be evaluated along these different dimensions. The lack of training data has also limited the ability to perform end-to-end training of tracking systems. As such, the highest performing tracking systems all rely on strong detectors trained on external image datasets. We hope that the release of this dataset will enable new lines of research that take advantage of large scale video based training data.
Enhancing Agile Software Development Sustainability through the Integration of User Experience and Gamification

This article provides a rich discussion on how the sustainability of agile development processes can be enhanced. In particular, we focus on a recently developed framework, named GLUX, that integrates Lean UX into Scrum. GLUX's main goal is to facilitate a seamless integration between agile and user experience (UX) by using gamification to motivate agile teams to adopt a user-centered mindset and carry out UX activities collaboratively throughout the development process. Our role as software researchers is to contribute towards improving software sustainability and provide the software engineering community with the tools and techniques that will improve the human, economic, and environmental sustainability of software development. We found that GLUX addresses human sustainability by empowering self-sufficient, problem-focused teams, building a motivating and engaging environment, and developing team cooperation. Economic sustainability is addressed by minimizing UX debt and using gamification techniques to direct the focus of the behavior and mindset of agile teams towards value creation. Finally, environmental sustainability is promoted by encouraging agile teams to build a minimum viable product (MVP).
Decentralized adaptive clustering of deep nets is beneficial for client collaboration

We study the problem of training personalized deep learning models in a decentralized peer-to-peer setting, focusing on the setting where data distributions differ between the clients and where different clients have different local learning tasks. We study both covariate and label shift, and our contribution is an algorithm which for each client finds beneficial collaborations based on a similarity estimate for the local task. Our method does not rely on hyperparameters which are hard to estimate, such as the number of client clusters, but rather continuously adapts to the network topology using soft cluster assignment based on a novel adaptive gossip algorithm. We test the proposed method in various settings where data is not independent and identically distributed among the clients. The experimental evaluation shows that the proposed method performs better than previous state-of-the-art algorithms for this problem setting, and handles situations well where previous methods fail.
Relationships Between pH Buffer Capacity and Selected Soil Properties of an Agrarian area in Samaru, Nigeria

The objectives of this research were to investigate the nature of pH buffer capacity and evaluate its association selected soil characteristics the study area. Soil samples from ten profile pits from within the study area were collected from genetic horizons. Soil samples were tested in the laboratory for electrical conductivity and pH buffer capacity using standard procedures. Soil data were analyzed using descriptive statistics. One-way analysis of variance and correlation analysis were applied to determine effects and relationships of selected soil properties with soil pH buffer capacity. The selected soil properties included particle size distribution, electrical conductivity, organic matter, cation exchange capacity and soil pH. Analysis of variance indicated that there were no significant effect of soil depth or drainage condition on distribution of pH buffer capacity in the study area. Correlation analysis indicated a non-significant weak relationship between pH buffer capacity and selected soil properties of the study area. This suggest that multiple interrelated factors could be responsible for the distribution of pH buffer capacity in the study area.
A randomized benchmarking suite for mid-circuit measurements

Mid-circuit measurements are a key component in many quantum information computing protocols, including quantum error correction, fault-tolerant logical operations, and measurement based quantum computing. As such, techniques to quickly and efficiently characterize or benchmark their performance are of great interest. Beyond the measured qubit, it is also relevant to determine what, if any, impact mid-circuit measurement has on adjacent, unmeasured, spectator qubits. Here, we present a mid-circuit measurement benchmarking suite developed from the ubiquitous paradigm of randomized benchmarking. We show how our benchmarking suite can be used to both detect as well as quantify errors on both measured and spectator qubits. We demonstrate the scalability of our suite by simultaneously characterizing mid-circuit measurement on multiple qubits from an IBM Quantum Falcon device, and support our experimental results with numerical simulations.
Direct Voxel Grid Optimization: Super-fast Convergence for Radiance Fields Reconstruction

We present a super-fast convergence approach to reconstructing the per-scene radiance field from a set of images that capture the scene with known poses. This task, which is often applied to novel view synthesis, is recently revolutionized by Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) for its state-of-the-art quality and flexibility. However, NeRF and its variants require a lengthy training time ranging from hours to days for a single scene. In contrast, our approach achieves NeRF-comparable quality and converges rapidly from scratch in less than 15 minutes with a single GPU. We adopt a representation consisting of a density voxel grid for scene geometry and a feature voxel grid with a shallow network for complex view-dependent appearance. Modeling with explicit and discretized volume representations is not new, but we propose two simple yet non-trivial techniques that contribute to fast convergence speed and high-quality output. First, we introduce the post-activation interpolation on voxel density, which is capable of producing sharp surfaces in lower grid resolution. Second, direct voxel density optimization is prone to suboptimal geometry solutions, so we robustify the optimization process by imposing several priors. Finally, evaluation on five inward-facing benchmarks shows that our method matches, if not surpasses, NeRF's quality, yet it only takes about 15 minutes to train from scratch for a new scene.
FBM: Fast-Bit Allocation for Mixed-Precision Quantization

Quantized neural networks are well known for reducing latency, power consumption, and model size without significant degradation in accuracy, making them highly applicable for systems with limited resources and low power requirements. Mixed precision quantization offers better utilization of customized hardware that supports arithmetic operations at different bitwidths. Existing mixed-precision schemes rely on having a high exploration space, resulting in a large carbon footprint. In addition, these bit allocation strategies mostly induce constraints on the model size rather than utilizing the performance of neural network deployment on specific hardware. Our work proposes Fast-Bit Allocation for Mixed-Precision Quantization (FBM), which finds an optimal bitwidth allocation by measuring desired behaviors through a simulation of a specific device, or even on a physical one. While dynamic transitions of bit allocation in mixed precision quantization with ultra-low bitwidth are known to suffer from performance degradation, we present a fast recovery solution from such transitions. A comprehensive evaluation of the proposed method on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet demonstrates our method's superiority over current state-of-the-art schemes in terms of the trade-off between neural network accuracy and hardware efficiency. Our source code, experimental settings and quantized models are available at https://github.com/RamorayDrake/FBM/
Delivering Speaking Style in Low-resource Voice Conversion with Multi-factor Constraints

Conveying the linguistic content and maintaining the source speech's speaking style, such as intonation and emotion, is essential in voice conversion (VC). However, in a low-resource situation, where only limited utterances from the target speaker are accessible, existing VC methods are hard to meet this requirement and capture the target speaker's timber. In this work, a novel VC model, referred to as MFC-StyleVC, is proposed for the low-resource VC task. Specifically, speaker timbre constraint generated by clustering method is newly proposed to guide target speaker timbre learning in different stages. Meanwhile, to prevent over-fitting to the target speaker's limited data, perceptual regularization constraints explicitly maintain model performance on specific aspects, including speaking style, linguistic content, and speech quality. Besides, a simulation mode is introduced to simulate the inference process to alleviate the mismatch between training and inference. Extensive experiments performed on highly expressive speech demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method in low-resource VC.