Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Context-Patch Face Hallucination Based on Thresholding Locality-Constrained Representation and Reproducing Learning

Face hallucination is a technique that reconstructs high-resolution (HR) faces from low-resolution (LR) faces, by using the prior knowledge learned from HR/LR face pairs. Most state-of-the-arts leverage position-patch prior knowledge of the human face to estimate the optimal representation coefficients for each image patch. However, they focus only the position information and usually ignore the context information of the image patch. In addition, when they are confronted with misalignment or the small sample size (SSS) problem, the hallucination performance is very poor. To this end, this paper incorporates the contextual information of the image patch and proposes a powerful and efficient context-patch-based face hallucination approach, namely, thresholding locality-constrained representation and reproducing learning (TLcR-RL). Under the context-patch-based framework, we advance a thresholding-based representation method to enhance the reconstruction accuracy and reduce the computational complexity. To further improve the performance of the proposed algorithm, we propose a promotion strategy called reproducing learning. By adding the estimated HR face to the training set, which can simulate the case that the HR version of the input LR face is present in the training set, it thus iteratively enhances the final hallucination result. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed TLcR-RL method achieves a substantial increase in the hallucinated results, both subjectively and objectively. In addition, the proposed framework is more robust to face misalignment and the SSS problem, and its hallucinated HR face is still very good when the LR test face is from the real world. The MATLAB source code is available at https://github.com/junjun-jiang/TLcR-RL.
Probing Context-Dependent Errors in Quantum Processors

Gates in error-prone quantum information processors are often modeled using sets of one- and two-qubit process matrices, the standard model of quantum errors. However, the results of quantum circuits on real processors often depend on additional external "context" variables. Such contexts may include the state of a spectator qubit, the time of data collection, or the temperature of control electronics. In this article, we demonstrate a suite of simple, widely applicable, and statistically rigorous methods for detecting context dependence in quantum-circuit experiments. They can be used on any data that comprise two or more "pools" of measurement results obtained by repeating the same set of quantum circuits in different contexts. These tools may be integrated seamlessly into standard quantum device characterization techniques, like randomized benchmarking or tomography. We experimentally demonstrate these methods by detecting and quantifying crosstalk and drift on the publicly accessible 16-qubit ibmqx3.Received 9 November 2018DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevX.9.021045Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.Published by the American Physical SocietyPhysics Subject Headings (PhySH)Research AreasQuantum benchmarkingQuantum computationQuantum gatesQuantum information processingQuantum tomographyQuantum Information
Improving variational autoencoder with deep feature consistent and generative adversarial training

We present a new method for improving the performances of variational autoencoder (VAE). In addition to enforcing the deep feature consistent principle thus ensuring the VAE output and its corresponding input images to have similar deep features, we also implement a generative adversarial training mechanism to force the VAE to output realistic and natural images. We present experimental results to show that the VAE trained with our new method outperforms state of the art in generating face images with much clearer and more natural noses, eyes, teeth, hair textures as well as reasonable backgrounds. We also show that our method can learn powerful embeddings of input face images, which can be used to achieve facial attribute manipulation. Moreover we propose a multi-view feature extraction strategy to extract effective image representations, which can be used to achieve state of the art performance in facial attribute prediction.
Secure Evaluation of Quantized Neural Networks

Abstract We investigate two questions in this paper: First , we ask to what extent “MPC friendly” models are already supported by major Machine Learning frameworks such as TensorFlow or PyTorch. Prior works provide protocols that only work on fixed-point integers and specialized activation functions, two aspects that are not supported by popular Machine Learning frameworks, and the need for these specialized model representations means that it is hard, and often impossible, to use e.g., TensorFlow to design, train and test models that later have to be evaluated securely. Second , we ask to what extent the functionality for evaluating Neural Networks already exists in general-purpose MPC frameworks. These frameworks have received more scrutiny, are better documented and supported on more platforms. Furthermore, they are typically flexible in terms of the threat model they support. In contrast, most secure evaluation protocols in the literature are targeted to a specific threat model and their implementations are only a “proof-of-concept”, making it very hard for their adoption in practice. We answer both of the above questions in a positive way:We observe that the quantization techniques supported by both TensorFlow, PyTorch and MXNet can provide models in a representation that can be evaluated securely; and moreover, that this evaluation can be performed by a general purpose MPC framework. We perform extensive benchmarks to understand the exact trade-offs between different corruption models, network sizes and efficiency. These experiments provide an interesting insight into cost between active and passive security, as well as honest and dishonest majority. Our work shows then that the separating line between existing ML frameworks and existing MPC protocols may be narrower than implicitly suggested by previous works.
daBNN

It is always well believed that Binary Neural Networks (BNNs) could drastically accelerate the inference efficiency by replacing the arithmetic operations in float-valued Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) with bit-wise operations. Nevertheless, there has not been open-source implementation in support of this idea on low-end ARM devices (e.g., mobile phones and embedded devices). In this work, we propose daBNN --- a super fast inference framework that implements BNNs on ARM devices. Several speed-up and memory refinement strategies for bit-packing, binarized convolution, and memory layout are uniquely devised to enhance inference efficiency. Compared to the recent open-source BNN inference framework, BMXNet, our daBNN is 7x~23x faster on a single binary convolution, and about 6x faster on Bi-Real Net 18 (a BNN variant of ResNet-18). The daBNN is a BSD-licensed inference framework, and its source code, sample projects and pre-trained models are available on-line: https://github.com/JDAI-CV/dabnn.
Encoding of matrix product states into quantum circuits of one- and two-qubit gates

The matrix product state (MPS) belongs to the most important models in, for example, quantum information sciences and condensed-matter physics. However, realizing an $N$-qubit MPS with large $N$ and large entanglement on a quantum platform is extremely challenging, since it requires high-level qudits or $n$-qubit gates with $n\ensuremath{\gg}2$ to carry or produce the entanglement. In this work, an efficient method that accurately encodes a given MPS into a quantum circuit with only one- and two-qubit gates is proposed. Essentially different from the existing compiling methods, our idea is to construct the unitary matrix product operators that optimally disentangle the MPS to a product state. These matrix product operators form the quantum circuit that evolves a product state to the targeted MPS with a high fidelity. Our benchmark on the ground-state MPSs of the strongly correlated spin models show that the constructed quantum circuits can simulate the MPSs with much fewer qubits than the sizes of the MPSs themselves. This method paves a feasible and efficient path to realizing useful and/or exotic quantum states and MPS-based models as quantum circuits on near-term quantum platforms.
Similarity-Preserving Linkage Hashing for Online Image Retrieval

Online image hashing aims to update hash functions on-the-fly along with newly arriving data streams, which has found broad applications in computer vision and beyond. To this end, most existing methods update hash functions simply using discrete labels or pairwise similarity to explore intra-class relationships, which, however, often deteriorates search performance when facing a domain gap or semantic shift. One reason is that they ignore the particular semantic relationships among different classes, which should be taken into account in updating hash functions. Besides, the common characteristics between the label vectors (can be regarded as a sort of binary codes) and to-be-learned binary hash codes have left unexploited. In this paper, we present a novel online hashing method, termed Similarity Preserving Linkage Hashing (SPLH), which not only utilizes pairwise similarity to learn the intra-class relationships, but also fully exploits a latent linkage space to capture the inter-class relationships and the common characteristics between label vectors and to-be-learned hash codes. Specifically, SPLH first maps the independent discrete label vectors and binary hash codes into a linkage space, through which the relative semantic distance between data points can be assessed precisely. As a result, the pairwise similarities within the newly arriving data stream are exploited to learn the latent semantic space to benefit binary code learning. To learn the model parameters effectively, we further propose an alternating optimization algorithm. Extensive experiments conducted on three widely-used datasets demonstrate the superior performance of SPLH over several state-of-the-art online hashing methods.
A Second-Order Disaster? Digital Technologies During the COVID-19 Pandemic

One of the most striking features of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom has been the disproportionate way in which it has affected Black, Asian, ethnic minority, and working class people. In this article, I argue that digital technologies and data practices in the response to COVID-19 amplify social inequalities, which are already accentuated by the pandemic, thus leading to a “second-order disaster”—a human-made disaster which further traps disadvantaged people into precarity. Inequalities are reproduced both in the everyday uses of technology for distance learning and remote work as well as in the public health response. Applications such as contact tracing apps raise concerns about “function creep”—the reuse of data for different purposes than the one for which they were originally collected—while they normalize surveillance which has been traditionally used on marginalized communities. The outsourcing of the digital public health response consolidates the arrival of the privatized digital welfare state, which increases risks of potential discrimination.
Rain Rendering for Evaluating and Improving Robustness to Bad Weather

Rain fills the atmosphere with water particles, which breaks the common assumption that light travels unaltered from the scene to the camera. While it is well-known that rain affects computer vision algorithms, quantifying its impact is difficult. In this context, we present a rain rendering pipeline that enables the systematic evaluation of common computer vision algorithms to controlled amounts of rain. We present three different ways to add synthetic rain to existing images datasets: completely physic-based; completely data-driven; and a combination of both. The physic-based rain augmentation combines a physical particle simulator and accurate rain photometric modeling. We validate our rendering methods with a user study, demonstrating our rain is judged as much as 73% more realistic than the state-of-theart. Using our generated rain-augmented KITTI, Cityscapes, and nuScenes datasets, we conduct a thorough evaluation of object detection, semantic segmentation, and depth estimation algorithms and show that their performance decreases in degraded weather, on the order of 15% for object detection, 60% for semantic segmentation, and 6-fold increase in depth estimation error. Finetuning on our augmented synthetic data results in improvements of 21% on object detection, 37% on semantic segmentation, and 8% on depth estimation.
Integrated single photon emitters

The realization of scalable systems for quantum information processing and networking is of utmost importance to the quantum information community. However, building such systems is difficult because of challenges in achieving all the necessary functionalities on a unified platform while maintaining stringent performance requirements of the individual elements. A promising approach that addresses this challenge is based on the consolidation of experimental and theoretical capabilities in quantum physics and integrated photonics. Integrated quantum photonic devices allow efficient control and read-out of quantum information while being scalable and cost effective. Here, the authors review recent developments in solid-state single photon emitters coupled with various integrated photonic structures, which form a critical component of future scalable quantum devices. Their work contributes to the further development and realization of quantum networking protocols and quantum logic on a scalable and fabrication-friendly platform.
Responsible Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Value Formation and Market Performance in Healthcare: the Mediating Role of Patient’s Cognitive Engagement

Abstract The Healthcare sector has been at the forefront of the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. Owing to the nature of the services and the vulnerability of a large section of end-users, the topic of responsible AI has become the subject of widespread study and discussion. We conduct a mixed-method study to identify the constituents of responsible AI in the healthcare sector and investigate its role in value formation and market performance. The study context is India, where AI technologies are in the developing phase. The results from 12 in-depth interviews enrich the more nuanced understanding of how different facets of responsible AI guide healthcare firms in evidence-based medicine and improved patient centered care. PLS-SEM analysis of 290 survey responses validates the theoretical framework and establishes responsible AI as a third-order factor. The 174 dyadic data findings also confirm the mediation mechanism of the patient’s cognitive engagement with responsible AI-solutions and perceived value, which leads to market performance.
Recent advances for quantum classifiers

Machine learning has achieved dramatic success in a broad spectrum of applications. Its interplay with quantum physics may lead to unprecedented perspectives for both fundamental research and commercial applications, giving rise to an emergent research frontier of quantum machine learning. Along this line, quantum classifiers, which are quantum devices that aim to solve classification problems in machine learning, have attracted tremendous attention recently. In this review, we give a relatively comprehensive overview for the studies of quantum classifiers, with a focus on recent advances. First, we will review a number of quantum classification algorithms, including quantum support vector machines, quantum kernel methods, quantum decision tree classifiers, quantum nearest neighbor algorithms, and quantum annealing based classifiers. Then, we move on to introduce the variational quantum classifiers, which are essentially variational quantum circuits for classifications. We will review different architectures for constructing variational quantum classifiers and introduce the barren plateau problem, where the training of quantum classifiers might be hindered by the exponentially vanishing gradient. In addition, the vulnerability aspect of quantum classifiers in the setting of adversarial learning and the recent experimental progress on different quantum classifiers will also be discussed.
Video Summarization Through Reinforcement Learning With a 3D Spatio-Temporal U-Net

Intelligent video summarization algorithms allow to quickly convey the most relevant information in videos through the identification of the most essential and explanatory content while removing redundant video frames. In this paper, we introduce the 3DST-UNet-RL framework for video summarization. A 3D spatio-temporal U-Net is used to efficiently encode spatio-temporal information of the input videos for downstream reinforcement learning (RL). An RL agent learns from spatio-temporal latent scores and predicts actions for keeping or rejecting a video frame in a video summary. We investigate if real/inflated 3D spatio-temporal CNN features are better suited to learn representations from videos than commonly used 2D image features. Our framework can operate in both, a fully unsupervised mode and a supervised training mode. We analyse the impact of prescribed summary lengths and show experimental evidence for the effectiveness of 3DST-UNet-RL on two commonly used general video summarization benchmarks. We also applied our method on a medical video summarization task. The proposed video summarization method has the potential to save storage costs of ultrasound screening videos as well as to increase efficiency when browsing patient video data during retrospective analysis or audit without loosing essential information.
Retrieve and refine

Code comment generation which aims to automatically generate natural language descriptions for source code, is a crucial task in the field of automatic software development. Traditional comment generation methods use manually-crafted templates or information retrieval (IR) techniques to generate summaries for source code. In recent years, neural network-based methods which leveraged acclaimed encoder-decoder deep learning framework to learn comment generation patterns from a large-scale parallel code corpus, have achieved impressive results. However, these emerging methods only take code-related information as input. Software reuse is common in the process of software development, meaning that comments of similar code snippets are helpful for comment generation. Inspired by the IR-based and template-based approaches, in this paper, we propose a neural comment generation approach where we use the existing comments of similar code snippets as exemplars to guide comment generation. Specifically, given a piece of code, we first use an IR technique to retrieve a similar code snippet and treat its comment as an exemplar. Then we design a novel seq2seq neural network that takes the given code, its AST, its similar code, and its exemplar as input, and leverages the information from the exemplar to assist in the target comment generation based on the semantic similarity between the source code and the similar code. We evaluate our approach on a large-scale Java corpus, which contains about 2M samples, and experimental results demonstrate that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by a substantial margin.
Rating the Crisis of Online Public Opinion Using a Multi-Level Index System

Online public opinion usually spreads rapidly and widely, thus a small incident probably evolves into a large social crisis in a very short time, and results in a heavy loss in credit or economic aspects. We propose a method to rate the crisis of online public opinion based on a multi-level index system to evaluate the impact of events objectively. Firstly, the dissemination mechanism of online public opinion is explained from the perspective of information ecology. According to the mechanism, some evaluation indexes are selected through correlation analysis and principal component analysis. Then, a classification model of text emotion is created via the training by deep learning to achieve the accurate quantification of the emotional indexes in the index system. Finally, based on the multi-level evaluation index system and grey correlation analysis, we propose a method to rate the crisis of online public opinion. The experiment with the real-time incident show that this method can objectively evaluate the emotional tendency of Internet users and rate the crisis in different dissemination stages of online public opinion. It is helpful to realizing the crisis warning of online public opinion and timely blocking the further spread of the crisis.
CBNet: A Composite Backbone Network Architecture for Object Detection

top-performing object detectors depend heavily on backbone networks, whose advances bring consistent performance gains through exploring more effective network structures. In this paper, we propose a novel and flexible backbone framework, namely CBNet, to construct high-performance detectors using existing open-source pre-trained backbones under the pre-training fine-tuning paradigm. In particular, CBNet architecture groups multiple identical backbones, which are connected through composite connections. Specifically, it integrates the high- and low-level features of multiple identical backbone networks and gradually expands the receptive field to more effectively perform object detection. We also propose a better training strategy with auxiliary supervision for CBNet-based detectors. CBNet has strong generalization capabilities for different backbones and head designs of the detector architecture. Without additional pre-training of the composite backbone, CBNet can be adapted to various backbones (i.e., CNN-based vs. Transformer-based) and head designs of most mainstream detectors (i.e., one-stage vs. two-stage, anchor-based vs. anchor-free-based). Experiments provide strong evidence that, compared with simply increasing the depth and width of the network, CBNet introduces a more efficient, effective, and resource-friendly way to build high-performance backbone networks. Particularly, our CB-Swin-L achieves 59.4% box AP and 51.6% mask AP on COCO test-dev under the single-model and single-scale testing protocol, which are significantly better than the state-of-the-art results (i.e., 57.7% box AP and 50.2% mask AP) achieved by Swin-L, while reducing the training time by 6×. With multi-scale testing, we push the current best single model result to a new record of 60.1% box AP and 52.3% mask AP without using extra training data. Code is available at https://github.com/VDIGPKU/CBNetV2.
Agreement-Based Joint Training for Bidirectional Attention-Based Neural Machine Translation

The attentional mechanism has proven to be effective in improving end-to-end neural machine translation. However, due to the intricate structural divergence between natural languages, unidirectional attention-based models might only capture partial aspects of attentional regularities. In this chapter, we propose agreement-based joint training for bidirectional attention-based end-to-end neural machine translation. Instead of training source-to-target and target-to-source translation models independently, our approach encourages the two complementary models to agree on word alignment matrices on the same training data. Experiments on ChineseEnglish and English-French translation tasks show that agreement-based joint training significantly improves both alignment and translation quality over independent training.