Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
UDepth: Fast Monocular Depth Estimation for Visually-guided Underwater Robots

In this paper, we present a fast monocular depth estimation method for enabling 3D perception capabilities of low-cost underwater robots. We formulate a novel end-to-end deep visual learning pipeline named UDepth, which incorporates domain knowledge of image formation characteristics of natural underwater scenes. First, we adapt a new input space from raw RGB image space by exploiting underwater light attenuation prior, and then devise a least-squared formulation for coarse pixel-wise depth prediction. Subsequently, we extend this into a domain projection loss that guides the end-to-end learning of UDepth on over 9K RGB-D training samples. UDepth is designed with a computationally light MobileNetV2 backbone and a Transformer-based optimizer for ensuring fast inference rates on embedded systems. By domain-aware design choices and through comprehensive experimental analyses, we demonstrate that it is possible to achieve state-of-the-art depth estimation performance while ensuring a small computational footprint. Specifically, with 70%-80% less network parameters than existing benchmarks, UDepth achieves comparable and often better depth estimation performance. While the full model offers over 66 FPS (13 FPS) inference rates on a single GPU (CPU core), our domain projection for coarse depth prediction runs at 51.5 FPS rates on single-board NVIDIA Jetson TX2s. The inference pipelines are available at https://github.com/uf-robopi/UDepth.
A Deep Learning Approximation of Non-Stationary Solutions to Wave Kinetic Equations

We present a deep learning approximation, stochastic optimization based, method for wave kinetic equations. To build confidence in our approach, we apply the method to a Smoluchowski coagulation equation with multiplicative kernel for which an analytic solution exists. Our deep learning approach is then used to approximate the non-stationary solution to a 3-wave kinetic equation corresponding to acoustic wave systems. To validate the neural network approximation, we compare the decay rate of the total energy with previously obtained theoretical results. A finite volume solution is presented and compared with the present method.
WARC-DL: Scalable Web Archive Processing for Deep Learning

Web archives have grown to petabytes. In addition to providing invaluable background knowledge on many social and cultural developments over the last 30 years, they also provide vast amounts of training data for machine learning. To benefit from recent developments in Deep Learning, the use of web archives requires a scalable solution for their processing that supports inference with and training of neural networks. To date, there is no publicly available library for processing web archives in this way, and some existing applications use workarounds. This paper presents WARC-DL, a deep learning-enabled pipeline for web archive processing that scales to petabytes.
Decentralised possibilistic inference with applications to target tracking

Fusing and sharing information from multiple sensors over a network is a challenging task. Part of this challenge arises from the absence of a foundational rule for fusing probability distributions, with various approaches stemming from different principles. Yet, when expressing tracking algorithms within the framework of possibility theory, one specific fusion rule can be proved to be exact in the sense that it is equivalent to the non-distributed possibilistic approach. In this article, this fusion rule is applied to decentralised fusion, based on the possibilistic analogue of the Bernoulli filter. We then show that the proposed approach outperforms its probabilistic counterpart on simulated data.
SpeedLimit: Neural Architecture Search for Quantized Transformer Models

While research in the field of transformer models has primarily focused on enhancing performance metrics such as accuracy and perplexity, practical applications in industry often necessitate a rigorous consideration of inference latency constraints. Addressing this challenge, we introduce SpeedLimit, a novel Neural Architecture Search (NAS) technique that optimizes accuracy whilst adhering to an upper-bound latency constraint. Our method incorporates 8-bit integer quantization in the search process to outperform the current state-of-the-art technique. Our results underline the feasibility and efficacy of seeking an optimal balance between performance and latency, providing new avenues for deploying state-of-the-art transformer models in latency-sensitive environments.
Burstein's permutation conjecture, Hong and Li's inversion sequence conjecture, and restricted Eulerian distributions

Recently, Hong and Li launched a systematic study of length-four pattern avoidance in inversion sequences, and in particular, they conjectured that the number of $0021$-avoiding inversion sequences can be enumerated by the OEIS entry A218225. Meanwhile, Burstein suggested that the same sequence might also count three sets of pattern restricted permutations. The objective of this paper is not only a confirmation of Hong and Li's conjecture and Burstein's first conjecture, but also two more delicate generating function identities with the $\mathsf{ides}$ statistic concerned in the restricted permutation case, and the $\mathsf{asc}$ statistic concerned in the restricted inversion sequence case, which yield a new equidistribution result.
Lightweight Image Codec via Multi-Grid Multi-Block-Size Vector Quantization (MGBVQ)

A multi-grid multi-block-size vector quantization (MGBVQ) method is proposed for image coding in this work. The fundamental idea of image coding is to remove correlations among pixels before quantization and entropy coding, e.g., the discrete cosine transform (DCT) and intra predictions, adopted by modern image coding standards. We present a new method to remove pixel correlations. First, by decomposing correlations into long- and short-range correlations, we represent long-range correlations in coarser grids due to their smoothness, thus leading to a multi-grid (MG) coding architecture. Second, we show that short-range correlations can be effectively coded by a suite of vector quantizers (VQs). Along this line, we argue the effectiveness of VQs of very large block sizes and present a convenient way to implement them. It is shown by experimental results that MGBVQ offers excellent rate-distortion (RD) performance, which is comparable with existing image coders, at much lower complexity. Besides, it provides a progressive coded bitstream.
Joint Triplet Loss Learning for Next New POI Recommendation

Sparsity of the User-POI matrix is a well established problem for next POI recommendation, which hinders effective learning of user preferences. Focusing on a more granular extension of the problem, we propose a Joint Triplet Loss Learning (JTLL) module for the Next New ($N^2$) POI recommendation task, which is more challenging. Our JTLL module first computes additional training samples from the users' historical POI visit sequence, then, a designed triplet loss function is proposed to decrease and increase distances of POI and user embeddings based on their respective relations. Next, the JTLL module is jointly trained with recent approaches to additionally learn unvisited relations for the recommendation task. Experiments conducted on two known real-world LBSN datasets show that our joint training module was able to improve the performances of recent existing works.
Dive into Self-Supervised Learning for Medical Image Analysis: Data, Models and Tasks

Self-supervised learning (SSL) has achieved remarkable performance in various medical imaging tasks by dint of priors from massive unlabelled data. However, regarding a specific downstream task, there is still a lack of an instruction book on how to select suitable pretext tasks and implementation details throughout the standard ``pretrain-then-finetune'' workflow. In this work, we focus on exploiting the capacity of SSL in terms of four realistic and significant issues: (1) the impact of SSL on imbalanced datasets, (2) the network architecture, (3) the applicability of upstream tasks to downstream tasks and (4) the stacking effect of SSL and common policies for deep learning. We provide a large-scale, in-depth and fine-grained study through extensive experiments on predictive, contrastive, generative and multi-SSL algorithms. Based on the results, we have uncovered several insights. Positively, SSL advances class-imbalanced learning mainly by boosting the performance of the rare class, which is of interest to clinical diagnosis. Unfortunately, SSL offers marginal or even negative returns in some cases, including severely imbalanced and relatively balanced data regimes, as well as combinations with common training policies. Our intriguing findings provide practical guidelines for the usage of SSL in the medical context and highlight the need for developing universal pretext tasks to accommodate diverse application scenarios.
Learn what matters: cross-domain imitation learning with task-relevant embeddings

We study how an autonomous agent learns to perform a task from demonstrations in a different domain, such as a different environment or different agent. Such cross-domain imitation learning is required to, for example, train an artificial agent from demonstrations of a human expert. We propose a scalable framework that enables cross-domain imitation learning without access to additional demonstrations or further domain knowledge. We jointly train the learner agent's policy and learn a mapping between the learner and expert domains with adversarial training. We effect this by using a mutual information criterion to find an embedding of the expert's state space that contains task-relevant information and is invariant to domain specifics. This step significantly simplifies estimating the mapping between the learner and expert domains and hence facilitates end-to-end learning. We demonstrate successful transfer of policies between considerably different domains, without extra supervision such as additional demonstrations, and in situations where other methods fail.
Impact of a non-deterministic rekey interval on the performance of arc4random

This paper is intended to provide the readers with a clear understanding of the modification done to the pseudo-random number generator (PRNG) arc4random. The arc4random PRNG was modified to implement a non-deterministic rekey interval. A comparison was made with the unpatched version regarding performance and the rekey interval's randomization. All measurements were done when the rekey was performed. A slight increase in performance was observed, and the rekey interval was randomized as expected.
Controllable Face Manipulation and UV Map Generation by Self-supervised Learning

Although manipulating facial attributes by Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) has been remarkably successful recently, there are still some challenges in explicit control of features such as pose, expression, lighting, etc. Recent methods achieve explicit control over 2D images by combining 2D generative model and 3DMM. However, due to the lack of realism and clarity in texture reconstruction by 3DMM, there is a domain gap between the synthetic image and the rendered image of 3DMM. Since rendered 3DMM images contain facial region only without the background, directly computing the loss between these two domains is not ideal and the resultant trained model will be biased. In this study, we propose to explicitly edit the latent space of the pretrained StyleGAN by controlling the parameters of the 3DMM. To address the domain gap problem, we propose a noval network called 'Map and edit' and a simple but effective attribute editing method to avoid direct loss computation between rendered and synthesized images. Furthermore, since our model can accurately generate multi-view face images while the identity remains unchanged. As a by-product, combined with visibility masks, our proposed model can also generate texture-rich and high-resolution UV facial textures. Our model relies on pretrained StyleGAN, and the proposed model is trained in a self-supervised manner without any manual annotations or datasets.
Mastering the Unsupervised Reinforcement Learning Benchmark from Pixels

Controlling artificial agents from visual sensory data is an arduous task. Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms can succeed but require large amounts of interactions between the agent and the environment. To alleviate the issue, unsupervised RL proposes to employ self-supervised interaction and learning, for adapting faster to future tasks. Yet, as shown in the Unsupervised RL Benchmark (URLB; Laskin et al. 2021), whether current unsupervised strategies can improve generalization capabilities is still unclear, especially in visual control settings. In this work, we study the URLB and propose a new method to solve it, using unsupervised model-based RL, for pre-training the agent, and a task-aware fine-tuning strategy combined with a new proposed hybrid planner, Dyna-MPC, to adapt the agent for downstream tasks. On URLB, our method obtains 93.59% overall normalized performance, surpassing previous baselines by a staggering margin. The approach is empirically evaluated through a large-scale empirical study, which we use to validate our design choices and analyze our models. We also show robust performance on the Real-Word RL benchmark, hinting at resiliency to environment perturbations during adaptation. Project website: https://masteringurlb.github.io/
Deep Neural Networks for Visual Reasoning

Visual perception and language understanding are - fundamental components of human intelligence, enabling them to understand and reason about objects and their interactions. It is crucial for machines to have this capacity to reason using these two modalities to invent new robot-human collaborative systems. Recent advances in deep learning have built separate sophisticated representations of both visual scenes and languages. However, understanding the associations between the two modalities in a shared context for multimodal reasoning remains a challenge. Focusing on language and vision modalities, this thesis advances the understanding of how to exploit and use pivotal aspects of vision-and-language tasks with neural networks to support reasoning. We derive these understandings from a series of works, making a two-fold contribution: (i) effective mechanisms for content selection and construction of temporal relations from dynamic visual scenes in response to a linguistic query and preparing adequate knowledge for the reasoning process (ii) new frameworks to perform reasoning with neural networks by exploiting visual-linguistic associations, deduced either directly from data or guided by external priors.
Tradeoffs between convergence rate and noise amplification for momentum-based accelerated optimization algorithms

We study momentum-based first-order optimization algorithms in which the iterations utilize information from the two previous steps and are subject to an additive white noise. This class of algorithms includes Polyak's heavy-ball and Nesterov's accelerated methods as special cases and noise accounts for uncertainty in either gradient evaluation or iteration updates. For strongly convex quadratic problems, we use the steady-state variance of the error in the optimization variable to quantify noise amplification and identify fundamental stochastic performance tradeoffs. Our approach utilizes the Jury stability criterion to provide a novel geometric characterization of conditions for linear convergence, and it clarifies the relation between the noise amplification and convergence rate as well as their dependence on the condition number and the constant algorithmic parameters. This geometric insight leads to simple alternative proofs of standard convergence results and allows us to establish analytical lower bounds on the product between the settling time and noise amplification that scale quadratically with the condition number. Our analysis also identifies a key difference between the gradient and iterate noise models: while the amplification of gradient noise can be made arbitrarily small by sufficiently decelerating the algorithm, the best achievable variance amplification for the iterate noise model increases linearly with the settling time in decelerating regime. Furthermore, we introduce two parameterized families of algorithms that strike a balance between noise amplification and settling time while preserving order-wise Pareto optimality for both noise models. Finally, by analyzing a class of accelerated gradient flow dynamics, whose suitable discretization yields the two-step momentum algorithm, we establish that stochastic performance tradeoffs also extend to continuous time.
Are Machine Programming Systems using Right Source-Code Measures to Select Code Repositories?

Machine programming (MP) is an emerging field at the intersection of deterministic and probabilistic computing, and it aims to assist software and hardware engineers, among other applications. Along with powerful compute resources, MP systems often rely on vast amount of open-source code to learn interesting properties about code and programming and solve problems in the areas of debugging, code recommendation, auto-completion, etc. Unfortunately, several of the existing MP systems either do not consider quality of code repositories or use atypical quality measures than those typically used in software engineering community to select them. As such, impact of quality of code repositories on the performance of these systems needs to be studied. In this preliminary paper, we evaluate impact of different quality repositories on the performance of a candidate MP system. Towards that objective, we develop a framework, named GitRank, to rank open-source repositories on quality, maintainability, and popularity by leveraging existing research on this topic. We then apply GitRank to evaluate correlation between the quality measures used by the candidate MP system and the quality measures used by our framework. Our preliminary results reveal some correlation between the quality measures used in GitRank and ControlFlag's performance, suggesting that some of the measures used in GitRank are applicable to ControlFlag. But it also raises questions around right quality measures for code repositories used in MP systems. We believe that our findings also generate interesting insights towards code quality measures that affect performance of MP systems.
A Simple Strategy to Provable Invariance via Orbit Mapping

Many applications require robustness, or ideally invariance, of neural networks to certain transformations of input data. Most commonly, this requirement is addressed by training data augmentation, using adversarial training, or defining network architectures that include the desired invariance by design. In this work, we propose a method to make network architectures provably invariant with respect to group actions by choosing one element from a (possibly continuous) orbit based on a fixed criterion. In a nutshell, we intend to 'undo' any possible transformation before feeding the data into the actual network. Further, we empirically analyze the properties of different approaches which incorporate invariance via training or architecture, and demonstrate the advantages of our method in terms of robustness and computational efficiency. In particular, we investigate the robustness with respect to rotations of images (which can hold up to discretization artifacts) as well as the provable orientation and scaling invariance of 3D point cloud classification.
Consideration on the Path of Non- original Database Rights Protection

In the current civil and commercial cases involving disputes over the ownership of data, judges tend to use the Anti-unfair Competition Law to regulate and protect the property rights and interests of databases. However, due to the limited scope of adjustment, incomprehensive protection, and other defects of the Anti-unfair Competition Law, the Anti-unfair Competition Law is not sufficient to regulate database rights and interests. In response, the Western countries have adopted special Database Protection Directive which has been transformed into a special protection for databases. There is also a new model of protection under patent laws. In the era of the booming development of big data, the problem of database rights and interests protection urgently needs a more comprehensive legislative solution.
A novel architecture of a secure medical system using dag

Electronic health information exchange allows providers to healthcare providers and patients to securely access vital medical information of the patient and share it in electronically with other healthcare providers. The paper considers the electronic health system eHealth. The patient's medical records will be stored in a distributed ledger, and not on the server of the medical institution. So no one can change patient data or deny him access to his own data. The use of DAG is considered on the example of the transfer of medical patient data to the doctor. The process of creating and sending medical data to DAG is illustrated with a specific example.
Many-to-Many Voice Conversion based Feature Disentanglement using Variational Autoencoder

Voice conversion is a challenging task which transforms the voice characteristics of a source speaker to a target speaker without changing linguistic content. Recently, there have been many works on many-to-many Voice Conversion (VC) based on Variational Autoencoder (VAEs) achieving good results, however, these methods lack the ability to disentangle speaker identity and linguistic content to achieve good performance on unseen speaker scenarios. In this paper, we propose a new method based on feature disentanglement to tackle many to many voice conversion. The method has the capability to disentangle speaker identity and linguistic content from utterances, it can convert from many source speakers to many target speakers with a single autoencoder network. Moreover, it naturally deals with the unseen target speaker scenarios. We perform both objective and subjective evaluations to show the competitive performance of our proposed method compared with other state-of-the-art models in terms of naturalness and target speaker similarity.
Pendampingan Penerapan SIA dalam Perlakuan Akuntansi Persediaan pada PT Ngabar Mandiri Sejahtera

The objectives of this community service are 1) assistance in the application of PT Ngabar Mandiri Sejahtera's Inventory Recognition, 2) assistance in the application of inventory value measurement with the PT Ngabar Mandiri Sejahtera cost formula, 3) assistance in the application of presentation of financial statements to inventory at PT Ngabar Mandiri Sejahtera. The results of the mentoring activity regarding the application of analysis of the application of accounting information systems to the accounting treatment of inventory for employees of PT Ngabar Mandiri Sejahtera as activity participants were able to understand about 1 type of inventory, namely inventory that is ready to be resold (merchandise inventory). The inventory recognition itself is recognized when the goods arrive at the warehouse and the purchase receipt arrives at the PT. The recording of merchandise is distinguished according to the classification of the type of goods. Stock taking activities themselves are carried out at the end of each period or end of the year. Inventory valuation is only based on cost (purchase price). Meanwhile, in SAK ETAP, inventory valuation is carried out by measuring the lower of the cost and selling price less costs to complete and sell. In presenting its financial statements, its accounting inventory is disclosed in the financial statements (income statement and balance sheet).