Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Multi-Modal Interaction Graph Convolutional Network for Temporal Language Localization in Videos

This paper focuses on tackling the problem of temporal language localization in videos, which aims to identify the start and end points of a moment described by a natural language sentence in an untrimmed video. However, it is non-trivial since it requires not only the comprehensive understanding of the video and sentence query, but also the accurate semantic correspondence capture between them. Existing efforts are mainly centered on exploring the sequential relation among video clips and query words to reason the video and sentence query, neglecting the other intra-modal relations (e.g., semantic similarity among video clips and syntactic dependency among the query words). Towards this end, in this work, we propose a Multi-modal Interaction Graph Convolutional Network (MIGCN), which jointly explores the complex intra-modal relations and inter-modal interactions residing in the video and sentence query to facilitate the understanding and semantic correspondence capture of the video and sentence query. In addition, we devise an adaptive context-aware localization method, where the context information is taken into the candidate moments and the multi-scale fully connected layers are designed to rank and adjust the boundary of the generated coarse candidate moments with different lengths. Extensive experiments on Charades-STA and ActivityNet datasets demonstrate the promising performance and superior efficiency of our model.
A Faster and More Effective Cross-View Matching Method of UAV and Satellite Images for UAV Geolocalization

Cross-view geolocalization matches the same target in different images from various views, such as views of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and satellites, which is a key technology for UAVs to autonomously locate and navigate without a positioning system (e.g., GPS and GNSS). The most challenging aspect in this area is the shifting of targets and nonuniform scales among different views. Published methods focus on extracting coarse features from parts of images, but neglect the relationship between different views, and the influence of scale and shifting. To bridge this gap, an effective network is proposed with well-designed structures, referred to as multiscale block attention (MSBA), based on a local pattern network. MSBA cuts images into several parts with different scales, among which self-attention is applied to make feature extraction more efficient. The features of different views are extracted by a multibranch structure, which was designed to make different branches learn from each other, leading to a more subtle relationship between views. The method was implemented with the newest UAV-based geolocalization dataset. Compared with the existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) method, MSBA accuracy improved by almost 10% when the inference time was equal to that of the SOTA method; when the accuracy of MSBA was the same as that of the SOTA method, inference time was shortened by 30%.
GestuRING: A Web-based Tool for Designing Gesture Input with Rings, Ring-Like, and Ring-Ready Devices

Despite an exciting area with many promises for innovations in wearable interactive systems, research on interaction techniques for smart rings lacks structured knowledge and readily-available resources for designers to systematically attain such innovations. In this work, we conduct a systematic literature review of ring-based gesture input, from which we extract key results and a large set of gesture commands for ring, ring-like, and ring-ready devices. We use these findings to deliver GestuRING, our web-based tool to support design of ring-based gesture input. GestuRING features a searchable gesture-to-function dictionary of 579 records with downloadable numerical data files and an associated YouTube video library. These resources are meant to assist the community in attaining further innovations in ring-based gesture input for interactive systems.
Privacy-Preserving Portrait Matting

Recently, there has been an increasing concern about the privacy issue raised by using personally identifiable information in machine learning. However, previous portrait matting methods were all based on identifiable portrait images. To fill the gap, we present P3M-10k in this paper, which is the first large-scale anonymized benchmark for Privacy-Preserving Portrait Matting. P3M-10k consists of 10,000 high-resolution face-blurred portrait images along with high-quality alpha mattes. We systematically evaluate both trimap-free and trimap-based matting methods on P3M-10k and find that existing matting methods show different generalization capabilities when following the Privacy-Preserving Training (PPT) setting, i.e., training on face-blurred images and testing on arbitrary images. To devise a better trimap-free portrait matting model, we propose P3M-Net, which leverages the power of a unified framework for both semantic perception and detail matting, and specifically emphasizes the interaction between them and the encoder to facilitate the matting process. Extensive experiments on P3M-10k demonstrate that P3M-Net outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of both objective metrics and subjective visual quality. Besides, it shows good generalization capacity under the PPT setting, confirming the value of P3M-10k for facilitating future research and enabling potential real-world applications. The source code and dataset are available at https://github.com/JizhiziLi/P3M.
When is resampling beneficial for feature selection with imbalanced wide data?

This paper studies the effects that combinations of balancing and feature selection techniques have on wide data (many more attributes than instances) when different classifiers are used. For this, an extensive study is done using 14 datasets, 3 balancing strategies, and 7 feature selection algorithms. The evaluation is carried out using 5 classification algorithms, analyzing the results for different percentages of selected features, and establishing the statistical significance using Bayesian tests. Some general conclusions of the study are that it is better to use RUS before the feature selection, while ROS and SMOTE offer better results when applied afterwards. Additionally, specific results are also obtained depending on the classifier used, for example, for Gaussian SVM the best performance is obtained when the feature selection is done with SVM-RFE before balancing the data with RUS.
Kauri

With the growing commercial interest in blockchains, permissioned implementations have received increasing attention. Unfortunately, the BFT consensus algorithms that are the backbone of most of these blockchains scale poorly and offer limited throughput. Many state-of-the-art algorithms require a single leader process to receive and validate votes from a quorum of processes and then broadcast the result, which is inherently non-scalable. Recent approaches avoid this bottleneck by using dissemination/aggregation trees to propagate values and collect and validate votes. However, the use of trees increases the round latency, which ultimately limits the throughput for deeper trees. In this paper we propose Kauri, a BFT communication abstraction that can sustain high throughput as the system size grows, leveraging a novel pipelining technique to perform scalable dissemination and aggregation on trees. Our evaluation shows that Kauri outperforms the throughput of state-of-the-art permissioned blockchain protocols, such as HotStuff, by up to 28x. Interestingly, in many scenarios, the parallelization provided by Kauri can also decrease the latency.
Synthetic Temporal Anomaly Guided End-to-End Video Anomaly Detection

Due to the limited availability of anomaly examples, video anomaly detection is often seen as one-class classification (OCC) problem. A popular way to tackle this problem is by utilizing an autoencoder (AE) trained only on normal data. At test time, the AE is then expected to reconstruct the normal input well while reconstructing the anomalies poorly. However, several studies show that, even with normal data only training, AEs can often start reconstructing anomalies as well which depletes their anomaly detection performance. To mitigate this, we propose a temporal pseudo anomaly synthesizer that generates fake-anomalies using only normal data. An AE is then trained to maximize the reconstruction loss on pseudo anomalies while minimizing this loss on normal data. This way, the AE is encouraged to produce distinguishable reconstructions for normal and anomalous frames. Extensive experiments and analysis on three challenging video anomaly datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach to improve the basic AEs in achieving superiority against several existing state-of-the-art models.
Solar Power Prediction Based on Satellite Measurements – A Graphical Learning Method for Tracking Cloud Motion

The stochastic cloud cover on photovoltaic (PV) panels affects the solar power outputs, producing high instability in the integrated power systems. It is an effective approach to track the cloud motion during short-term PV power forecasting based on data sources of satellite images. However, since temporal variations of these images are noisy and non-stationary, pixel-sensitive prediction methods are critically needed in order to seek a balance between the forecast precision and the huge computation burden due to a large image size. Hence, a graphical learning framework is proposed in this study for intra-hour PV power prediction. By simulating the cloud motion using bi-directional extrapolation, a directed graph is generated representing the pixel values from multiple frames of historical images. The nodes and edges in the graph denote the shapes and motion directions of the regions of interest (ROIs) in satellite images. A spatial-temporal graph neural network (GNN) is then proposed to deal with the graph. Comparing with conventional deep-learning-based models, GNN is more flexible for varying sizes of input, in order to be able to handle dynamic ROIs. Referring to the comparative studies, the proposed method greatly reduces the redundancy of image inputs without sacrificing the visual scope, and slightly improves the prediction accuracy.
Learning Behavior Trees with Genetic Programming in Unpredictable Environments

Modern industrial applications require robots to operate in unpredictable environments, and programs to be created with a minimal effort, to accommodate frequent changes to the task. Here, we show that genetic programming can be effectively used to learn the structure of a behavior tree (BT) to solve a robotic task in an unpredictable environment. We propose to use a simple simulator for learning, and demonstrate that the learned BTs can solve the same task in a realistic simulator, converging without the need for task specific heuristics, making our method appealing for real robotic applications.
Co-Transport for Class-Incremental Learning

Traditional learning systems are trained in closed-world for a fixed number of classes, and need pre-collected datasets in advance. However, new classes often emerge in real-world applications and should be learned incrementally. For example, in electronic commerce, new types of products appear daily, and in a social media community, new topics emerge frequently. Under such circumstances, incremental models should learn several new classes at a time without forgetting. We find a strong correlation between old and new classes in incremental learning, which can be applied to relate and facilitate different learning stages mutually. As a result, we propose CO-transport for class Incremental Learning (COIL), which learns to relate across incremental tasks with the class-wise semantic relationship. In detail, co-transport has two aspects: prospective transport tries to augment the old classifier with optimal transported knowledge as fast model adaptation. Retrospective transport aims to transport new class classifiers backward as old ones to overcome forgetting. With these transports, COIL efficiently adapts to new tasks, and stably resists forgetting. Experiments on benchmark and real-world multimedia datasets validate the effectiveness of our proposed method.
A pattern-aware self-attention network for distant supervised relation extraction

Distant supervised relation extraction is an efficient strategy of finding relational facts from unstructured text without labeled training data. A recent paradigm to develop relation extractors is using pre-trained Transformer language models to produce high-quality sentence representations. However, due to the original Transformer is weak at capturing local dependencies and phrasal structures, existing Transformer-based methods cannot identify various relational patterns in sentences. To address this issue, we propose a novel distant supervised relation extraction model, which employs a specific-designed pattern-aware self-attention network to automatically discover relational patterns for pre-trained Transformers in an end-to-end manner. Specifically, the proposed method assumes that the correlation between two adjacent tokens reflects the probability that they belong to the same pattern. Based on this assumption, a novel self-attention network is designed to generate the probability distribution of all patterns in a sentence. Then, the probability distribution is applied as a constraint in the first Transformer layer to encourage its attention heads to follow the relational pattern structures. As a result, fine-grained pattern information is enhanced in the pre-trained Transformer without losing global dependencies. Extensive experimental results on two popular benchmark datasets demonstrate that our model performs better than the state-of-the-art baselines.
Artificial Intelligence Based Body Sensor Network Framework—Narrative Review: Proposing an End-to-End Framework using Wearable Sensors, Real-Time Location Systems and Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning Algorithms for Data Collection, Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery in Sports and Healthcare

With the rising amount of data in the sports and health sectors, a plethora of applications using big data mining have become possible. Multiple frameworks have been proposed to mine, store, preprocess, and analyze physiological vitals data using artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms. Comparatively, less research has been done to collect potentially high volume, high-quality 'big data' in an organized, time-synchronized, and holistic manner to solve similar problems in multiple fields. Although a large number of data collection devices exist in the form of sensors. They are either highly specialized, univariate and fragmented in nature or exist in a lab setting. The current study aims to propose artificial intelligence-based body sensor network framework (AIBSNF), a framework for strategic use of body sensor networks (BSN), which combines with real-time location system (RTLS) and wearable biosensors to collect multivariate, low noise, and high-fidelity data. This facilitates gathering of time-synchronized location and physiological vitals data, which allows artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML)-based time series analysis. The study gives a brief overview of wearable sensor technology, RTLS, and provides use cases of AI/ML algorithms in the field of sensor fusion. The study also elaborates sample scenarios using a specific sensor network consisting of pressure sensors (insoles), accelerometers, gyroscopes, ECG, EMG, and RTLS position detectors for particular applications in the field of health care and sports. The AIBSNF may provide a solid blueprint for conducting research and development, forming a smooth end-to-end pipeline from data collection using BSN, RTLS and final stage analytics based on AI/ML algorithms.
FocusFace: Multi-task Contrastive Learning for Masked Face Recognition

SARS-CoV-2 has presented direct and indirect challenges to the scientific community. One of the most prominent indirect challenges advents from the mandatory use of face masks in a large number of countries. Face recognition methods struggle to perform identity verification with similar accuracy on masked and unmasked individuals. It has been shown that the performance of these methods drops considerably in the presence of face masks, especially if the reference image is unmasked. We propose FocusFace, a multi-task architecture that uses contrastive learning to be able to accurately perform masked face recognition. The proposed architecture is designed to be trained from scratch or to work on top of state-of-the-art face recognition methods without sacrificing the capabilities of a existing models in conventional face recognition tasks. We also explore different approaches to design the contrastive learning module. Results are presented in terms of masked-masked (M-M) and unmasked-masked (U-M) face verification performance. For both settings, the results are on par with published methods, but for M-M specifically, the proposed method was able to outperform all the solutions that it was compared to. We further show that when using our method on top of already existing methods the training computational costs decrease significantly while retaining similar performances. The implementation and the trained models are available at GitHub.
Memorize, Associate and Match: Embedding Enhancement via Fine-Grained Alignment for Image-Text Retrieval

Image-text retrieval aims to capture the semantic correlation between images and texts. Existing image-text retrieval methods can be roughly categorized into embedding learning paradigm and pair-wise learning paradigm. The former paradigm fails to capture the fine-grained correspondence between images and texts. The latter paradigm achieves finegrained alignment between regions and words, but the high cost of pair-wise computation leads to slow retrieval speed. In this paper, we propose a novel method named MEMBER by using Memory-based EMBedding Enhancement for image-text Retrieval (MEMBER), which introduces global memory banks to enable fine-grained alignment and fusion in embedding learning paradigm. Specifically, we enrich image (resp., text) features with relevant text (resp., image) features stored in the text (resp., image) memory bank. In this way, our model not only accomplishes mutual embedding enhancement across two modalities, but also maintains the retrieval efficiency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our MEMBER remarkably outperforms stateof- the-art approaches on two large-scale benchmark datasets.
Self-organizing radial basis function neural network using accelerated second-order learning algorithm

Gradient-based algorithms are commonly used for training radial basis function neural network (RBFNN). However, it is still difficult to avoid vanishing gradient to improve the learning performance in the training process. For this reason, in this paper, an accelerated second-order learning (ASOL) algorithm is developed to train RBFNN. First, an adaptive expansion and pruning mechanism (AEPM) of gradient space, based on the integrity and orthogonality of hidden neurons, is designed. Then, the effective gradient information is constantly added to gradient space and the redundant gradient information is eliminated from gradient space. Second, with AEPM, the neurons are generated or pruned accordingly. In this way, a self-organizing RBFNN (SORBFNN) which reduces the structure complexity and improves the generalization ability is obtained. Then, the structure and parameters in the learning process can be optimized by the proposed ASOL-based SORBFNN (ASOL-SORBFNN). Third, some theoretical analyses including the efficiency of the proposed AEPM on avoiding the vanishing gradient and the stability of SORBFNN in the process of structural adjustment are given, then the successful application of the proposed ASOL-SORBFNN is guaranteed. Finally, to illustrate the advantages of the proposed ASOL-SORBFNN, several experimental studies are examined. By comparing with other existing approaches, the results show that ASOL-SORBFNN performs well in terms of both learning speed and prediction accuracy.
Big data directed acyclic graph model for real-time COVID-19 twitter stream detection

Every day, large-scale data are continuously generated on social media as streams, such as Twitter, which inform us about all events around the world in real-time. Notably, Twitter is one of the effective platforms to update countries leaders and scientists during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Other people have also used this platform to post their concerns about the spread of this virus and a rapid increase of death cases globally. The aim of this work is to detect anomalous events associated with COVID-19 from Twitter. To this end, we propose a distributed Directed Acyclic Graph topology framework to aggregate and process large-scale real-time tweets related to COVID-19. The core of our system is a novel lightweight algorithm that can automatically detect anomaly events. In addition, our system can also identify, cluster, and visualize important keywords in tweets. On 18 August 2020, our model detected the highest anomaly since many tweets mentioned the casualties' updates and the debates on the pandemic that day. We obtained the three most commonly listed terms on Twitter: "covid", "death", and "Trump" (21,566, 11,779, and 4761 occurrences, respectively), with the highest TF-IDF score for these terms: "people" (0.63637), "school" (0.5921407) and "virus" (0.57385). From our clustering result, the word "death", "corona", and "case" are grouped into one cluster, where the word "pandemic", "school", and "president" are grouped as another cluster. These terms were located near each other on vector space so that they were clustered, indicating people's most concerned topics on Twitter.
V2W-BERT: A Framework for Effective Hierarchical Multiclass Classification of Software Vulnerabilities

We consider the problem of automating the mapping of observed vulnerabilities in software listed in Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) reports to weaknesses listed in Common Weakness Enumerations (CWE) reports, a hierarchically designed dictionary of software weaknesses. Mapping of CVEs to CWEs provides a means to understand how they might be exploited for malicious purposes, and to mitigate their impact. Since manual mapping of CVEs to CWEs is not a viable approach due to their ever-increasing sizes, automated approaches need to be devised but obtaining highly accurate mapping is a challenging problem. We present a novel Transformer-based learning framework (V2W-BERT) in this paper to solve this problem by bringing together ideas from natural language processing, link prediction and transfer learning. Our method outperforms previous approaches not only for CWE instances with abundant data to train, but also for rare CWE classes with little or no data. Using vulnerability and weakness reports from MITRE and the National Vulnerability Database, we achieve up to 97% prediction accuracy for randomly partitioned data and up to 94% prediction accuracy in temporally partitioned data. We demonstrate significant improvements in using historical data to predict weaknesses for future instances of CVEs. We believe that our work will would influence the design of better automated mapping approaches, and also that this technology could be deployed for more effective cybersecurity.