Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Robust machine learning segmentation for large-scale analysis of heterogeneous clinical brain MRI datasets

Every year, millions of brain MRI scans are acquired in hospitals, which is a figure considerably larger than the size of any research dataset. Therefore, the ability to analyze such scans could transform neuroimaging research. Yet, their potential remains untapped since no automated algorithm is robust enough to cope with the high variability in clinical acquisitions (MR contrasts, resolutions, orientations, artifacts, and subject populations). Here, we present SynthSeg+, an AI segmentation suite that enables robust analysis of heterogeneous clinical datasets. In addition to whole-brain segmentation, SynthSeg+ also performs cortical parcellation, intracranial volume estimation, and automated detection of faulty segmentations (mainly caused by scans of very low quality). We demonstrate SynthSeg+ in seven experiments, including an aging study on 14,000 scans, where it accurately replicates atrophy patterns observed on data of much higher quality. SynthSeg+ is publicly released as a ready-to-use tool to unlock the potential of quantitative morphometry.
Experimental quantum secret sharing based on phase encoding of coherent states

Quantum secret sharing (QSS) is one of the basic communication primitives in future quantum networks which addresses part of the basic cryptographic tasks of multiparty communication and computation. Nevertheless, it is a challenge to provide a practical QSS protocol with security against general attacks. A QSS protocol that balances security and practicality is still lacking. Here, we propose a QSS protocol with simple phase encoding of coherent states among three parties. Removing the requirement of impractical entangled resources and the need for phase randomization, our protocol can be implemented with accessible technology. We provide the finite-key analysis against coherent attacks and implement a proof-of-principle experiment to demonstrate our scheme's feasibility. Our scheme achieves a key rate of 85.3 bps under a 35 dB channel loss. Combined with security against general attacks and accessible technology, our protocol is a promising candidate for practical multiparty quantum communication networks.
Comparison of Mammography AI Algorithms with a Clinical Risk Model for 5-year Breast Cancer Risk Prediction: An Observational Study

Background Although several clinical breast cancer risk models are used to guide screening and prevention, they have only moderate discrimination. Purpose To compare selected existing mammography artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms and the Breast Cancer Surveillance Consortium (BCSC) risk model for prediction of 5-year risk. Materials and Methods This retrospective case-cohort study included data in women with a negative screening mammographic examination (no visible evidence of cancer) in 2016, who were followed until 2021 at Kaiser Permanente Northern California. Women with prior breast cancer or a highly penetrant gene mutation were excluded. Of the 324 009 eligible women, a random subcohort was selected, regardless of cancer status, to which all additional patients with breast cancer were added. The index screening mammographic examination was used as input for five AI algorithms to generate continuous scores that were compared with the BCSC clinical risk score. Risk estimates for incident breast cancer 0 to 5 years after the initial mammographic examination were calculated using a time-dependent area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC). Results The subcohort included 13 628 patients, of whom 193 had incident cancer. Incident cancers in eligible patients (additional 4391 of 324 009) were also included. For incident cancers at 0 to 5 years, the time-dependent AUC for BCSC was 0.61 (95% CI: 0.60, 0.62). AI algorithms had higher time-dependent AUCs than did BCSC, ranging from 0.63 to 0.67 (Bonferroni-adjusted P < .0016). Time-dependent AUCs for combined BCSC and AI models were slightly higher than AI alone (AI with BCSC time-dependent AUC range, 0.66-0.68; Bonferroni-adjusted P < .0016). Conclusion When using a negative screening examination, AI algorithms performed better than the BCSC risk model for predicting breast cancer risk at 0 to 5 years. Combined AI and BCSC models further improved prediction. © RSNA, 2023 Supplemental material is available for this article.
Attend-and-Excite: Attention-Based Semantic Guidance for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

Recent text-to-image generative models have demonstrated an unparalleled ability to generate diverse and creative imagery guided by a target text prompt. While revolutionary, current state-of-the-art diffusion models may still fail in generating images that fully convey the semantics in the given text prompt. We analyze the publicly available Stable Diffusion model and assess the existence of catastrophic neglect , where the model fails to generate one or more of the subjects from the input prompt. Moreover, we find that in some cases the model also fails to correctly bind attributes ( e.g. , colors) to their corresponding subjects. To help mitigate these failure cases, we introduce the concept of Generative Semantic Nursing (GSN) , where we seek to intervene in the generative process on the fly during inference time to improve the faithfulness of the generated images. Using an attention-based formulation of GSN, dubbed Attend-and-Excite , we guide the model to refine the cross-attention units to attend to all subject tokens in the text prompt and strengthen --- or excite --- their activations, encouraging the model to generate all subjects described in the text prompt. We compare our approach to alternative approaches and demonstrate that it conveys the desired concepts more faithfully across a range of text prompts. Code is available at our project page: https://attendandexcite.github.io/Attend-and-Excite/.
Super-NaturalInstructions: Generalization via Declarative Instructions on 1600+ NLP Tasks

How well can NLP models generalize to a variety of unseen tasks when provided with task instructions?To address this question, we first introduce SUPER-NATURALINSTRUCTIONS, 1 a benchmark of 1,616 diverse NLP tasks and their expert-written instructions.Our collection covers 76 distinct task types, including but not limited to classification, extraction, infilling, sequence tagging, text rewriting, and text composition.This large and diverse collection of tasks enables rigorous benchmarking of cross-task generalization under instructionstraining models to follow instructions on a subset of tasks and evaluating them on the remaining unseen ones.Furthermore, we build Tk-INSTRUCT, a transformer model trained to follow a variety of in-context instructions (plain language task definitions or k-shot examples).Our experiments show that Tk-INSTRUCT outperforms existing instruction-following models such as Instruct-GPT by over 9% on our benchmark despite being an order of magnitude smaller.We further analyze generalization as a function of various scaling parameters, such as the number of observed tasks, the number of instances per task, and model sizes.We hope our dataset and model facilitate future progress towards more general-purpose NLP models. 2
Integrating Monte Carlo Tree Search with Knowledge-Based Methods to Create Engaging Play in a Commercial Mobile Game

Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) has produced many recent breakthroughs in game AI research, particularly in computer Go. In this paper we consider how MCTS can be applied to create engaging AI for a popular commercial mobile phone game: Spades by AI Factory, which has been downloaded more than 2.5 million times. In particular, we show how MCTS can be integrated with knowledge-based methods to create an interesting, fun and strong player which makes far fewer plays that could be perceived by human observers as blunders than MCTS without the injection of knowledge. These blunders are particularly noticeable for Spades, where a human player must co-operate with an AI partner. MCTS gives objectively stronger play than the knowledge-based approach used in previous versions of the game and offers the flexibility to customise behaviour whilst maintaining a reusable core, with a reduced development cycle compared to purely knowledge-based techniques.
Perfect Hashing for State Space Exploration on the GPU

This paper exploits parallel computing power of graphics cards to accelerate state space search. We illustrate that modern graphics processing units (GPUs) have the potential to speed up breadth-first search significantly. For a bitvector representation of the search frontier, GPU algorithms with one and two bits per state are presented. Efficient perfect hash functions and their inverse are explored in order to achieve enhanced compression. We report maximal speed-ups of up to a factor of 27 wrt. single core CPU computation.
Incorporating Search Algorithms into RTS Game Agents

Real-time strategy (RTS) games are known to be one of the most complex gamegenres for humans to play, as well as one of the most difficult games forcomputer AI agents to play well. To tackle the task of applying AI to RTSgames, recent techniques have focused on a divide-and-conquer approach,splitting the game into strategic components, and developing separate systemsto solve each. This trend gives rise to a new problem: how to tie thesesystems together into a functional real-time strategy game playing agent. Inthis paper we discuss the architecture of UAlbertaBot, our entry into the 2011/2012 StarCraft AI competitions, and the techniques used to include heuristic search based AI systems for the intelligent automation of both build order planning and unit control for combat scenarios.
Abstraction-Guided Sampling for Motion Planning

Motion planning in continuous space is a fundamentalrobotics problem that has been approached from many per-spectives. Rapidly-exploring Random Trees (RRTs) usesampling to efficiently traverse the continuous and high-dimensional state space. Heuristic graph search methods uselower bounds on solution cost to focus effort on portions ofthe space that are likely to be traversed by low-cost solutions.In this work, we bring these two ideas together in a tech-nique called f -biasing: we use estimates of solution cost,computed as in heuristic search, to guide sparse sampling,as in RRTs. We see this new technique as strengthening theconnections between motion planning in robotics and combi-natorial search in artificial intelligence.
Optimising Matrix Product State Simulations of Shor's Algorithm

We detail techniques to optimise high-level classical simulations of Shor's quantum factoring algorithm. Chief among these is to examine the entangling properties of the circuit and to effectively map it across the one-dimensional structure of a matrix product state. Compared to previous approaches whose space requirements depend on <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"><mml:mi>r</mml:mi></mml:math>, the solution to the underlying order-finding problem of Shor's algorithm, our approach depends on its factors. We performed a matrix product state simulation of a 60-qubit instance of Shor's algorithm that would otherwise be infeasible to complete without an optimised entanglement mapping.
Finite-Time $\mathcal{H}_{\infty}$ Controller Synthesis of T–S Fuzzy Systems

This paper studies the finite-time H <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">∞</sub> control problem of T-S fuzzy systems subject to external disturbances. A novel fuzzy control approach is developed on the basis of the control Lyapunov function technique and the finite-time Lyapunov theorem so that the closed-loop fuzzy system is finite-time stable with guaranteed H <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">∞</sub> performance. It is shown that the proposed control approach does not require the existence of a Lyapunov function before design of the fuzzy controller in comparison with many existing control approaches to finite-time control of nonlinear systems via the technique of control Lyapunov functions, and thus, the finite-time controller and the corresponding Lyapunov function can be designed simultaneously. The procedures on how to obtain the fuzzy controller are provided in terms of linear matrix inequalities. Moreover, an upper bound on the time taken for state trajectories to arrive at their desired targets is estimated. The effectiveness of the proposed finite-time H <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">∞</sub> control approach is finally illustrated via numerical simulations.
Fast linear sum assignment with error-correction and no cost constraints

We propose an algorithm that efficiently solves the linear sum assignment problem with error-correction and no cost constraints. This problem is encountered for instance in the approximation of the graph edit distance. The fastest currently available solvers for the linear sum assignment problem require the pairwise costs to respect the triangle inequality. Our algorithm is as fast as these algorithms, but manages to drop the cost constraint. The main technical ingredient of our algorithm is a cost-dependent factorization of the node substitutions.
General Value Function Networks

State construction is important for learning in partially observable environments. A general purpose strategy for state construction is to learn the state update using a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), which updates the internal state using the current internal state and the most recent observation. This internal state provides a summary of the observed sequence, to facilitate accurate predictions and decision-making. At the same time, specifying and training RNNs is notoriously tricky, particularly as the common strategy to approximate gradients back in time, called truncated Back-prop Through Time (BPTT), can be sensitive to the truncation window. Further, domain-expertise—which can usually help constrain the function class and so improve trainability—can be difficult to incorporate into complex recurrent units used within RNNs. In this work, we explore how to use multi-step predictions to constrain the RNN and incorporate prior knowledge. In particular, we revisit the idea of using predictions to construct state and ask: does constraining (parts of) the state to consist of predictions about the future improve RNN trainability? We formulate a novel RNN architecture, called a General Value Function Network (GVFN), where each internal state component corresponds to a prediction about the future represented as a value function. We first provide an objective for optimizing GVFNs, and derive several algorithms to optimize this objective. We then show that GVFNs are more robust to the truncation level, in many cases only requiring one-step gradient updates.
A Novel Measurement Data Classification Algorithm Based on SVM for Tracking Closely Spaced Targets

Target tracking is an important field of investigation in wireless sensor networks. When multiple targets are closely spaced, their measurement points are mixed together due to the insufficient accuracy of the sensor. This may bring some difficulties in determining the positions of observation points required by subsequent algorithms and applications. Most of the known tracking algorithms are derived from the Kalman filter, extended Kalman filter, and particles filter. In this paper, a novel measurement data classification algorithm based on support vector machine (SVM) is provided. SVM and Kalman filter are combined to obtain the updated classification line at each sampling period, and the sampling points would be classified by the updated classification line to calculate the coordinates of the corresponding observation points, which are then used to estimate the precise positions of two targets. A series of simulations and experiments are carried out to validate the presented algorithm on classifying and tracking two targets moving closely. Simulation results for a maneuvering targets classification example illustrate the feasibility of the new algorithm, as well as experimental and quantitative results from the practical data validate the effectiveness and stability of our proposal in contrast with existing methods.
Reducing the communication complexity of quantum private database queries by subtle classical post-processing with relaxed quantum ability

Existing protocols for private database queries in the quantum context are classified into two-dimensional protocols and d-dimensional ones. For the two-dimensional protocols, to obtain a meaningful n-bit message from the database, the user Alice has to query n times to get all the n bits. However, each query may leak Alice's privacy once the server Bob obtains the address she queried, since each queried bit contributes to the whole queried message. Apparently, the longer the queried message is, the worse the user privacy becomes. By contrast, the d-dimensional protocol allows the user to query a multi-bit block with length no more than logd from the database via only one query. In this paper, we propose a novel d-dimensional quantum protocol for private database query. In contrast to existing d-dimensional protocols, the proposed protocol allows the user to retrieve a message of theoretically arbitrary length without the limitation of the dimension d by using a subtle classical post-processing strategy. Furthermore, the server's outcomes of measurement can be irrelevant for the implementation of the protocol thus relaxing his/her quantum ability. Finally, the security of the proposed protocol in the zero-error case has been proved in terms of the user privacy and database security.
Attentive Tensor Product Learning

This paper proposes a novel neural architecture — Attentive Tensor Product Learning (ATPL) — to represent grammatical structures of natural language in deep learning models. ATPL exploits Tensor Product Representations (TPR), a structured neural-symbolic model developed in cognitive science, to integrate deep learning with explicit natural language structures and rules. The key ideas of ATPL are: 1) unsupervised learning of role-unbinding vectors of words via the TPR-based deep neural network; 2) the use of attention modules to compute TPR; and 3) the integration of TPR with typical deep learning architectures including long short-term memory and feedforward neural networks. The novelty of our approach lies in its ability to extract the grammatical structure of a sentence by using role-unbinding vectors, which are obtained in an unsupervised manner. Our ATPL approach is applied to 1) image captioning, 2) part of speech (POS) tagging, and 3) constituency parsing of a natural language sentence. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in all these three natural language processing tasks.
Efficient parallel optimizations of a high-performance SIFT on GPUs

Stable local image feature detection is a fundamental problem in computer vision and is critical for obtaining the corresponding interest points among images. As a popular and robust feature extraction algorithm, the scale invariant feature transform (SIFT) is widely used in various domains, such as image stitching and remote sensing image registration. However, the computational complexity of SIFT is extremely high, which limits its application in real-time systems and large-scale data processing tasks. Thus, we propose several efficient optimizations to realize a high-performance SIFT (HartSift) by exploiting the computing resources of CPUs and GPUs in a heterogeneous machine. Our experimental results show that HartSift processes an image within 3.07∼7.71 ms, which is 55.88∼121.99 times, 5.17∼6.88 times, and 1.25∼1.79 times faster than OpenCV SIFT, SiftGPU, and CudaSift, respectively.
Gaussian-Induced Convolution for Graphs

Learning representation on graph plays a crucial role in numerous tasks of pattern recognition. Different from gridshaped images/videos, on which local convolution kernels can be lattices, however, graphs are fully coordinate-free on vertices and edges. In this work, we propose a Gaussianinduced convolution (GIC) framework to conduct local convolution filtering on irregular graphs. Specifically, an edgeinduced Gaussian mixture model is designed to encode variations of subgraph region by integrating edge information into weighted Gaussian models, each of which implicitly characterizes one component of subgraph variations. In order to coarsen a graph, we derive a vertex-induced Gaussian mixture model to cluster vertices dynamically according to the connection of edges, which is approximately equivalent to the weighted graph cut. We conduct our multi-layer graph convolution network on several public datasets of graph classification. The extensive experiments demonstrate that our GIC is effective and can achieve the state-of-the-art results.
Joint Dynamic Pose Image and Space Time Reversal for Human Action Recognition from Videos

Human action recognition aims to classify a given video according to which type of action it contains. Disturbance brought by clutter background and unrelated motions makes the task challenging for video frame-based methods. To solve this problem, this paper takes advantage of pose estimation to enhance the performances of video frame features. First, we present a pose feature called dynamic pose image (DPI), which describes human action as the aggregation of a sequence of joint estimation maps. Different from traditional pose features using sole joints, DPI suffers less from disturbance and provides richer information about human body shape and movements. Second, we present attention-based dynamic texture images (att-DTIs) as pose-guided video frame feature. Specifically, a video is treated as a space-time volume, and DTIs are obtained by observing the volume from different views. To alleviate the effect of disturbance on DTIs, we accumulate joint estimation maps as attention map, and extend DTIs to attention-based DTIs (att-DTIs). Finally, we fuse DPI and att-DTIs with multi-stream deep neural networks and late fusion scheme for action recognition. Experiments on NTU RGB+D, UTD-MHAD, and Penn-Action datasets show the effectiveness of DPI and att-DTIs, as well as the complementary property between them.
Video Imprint Segmentation for Temporal Action Detection in Untrimmed Videos

We propose a temporal action detection by spatial segmentation framework, which simultaneously categorize actions and temporally localize action instances in untrimmed videos. The core idea is the conversion of temporal detection task into a spatial semantic segmentation task. Firstly, the video imprint representation is employed to capture the spatial/temporal interdependences within/among frames and represent them as spatial proximity in a feature space. Subsequently, the obtained imprint representation is spatially segmented by a fully convolutional network. With such segmentation labels projected back to the video space, both temporal action boundary localization and per-frame spatial annotation can be obtained simultaneously. The proposed framework is robust to variable lengths of untrimmed videos, due to the underlying fixed-size imprint representations. The efficacy of the framework is validated in two public action detection datasets.