Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Generation of High-Resolution Handwritten Digits with an Ion-Trap Quantum Computer

Generating high-quality data (e.g. images or video) is one of the most exciting and challenging frontiers in unsupervised machine learning. Utilizing quantum computers in such tasks to potentially enhance conventional machine learning algorithms has emerged as a promising application, but poses big challenges due to the limited number of qubits and the level of gate noise in available devices. In this work, we provide the first practical and experimental implementation of a quantum-classical generative algorithm capable of generating high-resolution images of handwritten digits with state-of-the-art gate-based quantum computers. In our quantum-assisted machine learning framework, we implement a quantum-circuit based generative model to learn and sample the prior distribution of a Generative Adversarial Network. We introduce a multi-basis technique that leverages the unique possibility of measuring quantum states in different bases, hence enhancing the expressivity of the prior distribution. We train this hybrid algorithm on an ion-trap device based on $^{171}$Yb$^{+}$ ion qubits to generate high-quality images and quantitatively outperform comparable classical Generative Adversarial Networks trained on the popular MNIST data set for handwritten digits.
Causal Inference in Geoscience and Remote Sensing from Observational Data

Establishing causal relations between random variables from observational data is perhaps the most important challenge in today's \blue{science}. In remote sensing and geosciences this is of special relevance to better understand the Earth's system and the complex interactions between the governing processes. In this paper, we focus on observational causal inference, thus we try to estimate the correct direction of causation using a finite set of empirical data. In addition, we focus on the more complex bivariate scenario that requires strong assumptions and no conditional independence tests can be used. In particular, we explore the framework of (non-deterministic) additive noise models, which relies on the principle of independence between the cause and the generating mechanism. A practical algorithmic instantiation of such principle only requires 1) two regression models in the forward and backward directions, and 2) the estimation of {\em statistical independence} between the obtained residuals and the observations. The direction leading to more independent residuals is decided to be the cause. We instead propose a criterion that uses the {\em sensitivity} (derivative) of the dependence estimator, the sensitivity criterion allows to identify samples most affecting the dependence measure, and hence the criterion is robust to spurious detections. We illustrate performance in a collection of 28 geoscience causal inference problems, in a database of radiative transfer models simulations and machine learning emulators in vegetation parameter modeling involving 182 problems, and in assessing the impact of different regression models in a carbon cycle problem. The criterion achieves state-of-the-art detection rates in all cases, it is generally robust to noise sources and distortions.
DIPPAS: A Deep Image Prior PRNU Anonymization Scheme

Source device identification is an important topic in image forensics since it allows to trace back the origin of an image. Its forensics counter-part is source device anonymization, that is, to mask any trace on the image that can be useful for identifying the source device. A typical trace exploited for source device identification is the Photo Response Non-Uniformity (PRNU), a noise pattern left by the device on the acquired images. In this paper, we devise a methodology for suppressing such a trace from natural images without significant impact on image quality. Specifically, we turn PRNU anonymization into an optimization problem in a Deep Image Prior (DIP) framework. In a nutshell, a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) acts as generator and returns an image that is anonymized with respect to the source PRNU, still maintaining high visual quality. With respect to widely-adopted deep learning paradigms, our proposed CNN is not trained on a set of input-target pairs of images. Instead, it is optimized to reconstruct the PRNU-free image from the original image under analysis itself. This makes the approach particularly suitable in scenarios where large heterogeneous databases are analyzed and prevents any problem due to lack of generalization. Through numerical examples on publicly available datasets, we prove our methodology to be effective compared to state-of-the-art techniques.
Excitable Networks for Finite State Computation with Continuous Time Recurrent Neural Networks

Continuous time recurrent neural networks (CTRNN) are systems of coupled ordinary differential equations that are simple enough to be insightful for describing learning and computation, from both biological and machine learning viewpoints. We describe a direct constructive method of realising finite state input-dependent computations on an arbitrary directed graph. The constructed system has an excitable network attractor whose dynamics we illustrate with a number of examples. The resulting CTRNN has intermittent dynamics: trajectories spend long periods of time close to steady-state, with rapid transitions between states. Depending on parameters, transitions between states can either be excitable (inputs or noise needs to exceed a threshold to induce the transition), or spontaneous (transitions occur without input or noise). In the excitable case, we show the threshold for excitability can be made arbitrarily sensitive.
Invisible Backdoor Attack with Sample-Specific Triggers

Recently, backdoor attacks pose a new security threat to the training process of deep neural networks (DNNs). Attackers intend to inject hidden backdoors into DNNs, such that the attacked model performs well on benign samples, whereas its prediction will be maliciously changed if hidden backdoors are activated by the attacker-defined trigger. Existing backdoor attacks usually adopt the setting that triggers are sample-agnostic, $i.e.,$ different poisoned samples contain the same trigger, resulting in that the attacks could be easily mitigated by current backdoor defenses. In this work, we explore a novel attack paradigm, where backdoor triggers are sample-specific. In our attack, we only need to modify certain training samples with invisible perturbation, while not need to manipulate other training components ($e.g.$, training loss, and model structure) as required in many existing attacks. Specifically, inspired by the recent advance in DNN-based image steganography, we generate sample-specific invisible additive noises as backdoor triggers by encoding an attacker-specified string into benign images through an encoder-decoder network. The mapping from the string to the target label will be generated when DNNs are trained on the poisoned dataset. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets verify the effectiveness of our method in attacking models with or without defenses.
KATRec: Knowledge Aware aTtentive Sequential Recommendations

Sequential recommendation systems model dynamic preferences of users based on their historical interactions with platforms. Despite recent progress, modeling short-term and long-term behavior of users in such systems is nontrivial and challenging. To address this, we present a solution enhanced by a knowledge graph called KATRec (Knowledge Aware aTtentive sequential Recommendations). KATRec learns the short and long-term interests of users by modeling their sequence of interacted items and leveraging pre-existing side information through a knowledge graph attention network. Our novel knowledge graph-enhanced sequential recommender contains item multi-relations at the entity-level and users' dynamic sequences at the item-level. KATRec improves item representation learning by considering higher-order connections and incorporating them in user preference representation while recommending the next item. Experiments on three public datasets show that KATRec outperforms state-of-the-art recommendation models and demonstrates the importance of modeling both temporal and side information to achieve high-quality recommendations.
Fair Regression with Wasserstein Barycenters

We study the problem of learning a real-valued function that satisfies the Demographic Parity constraint. It demands the distribution of the predicted output to be independent of the sensitive attribute. We consider the case that the sensitive attribute is available for prediction. We establish a connection between fair regression and optimal transport theory, based on which we derive a close form expression for the optimal fair predictor. Specifically, we show that the distribution of this optimum is the Wasserstein barycenter of the distributions induced by the standard regression function on the sensitive groups. This result offers an intuitive interpretation of the optimal fair prediction and suggests a simple post-processing algorithm to achieve fairness. We establish risk and distribution-free fairness guarantees for this procedure. Numerical experiments indicate that our method is very effective in learning fair models, with a relative increase in error rate that is inferior to the relative gain in fairness.
The Neural Coding Framework for Learning Generative Models

Neural generative models can be used to learn complex probability distributions from data, to sample from them, and to produce probability density estimates. We propose a computational framework for developing neural generative models inspired by the theory of predictive processing in the brain. According to predictive processing theory, the neurons in the brain form a hierarchy in which neurons in one level form expectations about sensory inputs from another level. These neurons update their local models based on differences between their expectations and the observed signals. In a similar way, artificial neurons in our generative models predict what neighboring neurons will do, and adjust their parameters based on how well the predictions matched reality. In this work, we show that the neural generative models learned within our framework perform well in practice across several benchmark datasets and metrics and either remain competitive with or significantly outperform other generative models with similar functionality (such as the variational auto-encoder).
Depth Completion using Piecewise Planar Model

A depth map can be represented by a set of learned bases and can be efficiently solved in a closed form solution. However, one issue with this method is that it may create artifacts when colour boundaries are inconsistent with depth boundaries. In fact, this is very common in a natural image. To address this issue, we enforce a more strict model in depth recovery: a piece-wise planar model. More specifically, we represent the desired depth map as a collection of 3D planar and the reconstruction problem is formulated as the optimization of planar parameters. Such a problem can be formulated as a continuous CRF optimization problem and can be solved through particle based method (MP-PBP) \cite{Yamaguchi14}. Extensive experimental evaluations on the KITTI visual odometry dataset show that our proposed methods own high resistance to false object boundaries and can generate useful and visually pleasant 3D point clouds.
Privacy-Preserving Synthetic Smart Meters Data

Power consumption data is very useful as it allows to optimize power grids, detect anomalies and prevent failures, on top of being useful for diverse research purposes. However, the use of power consumption data raises significant privacy concerns, as this data usually belongs to clients of a power company. As a solution, we propose a method to generate synthetic power consumption samples that faithfully imitate the originals, but are detached from the clients and their identities. Our method is based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). Our contribution is twofold. First, we focus on the quality of the generated data, which is not a trivial task as no standard evaluation methods are available. Then, we study the privacy guarantees provided to members of the training set of our neural network. As a minimum requirement for privacy, we demand our neural network to be robust to membership inference attacks, as these provide a gateway for further attacks in addition to presenting a privacy threat on their own. We find that there is a compromise to be made between the privacy and the performance provided by the algorithm.
Spatially-Adaptive Pixelwise Networks for Fast Image Translation

We introduce a new generator architecture, aimed at fast and efficient high-resolution image-to-image translation. We design the generator to be an extremely lightweight function of the full-resolution image. In fact, we use pixel-wise networks; that is, each pixel is processed independently of others, through a composition of simple affine transformations and nonlinearities. We take three important steps to equip such a seemingly simple function with adequate expressivity. First, the parameters of the pixel-wise networks are spatially varying so they can represent a broader function class than simple 1x1 convolutions. Second, these parameters are predicted by a fast convolutional network that processes an aggressively low-resolution representation of the input; Third, we augment the input image with a sinusoidal encoding of spatial coordinates, which provides an effective inductive bias for generating realistic novel high-frequency image content. As a result, our model is up to 18x faster than state-of-the-art baselines. We achieve this speedup while generating comparable visual quality across different image resolutions and translation domains.
Biclustering and Boolean Matrix Factorization in Data Streams

We study the clustering of bipartite graphs and Boolean matrix factorization in data streams. We consider a streaming setting in which the vertices from the left side of the graph arrive one by one together with all of their incident edges. We provide an algorithm that, after one pass over the stream, recovers the set of clusters on the right side of the graph using sublinear space; to the best of our knowledge, this is the first algorithm with this property. We also show that after a second pass over the stream, the left clusters of the bipartite graph can be recovered and we show how to extend our algorithm to solve the Boolean matrix factorization problem (by exploiting the correspondence of Boolean matrices and bipartite graphs). We evaluate an implementation of the algorithm on synthetic data and on real-world data. On real-world datasets the algorithm is orders of magnitudes faster than a static baseline algorithm while providing quality results within a factor 2 of the baseline algorithm. Our algorithm scales linearly in the number of edges in the graph. Finally, we analyze the algorithm theoretically and provide sufficient conditions under which the algorithm recovers a set of planted clusters under a standard random graph model.
Joint Channel Estimation and Data Decoding using SVM-based Receivers

Modern communication systems organize receivers in blocks in order to simplify their analysis and design. However, an approach that considers the receiver design from a wider perspective rather than treating it block-by-block may take advantage of the impacts of these blocks on each other and provide better performance. Herein, we can benefit from machine learning and compose a receiver model implementing supervised learning techniques. With this motivation, we consider a one-to-one transmission system over a flat fast fading wireless channel and propose a support vector machines (SVM)-based receiver that combines the pilot-based channel estimation, data demodulation and decoding processes in one joint operation. We follow two techniques in the receiver design. We first design one SVM-based classifier that outputs the class of the encoding codeword that enters the encoder at the transmitter side. Then, we put forward a model with one SVM-based classifier per one bit in the encoding codeword, where each classifier assigns the value of the corresponding bit in the encoding vector. With the second technique, we simplify the receiver design especially for longer encoding codewords. We show that the SVM-based receiver performs very closely to the maximum likelihood decoder, which is known to be the optimal decoding strategy when the encoding vectors at the transmitter are equally likely. We further show that the SVM-based receiver outperforms the conventional receivers that perform channel estimation, data demodulation and decoding in blocks. Finally, we show that we can train the SVM-based receiver with 1-bit analog-to-digital converter (ADC) outputs and the SVM-based receiver can perform very closely to the conventional receivers that take 32-bit ADC outputs as inputs.
Event Guided Denoising for Multilingual Relation Learning

General purpose relation extraction has recently seen considerable gains in part due to a massively data-intensive distant supervision technique from Soares et al. (2019) that produces state-of-the-art results across many benchmarks. In this work, we present a methodology for collecting high quality training data for relation extraction from unlabeled text that achieves a near-recreation of their zero-shot and few-shot results at a fraction of the training cost. Our approach exploits the predictable distributional structure of date-marked news articles to build a denoised corpus -- the extraction process filters out low quality examples. We show that a smaller multilingual encoder trained on this corpus performs comparably to the current state-of-the-art (when both receive little to no fine-tuning) on few-shot and standard relation benchmarks in English and Spanish despite using many fewer examples (50k vs. 300mil+).
LSB Steganography Using Pixel Locator Sequence with AES

Image steganography is the art of hiding data into images. Secret data such as messages, audio, images can be hidden inside the cover image. This is mainly achieved by hiding the data into the LSB(Least Significant Bit) of the image pixels. To improve the security of steganography, this paper studied data encryption with AES(Advanced Encryption Standard) and LSB based data hiding technique with advanced user-defined encrypted data distribution in pixels other than the common linear computational method of storing data in a linear form. This data distribution file will contain the location of the data(in form of pixel numbers) to be encrypted/decrypted which is further encrypted with AES thus providing double encryption for data and its location stored over pixels. Steganography has many applications such as medical, military, copyright information, etc.
Sentiment analysis in Bengali via transfer learning using multi-lingual BERT

Sentiment analysis (SA) in Bengali is challenging due to this Indo-Aryan language's highly inflected properties with more than 160 different inflected forms for verbs and 36 different forms for noun and 24 different forms for pronouns. The lack of standard labeled datasets in the Bengali domain makes the task of SA even harder. In this paper, we present manually tagged 2-class and 3-class SA datasets in Bengali. We also demonstrate that the multi-lingual BERT model with relevant extensions can be trained via the approach of transfer learning over those novel datasets to improve the state-of-the-art performance in sentiment classification tasks. This deep learning model achieves an accuracy of 71\% for 2-class sentiment classification compared to the current state-of-the-art accuracy of 68\%. We also present the very first Bengali SA classifier for the 3-class manually tagged dataset, and our proposed model achieves an accuracy of 60\%. We further use this model to analyze the sentiment of public comments in the online daily newspaper. Our analysis shows that people post negative comments for political or sports news more often, while the religious article comments represent positive sentiment. The dataset and code is publicly available at https://github.com/KhondokerIslam/Bengali\_Sentiment.
Can I Take Your Subdomain? Exploring Related-Domain Attacks in the Modern Web

Related-domain attackers control a sibling domain of their target web application, e.g., as the result of a subdomain takeover. Despite their additional power over traditional web attackers, related-domain attackers received only limited attention by the research community. In this paper we define and quantify for the first time the threats that related-domain attackers pose to web application security. In particular, we first clarify the capabilities that related-domain attackers can acquire through different attack vectors, showing that different instances of the related-domain attacker concept are worth attention. We then study how these capabilities can be abused to compromise web application security by focusing on different angles, including: cookies, CSP, CORS, postMessage and domain relaxation. By building on this framework, we report on a large-scale security measurement on the top 50k domains from the Tranco list that led to the discovery of vulnerabilities in 887 sites, where we quantified the threats posed by related-domain attackers to popular web applications.
Evolving Character-Level DenseNet Architectures using Genetic Programming

DenseNet architectures have demonstrated impressive performance in image classification tasks, but limited research has been conducted on using character-level DenseNet (char-DenseNet) architectures for text classification tasks. It is not clear what DenseNet architectures are optimal for text classification tasks. The iterative task of designing, training and testing of char-DenseNets is an NP-Hard problem that requires expert domain knowledge. Evolutionary deep learning (EDL) has been used to automatically design CNN architectures for the image classification domain, thereby mitigating the need for expert domain knowledge. This study demonstrates the first work on using EDL to evolve char-DenseNet architectures for text classification tasks. A novel genetic programming-based algorithm (GP-Dense) coupled with an indirect-encoding scheme, facilitates the evolution of performant char DenseNet architectures. The algorithm is evaluated on two popular text datasets, and the best-evolved models are benchmarked against four current state-of-the-art character-level CNN and DenseNet models. Results indicate that the algorithm evolves performant models for both datasets that outperform two of the state-of-the-art models in terms of model accuracy and three of the state-of-the-art models in terms of parameter size.
The Application of Blockchain-Based Crypto Assets for Integrating the Physical and Financial Supply Chains in the Construction &amp; Engineering Industry

Supply chain integration remains an elusive goal for the construction and engineering industry. The high degree of fragmentation and the reliance on third-party financial institutions has pushed the physical and financial supply chains apart. The paper demonstrates how blockchain-based crypto assets (crypto currencies and crypto tokens) can address this limitation when used for conditioning the flow of funds based on the flow of products. The paper contrasts the integration between cash and product flows in supply chains that rely on fiat currencies and crypto assets for their payment settlement. Two facets of crypto asset-enabled integration, atomicity and granularity, are further introduced. The thesis is validated in the context of construction progress payments. The as-built data captured by unmanned aerial and ground vehicles was passed to an autonomous smart contract-based method that utilizes crypto-currencies and crypto tokens for payment settlement; the resulting payment datasets, written to the Ethereum blockchain, were analyzed in terms of their integration of product and cash flow. The work is concluded with a discussion of findings and their implications for the industry.