Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Dilated Convolution-based Feature Refinement Network for Crowd Localization

As an emerging computer vision task, crowd localization has received increasing attention due to its ability to produce more accurate spatially predictions. However, continuous scale variations in complex crowd scenes lead to tiny individuals at the edges, so that existing methods cannot achieve precise crowd localization. Aiming at alleviating the above problems, we propose a novel Dilated Convolution-based Feature Refinement Network (DFRNet) to enhance the representation learning capability. Specifically, the DFRNet is built with three branches that can capture the information of each individual in crowd scenes more precisely. More specifically, we introduce a Feature Perception Module to model long-range contextual information at different scales by adopting multiple dilated convolutions, thus providing sufficient feature information to perceive tiny individuals at the edge of images. Afterwards, a Feature Refinement Module is deployed at multiple stages of the three branches to facilitate the mutual refinement of feature information at different scales, thus further improving the expression capability of multi-scale contextual information. By incorporating the above modules, DFRNet can locate individuals in complex scenes more precisely. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate that the proposed method has more advanced performance compared to existing methods and can be more accurately adapted to complex crowd scenes.
Temporal knowledge graph embedding via sparse transfer matrix

Knowledge Graph Completion (KGC) is a fundamental problem for temporal knowledge graphs (TKGs), and TKGs embedding methods are one of the essential methods for KGC. However, existing TKG embedding methods encounter a scalability dilemma, i.e., the inconsistency in parameter scalability among different datasets, and the less use of global information, e.g., statistics and dependencies of facts. To mitigate these two issues, we propose a novel and effective TKG embedding method, named Temporal Knowledge Graph Embedding via Sparse Transfer Matrix (TASTER), which provides a framework to utilize both global and local information. Regarding a TKG as a static knowledge graph when ignoring the time dimension, TASTER first learns global embeddings based on this static knowledge graph to capture global information. To capture the local information in a specific timestamp, TASTER evolves local embeddings from global embeddings based on the corresponding subgraph. Besides, TASTER learns evolving entity embeddings through sparse transformation matrices, which could better adapt to TKGs with a varied number of subgraphs. We conduct experiments on three real-world datasets, and TASTER outperforms most existing models on the link prediction task of TKGs, which validates the its effectiveness.
Examining the potential of augmented reality in the study of Computer Science at school

The phenomenon of augmented reality (AR) in education is examined in the article. The use of computer data in augmented reality (AR) enhances the physical world. Such content is associated with particular places or things to do. Applications for augmented reality (AR) have recently become accessible on mobile devices. AR is made accessible through media (news, entertainment, sports). It is beginning to spread into other spheres of life (such as e-commerce, travel, marketing). However, the main influence on AR is education. The authors investigated the potential applications of augmented reality in education based on the examination of scholarly papers. They found ways to use augmented reality in the classroom to teach computer science. Students can observe how computer systems operate when their parameters are changed thanks to such apps and services. In addition, students can visualize algorithms and data processes as well as modify computer hardware for augmented reality objects. The article outlines the subject matter of author preparation for working teachers. A few applications for training in AR technology were taken into consideration at this occasion. The advantages of using augmented reality items in computer science education are highlighted. It has been demonstrated that using augmented reality offers a chance to improve the realism of research and offers an emotional and cognitive experience. The development of new representations of actual objects and the creation of new chances for collaborative learning all help to engage students in systematic learning.The age of teachers, student engagement, the use of technology in education, play and entertainment styles of learning, and other aspects that affect the adoption of augmented reality in school computer science were all examined by the writers. Numerous STEM augmented reality projects have been chosen. The attitudes of the teachers toward these projects were assessed using expert evaluation, and the projects with the highest ratings underwent evaluation.
Deep learning enabled cross‐lingual search with metaheuristic web based query optimization model for <scp>multi‐document</scp> summarization

Summary Due to the exponential increase in the generation of digital documents and in the online search user diversity, multilingual information is highly available on the Internet. However, the huge amount of multilingual data cannot be analyzed manually. Therefore, cross lingual multi‐document summarization (CLMDS) model is introduced to generate a summary of several documents in which the summary language is different from the source document language. This paper presents a Deep Learning Enabled Cross‐lingual Search with Metaheuristic based Query Optimization (DLCLS‐MQO) model for Multi‐document summarization. The DLCLS‐MQO model allows to offer a query in Tamil, summarize several English documents, and lastly translate the summary into Tamil. The DLCLS‐MQO model encompasses four stages of operation such as multilingual search, query optimization, automatic sematic lexicon builder, and document summarization. Firstly, bidirectional long short‐term memory (BiLSTM) model is applied to perform multilingual searching process. Followed by, sunflower optimization (SFO) algorithm based query optimization process is carried out. Moreover, global vectors (GloVe) method is used for the construction of domain oriented sentiment lexicons. Finally, extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) model is applied for the CLMDS. A detailed simulation analysis takes place to highlight the betterment of the DLCLS‐MQO model. The resultant experimental values portrayed the superior performance of the DLCLS‐MQO model over the compared methods.
3M: An Effective Multi-view, Multi-granularity, and Multi-aspect Modeling Approach to English Pronunciation Assessment

As an indispensable ingredient of computer-assisted pronunciation training (CAPT), automatic pronunciation assessment (APA) plays a pivotal role in aiding self-directed language learners by providing multi-aspect and timely feedback. However, there are at least two potential obstacles that might hinder its performance for practical use. On one hand, most of the studies focus exclusively on leveraging segmental (phonetic)-level features such as goodness of pronunciation (GOP); this, however, may cause a discrepancy of feature granularity when performing suprasegmental (prosodic)-level pronunciation assessment. On the other hand, automatic pronunciation assessments still suffer from the lack of large-scale labeled speech data of non-native speakers, which inevitably limits the performance of pronunciation assessment. In this paper, we tackle these problems by integrating multiple prosodic and phonological features to provide a multi-view, multi-granularity, and multi-aspect (3M) pronunciation modeling. Specifically, we augment GOP with prosodic and self-supervised learning (SSL) features, and meanwhile develop a vowel/consonant positional embedding for a more phonology-aware automatic pronunciation assessment. A series of experiments conducted on the publicly-available speechocean762 dataset show that our approach can obtain significant improvements on several assessment granularities in comparison with previous work, especially on the assessment of speaking fluency and speech prosody.
Understanding and predicting the determinants of blockchain technology adoption and SMEs' performance

Purpose The success of SMEs' financial and market performance (MAP) depends on the firms' level of blockchain technology adoption (BCA) and identifying the crucial antecedents that influence SMEs' adoption. Therefore, this research attempts to develop an integrated model to understand and predict the determinants of BCA and its effect on SMEs' performance. The purpose of this paper is to address this issue. Design/methodology/approach The theoretical foundations are the technology–organization –environment (TOE) framework and the resource-based view (RBV) perspective. The authors distributed a survey to SMEs in South Africa and received 311 responses. The covariance-based structural equation modeling (CB-SEM) followed by the artificial neural network (ANN) technique was used for the data analysis. Findings The SEM results showed that SMEs' relative advantage, compatibility, top management support (TMS), organizational readiness (ORD), competitive pressures (COP), external support, regulations and legislation significantly influence SMEs' BCA. However, complexity negatively impacts SMEs' BCA. The analysis results also revealed that SMEs' BCA significantly influences the financial performance of the firms, followed by MAP. Furthermore, model determinants were input to an ANN modeling. The ANN results showed that TMS is the most critical predictor of SMEs' BCA, followed by ORD, COP, external support, and regulations and legislation. Practical implications The results provide valuable information for SMEs when maneuvering their adoption strategies in the scope of blockchain technology. Additionally, from the perspective of an emerging market, the study has successfully contributed the TOE framework and the RBV. Originality/value This study is the first work to explore the determinants of BCA in the context of SMEs from a developing country. This paper is also one pioneer in attempts to develop a causal and predictive statistical model for predicting the determinants of BCA in SMEs' performance.
Efficient Few-Shot Object Detection via Knowledge Inheritance

Few-shot object detection (FSOD), which aims at learning a generic detector that can adapt to unseen tasks with scarce training samples, has witnessed consistent improvement recently. However, most existing methods ignore the efficiency issues, e.g., high computational complexity and slow adaptation speed. Notably, efficiency has become an increasingly important evaluation metric for few-shot techniques due to an emerging trend toward embedded AI. To this end, we present an efficient pretrain-transfer framework (PTF) baseline with no computational increment, which achieves comparable results with previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. Upon this baseline, we devise an initializer named knowledge inheritance (KI) to reliably initialize the novel weights for the box classifier, which effectively facilitates the knowledge transfer process and boosts the adaptation speed. Within the KI initializer, we propose an adaptive length re-scaling (ALR) strategy to alleviate the vector length inconsistency between the predicted novel weights and the pretrained base weights. Finally, our approach not only achieves the SOTA results across three public benchmarks, i.e., PASCAL VOC, COCO and LVIS, but also exhibits high efficiency with 1.8-100x faster adaptation speed against the other methods on COCO/LVIS benchmark during few-shot transfer. To our best knowledge, this is the first work to consider the efficiency problem in FSOD. We hope to motivate a trend toward powerful yet efficient few-shot technique development. The codes are publicly available at https://github.com/Ze-Yang/Efficient-FSOD.
Path-Based Recommender System for Learning Activities Using Knowledge Graphs

Recommender systems can offer a fertile ground in e-learning software, since they can assist users by presenting them with learning material in which they can be more interested, based on their preferences. To this end, in this paper, we present a new method for a knowledge-graph-based, path-based recommender system for learning activities. The suggested approach makes better learning activity recommendations by using connections between people and/or products. By pre-defining meta-paths or automatically mining connective patterns, our method uses the student-learning activity graph to find path-level commonalities for learning activities. The path-based approach can provide an explanation for the result as well. Our methodology is used in an intelligent tutoring system with Java programming as the domain being taught. The system keeps track of user behavior and can recommend learning activities to students using a knowledge-graph-based recommender system. Numerous metadata, such as kind, complexity, and number of questions, are used to describe each activity. The system has been evaluated with promising results that highlight the effectiveness of the path-based recommendations for learning activities, while preserving the pedagogical affordance.
Style-Hallucinated Dual Consistency Learning for Domain Generalized Semantic Segmentation

In this paper, we study the task of synthetic-to-real domain generalized semantic segmentation, which aims to learn a model that is robust to unseen real-world scenes using only synthetic data. The large domain shift between synthetic and real-world data, including the limited source environmental variations and the large distribution gap between synthetic and real-world data, significantly hinders the model performance on unseen real-world scenes. In this work, we propose the Style-HAllucinated Dual consistEncy learning (SHADE) framework to handle such domain shift. Specifically, SHADE is constructed based on two consistency constraints, Style Consistency (SC) and Retrospection Consistency (RC). SC enriches the source situations and encourages the model to learn consistent representation across style-diversified samples. RC leverages real-world knowledge to prevent the model from overfitting to synthetic data and thus largely keeps the representation consistent between the synthetic and real-world models. Furthermore, we present a novel style hallucination module (SHM) to generate style-diversified samples that are essential to consistency learning. SHM selects basis styles from the source distribution, enabling the model to dynamically generate diverse and realistic samples during training. Experiments show that our SHADE yields significant improvement and outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 5.05% and 8.35% on the average mIoU of three real-world datasets on single- and multi-source settings, respectively.
Multilingual Sentiment Analysis for Under-Resourced Languages: A Systematic Review of the Landscape

Sentiment analysis automatically evaluates people’s opinions of products or services. It is an emerging research area with promising advancements in high-resource languages such as Indo-European languages (e.g. English). However, the same cannot be said for languages with limited resources. In this study, we evaluate multilingual sentiment analysis techniques for under-resourced languages and the use of high-resourced languages to develop resources for low-resource languages. The ultimate goal is to identify appropriate strategies for future investigations. We report over 35 studies with different languages demonstrating an interest in developing models for under-resourced languages in a multilingual context. Furthermore, we illustrate the drawbacks of each strategy used for sentiment analysis. Our focus is to critically compare methods, employed datasets and identify research gaps. This study contributes to theoretical literature reviews with complete coverage of multilingual sentiment analysis studies from 2008 to date. Furthermore, we demonstrate how sentiment analysis studies have grown tremendously. Finally, because most studies propose methods based on deep learning approaches, we offer a deep learning framework for multilingual sentiment analysis that does not rely on the machine translation system. According to the meta-analysis protocol of this literature review, we found that, in general, just over 60% of the studies have used deep learning frameworks, which significantly improved the sentiment analysis performance. Therefore, deep learning methods are recommended for the development of multilingual sentiment analysis for under-resourced languages.
Signing at Scale: Learning to Co-Articulate Signs for Large-Scale Photo-Realistic Sign Language Production

Sign languages are visual languages, with vocabularies as rich as their spoken language counterparts. However, current deep-learning based Sign Language Production (SLP) models produce under-articulated skeleton pose sequences from constrained vocabularies and this limits applicability. To be understandable and accepted by the deaf, an automatic SLP system must be able to generate co-articulated photo-realistic signing sequences for large domains of discourse. In this work, we tackle large-scale SLP by learning to co-articulate between dictionary signs, a method capable of producing smooth signing while scaling to unconstrained domains of discourse. To learn sign co-articulation, we propose a novel Frame Selection Network (FS-NET) that improves the temporal alignment of interpolated dictionary signs to continuous signing sequences. Additionally, we propose SIGNGAN, a pose-conditioned human synthesis model that produces photo-realistic sign language videos direct from skeleton pose. We propose a novel keypoint-based loss function which improves the quality of synthe-sized hand images. We evaluate our SLP model on the large-scale meineDGS (mDGS) corpus, conducting extensive user evaluation showing our FS-NET approach improves coarticulation of interpolated dictionary signs. Additionally, we show that SIGNGAN significantly outperforms all baseline methods for quantitative metrics, human perceptual studies and native deaf signer comprehension.
SdAE: Self-distillated Masked Autoencoder

With the development of generative-based self-supervised learning (SSL) approaches like BeiT and MAE, how to learn good representations by masking random patches of the input image and reconstructing the missing information has grown in concern. However, BeiT and PeCo need a “pre-pretraining” stage to produce discrete codebooks for masked patches representing. MAE does not require a pre-training codebook process, but setting pixels as reconstruction targets may introduce an optimization gap between pre-training and downstream tasks that good reconstruction quality may not always lead to the high descriptive capability for the model. Considering the above issues, in this paper, we propose a simple Self-distillated masked AutoEncoder network, namely SdAE. SdAE consists of a student branch using an encoder-decoder structure to reconstruct the missing information, and a teacher branch producing latent representation of masked tokens. We also analyze how to build good views for the teacher branch to produce latent representation from the perspective of information bottleneck. After that, we propose a multi-fold masking strategy to provide multiple masked views with balanced information for boosting the performance, which can also reduce the computational complexity. Our approach generalizes well: with only 300 epochs pre-training, a vanilla ViT-Base model achieves an 84.1% fine-tuning accuracy on ImageNet-1 k classification, 48.6 mIOU on ADE20K segmentation, and 48.9 mAP on COCO detection with only 300 epochs pre-training, which surpasses other methods by a considerable margin. Code is available at https://github.com/AbrahamYabo/SdAE .
Application of Artificial Intelligence to Network Forensics: Survey, Challenges and Future Directions

Network forensics focuses on the identification and investigation of internal and external network attacks, the reverse engineering of network protocols, and the uninstrumented investigation of networked devices. It lies at the intersection of digital forensics, incident response and network security. Network attacks exploit software and hardware vulnerabilities and communication protocols. The scope of a network forensic investigation can range from Internet-wide down to a single device’s network traffic. Network analysis tools (NATs) aid security professionals and law enforcement in the capturing, identification and analysis of network traffic. However, in most instances, the sheer volume of data to be analyzed is enormous and, despite some built-in NAT automation, the investigation of network traffic is often an arduous process. Furthermore, significant expert time remains wasted in the investigation of a high frequency of false positive alerting from automated systems. To address this globally impacting problem, artificial intelligence based approaches are becoming increasingly employed to automatically detect attacks and increase network traffic classification accuracy. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of the state-of-the-art in network forensics and the application of expert systems, machine learning, deep learning, and ensemble/hybrid approaches to a range of application areas in the field. These include network traffic analysis, intrusion detection systems, Internet-of-Things devices, cloud forensics, DNS tunneling, smart grid forensics, and vehicle forensics. In addition, the current challenges and future research directions for each of the aforementioned application areas is discussed.
Critical Regularizations for Neural Surface Reconstruction in the Wild

Neural implicit functions have recently shown promising results on surface reconstructions from multiple views. However, current methods still suffer from excessive time complexity and poor robustness when reconstructing unbounded or complex scenes. In this paper, we present RegSDF, which shows that proper point cloud supervisions and geometry regularizations are sufficient to produce high-quality and robust reconstruction results. Specifically, RegSDF takes an additional oriented point cloud as input, and optimizes a signed distance field and a surface light field within a differentiable rendering framework. We also introduce the two critical regularizations for this optimization. The first one is the Hessian regularization that smoothly diffuses the signed distance values to the entire distance field given noisy and incomplete input. And the second one is the minimal surface regularization that compactly interpolates and extrapolates the missing geometry. Extensive experiments are conducted on DTU, Blended-MVS, and Tanks and Temples datasets. Compared with recent neural surface reconstruction approaches, RegSDF is able to reconstruct surfaces with fine details even for open scenes with complex topologies and unstructured camera trajectories.