Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
CT Super-Resolution GAN Constrained by the Identical, Residual, and Cycle Learning Ensemble (GAN-CIRCLE)

Computed tomography (CT) is widely used in screening, diagnosis, and image-guided therapy for both clinical and research purposes. Since CT involves ionizing radiation, an overarching thrust of related technical research is development of novel methods enabling ultrahigh quality imaging with fine structural details while reducing the X-ray radiation. In this paper, we present a semi-supervised deep learning approach to accurately recover high-resolution (HR) CT images from low-resolution (LR) counterparts. Specifically, with the generative adversarial network (GAN) as the building block, we enforce the cycle-consistency in terms of the Wasserstein distance to establish a nonlinear end-to-end mapping from noisy LR input images to denoised and deblurred HR outputs. We also include the joint constraints in the loss function to facilitate structural preservation. In this deep imaging process, we incorporate deep convolutional neural network (CNN), residual learning, and network in network techniques for feature extraction and restoration. In contrast to the current trend of increasing network depth and complexity to boost the CT imaging performance, which limit its real-world applications by imposing considerable computational and memory overheads, we apply a parallel $1\times1$ CNN to compress the output of the hidden layer and optimize the number of layers and the number of filters for each convolutional layer. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations demonstrate that our proposed model is accurate, efficient and robust for super-resolution (SR) image restoration from noisy LR input images. In particular, we validate our composite SR networks on three large-scale CT datasets, and obtain promising results as compared to the other state-of-the-art methods.
M3D-RPN: Monocular 3D Region Proposal Network for Object Detection

Understanding the world in 3D is a critical component of urban autonomous driving. Generally, the combination of expensive LiDAR sensors and stereo RGB imaging has been paramount for successful 3D object detection algorithms, whereas monocular image-only methods experience drastically reduced performance. We propose to reduce the gap by reformulating the monocular 3D detection problem as a standalone 3D region proposal network. We leverage the geometric relationship of 2D and 3D perspectives, allowing 3D boxes to utilize well-known and powerful convolutional features generated in the image-space. To help address the strenuous 3D parameter estimations, we further design depth-aware convolutional layers which enable location specific feature development and in consequence improved 3D scene understanding. Compared to prior work in monocular 3D detection, our method consists of only the proposed 3D region proposal network rather than relying on external networks, data, or multiple stages. M3D-RPN is able to significantly improve the performance of both monocular 3D Object Detection and Bird's Eye View tasks within the KITTI urban autonomous driving dataset, while efficiently using a shared multi-class model.
Binary neural networks: A survey

The binary neural network, largely saving the storage and computation, serves as a promising technique for deploying deep models on resource-limited devices. However, the binarization inevitably causes severe information loss, and even worse, its discontinuity brings difficulty to the optimization of the deep network. To address these issues, a variety of algorithms have been proposed, and achieved satisfying progress in recent years. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of these algorithms, mainly categorized into the native solutions directly conducting binarization, and the optimized ones using techniques like minimizing the quantization error, improving the network loss function, and reducing the gradient error. We also investigate other practical aspects of binary neural networks such as the hardware-friendly design and the training tricks. Then, we give the evaluation and discussions on different tasks, including image classification, object detection and semantic segmentation. Finally, the challenges that may be faced in future research are prospected.
The Many Faces of Robustness: A Critical Analysis of Out-of-Distribution Generalization

We introduce four new real-world distribution shift datasets consisting of changes in image style, image blurriness, geographic location, camera operation, and more. With our new datasets, we take stock of previously proposed methods for improving out-of-distribution robustness and put them to the test. We find that using larger models and artificial data augmentations can improve robustness on real-world distribution shifts, contrary to claims in prior work. We find improvements in artificial robustness benchmarks can transfer to real-world distribution shifts, contrary to claims in prior work. Motivated by our observation that data augmentations can help with real-world distribution shifts, we also introduce a new data augmentation method which advances the state-of-the-art and outperforms models pre-trained with 1000× more labeled data. Overall we find that some methods consistently help with distribution shifts in texture and local image statistics, but these methods do not help with some other distribution shifts like geographic changes. Our results show that future research must study multiple distribution shifts simultaneously, as we demonstrate that no evaluated method consistently improves robustness.
DoubleU-Net: A Deep Convolutional Neural Network for Medical Image Segmentation

Semantic image segmentation is the process of labeling each pixel of an image with its corresponding class. An encoder-decoder based approach, like U-Net and its variants, is a popular strategy for solving medical image segmentation tasks. To improve the performance of U-Net on various segmentation tasks, we propose a novel architecture called DoubleU-Net, which is a combination of two U-Net architectures stacked on top of each other. The first U-Net uses a pre-trained VGG-19 as the encoder, which has already learned features from ImageNet and can be transferred to another task easily. To capture more semantic information efficiently, we added another U-Net at the bottom. We also adopt Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling (ASPP) to capture contextual information within the network. We have evaluated DoubleU-Net using four medical segmentation datasets, covering various imaging modalities such as colonoscopy, dermoscopy, and microscopy. Experiments on the MICCAI 2015 segmentation challenge, the CVC-ClinicDB, the 2018 Data Science Bowl challenge, and the Lesion boundary segmentation datasets demonstrate that the DoubleU-Net outperforms U-Net and the baseline models. Moreover, DoubleU-Net produces more accurate segmentation masks, especially in the case of the CVC-ClinicDB and MICCAI 2015 segmentation challenge datasets, which have challenging images such as smaller and flat polyps. These results show the improvement over the existing U-Net model. The encouraging results, produced on various medical image segmentation datasets, show that DoubleU-Net can be used as a strong baseline for both medical image segmentation and cross-dataset evaluation testing to measure the generalizability of Deep Learning (DL) models.
Chatbots: History, technology, and applications

This literature review presents the History, Technology, and Applications of Natural Dialog Systems or simply chatbots. It aims to organize critical information that is a necessary background for further research activity in the field of chatbots. More specifically, while giving the historical evolution, from the generative idea to the present day, we point out possible weaknesses of each stage. After we present a complete categorization system, we analyze the two essential implementation technologies, namely, the pattern matching approach and machine learning. Moreover, we compose a general architectural design that gathers critical details, and we highlight crucial issues to take into account before system design. Furthermore, we present chatbots applications and industrial use cases while we point out the risks of using chatbots and suggest ways to mitigate them. Finally, we conclude by stating our view regarding the direction of technology so that chatbots will become really smart.
Deep learning for AI

How can neural networks learn the rich internal representations required for difficult tasks such as recognizing objects or understanding language?
An Open-Source Benchmark Suite for Microservices and Their Hardware-Software Implications for Cloud &amp; Edge Systems

Cloud services have recently started undergoing a major shift from monolithic applications, to graphs of hundreds or thousands of loosely-coupled microservices. Microservices fundamentally change a lot of assumptions current cloud systems are designed with, and present both opportunities and challenges when optimizing for quality of service (QoS) and cloud utilization.
Attentional Feature Fusion

Feature fusion, the combination of features from different layers or branches, is an omnipresent part of modern network architectures. It is often implemented via simple operations, such as summation or concatenation, but this might not be the best choice. In this work, we propose a uniform and general scheme, namely attentional feature fusion, which is applicable for most common scenarios, including feature fusion induced by short and long skip connections as well as within Inception layers. To better fuse features of inconsistent semantics and scales, we propose a multiscale channel attention module, which addresses issues that arise when fusing features given at different scales. We also demonstrate that the initial integration of feature maps can become a bottleneck and that this issue can be alleviated by adding another level of attention, which we refer to as iterative attentional feature fusion. With fewer layers or parameters, our models outperform state-of-the-art networks on both CIFAR-100 and ImageNet datasets, which suggests that more sophisticated attention mechanisms for feature fusion hold great potential to consistently yield better results compared to their direct counterparts. Our codes and trained models are available online <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sup> .
Using generative adversarial networks for improving classification effectiveness in credit card fraud detection

In the last years, the number of frauds in credit card-based online payments has grown dramatically, pushing banks and e-commerce organizations to implement automatic fraud detection systems, performing data mining on huge transaction logs. Machine learning seems to be one of the most promising solutions for spotting illicit transactions, by distinguishing fraudulent and non-fraudulent instances through the use of supervised binary classification systems properly trained from pre-screened sample datasets. However, in such a specific application domain, datasets available for training are strongly imbalanced, with the class of interest considerably less represented than the other. This significantly reduces the effectiveness of binary classifiers, undesirably biasing the results toward the prevailing class, while we are interested in the minority class. Oversampling the minority class has been adopted to alleviate this problem, but this method still has some drawbacks. Generative Adversarial Networks are general, flexible, and powerful generative deep learning models that have achieved success in producing convincingly real-looking images. We trained a GAN to output mimicked minority class examples, which were then merged with training data into an augmented training set so that the effectiveness of a classifier can be improved. Experiments show that a classifier trained on the augmented set outperforms the same classifier trained on the original data, especially as far the sensitivity is concerned, resulting in an effective fraud detection mechanism.
Convolutional neural network improvement for breast cancer classification

Traditionally, physicians need to manually delineate the suspected breast cancer area. Numerous studies have mentioned that manual segmentation takes time, and depends on the machine and the operator. The algorithm called Convolutional Neural Network Improvement for Breast Cancer Classification (CNNI-BCC) is presented to assist medical experts in breast cancer diagnosis in timely manner. The CNNI-BCC uses a convolutional neural network that improves the breast cancer lesion classification in order to help experts for breast cancer diagnosis. CNNI-BCC can classify incoming breast cancer medical images into malignant, benign, and healthy patients. The application of present algorithm can assist in classification of mammographic medical images into benign patient, malignant patient and healthy patient without prior information of the presence of a cancerous lesion. The presented method aims to help medical experts for the classification of breast cancer lesion through the implementation of convolutional neural network for the classification of breast cancer. CNNI-BCC can categorize incoming medical images as malignant, benign or normal patient with sensitivity, accuracy, area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) and specificity of 89.47%, 90.50%, 0.901 ± 0.0314 and 90.71% respectively.
Dense Attention Pyramid Networks for Multi-Scale Ship Detection in SAR Images

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is an active microwave imaging sensor with the capability of working in all-weather, all-day to provide high-resolution SAR images. Recently, SAR images have been widely used in civilian and military fields, such as ship detection. The scales of different ships vary in SAR images, especially for small-scale ships, which only occupy few pixels and have lower contrast. Compared with large-scale ships, the current ship detection methods are insensitive to small-scale ships. Therefore, the ship detection methods are facing difficulties with multi-scale ship detection in SAR images. A novel multi-scale ship detection method based on a dense attention pyramid network (DAPN) in SAR images is proposed in this paper. The DAPN adopts a pyramid structure, which densely connects convolutional block attention module (CBAM) to each concatenated feature map from top to bottom of the pyramid network. In this way, abundant features containing resolution and semantic information are extracted for multi-scale ship detection while refining concatenated feature maps to highlight salient features for specific scales by CBAM. Then, the salient features are integrated with global unblurred features to improve accuracy effectively in SAR images. Finally, the fused feature maps are fed to the detection network to obtain the final detection results. Experiments on the data set of SAR ship detection data set (SSDD) including multi-scale ships in various SAR images show that the proposed method can detect multi-scale ships in different scenes of SAR images with extremely high accuracy and outperforms other ship detection methods implemented on SSDD.
Automatic text summarization: A comprehensive survey

Automatic Text Summarization (ATS) is becoming much more important because of the huge amount of textual content that grows exponentially on the Internet and the various archives of news articles, scientific papers, legal documents, etc. Manual text summarization consumes a lot of time, effort, cost, and even becomes impractical with the gigantic amount of textual content. Researchers have been trying to improve ATS techniques since the 1950s. ATS approaches are either extractive, abstractive, or hybrid. The extractive approach selects the most important sentences in the input document(s) then concatenates them to form the summary. The abstractive approach represents the input document(s) in an intermediate representation then generates the summary with sentences that are different than the original sentences. The hybrid approach combines both the extractive and abstractive approaches. Despite all the proposed methods, the generated summaries are still far away from the human-generated summaries. Most researches focus on the extractive approach. It is required to focus more on the abstractive and hybrid approaches. This research provides a comprehensive survey for the researchers by presenting the different aspects of ATS: approaches, methods, building blocks, techniques, datasets, evaluation methods, and future research directions.
Task scheduling techniques in cloud computing: A literature survey

Cloud computing manages a variety of virtualized resources, which makes scheduling a critical component. In the cloud, a client may utilize several thousand virtualized assets for every task. Consequently, manual scheduling is not a feasible solution. The basic idea behind task scheduling is to slate tasks to minimize time loss and maximize performance. Several research efforts have examined task scheduling in the past. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of task scheduling strategies and the associated metrics suitable for cloud computing environments. It discusses the various issues related to scheduling methodologies and the limitations to overcome. Distinctive scheduling procedures are studied to discover which characteristics are to be included in a given system and which ones to disregard. The literature survey is organized based on three different perspectives: methods, applications, and parameter-based measures utilized. In addition, future research issues related to cloud computing-based scheduling are identified.
A Survey on Bitrate Adaptation Schemes for Streaming Media Over HTTP

In this survey, we present state-of-the-art bitrate adaptation algorithms for HTTP adaptive streaming (HAS). As a key distinction from other streaming approaches, the bitrate adaptation algorithms in HAS are chiefly executed at each client, i.e., in a distributed manner. The objective of these algorithms is to ensure a high quality of experience (QoE) for viewers in the presence of bandwidth fluctuations due to factors like signal strength, network congestion, network reconvergence events, etc. While such fluctuations are common in public Internet, they can also occur in home networksor even managed networks where there is often admission control and QoS tools. Bitrate adaptation algorithms may take factors like bandwidth estimations, playback buffer fullness, device features, viewer preferences, and content features into account, albeit with different weights. Since the viewer's QoE needs to be determined in real-time during playback, objective metrics are generally used including number of buffer stalls, duration of startup delay, frequency and amount of quality oscillations, and video instability. By design, the standards for HAS do not mandate any particular adaptation algorithm, leaving it to system builders to innovate and implement their own method. This survey provides an overview of the different methods proposed over the last several years.
Moments in Time Dataset: One Million Videos for Event Understanding

We present the Moments in Time Dataset, a large-scale human-annotated collection of one million short videos corresponding to dynamic events unfolding within three seconds. Modeling the spatial-audio-temporal dynamics even for actions occurring in 3 second videos poses many challenges: meaningful events do not include only people, but also objects, animals, and natural phenomena; visual and auditory events can be symmetrical in time (“opening” is “closing” in reverse), and either transient or sustained. We describe the annotation process of our dataset (each video is tagged with one action or activity label among 339 different classes), analyze its scale and diversity in comparison to other large-scale video datasets for action recognition, and report results of several baseline models addressing separately, and jointly, three modalities: spatial, temporal and auditory. The Moments in Time dataset, designed to have a large coverage and diversity of events in both visual and auditory modalities, can serve as a new challenge to develop models that scale to the level of complexity and abstract reasoning that a human processes on a daily basis.
Correlation Congruence for Knowledge Distillation

Most teacher-student frameworks based on knowledge distillation (KD) depend on a strong congruent constraint on instance level. However, they usually ignore the correlation between multiple instances, which is also valuable for knowledge transfer. In this work, we propose a new framework named correlation congruence for knowledge distillation (CCKD), which transfers not only the instance-level information but also the correlation between instances. Furthermore, a generalized kernel method based on Taylor series expansion is proposed to better capture the correlation between instances. Empirical experiments and ablation studies on image classification tasks (including CIFAR-100, ImageNet-1K) and metric learning tasks (including ReID and Face Recognition) show that the proposed CCKD substantially outperforms the original KD and other SOTA KD-based methods. The CCKD can be easily deployed in the majority of the teacher-student framework such as KD and hint-based learning methods.
The shape of and solutions to the MTurk quality crisis

Abstract Amazon's Mechanical Turk is widely used for data collection; however, data quality may be declining due to the use of virtual private servers to fraudulently gain access to studies. Unfortunately, we know little about the scale and consequence of this fraud, and tools for social scientists to detect and prevent this fraud are underdeveloped. We first analyze 38 studies and show that this fraud is not new, but has increased recently. We then show that these fraudulent respondents provide particularly low-quality data and can weaken treatment effects. Finally, we provide two solutions: an easy-to-use application for identifying fraud in the existing datasets and a method for blocking fraudulent respondents in Qualtrics surveys.
Deep Joint Source-Channel Coding for Wireless Image Transmission

We propose a joint source and channel coding (JSCC) technique for wireless image transmission that does not rely on explicit codes for either compression or error correction; instead, it directly maps the image pixel values to the complex-valued channel input symbols. We parameterize the encoder and decoder functions by two convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which are trained jointly, and can be considered as an autoencoder with a non-trainable layer in the middle that represents the noisy communication channel. Our results show that the proposed deep JSCC scheme outperforms digital transmission concatenating JPEG or JPEG2000 compression with a capacity achieving channel code at low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and channel bandwidth values in the presence of additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN). More strikingly, deep JSCC does not suffer from the ``cliff effect'', and it provides a graceful performance degradation as the channel SNR varies with respect to the SNR value assumed during training. In the case of a slow Rayleigh fading channel, deep JSCC learns noise resilient coded representations and significantly outperforms separation-based digital communication at all SNR and channel bandwidth values.