Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Super-Resolution Based Patch-Free 3D Image Segmentation with High-Frequency Guidance

High resolution (HR) 3D images are widely used nowadays, such as medical images like Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and Computed Tomography (CT). However, segmentation of these 3D images remains a challenge due to their high spatial resolution and dimensionality in contrast to currently limited GPU memory. Therefore, most existing 3D image segmentation methods use patch-based models, which have low inference efficiency and ignore global contextual information. To address these problems, we propose a super-resolution (SR) based patch-free 3D image segmentation framework that can realize HR segmentation from a global-wise low-resolution (LR) input. The framework contains two sub-tasks, of which semantic segmentation is the main task and super resolution is an auxiliary task aiding in rebuilding the high frequency information from the LR input. To furthermore balance the information loss with the LR input, we propose a High-Frequency Guidance Module (HGM), and design an efficient selective cropping algorithm to crop an HR patch from the original image as restoration guidance for it. In addition, we also propose a Task-Fusion Module (TFM) to exploit the inter connections between segmentation and SR task, realizing joint optimization of the two tasks. When predicting, only the main segmentation task is needed, while other modules can be removed for acceleration. The experimental results on two different datasets show that our framework has a four times higher inference speed compared to traditional patch-based methods, while its performance also surpasses other patch-based and patch-free models.
ClipBot: an educational, physically impaired robot that learns to walk via genetic algorithm optimization

Educational robots allow experimenting with a variety of principles from mechanics, electronics, and informatics. Here we propose ClipBot, a low-cost, do-it-yourself, robot whose skeleton is made of two paper clips. An Arduino nano microcontroller actuates two servo motors that move the paper clips. However, such mechanical configuration confers physical impairments to movement. This creates the need for and allows experimenting with artificial intelligence methods to overcome hardware limitations. We report our experience in the usage of this robot during the study week 'fascinating informatics', organized by the Swiss Foundation Schweizer Jugend Forscht (www.sjf.ch). Students at the high school level were asked to implement a genetic algorithm to optimize the movements of the robot until it learned to walk. Such a methodology allowed the robot to learn the motor actuation scheme yielding straight movement in the forward direction using less than 20 iterations.
DEEPFAKE CLI: Accelerated Deepfake Detection using FPGAs

Because of the availability of larger datasets and recent improvements in the generative model, more realistic Deepfake videos are being produced each day. People consume around one billion hours of video on social media platforms every day, and thats why it is very important to stop the spread of fake videos as they can be damaging, dangerous, and malicious. There has been a significant improvement in the field of deepfake classification, but deepfake detection and inference have remained a difficult task. To solve this problem in this paper, we propose a novel DEEPFAKE C-L-I (Classification-Localization-Inference) in which we have explored the idea of accelerating Quantized Deepfake Detection Models using FPGAs due to their ability of maximum parallelism and energy efficiency compared to generalized GPUs. In this paper, we have used light MesoNet with EFF-YNet structure and accelerated it on VCK5000 FPGA, powered by state-of-the-art VC1902 Versal Architecture which uses AI, DSP, and Adaptable Engines for acceleration. We have benchmarked our inference speed with other state-of-the-art inference nodes, got 316.8 FPS on VCK5000 while maintaining 93\% Accuracy.
Maximum Likelihood Learning of Unnormalized Models for Simulation-Based Inference

We introduce two synthetic likelihood methods for Simulation-Based Inference (SBI), to conduct either amortized or targeted inference from experimental observations when a high-fidelity simulator is available. Both methods learn a conditional energy-based model (EBM) of the likelihood using synthetic data generated by the simulator, conditioned on parameters drawn from a proposal distribution. The learned likelihood can then be combined with any prior to obtain a posterior estimate, from which samples can be drawn using MCMC. Our methods uniquely combine a flexible Energy-Based Model and the minimization of a KL loss: this is in contrast to other synthetic likelihood methods, which either rely on normalizing flows, or minimize score-based objectives; choices that come with known pitfalls. We demonstrate the properties of both methods on a range of synthetic datasets, and apply them to a neuroscience model of the pyloric network in the crab, where our method outperforms prior art for a fraction of the simulation budget.
Linguistic-Enhanced Transformer with CTC Embedding for Speech Recognition

The recent emergence of joint CTC-Attention model shows significant improvement in automatic speech recognition (ASR). The improvement largely lies in the modeling of linguistic information by decoder. The decoder joint-optimized with an acoustic encoder renders the language model from ground-truth sequences in an auto-regressive manner during training. However, the training corpus of the decoder is limited to the speech transcriptions, which is far less than the corpus needed to train an acceptable language model. This leads to poor robustness of decoder. To alleviate this problem, we propose linguistic-enhanced transformer, which introduces refined CTC information to decoder during training process, so that the decoder can be more robust. Our experiments on AISHELL-1 speech corpus show that the character error rate (CER) is relatively reduced by up to 7%. We also find that in joint CTC-Attention ASR model, decoder is more sensitive to linguistic information than acoustic information.
TuneUp: A Simple Improved Training Strategy for Graph Neural Networks

Despite recent advances in Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), their training strategies remain largely under-explored. The conventional training strategy learns over all nodes in the original graph(s) equally, which can be sub-optimal as certain nodes are often more difficult to learn than others. Here we present TuneUp, a simple curriculum-based training strategy for improving the predictive performance of GNNs. TuneUp trains a GNN in two stages. In the first stage, TuneUp applies conventional training to obtain a strong base GNN. The base GNN tends to perform well on head nodes (nodes with large degrees) but less so on tail nodes (nodes with small degrees). Therefore, the second stage of TuneUp focuses on improving prediction on the difficult tail nodes by further training the base GNN on synthetically generated tail node data. We theoretically analyze TuneUp and show it provably improves generalization performance on tail nodes. TuneUp is simple to implement and applicable to a broad range of GNN architectures and prediction tasks. Extensive evaluation of TuneUp on five diverse GNN architectures, three types of prediction tasks, and both transductive and inductive settings shows that TuneUp significantly improves the performance of the base GNN on tail nodes, while often even improving the performance on head nodes. Altogether, TuneUp produces up to 57.6% and 92.2% relative predictive performance improvement in the transductive and the challenging inductive settings, respectively.
Do Software Security Practices Yield Fewer Vulnerabilities?

Due to the ever-increasing security breaches, practitioners are motivated to produce more secure software. In the United States, the White House Office released a memorandum on Executive Order (EO) 14028 that mandates organizations provide self-attestation of the use of secure software development practices. The OpenSSF Scorecard project allows practitioners to measure the use of software security practices automatically. However, little research has been done to determine whether the use of security practices improves package security, particularly which security practices have the biggest impact on security outcomes. The goal of this study is to assist practitioners and researchers making informed decisions on which security practices to adopt through the development of models between software security practice scores and security vulnerability counts. To that end, we developed five supervised machine learning models for npm and PyPI packages using the OpenSSF Scorecared security practices scores and aggregate security scores as predictors and the number of externally-reported vulnerabilities as a target variable. Our models found four security practices (Maintained, Code Review, Branch Protection, and Security Policy) were the most important practices influencing vulnerability count. However, we had low R^2 (ranging from 9% to 12%) when we tested the models to predict vulnerability counts. Additionally, we observed that the number of reported vulnerabilities increased rather than reduced as the aggregate security score of the packages increased. Both findings indicate that additional factors may influence the package vulnerability count. We suggest that vulnerability count and security score data be refined such that these measures may be used to provide actionable guidance on security practices.
NeuralSearchX: Serving a Multi-billion-parameter Reranker for Multilingual Metasearch at a Low Cost

The widespread availability of search API's (both free and commercial) brings the promise of increased coverage and quality of search results for metasearch engines, while decreasing the maintenance costs of the crawling and indexing infrastructures. However, merging strategies frequently comprise complex pipelines that require careful tuning, which is often overlooked in the literature. In this work, we describe NeuralSearchX, a metasearch engine based on a multi-purpose large reranking model to merge results and highlight sentences. Due to the homogeneity of our architecture, we could focus our optimization efforts on a single component. We compare our system with Microsoft's Biomedical Search and show that our design choices led to a much cost-effective system with competitive QPS while having close to state-of-the-art results on a wide range of public benchmarks. Human evaluation on two domain-specific tasks shows that our retrieval system outperformed Google API by a large margin in terms of nDCG@10 scores. By describing our architecture and implementation in detail, we hope that the community will build on our design choices. The system is available at https://neuralsearchx.nsx.ai.
Multi-level Data Representation For Training Deep Helmholtz Machines

A vast majority of the current research in the field of Machine Learning is done using algorithms with strong arguments pointing to their biological implausibility such as Backpropagation, deviating the field's focus from understanding its original organic inspiration to a compulsive search for optimal performance. Yet, there have been a few proposed models that respect most of the biological constraints present in the human brain and are valid candidates for mimicking some of its properties and mechanisms. In this paper, we will focus on guiding the learning of a biologically plausible generative model called the Helmholtz Machine in complex search spaces using a heuristic based on the Human Image Perception mechanism. We hypothesize that this model's learning algorithm is not fit for Deep Networks due to its Hebbian-like local update rule, rendering it incapable of taking full advantage of the compositional properties that multi-layer networks provide. We propose to overcome this problem, by providing the network's hidden layers with visual queues at different resolutions using a Multi-level Data representation. The results on several image datasets showed the model was able to not only obtain better overall quality but also a wider diversity in the generated images, corroborating our intuition that using our proposed heuristic allows the model to take more advantage of the network's depth growth. More importantly, they show the unexplored possibilities underlying brain-inspired models and techniques.
Quantum deep recurrent reinforcement learning

Recent advances in quantum computing (QC) and machine learning (ML) have drawn significant attention to the development of quantum machine learning (QML). Reinforcement learning (RL) is one of the ML paradigms which can be used to solve complex sequential decision making problems. Classical RL has been shown to be capable to solve various challenging tasks. However, RL algorithms in the quantum world are still in their infancy. One of the challenges yet to solve is how to train quantum RL in the partially observable environments. In this paper, we approach this challenge through building QRL agents with quantum recurrent neural networks (QRNN). Specifically, we choose the quantum long short-term memory (QLSTM) to be the core of the QRL agent and train the whole model with deep $Q$-learning. We demonstrate the results via numerical simulations that the QLSTM-DRQN can solve standard benchmark such as Cart-Pole with more stable and higher average scores than classical DRQN with similar architecture and number of model parameters.
A Transparent, Simple AI Tool for Constructing Efficient and Robust Fast and Frugal Trees for Classification Under Risk

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has produced extremely efficient and effective classification and decision “machines” that learn from given data sets and generalize well to unknown data. These are mostly celebrated tools produced by methodologies of machine learning. There is a drawback, though, namely their lack of transparency in construction. Agents often ignore the construction steps and use them as black-box algorithms. We exhibit simple and transparent steps for creating robust and yet simple heuristics for classification based on the AI tool ARBOR. We also claim that these transparent classifiers compete well against powerful machines, especially when training sets are small.
Brody and Jamie’s Colleague: The Difference in Confidence Interval Estimators and Estimates

In an ever-increasing data-driven world, understanding and describing uncertainty around statistical results have become increasingly more important. Although describing uncertainty can take many forms, recent statements from professional associations (e.g., American Statistical Association) have suggested an increased use of confidence intervals. The calculation of a confidence interval (CI) is fairly straightforward, but the interpretation of a frequentist CI is not. This paper presents a case that demonstrates a potentially important connection among the CI estimator, estimate, and the coverage probability to gain a deep understanding of the meaning of the word confident in the interpretation of a CI. The case provides evidence of the connections among the coverage probability, long-run interpretation of a CI, and the interpretation of a CI that may support robust knowledge.
Integrating Technology and Narrative to Engage Young Adolescents With COVID Data

The COVID-19 pandemic has offered opportunities to immerse high needs 10–14-year-olds in real-life data that matter. We developed and tested an out-of-school program to increase youth understanding of data science through epidemiology. The 15–20-hour Data Detectives Clubs are structured around an adventure novel, The Case of the COVID Crisis, which introduces readers to epidemics across space and time. Chapters are accompanied by activities, discussion, and exploration of infection and vaccine data using CODAP, the Common Online Data Analysis Platform. To date, around 600 youth have experienced the program, focusing primarily on time-series data. Youth learned about noisy data, comparing graphs, and matching rates to cumulative numbers. These clubs demonstrate the feasibility of integrating data science with epidemiology outside of school.
Generating GPU Compiler Heuristics using Reinforcement Learning

GPU compilers are complex software programs with many optimizations specific to target hardware. These optimizations are often controlled by heuristics hand-designed by compiler experts using time- and resource-intensive processes. In this paper, we developed a GPU compiler autotuning framework that uses off-policy deep reinforcement learning to generate heuristics that improve the frame rates of graphics applications. Furthermore, we demonstrate the resilience of these learned heuristics to frequent compiler updates by analyzing their stability across a year of code check-ins without retraining. We show that our machine learning-based compiler autotuning framework matches or surpasses the frame rates for 98% of graphics benchmarks with an average uplift of 1.6% up to 15.8%.
ptype-cat: Inferring the Type and Values of Categorical Variables

Type inference is the task of identifying the type of values in a data column and has been studied extensively in the literature. Most existing type inference methods support data types such as Boolean, date, float, integer and string. However, these methods do not consider non-Boolean categorical variables, where there are more than two possible values encoded by integers or strings. Therefore, such columns are annotated either as integer or string rather than categorical, and need to be transformed into categorical manually by the user. In this paper, we propose a probabilistic type inference method that can identify the general categorical data type (including non-Boolean variables). Additionally, we identify the possible values of each categorical variable by adapting the existing type inference method ptype. Combining these methods, we present ptype-cat which achieves better results than existing applicable solutions.
An Accurate, Scalable and Verifiable Protocol for Federated Differentially Private Averaging

Learning from data owned by several parties, as in federated learning, raises challenges regarding the privacy guarantees provided to participants and the correctness of the computation in the presence of malicious parties. We tackle these challenges in the context of distributed averaging, an essential building block of federated learning algorithms. Our first contribution is a scalable protocol in which participants exchange correlated Gaussian noise along the edges of a network graph, complemented by independent noise added by each party. We analyze the differential privacy guarantees of our protocol and the impact of the graph topology under colluding malicious parties, showing that we can nearly match the utility of the trusted curator model even when each honest party communicates with only a logarithmic number of other parties chosen at random. This is in contrast with protocols in the local model of privacy (with lower utility) or based on secure aggregation (where all pairs of users need to exchange messages). Our second contribution enables users to prove the correctness of their computations without compromising the efficiency and privacy guarantees of the protocol. Our verification protocol relies on standard cryptographic primitives like commitment schemes and zero knowledge proofs.
Adversarial machine learning for protecting against online manipulation

Adversarial examples are inputs to a machine learning system that result in an incorrect output from that system. Attacks launched through this type of input can cause severe consequences: for example, in the field of image recognition, a stop signal can be misclassified as a speed limit indication.However, adversarial examples also represent the fuel for a flurry of research directions in different domains and applications. Here, we give an overview of how they can be profitably exploited as powerful tools to build stronger learning models, capable of better-withstanding attacks, for two crucial tasks: fake news and social bot detection.
Research on signature based on Grover quantum encryption algorithm

Quantum signature is a classical digital signature technology, which realizes the security guarantee of the integrity, nonrepudiation and non-tampering of quantum information through the basic principles of quantum mechanics. Arbitrated quantum signature (AQS) is a hot spot in current quantum signature research. The article deeply discusses the basic principle of AQS system, and takes the research and design of AQS scheme as the main idea, researches and analyzes the existing AQS scheme, finds the existing problems, and gives solutions. At the same time, in order to further improve the arbitration function of AQS, this paper proposes a flexible tracking quantum group blind signature system based on AQGBS.
Research on security protection path of information infrastructure: how to identify the critical information infrastructure of the communication industry

With the rapid development of information and communication technology, network attacks and sabotage methods emerge one after another, and the internal and external risks facing the critical information infrastructure in the communication industry are becoming increasingly prominent. In order to improve the effectiveness and pertinence of the security protection of critical information infrastructure, the security protection path of critical information infrastructure is proposed. Through the analysis of structural equation model (SEM), it is confirmed that the identification factors of critical information infrastructure in the communication industry include three kinds of factors: importance, harmfulness and relevance. It also points out the influence degree of each factor on the critical degree value and each secondary index on the three factors, which has a certain reference significance for the effective identification of the critical information infrastructure in the communication industry.