Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
RepMet: Representative-Based Metric Learning for Classification and Few-Shot Object Detection

Distance metric learning (DML) has been successfully applied to object classification, both in the standard regime of rich training data and in the few-shot scenario, where each category is represented by only a few examples. In this work, we propose a new method for DML that simultaneously learns the backbone network parameters, the embedding space, and the multi-modal distribution of each of the training categories in that space, in a single end-to-end training process. Our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods for DML-based object classification on a variety of standard fine-grained datasets. Furthermore, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on the problem of few-shot object detection, by incorporating the proposed DML architecture as a classification head into a standard object detection model. We achieve the best results on the ImageNet-LOC dataset compared to strong baselines, when only a few training examples are available. We also offer the community a new episodic benchmark based on the ImageNet dataset for the few-shot object detection task.
A hybrid deep learning model for short-term PV power forecasting

The integration of PV power brings great economic and environmental benefits. However, the high penetration of PV power may challenge the planning and operation of the existing power system owing to the intermittence and randomicity of PV power generation. Achieving accurate forecasting for PV power generation is important for providing high quality electric energy for end-consumers and for enhancing the reliability of power system operation. Motivated by recent advancements in deep learning methods and their satisfactory performance in the energy sector, a hybrid deep learning model combining wavelet packet decomposition (WPD) and long short-term memory (LSTM) networks is proposed in this study. The hybrid deep learning model is utilized for one-hour-ahead PV power forecasting with five-minute intervals. WPD is first used to decompose the original PV power series into sub-series. Next, four independent LSTM networks are developed for these sub-series. Finally, the results predicted by each LSTM network are reconstructed and a linear weighting method is employed to obtain the final forecasting results. The performance of the proposed method is demonstrated with a case study using an actual dataset collected from Alice Springs, Australia. Comparisons with individual LSTM, recurrent neural network (RNN), gated recurrent (GRU), and multi-layer perceptron (MLP) models are also presented. The values of three performance evaluation indicators, MBE, MAPE, and RMSE, show that the proposed hybrid deep learning model exhibits superior performance in both forecasting accuracy and stability.
Blockchain in the operations and supply chain management: Benefits, challenges and future research opportunities

Blockchain technologies have captured the imagination of scholars, managers, and practitioners around the world. It is widely accepted by these actors that blockchain is not a buzzword, but a highly disruptive technology that is already remodeling the organizations and their supply chain business models. Despite the meaningful advance in the last years, blockchain applications regarding the operations and supply chain management (OSCM) are still in their infancy. Little is known about the role of blockchain in terms of operations traceability, as well in areas such as e-commerce, agriculture, public services, etc. Therefore, this Special Issue seeks to extend our understanding of blockchain applications in OSCM and how firms create and capture business value with blockchain. To this effect, this Special Issue will provide a well-articulated and in-depth discussion of the role of blockchain in creating value in the domain of OSCM. Specifically, it is expected that more light is shed on how blockchain integrates with and impacts new business models, transforms relationships, and improves performance and competitive advantage in OSCM. Also, the evolution of blockchain was reviewed in order to provide a strong background to the readers. The literature review was performed taking into account a bibliometric perspective of blockchain-related publications. The review supports the importance of this Special Issue by highlighting the urgent needs of this topic in this reputable journal. Finally, we provide future research directions and a guide for the papers presented in this Special Issue.
Exploring the Limitations of Behavior Cloning for Autonomous Driving

Driving requires reacting to a wide variety of complex environment conditions and agent behaviors. Explicitly modeling each possible scenario is unrealistic. In contrast, imitation learning can, in theory, leverage data from large fleets of human-driven cars. Behavior cloning in particular has been successfully used to learn simple visuomotor policies end-to-end, but scaling to the full spectrum of driving behaviors remains an unsolved problem. In this paper, we propose a new benchmark to experimentally investigate the scalability and limitations of behavior cloning. We show that behavior cloning leads to state-ofthe-art results, executing complex lateral and longitudinal maneuvers, even in unseen environments, without being explicitly programmed to do so. However, we confirm some limitations of the behavior cloning approach: some wellknown limitations (e.g., dataset bias and overfitting), new generalization issues (e.g., dynamic objects and the lack of a causal modeling), and training instabilities, all requiring further research before behavior cloning can graduate to real-world driving. The code, dataset, benchmark, and agent studied in this paper can be found at http:// github.com/felipecode/coiltraine/blob/ master/docs/exploring_limitations.md.
Improved Binary Grey Wolf Optimizer and Its application for feature selection

Grey Wolf Optimizer (GWO) is a new swarm intelligence algorithm mimicking the behaviours of grey wolves. Its abilities include fast convergence, simplicity and easy realization. It has been proved its superior performance and widely used to optimize the continuous applications, such as, cluster analysis, engineering problem, training neural network and etc. However, there are still some binary problems to optimize in the real world. Since binary can only be taken from values of 0 or 1, the standard GWO is not suitable for the problems of discretization. Binary Grey Wolf Optimizer (BGWO) extends the application of the GWO algorithm and is applied to binary optimization issues. In the position updating equations of BGWO, the a parameter controls the values of A and D, and influences algorithmic exploration and exploitation. This paper analyses the range of values of AD under binary condition and proposes a new updating equation for the a parameter to balance the abilities of global search and local search. Transfer function is an important part of BGWO, which is essential for mapping the continuous value to binary one. This paper includes five transfer functions and focuses on improving their solution quality. Through verifying the benchmark functions, the advanced binary GWO is superior to the original BGWO in the optimality, time consumption and convergence speed. It successfully implements feature selection in the UCI datasets and acquires low classification errors with few features.
CCNet: Criss-Cross Attention for Semantic Segmentation

Contextual information is vital in visual understanding problems, such as semantic segmentation and object detection. We propose a criss-cross network (CCNet) for obtaining full-image contextual information in a very effective and efficient way. Concretely, for each pixel, a novel criss-cross attention module harvests the contextual information of all the pixels on its criss-cross path. By taking a further recurrent operation, each pixel can finally capture the full-image dependencies. Besides, a category consistent loss is proposed to enforce the criss-cross attention module to produce more discriminative features. Overall, CCNet is with the following merits: 1) GPU memory friendly. Compared with the non-local block, the proposed recurrent criss-cross attention module requires 11× less GPU memory usage. 2) High computational efficiency. The recurrent criss-cross attention significantly reduces FLOPs by about 85 percent of the non-local block. 3) The state-of-the-art performance. We conduct extensive experiments on semantic segmentation benchmarks including Cityscapes, ADE20K, human parsing benchmark LIP, instance segmentation benchmark COCO, video segmentation benchmark CamVid. In particular, our CCNet achieves the mIoU scores of 81.9, 45.76 and 55.47 percent on the Cityscapes test set, the ADE20K validation set and the LIP validation set respectively, which are the new state-of-the-art results. The source codes are available at https://github.com/speedinghzl/CCNethttps://github.com/speedinghzl/CCNet.
Retinex-inspired Unrolling with Cooperative Prior Architecture Search for Low-light Image Enhancement

Low-light image enhancement plays very important roles in low-level vision areas. Recent works have built a great deal of deep learning models to address this task. However, these approaches mostly rely on significant architecture engineering and suffer from high computational burden. In this paper, we propose a new method, named Retinex-inspired Unrolling with Architecture Search (RUAS), to construct lightweight yet effective enhancement network for low-light images in real-world scenario. Specifically, building upon Retinex rule, RUAS first establishes models to characterize the intrinsic underexposed structure of low-light images and unroll their optimization processes to construct our holistic propagation structure. Then by designing a cooperative reference-free learning strategy to discover low-light prior architectures from a compact search space, RUAS is able to obtain a top-performing image enhancement network, which is with fast speed and requires few computational resources. Extensive experiments verify the superiority of our RUAS framework against recently proposed state-of-the-art methods. The project page is available at http://dutmedia.org/RUAS/.
Convolutional Neural Network Architectures for Signals Supported on Graphs

Two architectures that generalize convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for the processing of signals supported on graphs are introduced. We start with the selection graph neural network (GNN), which replaces linear time invariant filters with linear shift invariant graph filters to generate convolutional features and reinterprets pooling as a possibly nonlinear subsampling stage where nearby nodes pool their information in a set of preselected sample nodes. A key component of the architecture is to remember the position of sampled nodes to permit computation of convolutional features at deeper layers. The second architecture, dubbed aggregation GNN, diffuses the signal through the graph and stores the sequence of diffused components observed by a designated node. This procedure effectively aggregates all components into a stream of information having temporal structure to which the convolution and pooling stages of regular CNNs can be applied. A multinode version of aggregation GNNs is further introduced for operation in large scale graphs. An important property of selection and aggregation GNNs is that they reduce to conventional CNNs when particularized to time signals reinterpreted as graph signals in a circulant graph. Comparative numerical analyses are performed in a source localization application over synthetic and real-world networks. Performance is also evaluated for an authorship attribution problem and text category classification. Multinode aggregation GNNs are consistently the best performing GNN architecture.
A new meta-heuristic optimizer: Pathfinder algorithm

This paper proposes a new meta-heuristic algorithm called Pathfinder Algorithm (PFA) to solve optimization problems with different structure. This method is inspired by collective movement of animal group and mimics the leadership hierarchy of swarms to find best food area or prey. The proposed method is tested on some optimization problems to show and confirm the performance on test beds. It can be observed on benchmark test functions that PFA is able to converge global optimum and avoid the local optima effectively. Also, PFA is designed for multi-objective problems (MOPFA). The results obtained show that it can approximate to true Pareto optimal solutions. The proposed PFA and MPFA are implemented to some design problems and a multi-objective engineering problem which is time consuming and computationally expensive. The results of final case study verify the superiority of the algorithms proposed in solving challenging real-world problems with unknown search spaces. Furthermore, the method provides very competitive solutions compared to well-known meta-heuristics in literature, such as particle swarm optimization, artificial bee colony, firefly and grey wolf optimizer.
A high-resolution geospatial assessment of the rooftop solar photovoltaic potential in the European Union

Rooftop solar photovoltaic (PV) systems can make a significant contribution to Europe's energy transition. Realising this potential raises challenges at policy and electricity system planning level. To address this, the authors have developed a geospatially explicit methodology using up-to-date spatial information of the EU building stock to quantify the available rooftop area for PV systems. To do this, it combines satellite-based and statistical data sources with machine learning to provide a reliable assessment of the technical potential for rooftop PV electricity production with a spatial resolution of 100 m across the European Union (EU). It estimates the levelised cost of electricity (LCOE) using country-specific parameters and compares it to the latest household electricity prices. The results show that the EU rooftops could potentially produce 680 TWh of solar electricity annually (representing 24.4% of current electricity consumption), two thirds of which at a cost lower than the current residential tariffs. Country aggregated results illustrate existing barriers for cost-effective rooftop systems in countries with low electricity prices and high investment interest rates, as well as provide indications on how to address these.
Exploring Randomly Wired Neural Networks for Image Recognition

Neural networks for image recognition have evolved through extensive manual design from simple chain-like models to structures with multiple wiring paths. The success of ResNets and DenseNets is due in large part to their innovative wiring plans. Now, neural architecture search (NAS) studies are exploring the joint optimization of wiring and operation types, however, the space of possible wirings is constrained and still driven by manual design despite being searched. In this paper, we explore a more diverse set of connectivity patterns through the lens of randomly wired neural networks. To do this, we first define the concept of a stochastic network generator that encapsulates the entire network generation process. Encapsulation provides a unified view of NAS and randomly wired networks. Then, we use three classical random graph models to generate randomly wired graphs for networks. The results are surprising: several variants of these random generators yield network instances that have competitive accuracy on the ImageNet benchmark. These results suggest that new efforts focusing on designing better network generators may lead to new breakthroughs by exploring less constrained search spaces with more room for novel design.
A Brief Survey on Semantic Segmentation with Deep Learning

Semantic segmentation is a challenging task in computer vision. In recent years, the performance of semantic segmentation has been greatly improved by using deep learning techniques. A large number of novel methods have been proposed. This paper aims to provide a brief review of research efforts on deep-learning-based semantic segmentation methods. We categorize the related research according to its supervision level, i.e., fully-supervised methods, weakly-supervised methods and semi-supervised methods. We also discuss the common challenges of the current research, and present several valuable growing research points in this field. This survey is expected to familiarize readers with the progress and challenges of semantic segmentation research in the deep learning era.
Prediction of epidemic trends in COVID-19 with logistic model and machine learning technics

COVID-19 has now had a huge impact in the world, and more than 8 million people in more than 100 countries are infected. To contain its spread, a number of countries published control measures. However, it's not known when the epidemic will end in global and various countries. Predicting the trend of COVID-19 is an extremely important challenge. We integrate the most updated COVID-19 epidemiological data before June 16, 2020 into the Logistic model to fit the cap of epidemic trend, and then feed the cap value into FbProphet model, a machine learning based time series prediction model to derive the epidemic curve and predict the trend of the epidemic. Three significant points are summarized from our modeling results for global, Brazil, Russia, India, Peru and Indonesia. Under mathematical estimation, the global outbreak will peak in late October, with an estimated 14.12 million people infected cumulatively.
Interpretable machine learning: Fundamental principles and 10 grand challenges

Interpretability in machine learning (ML) is crucial for high stakes decisions and troubleshooting. In this work, we provide fundamental principles for interpretable ML, and dispel common misunderstandings that dilute the importance of this crucial topic. We also identify 10 technical challenge areas in interpretable machine learning and provide history and background on each problem. Some of these problems are classically important, and some are recent problems that have arisen in the last few years. These problems are: (1) Optimizing sparse logical models such as decision trees; (2) Optimization of scoring systems; (3) Placing constraints into generalized additive models to encourage sparsity and better interpretability; (4) Modern case-based reasoning, including neural networks and matching for causal inference; (5) Complete supervised disentanglement of neural networks; (6) Complete or even partial unsupervised disentanglement of neural networks; (7) Dimensionality reduction for data visualization; (8) Machine learning models that can incorporate physics and other generative or causal constraints; (9) Characterization of the “Rashomon set” of good models; and (10) Interpretable reinforcement learning. This survey is suitable as a starting point for statisticians and computer scientists interested in working in interpretable machine learning.
Verified quantum information scrambling

Quantum scrambling is the dispersal of local information into many-body quantum entanglements and correlations distributed throughout an entire system. This concept accompanies the dynamics of thermalization in closed quantum systems, and has recently emerged as a powerful tool for characterizing chaos in black holes1-4. However, the direct experimental measurement of quantum scrambling is difficult, owing to the exponential complexity of ergodic many-body entangled states. One way to characterize quantum scrambling is to measure an out-of-time-ordered correlation function (OTOC); however, because scrambling leads to their decay, OTOCs do not generally discriminate between quantum scrambling and ordinary decoherence. Here we implement a quantum circuit that provides a positive test for the scrambling features of a given unitary process5,6. This approach conditionally teleports a quantum state through the circuit, providing an unambiguous test for whether scrambling has occurred, while simultaneously measuring an OTOC. We engineer quantum scrambling processes through a tunable three-qubit unitary operation as part of a seven-qubit circuit on an ion trap quantum computer. Measured teleportation fidelities are typically about 80 per cent, and enable us to experimentally bound the scrambling-induced decay of the corresponding OTOC measurement.
Animating Arbitrary Objects via Deep Motion Transfer

This paper introduces a novel deep learning framework for image animation. Given an input image with a target object and a driving video sequence depicting a moving object, our framework generates a video in which the target object is animated according to the driving sequence. This is achieved through a deep architecture that decouples appearance and motion information. Our framework consists of three main modules: (i) a Keypoint Detector unsupervisely trained to extract object keypoints, (ii) a Dense Motion prediction network for generating dense heatmaps from sparse keypoints, in order to better encode motion information and (iii) a Motion Transfer Network, which uses the motion heatmaps and appearance information extracted from the input image to synthesize the output frames. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on several benchmark datasets, spanning a wide variety of object appearances, and show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art image animation and video generation methods.
A Comprehensive Analysis of Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE) for handling class imbalance

Imbalanced classification problems are often encountered in many applications. The challenge is that there is a minority class that has typically very little data and is often the focus of attention. One approach for handling imbalance is to generate extra data from the minority class, to overcome its shortage of data. The Synthetic Minority over-sampling TEchnique (SMOTE) is one of the dominant methods in the literature that achieves this extra sample generation. It is based on generating examples on the lines connecting a point and one its K-nearest neighbors. This paper presents a theoretical and experimental analysis of the SMOTE method. We explore the accuracy of how faithful it emulates the underlying density. To our knowledge, this is the first mathematical analysis of the SMOTE method. Moreover, we analyze the effect of the different factors on generation accuracy, such as the dimension, size of the training set and the considered number of neighbors K. We also provide a qualitative analysis that examines the factors affecting its accuracy. In addition, we explore the impact of SMOTE on classification boundary, and classification performance.
GradNet: Gradient-Guided Network for Visual Object Tracking

The fully-convolutional siamese network based on template matching has shown great potentials in visual tracking. During testing, the template is fixed with the initial target feature and the performance totally relies on the general matching ability of the siamese network. However, this manner cannot capture the temporal variations of targets or background clutter. In this work, we propose a novel gradient-guided network to exploit the discriminative information in gradients and update the template in the siamese network through feed-forward and backward operations. To be specific, the algorithm can utilize the information from the gradient to update the template in the current frame. In addition, a template generalization training method is proposed to better use gradient information and avoid overfitting. To our knowledge, this work is the first attempt to exploit the information in the gradient for template update in siamese-based trackers. Extensive experiments on recent benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves better performance than other state-of-the-art trackers.