Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Binary Optimization Using Hybrid Grey Wolf Optimization for Feature Selection

A binary version of the hybrid grey wolf optimization (GWO) and particle swarm optimization (PSO) is proposed to solve feature selection problems in this paper. The original PSOGWO is a new hybrid optimization algorithm that benefits from the strengths of both GWO and PSO. Despite the superior performance, the original hybrid approach is appropriate for problems with a continuous search space. Feature selection, however, is a binary problem. Therefore, a binary version of hybrid PSOGWO called BGWOPSO is proposed to find the best feature subset. To find the best solutions, the wrapper-based method K-nearest neighbors classifier with Euclidean separation matric is utilized. For performance evaluation of the proposed binary algorithm, 18 standard benchmark datasets from UCI repository are employed. The results show that BGWOPSO significantly outperformed the binary GWO (BGWO), the binary PSO, the binary genetic algorithm, and the whale optimization algorithm with simulated annealing when using several performance measures including accuracy, selecting the best optimal features, and the computational time.
Self-Supervised Spatiotemporal Learning via Video Clip Order Prediction

We propose a self-supervised spatiotemporal learning technique which leverages the chronological order of videos. Our method can learn the spatiotemporal representation of the video by predicting the order of shuffled clips from the video. The category of the video is not required, which gives our technique the potential to take advantage of infinite unannotated videos. There exist related works which use frames, while compared to frames, clips are more consistent with the video dynamics. Clips can help to reduce the uncertainty of orders and are more appropriate to learn a video representation. The 3D convolutional neural networks are utilized to extract features for clips, and these features are processed to predict the actual order. The learned representations are evaluated via nearest neighbor retrieval experiments. We also use the learned networks as the pre-trained models and finetune them on the action recognition task. Three types of 3D convolutional neural networks are tested in experiments, and we gain large improvements compared to existing self-supervised methods.
TEA: Temporal Excitation and Aggregation for Action Recognition

Temporal modeling is key for action recognition in videos. It normally considers both short-range motions and long-range aggregations. In this paper, we propose a Temporal Excitation and Aggregation (TEA) block, including a motion excitation (ME) module and a multiple temporal aggregation (MTA) module, specifically designed to capture both short- and long-range temporal evolution. In particular, for short-range motion modeling, the ME module calculates the feature-level temporal differences from spatiotemporal features. It then utilizes the differences to excite the motion-sensitive channels of the features. The long-range temporal aggregations in previous works are typically achieved by stacking a large number of local temporal convolutions. Each convolution processes a local temporal window at a time. In contrast, the MTA module proposes to deform the local convolution to a group of sub-convolutions, forming a hierarchical residual architecture. Without introducing additional parameters, the features will be processed with a series of sub-convolutions, and each frame could complete multiple temporal aggregations with neighborhoods. The final equivalent receptive field of temporal dimension is accordingly enlarged, which is capable of modeling the long-range temporal relationship over distant frames. The two components of the TEA block are complementary in temporal modeling. Finally, our approach achieves impressive results at low FLOPs on several action recognition benchmarks, such as Kinetics, Something-Something, HMDB51, and UCF101, which confirms its effectiveness and efficiency.
Understanding anthropomorphism in service provision: a meta-analysis of physical robots, chatbots, and other AI

Abstract An increasing number of firms introduce service robots, such as physical robots and virtual chatbots, to provide services to customers. While some firms use robots that resemble human beings by looking and acting humanlike to increase customers’ use intention of this technology, others employ machinelike robots to avoid uncanny valley effects, assuming that very humanlike robots may induce feelings of eeriness. There is no consensus in the service literature regarding whether customers’ anthropomorphism of robots facilitates or constrains their use intention. The present meta-analysis synthesizes data from 11,053 individuals interacting with service robots reported in 108 independent samples. The study synthesizes previous research to clarify this issue and enhance understanding of the construct. We develop a comprehensive model to investigate relationships between anthropomorphism and its antecedents and consequences. Customer traits and predispositions (e.g., computer anxiety), sociodemographics (e.g., gender), and robot design features (e.g., physical, nonphysical) are identified as triggers of anthropomorphism. Robot characteristics (e.g., intelligence) and functional characteristics (e.g., usefulness) are identified as important mediators, although relational characteristics (e.g., rapport) receive less support as mediators. The findings clarify contextual circumstances in which anthropomorphism impacts customer intention to use a robot. The moderator analysis indicates that the impact depends on robot type (i.e., robot gender) and service type (i.e., possession-processing service, mental stimulus-processing service). Based on these findings, we develop a comprehensive agenda for future research on service robots in marketing.
Real-ESRGAN: Training Real-World Blind Super-Resolution with Pure Synthetic Data

Though many attempts have been made in blind super-resolution to restore low-resolution images with unknown and complex degradations, they are still far from addressing general real-world degraded images. In this work, we extend the powerful ESRGAN to a practical restoration application (namely, Real-ESRGAN), which is trained with pure synthetic data. Specifically, a high-order degradation modeling process is introduced to better simulate complex real-world degradations. We also consider the common ringing and overshoot artifacts in the synthesis process. In addition, we employ a U-Net discriminator with spectral normalization to increase discriminator capability and stabilize the training dynamics. Extensive comparisons have shown its superior visual performance than prior works on various real datasets. We also provide efficient implementations to synthesize training pairs on the fly.
Denoising Prior Driven Deep Neural Network for Image Restoration

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have shown very promising results for various image restoration (IR) tasks. However, the design of network architectures remains a major challenging for achieving further improvements. While most existing DNN-based methods solve the IR problems by directly mapping low quality images to desirable high-quality images, the observation models characterizing the image degradation processes have been largely ignored. In this paper, we first propose a denoising-based IR algorithm, whose iterative steps can be computed efficiently. Then, the iterative process is unfolded into a deep neural network, which is composed of multiple denoisers modules interleaved with back-projection (BP) modules that ensure the observation consistencies. A convolutional neural network (CNN) based denoiser that can exploit the multi-scale redundancies of natural images is proposed. As such, the proposed network not only exploits the powerful denoising ability of DNNs, but also leverages the prior of the observation model. Through end-to-end training, both the denoisers and the BP modules can be jointly optimized. Experimental results on several IR tasks, e.g., image denoisig, super-resolution and deblurring show that the proposed method can lead to very competitive and often state-of-the-art results on several IR tasks, including image denoising, deblurring and super-resolution.
Attentive Feedback Network for Boundary-Aware Salient Object Detection

Recent deep learning based salient object detection methods achieve gratifying performance built upon Fully Convolutional Neural Networks (FCNs). However, most of them have suffered from the boundary challenge. The state-of-the-art methods employ feature aggregation tech- nique and can precisely find out wherein the salient object, but they often fail to segment out the entire object with fine boundaries, especially those raised narrow stripes. So there is still a large room for improvement over the FCN based models. In this paper, we design the Attentive Feedback Modules (AFMs) to better explore the structure of objects. A Boundary-Enhanced Loss (BEL) is further employed for learning exquisite boundaries. Our proposed deep model produces satisfying results on the object boundaries and achieves state-of-the-art performance on five widely tested salient object detection benchmarks. The network is in a fully convolutional fashion running at a speed of 26 FPS and does not need any post-processing.
Efficient and Privacy-Enhanced Federated Learning for Industrial Artificial Intelligence

By leveraging deep learning-based technologies, industrial artificial intelligence (IAI) has been applied to solve various industrial challenging problems in Industry 4.0. However, for privacy reasons, traditional centralized training may be unsuitable for sensitive data-driven industrial scenarios, such as healthcare and autopilot. Recently, federated learning has received widespread attention, since it enables participants to collaboratively learn a shared model without revealing their local data. However, studies have shown that, by exploiting the shared parameters adversaries can still compromise industrial applications such as auto-driving navigation systems, medical data in wearable devices, and industrial robots' decision making. In this article, to solve this problem, we propose an efficient and privacy-enhanced federated learning (PEFL) scheme for IAI. Compared with existing solutions, PEFL is noninteractive, and can prevent private data from being leaked even if multiple entities collude with each other. Moreover, extensive experiments with real-world data demonstrate the superiority of PEFL in terms of accuracy and efficiency.
Uncertainty-Aware Self-ensembling Model for Semi-supervised 3D Left Atrium Segmentation

Training deep convolutional neural networks usually requires a large amount of labeled data. However, it is expensive and time-consuming to annotate data for medical image segmentation tasks. In this paper, we present a novel uncertainty-aware semi-supervised framework for left atrium segmentation from 3D MR images. Our framework can effectively leverage the unlabeled data by encouraging consistent predictions of the same input under different perturbations. Concretely, the framework consists of a student model and a teacher model, and the student model learns from the teacher model by minimizing a segmentation loss and a consistency loss with respect to the targets of the teacher model. We design a novel uncertainty-aware scheme to enable the student model to gradually learn from the meaningful and reliable targets by exploiting the uncertainty information. Experiments show that our method achieves high performance gains by incorporating the unlabeled data. Our method outperforms the state-of-the-art semi-supervised methods, demonstrating the potential of our framework for the challenging semi-supervised problems.
AI-based chatbots in customer service and their effects on user compliance

Abstract Communicating with customers through live chat interfaces has become an increasingly popular means to provide real-time customer service in many e-commerce settings. Today, human chat service agents are frequently replaced by conversational software agents or chatbots, which are systems designed to communicate with human users by means of natural language often based on artificial intelligence (AI). Though cost- and time-saving opportunities triggered a widespread implementation of AI-based chatbots, they still frequently fail to meet customer expectations, potentially resulting in users being less inclined to comply with requests made by the chatbot. Drawing on social response and commitment-consistency theory, we empirically examine through a randomized online experiment how verbal anthropomorphic design cues and the foot-in-the-door technique affect user request compliance. Our results demonstrate that both anthropomorphism as well as the need to stay consistent significantly increase the likelihood that users comply with a chatbot’s request for service feedback. Moreover, the results show that social presence mediates the effect of anthropomorphic design cues on user compliance.
Explainable Deep Learning Models in Medical Image Analysis

Deep learning methods have been very effective for a variety of medical diagnostic tasks and have even outperformed human experts on some of those. However, the black-box nature of the algorithms has restricted their clinical use. Recent explainability studies aim to show the features that influence the decision of a model the most. The majority of literature reviews of this area have focused on taxonomy, ethics, and the need for explanations. A review of the current applications of explainable deep learning for different medical imaging tasks is presented here. The various approaches, challenges for clinical deployment, and the areas requiring further research are discussed here from a practical standpoint of a deep learning researcher designing a system for the clinical end-users.
<b>dbscan</b>: Fast Density-Based Clustering with <i>R</i>

This article describes the implementation and use of the R package dbscan, which provides complete and fast implementations of the popular density-based clustering algorithm DBSCAN and the augmented ordering algorithm OPTICS.Package dbscan uses advanced open-source spatial indexing data structures implemented in C++ to speed up computation.An important advantage of this implementation is that it is up-to-date with several improvements that have been added since the original algorithms were publications (e.g., artifact corrections and dendrogram extraction methods for OPTICS).We provide a consistent presentation of the DBSCAN and OPTICS algorithms, and compare dbscan's implementation with other popular libraries such as the R package fpc, ELKI, WEKA, PyClustering, SciKit-Learn, and SPMF in terms of available features and using an experimental comparison.
Experimental demonstration of memory-enhanced quantum communication

The ability to communicate quantum information over long distances is of central importance in quantum science and engineering. For example, it enables secure quantum key distribution (QKD) relying on fundamental principles that prohibit the "cloning" of unknown quantum states. While QKD is being successfully deployed, its range is currently limited by photon losses and cannot be extended using straightforward measure-and-repeat strategies without compromising its unconditional security. Alternatively, quantum repeaters, which utilize intermediate quantum memory nodes and error correction techniques, can extend the range of quantum channels. However, their implementation remains an outstanding challenge, requiring a combination of efficient and high-fidelity quantum memories, gate operations, and measurements. Here we report the experimental realization of memory-enhanced quantum communication. We use a single solid-state spin memory integrated in a nanophotonic diamond resonator to implement asynchronous Bell-state measurements. This enables a four-fold increase in the secret key rate of measurement device independent (MDI)-QKD over the loss-equivalent direct-transmission method while operating megahertz clock rates. Our results represent a significant step towards practical quantum repeaters and large-scale quantum networks.
Snake Optimizer: A novel meta-heuristic optimization algorithm

In recent years, several metaheuristic algorithms have been introduced in engineering and scientific fields to address real-life optimization problems. In this study, a novel nature-inspired metaheuristics algorithm named as Snake Optimizer (SO) is proposed to tackle a various set of optimization tasks which imitates the special mating behavior of snakes. Each snake (male/female) fights to have the best partner if the existed quantity of food is enough and the temperature is low. This study mathematically mimics and models such foraging and reproduction behaviors and patterns to present a simple and efficient optimization algorithm. To verify the validity and superiority of the proposed method, SO is tested on 29 unconstrained Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC) 2017 benchmark functions and four constrained real-world engineering problems. SO is compared with other 9 well-known and newly developed algorithms such as Linear population size reduction-Success-History Adaptation for Differential Evolution (L-SHADE), Ensemble Sinusoidal incorporated with L-SHADE (LSHADE-EpSin), Covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategy (CMAES), Coyote Optimization Algorithm (COA), Moth-flame Optimization, Harris Hawks Optimizer, Thermal Exchange optimization, Grasshopper Optimization Algorithm, and Whale Optimization Algorithm. Experimental results and statistical comparisons prove the effectiveness and efficiency of SO on different landscapes with respect to exploration–exploitation balance and convergence curve speed. The source code is currently available for public from: https://se.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/106465-snake-optimizer
Survey on Coverage Path Planning with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Coverage path planning consists of finding the route which covers every point of a certain area of interest. In recent times, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have been employed in several application domains involving terrain coverage, such as surveillance, smart farming, photogrammetry, disaster management, civil security, and wildfire tracking, among others. This paper aims to explore and analyze the existing studies in the literature related to the different approaches employed in coverage path planning problems, especially those using UAVs. We address simple geometric flight patterns and more complex grid-based solutions considering full and partial information about the area of interest. The surveyed coverage approaches are classified according to a classical taxonomy, such as no decomposition, exact cellular decomposition, and approximate cellular decomposition. This review also contemplates different shapes of the area of interest, such as rectangular, concave and convex polygons. The performance metrics usually applied to evaluate the success of the coverage missions are also presented.
A Neural Influence Diffusion Model for Social Recommendation

Precise user and item embedding learning is the key to building a successful recommender system. Traditionally, Collaborative Filtering (CF) provides a way to learn user and item embeddings from the user-item interaction history. However, the performance is limited due to the sparseness of user behavior data. With the emergence of online social networks, social recommender systems have been proposed to utilize each user's local neighbors' preferences to alleviate the data sparsity for better user embedding modeling. We argue that, for each user of a social platform, her potential embedding is influenced by her trusted users, with these trusted users are influenced by the trusted users' social connections. As social influence recursively propagates and diffuses in the social network, each user's interests change in the recursive process. Nevertheless, the current social recommendation models simply developed static models by leveraging the local neighbors of each user without simulating the recursive diffusion in the global social network, leading to suboptimal recommendation performance. In this paper, we propose a deep influence propagation model to stimulate how users are influenced by the recursive social diffusion process for social recommendation. For each user, the diffusion process starts with an initial embedding that fuses the related features and a free user latent vector that captures the latent behavior preference. The key idea of our proposed model is that we design a layer-wise influence propagation structure to model how users' latent embeddings evolve as the social diffusion process continues. We further show that our proposed model is general and could be applied when the user~(item) attributes or the social network structure is not available. Finally, extensive experimental results on two real-world datasets clearly show the effectiveness of our proposed model, with more than 13% performance improvements over the best baselines for top-10 recommendation on the two datasets.
Recent trends in the use of statistical tests for comparing swarm and evolutionary computing algorithms: Practical guidelines and a critical review

A key aspect of the design of evolutionary and swarm intelligence algorithms is studying their performance. Statistical comparisons are also a crucial part which allows for reliable conclusions to be drawn. In the present paper we gather and examine the approaches taken from different perspectives to summarise the assumptions made by these statistical tests, the conclusions reached and the steps followed to perform them correctly. In this paper, we conduct a survey on the current trends of the proposals of statistical analyses for the comparison of algorithms of computational intelligence and include a description of the statistical background of these tests. We illustrate the use of the most common tests in the context of the Competition on single-objective real parameter optimisation of the IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC) 2017 and describe the main advantages and drawbacks of the use of each kind of test and put forward some recommendations concerning their use.
A comprehensive survey on sentiment analysis: Approaches, challenges and trends

Sentiment analysis (SA), also called Opinion Mining (OM) is the task of extracting and analyzing people’s opinions, sentiments, attitudes, perceptions, etc., toward different entities such as topics, products, and services. The fast evolution of Internet-based applications like websites, social networks, and blogs, leads people to generate enormous heaps of opinions and reviews about products, services, and day-to-day activities. Sentiment analysis poses as a powerful tool for businesses, governments, and researchers to extract and analyze public mood and views, gain business insight, and make better decisions. This paper presents a complete study of sentiment analysis approaches, challenges, and trends, to give researchers a global survey on sentiment analysis and its related fields. The paper presents the applications of sentiment analysis and describes the generic process of this task. Then, it reviews, compares, and investigates the used approaches to have an exhaustive view of their advantages and drawbacks. The challenges of sentiment analysis are discussed next to clarify future directions.