Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
LC-QuAD 2.0: A Large Dataset for Complex Question Answering over Wikidata and DBpedia

Providing machines with the capability of exploring knowledge graphs and answering natural language questions has been an active area of research over the past decade. In this direction translating natural language questions to formal queries has been one of the key approaches. To advance the research area, several datasets like WebQuestions, QALD and LCQuAD have been published in the past. The biggest data set available for complex questions (LCQuAD) over knowledge graphs contains five thousand questions. We now provide LC-QuAD 2.0 (Large-Scale Complex Question Answering Dataset) with 30,000 questions, their paraphrases and their corresponding SPARQL queries. LC-QuAD 2.0 is compatible with both Wikidata and DBpedia 2018 knowledge graphs. In this article, we explain how the dataset was created and the variety of questions available with examples. We further provide a statistical analysis of the dataset. Resource Type: Dataset Website and documentation: http://lc-quad.sda.tech/ Permanent URL: https://figshare.com/projects/LCQuAD_2_0/62270 .
Temporal Attentive Alignment for Large-Scale Video Domain Adaptation

Although various image-based domain adaptation (DA) techniques have been proposed in recent years, domain shift in videos is still not well-explored. Most previous works only evaluate performance on small-scale datasets which are saturated. Therefore, we first propose two large-scale video DA datasets with much larger domain discrepancy: UCF-HMDB_full and Kinetics-Gameplay. Second, we investigate different DA integration methods for videos, and show that simultaneously aligning and learning temporal dynamics achieves effective alignment even without sophisticated DA methods. Finally, we propose Temporal Attentive Adversarial Adaptation Network (TA <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">3</sup> N), which explicitly attends to the temporal dynamics using domain discrepancy for more effective domain alignment, achieving state-of-the-art performance on four video DA datasets (e.g. 7.9% accuracy gain over “Source only” from 73.9% to 81.8% on “HMDB → UCF”, and 10.3% gain on “Kinetics → Gameplay”). The code and data are released at http://github.com/cmhungsteve/TA3N.
MC360IQA: A Multi-channel CNN for Blind 360-Degree Image Quality Assessment

360-degree images/videos have been dramatically increasing in recent years. The characteristic of omnidirectional-view results in high resolution of 360-degree images/videos, which makes them difficult to be transported and stored. To deal with the problem, video coding technologies are used to compress the omnidirectional content but they will introduce the compression distortion. Therefore, it is important to study how popular coding technologies affect the quality of 360-degree images. In this paper, we present a study on both subjective and objective quality assessment of compressed virtual reality (VR) images. We first build a compressed VR image quality (CVIQ) database including 16 reference images and 528 compressed ones with three prevailing coding technologies. Then, we propose a multi-channel convolution neural network (CNN) for blind 360-degree image quality assessment (MC360IQA). To be consistent with the visual content seen in the VR device, we project each 360-degree image into six viewport images, which are adopted as inputs of the proposed model. MC360IQA consists of two parts, a multi-channel CNN and an image quality regressor. The multi-channel CNN includes six parallel hyper-ResNet34 networks, where the hyper structure is used to incorporate the features from intermediate layers. The image quality regressor fuses the features and regresses them to final scores. The experimental results show that our model achieves the best performance among the state-of-art full-reference (FR) and no-reference (NR) image quality assessment (IQA) models on the CVIQ database and other available 360-degree IQA database.
WSOD2: Learning Bottom-Up and Top-Down Objectness Distillation for Weakly-Supervised Object Detection

We study on weakly-supervised object detection (WSOD) which plays a vital role in relieving human involvement from object-level annotations. Predominant works integrate region proposal mechanisms with convolutional neural networks (CNN). Although CNN is proficient in extracting discriminative local features, grand challenges still exist to measure the likelihood of a bounding box containing a complete object (i.e., “objectness”). In this paper, we propose a novel WSOD framework with Objectness Distillation (i.e., WSOD2) by designing a tailored training mechanism for weakly-supervised object detection. Multiple regression targets are specifically determined by jointly considering bottom-up (BU) and top-down (TD) objectness from low-level measurement and CNN confidences with an adaptive linear combination. As bounding box regression can facilitate a region proposal learning to approach its regression target with high objectness during training, deep objectness representation learned from bottom-up evidences can be gradually distilled into CNN by optimization. We explore different adaptive training curves for BU/TD objectness, and show that the proposed WSOD2 can achieve state-of-the-art results.
Skeleton Image Representation for 3D Action Recognition Based on Tree Structure and Reference Joints

In the last years, the computer vision research community has studied on how to model temporal dynamics in videos to employ 3D human action recognition. To that end, two main baseline approaches have been researched: (i) Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) with Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM); and (ii) skeleton image representations used as input to a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). Although RNN approaches present excellent results, such methods lack the ability to efficiently learn the spatial relations between the skeleton joints. On the other hand, the representations used to feed CNN approaches present the advantage of having the natural ability of learning structural information from 2D arrays (i.e., they learn spatial relations from the skeleton joints). To further improve such representations, we introduce the Tree Structure Reference Joints Image (TSRJI), a novel skeleton image representation to be used as input to CNNs. The proposed representation has the advantage of combining the use of reference joints and a tree structure skeleton. While the former incorporates different spatial relationships between the joints, the latter preserves important spatial relations by traversing a skeleton tree with a depth-first order algorithm. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed representation for 3D action recognition on two datasets achieving state-of-the-art results on the recent NTU RGB+D 120 dataset.
Glomerulosclerosis identification in whole slide images using semantic segmentation

Background and Objective: Glomeruli identification, i.e., detection and characterization, is a key procedure in many nephropathology studies. In this paper, semantic segmentation based on convolutional neural networks (CNN) is proposed to detect glomeruli using Whole Slide Imaging (WSI) follows by a classification CNN to divide the glomeruli into normal and sclerosed. Methods: Comparison between U-Net and SegNet CNNs is performed for pixel-level segmentation considering both a two and three class problem, that is, a) non-glomerular and glomerular structures and b) non-glomerular normal glomerular and sclerotic structures. The two class semantic segmentation result is then used for a CNN classification where glomerular regions are divided into normal and global sclerosed glomeruli. Results: These methods were tested on a dataset composed of 47 WSIs belonging to human kidney sections stained with Periodic Acid Schiff (PAS). The best approach was the SegNet for two class segmentation follows by a fine-tuned AlexNet network to characterize the glomeruli. 98.16% of accuracy was obtained with this process of consecutive CNNs (SegNet-AlexNet) for segmentation and classification. Conclusion: The results obtained demonstrate that the sequential CNN segmentation-classification strategy achieves higher accuracy reducing misclassified cases and therefore being the methodology proposed for glomerulosclerosis detection.
Key.Net: Keypoint Detection by Handcrafted and Learned CNN Filters

We introduce a novel approach for keypoint detection task that combines handcrafted and learned CNN filters within a shallow multi-scale architecture. Handcrafted filters provide anchor structures for learned filters, which localize, score and rank repeatable features. Scale-space representation is used within the network to extract keypoints at different levels. We design a loss function to detect robust features that exist across a range of scales and to maximize the repeatability score. Our Key.Net model is trained on data synthetically created from ImageNet and evaluated on HPatches benchmark. Results show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art detectors in terms of repeatability, matching performance and complexity.
Groupchain: Towards a Scalable Public Blockchain in Fog Computing of IoT Services Computing

Powered by a number of smart devices distributed throughout the whole network, the Internet of Things (IoT) is supposed to provide services computing for massive data from devices. Fog computing, an extension of cloud-based IoT-oriented solutions, has emerged with requirements for distribution and decentralization. In this respect, the conjunction with Blockchain provides a natural solution for decentralization, as well as potentially helps fog computing overcome some deficiencies such as security and privacy then consequently expand the application scope of IoT. However, one of the key challenges of blockchain's integration with fog computing is scalability. To end this, this work proposes Groupchain, a novel scalable public blockchain of a two-chain structure suitable for fog computing of IoT services computing. Groupchain employs the leader group to collectively commit blocks for highertransaction efficiency and introduces bonus and deposit into the incentive mechanism to supervise behaviors of members in the leader group. Our security analysis shows that Groupchain retains the security of Bitcoin-like blockchain and enhances defense against attacks such as double-spend and selfish mining. We implement a prototype of Groupchain and conducted experiments. The experimental results demonstrate that Groupchain achieves optimization on transaction throughput and confirmation latency which are argued in Bitcoin.
Sentiment Classification Using a Single-Layered BiLSTM Model

This study presents a computationally efficient deep learning model for binary sentiment classification, which aims to decide the sentiment polarity of people's opinions, attitudes, and emotions expressed in written text. To achieve this, we exploited three widely practiced datasets based on public opinions about movies. We utilized merely one bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) layer along with a global pooling mechanism and achieved an accuracy of 80.500%, 85.780%, and 90.585% on MR, SST2 and IMDb datasets, respectively. We concluded that the performance metrics of our proposed approach are competitive with the recently published models, having comparatively complex architectures. Also, it is inferred that the proposed single-layered BiLSTM based architecture is computationally efficient and can be recommended for real-time applications in the field of sentiment analysis.
Blockchain and AI amalgamation for energy cloud management: Challenges, solutions, and future directions

In the recent years, the Smart Grid (SG) system faces various challenges like the ever-increasing energy demand, the enormous growth of renewable energy sources (RES) with distributed energy generation (EG), the extensive Internet of Things (IoT) devices adaptation, the emerging security threats, and the foremost goal of sustaining the SG stability, efficiency and reliability. To cope up these issues there exists, the energy cloud management (ECM) system, which combines the infrastructure for energy, with intelligent energy usage and value-added services as per consumers demand. To achieve these, efficient demand-side forecasting and secure data transmission are the key factors. The energy management issues pose extreme gravity in finding sustainable solutions by using the blockchain (BC) and Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI-based techniques support various services such as energy load prediction, classification of the consumer, load management, and analysis where the BC provides data immutability and trust mechanism for secure energy management. Therefore, this paper reviews several existing AI-based approaches along with the advantages and challenges of integrating the BC technology and AI in the ECM system. We presented a decentralized AI-based ECM framework for energy management using BC and validate it using a case study. It is shown that how BC and AI can be used to mitigate ECM with security and privacy issues. Finally, we highlighted the open research issues and challenges of the BC-AI-based ECM system.
Syntax-Aware Action Targeting for Video Captioning

Existing methods on video captioning have made great efforts to identify objects/instances in videos, but few of them emphasize the prediction of action. As a result, the learned models are likely to depend heavily on the prior of training data, such as the co-occurrence of objects, which may cause an enormous divergence between the generated descriptions and the video content. In this paper, we explicitly emphasize the importance of \textit{action} by predicting visually-related syntax components including \textit{subject}, \textit{object} and \textit{predicate}. Specifically, we propose a Syntax-Aware Action Targeting (SAAT) module that firstly builds a self-attended scene representation to draw global dependence among multiple objects within a scene, and then decodes the visually-related syntax components by setting different queries. After targeting the \textit{action}, indicated by \textit{predicate}, our captioner learns an attention distribution over the \textit{predicate} and the previously predicted words to guide the generation of the next word. Comprehensive experiments on MSVD and MSR-VTT datasets demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed model.
Background Matting: The World Is Your Green Screen

We propose a method for creating a matte - the per-pixel foreground color and alpha - of a person by taking photos or videos in an everyday setting with a handheld camera. Most existing matting methods require a green screen background or a manually created trimap to produce a good matte. Automatic, trimap-free methods are appearing, but are not of comparable quality. In our trimap free approach, we ask the user to take an additional photo of the background without the subject at the time of capture. This step requires a small amount of foresight but is far less timeconsuming than creating a trimap. We train a deep network with an adversarial loss to predict the matte. We first train a matting network with a supervised loss on ground truth data with synthetic composites. To bridge the domain gap to real imagery with no labeling, we train another matting network guided by the first network and by a discriminator that judges the quality of composites. We demonstrate results on a wide variety of photos and videos and show significant improvement over the state of the art.
Adaptive Dilated Network With Self-Correction Supervision for Counting

The counting problem aims to estimate the number of objects in images. Due to large scale variation and labeling deviations, it remains a challenging task. The static density map supervised learning framework is widely used in existing methods, which uses the Gaussian kernel to generate a density map as the learning target and utilizes the Euclidean distance to optimize the model. However, the framework is intolerable to the labeling deviations and can not reflect the scale variation. In this paper, we propose an adaptive dilated convolution and a novel supervised learning framework named self-correction (SC) supervision. In the supervision level, the SC supervision utilizes the outputs of the model to iteratively correct the annotations and employs the SC loss to simultaneously optimize the model from both the whole and the individuals. In the feature level, the proposed adaptive dilated convolution predicts a continuous value as the specific dilation rate for each location, which adapts the scale variation better than a discrete and static dilation rate. Extensive experiments illustrate that our approach has achieved a consistent improvement on four challenging benchmarks. Especially, our approach achieves better performance than the state-of-the-art methods on all benchmark datasets.
DeepLPF: Deep Local Parametric Filters for Image Enhancement

Digital artists often improve the aesthetic quality of digital photographs through manual retouching. Beyond global adjustments, professional image editing programs provide local adjustment tools operating on specific parts of an image. Options include parametric (graduated, radial filters) and unconstrained brush tools. These highly expressive tools enable a diverse set of local image enhancements. However, their use can be time consuming, and requires artistic capability. State-of-the-art automated image enhancement approaches typically focus on learning pixel-level or global enhancements. The former can be noisy and lack interpretability, while the latter can fail to capture fine-grained adjustments. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to automatically enhance images using learned spatially local filters of three different types (Elliptical Filter, Graduated Filter, Polynomial Filter). We introduce a deep neural network, dubbed Deep Local Parametric Filters (DeepLPF), which regresses the parameters of these spatially localized filters that are then automatically applied to enhance the image. DeepLPF provides a natural form of model regularization and enables interpretable, intuitive adjustments that lead to visually pleasing results. We report on multiple benchmarks and show that DeepLPF produces state-of-the-art performance on two variants of the MIT-Adobe 5k dataset, often using a fraction of the parameters required for competing methods.
DMCP: Differentiable Markov Channel Pruning for Neural Networks

Recent works imply that the channel pruning can be regarded as searching optimal sub-structure from unpruned networks. However, existing works based on this observation require training and evaluating a large number of structures, which limits their application. In this paper, we propose a novel differentiable method for channel pruning, named Differentiable Markov Channel Pruning (DMCP), to efficiently search the optimal sub-structure. Our method is differentiable and can be directly optimized by gradient descent with respect to standard task loss and budget regularization (e.g. FLOPs constraint). In DMCP, we model the channel pruning as a Markov process, in which each state represents for retaining the corresponding channel during pruning, and transitions between states denote the pruning process. In the end, our method is able to implicitly select the proper number of channels in each layer by the Markov process with optimized transitions. To validate the effectiveness of our method, we perform extensive experiments on Imagenet with ResNet and MobilenetV2. Results show our method can achieve consistent improvement than state-of-the-art pruning methods in various FLOPs settings.
All in One Bad Weather Removal Using Architectural Search

Many methods have set state-of-the-art performance on restoring images degraded by bad weather such as rain, haze, fog, and snow, however they are designed specifically to handle one type of degradation. In this paper, we propose a method that can handle multiple bad weather degradations: rain, fog, snow and adherent raindrops using a single network. To achieve this, we first design a generator with multiple task-specific encoders, each of which is associated with a particular bad weather degradation type. We utilize a neural architecture search to optimally process the image features extracted from all encoders. Subsequently, to convert degraded image features to clean background features, we introduce a series of tensor-based operations encapsulating the underlying physics principles behind the formation of rain, fog, snow and adherent raindrops. These operations serve as the basic building blocks for our architectural search. Finally, our discriminator simultaneously assesses the correctness and classifies the degradation type of the restored image. We design a novel adversarial learning scheme that only backpropagates the loss of a degradation type to the respective task-specific encoder. Despite being designed to handle different types of bad weather, extensive experiments demonstrate that our method performs competitively to the individual and dedicated state-of-the-art image restoration methods.
Securing interim payments in construction projects through a blockchain-based framework

Interim payment provisions in construction projects are susceptible to unfair practices. In construction project participants with varying financial capacities belonging to different organizations are bound by contractual relationships. Due to this type of project organizational structure, project participants do not completely trust each other which prevents the adoption of existing centralized automated frameworks for interim payment. Therefore, this paper presents a distributed blockchain-based framework that does not require to be trusted for automatically enforcing the terms and conditions related to interim payments and sharing payment records at project-level transparently and securely. A logic to automatically initiate, validate, and disburse interim payments according to general contract conditions for interim payments is formalized in this paper. A blockchain-based data model that enables selective-transparency in payment records is proposed. This data model facilitates the sharing of sensitive financial information privately between two contracting parties and non-sensitive payment-related information publicly among all project participants. The proposed blockchain-based framework is supported by a key management strategy to facilitate different security properties such as confidentiality and authenticity of data and users. Considering the non-technical nature of construction project participants, the proposed key management strategy is designed to dynamically generate cryptographic keys from publicly sharable parameters so that storage and management overheads are reduced. Security properties such as immutability, data confidentiality, user integrity, performance, and cost of deployment of the proposed blockchain framework are validated and recommendations for executing the proposed framework with a high level of security are discussed in this paper.