Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Role of Artificial Intelligence in Shaping Consumer Demand in E-Commerce

The advent and incorporation of technology in businesses have reformed operations across industries. Notably, major technical shifts in e-commerce aim to influence customer behavior in favor of some products and brands. Artificial intelligence (AI) comes on board as an essential innovative tool for personalization and customizing products to meet specific demands. This research finds that, despite the contribution of AI systems in e-commerce, its ethical soundness is a contentious issue, especially regarding the concept of explainability. The study adopted the use of word cloud analysis, voyance analysis, and concordance analysis to gain a detailed understanding of the idea of explainability as has been utilized by researchers in the context of AI. Motivated by a corpus analysis, this research lays the groundwork for a uniform front, thus contributing to a scientific breakthrough that seeks to formulate Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) models. XAI is a machine learning field that inspects and tries to understand the models and steps involved in how the black box decisions of AI systems are made; it provides insights into the decision points, variables, and data used to make a recommendation. This study suggested that, to deploy explainable XAI systems, ML models should be improved, making them interpretable and comprehensible.
Scale variance minimization for unsupervised domain adaptation in image segmentation

We focus on unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) in image segmentation. Existing works address this challenge largely by aligning inter-domain representations, which may lead over-alignment that impairs the semantic structures of images and further target-domain segmentation performance. We design a scale variance minimization (SVMin) method by enforcing the intra-image semantic structure consistency in the target domain. Specifically, SVMin leverages an intrinsic property that simple scale transformation has little effect on the semantic structures of images. It thus introduces certain supervision in the target domain by imposing a scale-invariance constraint while learning to segment an image and its scale-transformation concurrently. Additionally, SVMin is complementary to most existing UDA techniques and can be easily incorporated with consistent performance boost but little extra parameters. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves superior domain adaptive segmentation performance as compared with the state-of-the-art. Preliminary studies show that SVMin can be easily adapted for UDA-based image classification.
A comparative study of effective approaches for Arabic sentiment analysis

Sentiment analysis (SA) is a natural language processing (NLP) application that aims to analyse and identify sentiment within a piece of text. Arabic SA started to receive more attention in the last decade with many approaches showing some effectiveness for detecting sentiment on multiple datasets. While there have been some surveys summarising some of the approaches for Arabic SA in literature, most of these approaches are reported on different datasets, which makes it difficult to identify the most effective approaches among those. In addition, those approaches do not cover the recent advances in NLP that use transformers. This paper presents a comprehensive comparative study on the most effective approaches used for Arabic sentiment analysis. We re-implement most of the existing approaches for Arabic SA and test their effectiveness on three of the most popular benchmark datasets for Arabic SA. Further, we examine the use of transformer-based language models for Arabic SA and show their superior performance compared to the existing approaches, where the best model achieves F-score scores of 0.69, 0.76, and 0.92 on the SemEval, ASTD, and ArSAS benchmark datasets. We also apply an extensive analysis of the possible reasons for failures, which show the limitations of the existing annotated Arabic SA datasets, and the challenge of sarcasm that is prominent in Arabic dialects. Finally, we highlight the main gaps in Arabic sentiment analysis research and suggest the most in-need future research directions in this area.
Deep Learning based NLP Techniques In Text to Speech Synthesis for Communication Recognition

The computer system is developing the model for speech synthesis of various aspects for natural language processing. The speech synthesis explores by articulatory, formant and concatenate synthesis. These techniques lead more aperiodic distortion and give exponentially increasing error rate during process of the system. Recently, advances on speech synthesis are tremendously moves towards deep learning process in order to achieve better performance. Due to leverage of large scale data gives effective feature representations to speech synthesis. The main objective of this research article is that implements deep learning techniques into speech synthesis and compares the performance in terms of aperiodic distortion with prior model of algorithms in natural language processing.
A Simple Way to Make Neural Networks Robust Against Diverse Image Corruptions

The human visual system is remarkably robust against a wide range of naturally occurring variations and corruptions like rain or snow. In contrast, the performance of modern image recognition models strongly degrades when evaluated on previously unseen corruptions. Here, we demonstrate that a simple but properly tuned training with additive Gaussian and Speckle noise generalizes surprisingly well to unseen corruptions, easily reaching the state of the art on the corruption benchmark ImageNet-C (with ResNet50) and on MNIST-C. We build on top of these strong baseline results and show that an adversarial training of the recognition model against locally correlated worst-case noise distributions leads to an additional increase in performance. This regularization can be combined with previously proposed defense methods for further improvement.
Self-weighted Robust LDA for Multiclass Classification with Edge Classes

Linear discriminant analysis (LDA) is a popular technique to learn the most discriminative features for multi-class classification. A vast majority of existing LDA algorithms are prone to be dominated by the class with very large deviation from the others, i.e., edge class, which occurs frequently in multi-class classification. First, the existence of edge classes often makes the total mean biased in the calculation of between-class scatter matrix. Second, the exploitation of ℓ 2 -norm based between-class distance criterion magnifies the extremely large distance corresponding to edge class. In this regard, a novel self-weighted robust LDA with ℓ 2,1 -norm based pairwise between-class distance criterion, called SWRLDA, is proposed for multi-class classification especially with edge classes. SWRLDA can automatically avoid the optimal mean calculation and simultaneously learn adaptive weights for each class pair without setting any additional parameter. An efficient re-weighted algorithm is exploited to derive the global optimum of the challenging ℓ 2,1 -norm maximization problem. The proposed SWRLDA is easy to implement and converges fast in practice. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SWRLDA performs favorably against other compared methods on both synthetic and real-world datasets while presenting superior computational efficiency in comparison with other techniques.
Global Table Extractor (GTE): A Framework for Joint Table Identification and Cell Structure Recognition Using Visual Context

Documents are often used for knowledge sharing and preservation in business and science, within which are tables that capture most of the critical data. Unfortunately, most documents are stored and distributed as PDF or scanned images, which fail to preserve logical table structure. Recent vision-based deep learning approaches have been proposed to address this gap, but most still cannot achieve state-of-the-art results. We present Global Table Extractor (GTE), a vision-guided systematic framework for joint table detection and cell structured recognition, which could be built on top of any object detection model. With GTE-Table, we invent a new penalty based on the natural cell containment constraint of tables to train our table network aided by cell location predictions. GTE-Cell is a new hierarchical cell detection network that leverages table styles. Further, we design a method to automatically label table and cell structure in existing documents to cheaply create a large corpus of training and test data. We use this to enhance PubTabNet with cell labels and create FinTabNet, real-world and complex scientific and financial datasets with detailed table structure annotations to help train and test structure recognition. Our framework surpasses previous state-of-the-art results on the ICDAR 2013 and ICDAR 2019 table competition in both table detection and cell structure recognition. Further experiments demonstrate a greater than 45% improvement in cell structure recognition when compared to a vanilla RetinaNet object detection model in our new out-of-domain FinTabNet.
The meaning and structure of scenes

We live in a rich, three dimensional world with complex arrangements of meaningful objects. For decades, however, theories of visual attention and perception have been based on findings generated from lines and color patches. While these theories have been indispensable for our field, the time has come to move on from this rather impoverished view of the world and (at least try to) get closer to the real thing. After all, our visual environment consists of objects that we not only look at, but constantly interact with. Having incorporated the meaning and structure of scenes, i.e. its "grammar", then allows us to easily understand objects and scenes we have never encountered before. Studying this grammar provides us with the fascinating opportunity to gain new insights into the complex workings of attention, perception, and cognition. In this review, I will discuss how the meaning and the complex, yet predictive structure of real-world scenes influence attention allocation, search, and object identification.
bSSA: Binary Salp Swarm Algorithm With Hybrid Data Transformation for Feature Selection

Feature selection is a technique commonly used in Data Mining and Machine Learning. Traditional feature selection methods, when applied to large datasets, generate a large number of feature subsets. Selecting optimal features within this high dimensional data space is time-consuming and negatively affects the system's performance. This paper proposes a new binary Salp Swarm Algorithm (bSSA) for selecting the best feature set from transformed datasets. The proposed feature selection method first transforms the original data-set using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and fast Independent Component Analysis (fastICA) based hybrid data transformation methods; next, a binary Salp Swarm optimizer is used for finding the best features. The proposed feature selection approach improves accuracy and eliminates the selection of irrelevant features. We validate our technique on fifteen different benchmark data sets. We conduct an extensive study to measure the performance and feature selection accuracy of the proposed technique. The proposed bSSA is compared to Binary Genetic Algorithm (bGA), Binary Binomial Cuckoo Search (bBCS), Binary Grey Wolf Optimizer (bGWO), Binary Competitive Swarm Optimizer (bCSO), and Binary Crow Search Algorithm (bCSA). The proposed method attains a mean accuracy of 95.26% with 7.78% features on PCA-fastICA transformed datasets. The results show that bSSA outperforms the existing methods for the majority of the performance measures.
Aggregation-Based Graph Convolutional Hashing for Unsupervised Cross-Modal Retrieval

Cross-modal hashing has sparked much attention in large-scale information retrieval for its storage and query efficiency. Despite the great success achieved by supervised approaches, existing unsupervised hashing methods still suffer from the lack of reliable learning guidance and cross-modal discrepancy. In this paper, we propose Aggregation-based Graph Convolutional Hashing (AGCH) to tackle these obstacles. First, considering that a single similarity metric can hardly represent data relationships comprehensively, we develop an efficient aggregation strategy that utilises multiple metrics to construct a more precise affinity matrix for learning. Specifically, we apply various similarity measures to exploit the structural information of multiple modalities from different perspectives and then aggregate the obtained information to produce a joint similarity matrix. Furthermore, a novel deep model is designed to learn unified binary codes across different modalities, where the key components include modality-specific encoders, Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) and a fusion module. The modality-specific encoders are tasked to learn feature embeddings for each individual modality. On this basis, we leverage GCNs to further excavate the semantic structure of data, along with a fusion module to correlate different modalities. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art competitors.
Software tools for quantum control: improving quantum computer performance through noise and error suppression

Manipulating quantum computing hardware in the presence of imperfect devices and control systems is a central challenge in realizing useful quantum computers. Susceptibility to noise limits the performance and capabilities of noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices, as well as any future quantum computing technologies. Fortunately quantum control enables efficient execution of quantum logic operations and algorithms with built-in robustness to errors, without the need for complex logical encoding. In this manuscript we introduce software tools for the application and integration of quantum control in quantum computing research, serving the needs of hardware R&D teams, algorithm developers, and end users. We provide an overview of a set of python-based classical software tools for creating and deploying optimized quantum control solutions at various layers of the quantum computing software stack. We describe a software architecture leveraging both high-performance distributed cloud computation and local custom integration into hardware systems, and explain how key functionality is integrable with other software packages and quantum programming languages. Our presentation includes a detailed mathematical overview of central product features including a flexible optimization toolkit, filter functions for analyzing noise susceptibility in high-dimensional Hilbert spaces, and new approaches to noise and hardware characterization. Pseudocode is presented in order to elucidate common programming workflows for these tasks, and performance benchmarking is reported for numerically intensive tasks, highlighting the benefits of the selected cloud-compute architecture. Finally, we present a series of case studies demonstrating the application of quantum control solutions using these tools in real experimental settings for both trapped-ion and superconducting quantum computer hardware.
Transfer Learning in Magnetic Resonance Brain Imaging: A Systematic Review

Transfer learning refers to machine learning techniques that focus on acquiring knowledge from related tasks to improve generalization in the tasks of interest. In MRI, transfer learning is important for developing strategies that address the variation in MR images. Additionally, transfer learning is beneficial to re-utilize machine learning models that were trained to solve related tasks to the task of interest. Our goal is to identify research directions, gaps of knowledge, applications, and widely used strategies among the transfer learning approaches applied in MR brain imaging. We performed a systematic literature search for articles that applied transfer learning to MR brain imaging. We screened 433 studies and we categorized and extracted relevant information, including task type, application, and machine learning methods. Furthermore, we closely examined brain MRI-specific transfer learning approaches and other methods that tackled privacy, unseen target domains, and unlabeled data. We found 129 articles that applied transfer learning to brain MRI tasks. The most frequent applications were dementia related classification tasks and brain tumor segmentation. A majority of articles utilized transfer learning on convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Only few approaches were clearly brain MRI specific, considered privacy issues, unseen target domains or unlabeled data. We proposed a new categorization to group specific, widely-used approaches. There is an increasing interest in transfer learning within brain MRI. Public datasets have contributed to the popularity of Alzheimer's diagnostics/prognostics and tumor segmentation. Likewise, the availability of pretrained CNNs has promoted their utilization. Finally, the majority of the surveyed studies did not examine in detail the interpretation of their strategies after applying transfer learning, and did not compare to other approaches.
Dynamic adaptive residual network for liver CT image segmentation

Due to the gray values of liver and surrounding tissues and organs are resemblance in abdominal computed tomography(CT) images, it is difficult to accurately determine the boundary of liver images. To address the aforementioned issues, we propose a segmentation method based on dynamic adaptive residual network (DAR-net). Firstly, inspired by the U-Net network, a dynamic adaptive pooling strategy based on interpolation optimization is proposed to process all features in the pooling domain. Subsequently, the skip connections and a residual structure are introduced into the network to improve the generalization ability and convergence speed of DAR-net. Finally, removing irrelevant pixels and condition random fields are used to optimize the boundaries and textures of liver to avoid the inaccuracy of liver boundaries. Experiments on a standard 3DIRCADB dataset demonstrate that the DAR-net can obtain the average Dice score is 96.13%, which increases by 13.02% compared to the prediction result without any processing.
A deep learning model (ALNet) for the diagnosis of acute leukaemia lineage using peripheral blood cell images

Morphological differentiation among blasts circulating in blood in acute leukaemia is challenging. Artificial intelligence decision support systems hold substantial promise as part of clinical practise in detecting haematological malignancy. This study aims to develop a deep learning-based system to predict the diagnosis of acute leukaemia using blood cell images. A set of 731 blood smears containing 16,450 single-cell images was analysed from 100 healthy controls, 191 patients with viral infections and 148 with acute leukaemia. Training and testing sets were arranged with 85% and 15% of these smears, respectively. To find the best architecture for acute leukaemia classification VGG16, ResNet101, DenseNet121 and SENet154 were evaluated. Fine-tuning was implemented to these pre-trained CNNs to adapt their layers to our data. Once the best architecture was chosen, a system with two modules working sequentially was configured (ALNet). The first module recognised abnormal promyelocytes among other mononuclear blood cell images, such as lymphocytes, monocytes, reactive lymphocytes and blasts. The second distinguished if blasts were myeloid or lymphoid lineage. The final strategy was to predict patients’ initial diagnosis of acute leukaemia lineage using the blood smear review. ALNet was assessed with smears of the testing set. ALNet provided the correct diagnostic prediction of all patients with promyelocytic and myeloid leukaemia. Sensitivity, specificity and precision values of 100%, 92.3% and 93.7%, respectively, were obtained for myeloid leukaemia. Regarding lymphoid leukaemia, a sensitivity of 89% and specificity and precision values of 100% were obtained. ALNet is a predictive model designed with two serially connected convolutional networks. It is proposed to assist clinical pathologists in the diagnosis of acute leukaemia during the blood smear review. It has been proved to distinguish neoplastic (leukaemia) and non-neoplastic (infections) diseases, as well as recognise the leukaemia lineage.
Robot Navigation in Crowded Environments Using Deep Reinforcement Learning

Mobile robots operating in public environments require the ability to navigate among humans and other obstacles in a socially compliant and safe manner. This work presents a combined imitation learning and deep reinforcement learning approach for motion planning in such crowded and cluttered environments. By separately processing information related to static and dynamic objects, we enable our network to learn motion patterns that are tailored to real-world environments. Our model is also designed such that it can handle usual cases in which robots can be equipped with sensor suites that only offer limited field of view. Our model outperforms current state-of-the-art approaches, which is shown in simulated environments containing human-like agents and static obstacles. Additionally, we demonstrate the real-time performance and applicability of our model by successfully navigating a robotic platform through real-world environments.
Opposition-based Laplacian Equilibrium Optimizer with application in Image Segmentation using Multilevel Thresholding

This paper proposes a modified version of freshly developed Equilibrium Optimizer (EO) for segmentation of gray-scale images using multi-level thresholding. Laplace distribution based random walk is utilized to update the concentration of search agents around equilibrium candidates (best solution) towards to attain optimal position (equilibrium state) for achieving better diversification of search space. An opposition based learning (OBL) mechanism is then applied with hybridization of the varying acceleration coefficient to the best solution for accelerating exploitation at a later phase of each iteration. The performance of proposed Opposition-based Laplacian Equilibrium Optimizer (OB-L-EO) is validated using test suites containing benchmark problems of wide varieties of complexities. Various analyses are conducted including Wilcoxon ranksum test for statistical significance, convergence curves and distance between solution before and after applying modification strategies. Finally, the proposed OB-L-EO is employed for image segmentation by utilizing Otsu's interclass variance function to obtain optimum threshold values for image segmentation. The performance of the proposed algorithm is verified by determining mean value of interclass variance and peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR). The obtained results are then compared and analysed with other metaheuristics algorithms to show superiority of proposed OB-L-EO.