Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Efficient Verifiable Delay Functions

We construct a verifiable delay function (VDF). A VDF is a function whose evaluation requires running a given number of sequential steps, yet the result can be efficiently verified. They have applications in decentralised systems, such as the generation of trustworthy public randomness in a trustless environment, or resource-efficient blockchains. To construct our VDF, we actually build a trapdoor VDF. A trapdoor VDF is essentially a VDF which can be evaluated efficiently by parties who know a secret (the trapdoor). By setting up this scheme in a way that the trapdoor is unknown (not even by the party running the setup, so that there is no need for a trusted setup environment), we obtain a simple VDF. Our construction is based on groups of unknown order such as an RSA group or the class group of an imaginary quadratic field. The output of our construction is very short (the result and the proof of correctness are each a single element of the group), and the verification of correctness is very efficient.
FairDrop: Biased Edge Dropout for Enhancing Fairness in Graph Representation Learning

Graph representation learning has become a ubiquitous component in many scenarios, ranging from social network analysis to energy forecasting in smart grids. In several applications, ensuring the fairness of the node (or graph) representations with respect to some protected attributes is crucial for their correct deployment. Yet, fairness in graph deep learning remains underexplored, with few solutions available. In particular, the tendency of similar nodes to cluster on several real-world graphs (i.e., homophily) can dramatically worsen the fairness of these procedures. In this article, we propose a novel biased edge dropout algorithm (FairDrop) to counter-act homophily and improve fairness in graph representation learning. FairDrop can be plugged in easily on many existing algorithms, is efficient, adaptable, and can be combined with other fairness-inducing solutions. After describing the general algorithm, we demonstrate its application on two benchmark tasks, specifically, as a random walk model for producing node embeddings, and to a graph convolutional network for link prediction. We prove that the proposed algorithm can successfully improve the fairness of all models with only a small or negligible drop in accuracy, and compares favourably with existing state-of-the-art solutions. In an ablation study, we demonstrate that our algorithm can flexibly interpolate between biasing towards fairness and an unbiased edge dropout. Furthermore, to better evaluate the gains, we propose a new dyadic group definition to measure the bias of a link prediction task when paired with group-based fairness metrics. In particular, we extend the metric used to measure the bias in node embeddings by taking account of the graph structure.
Machine Translation System Using Deep Learning for English to Urdu

Machine translation is an ongoing field of research from the last decades. The main aim of machine translation is to remove the language barrier. Earlier research in this field started with the direct word-to-word replacement of source language by the target language. Later on, with the advancement in computer and communication technology, there was a paradigm shift to data-driven models like statistical and neural machine translation approaches. In this paper, we have used a neural network-based deep learning technique for English to Urdu languages. Parallel corpus sizes of around 30923 sentences are used. The corpus contains sentences from English-Urdu parallel corpus, news, and sentences which are frequently used in day-to-day life. The corpus contains 542810 English tokens and 540924 Urdu tokens, and the proposed system is trained and tested using 70 : 30 criteria. In order to evaluate the efficiency of the proposed system, several automatic evaluation metrics are used, and the model output is also compared with the output from Google Translator. The proposed model has an average BLEU score of 45.83.
Anomaly detection-inspired few-shot medical image segmentation through self-supervision with supervoxels

Recent work has shown that label-efficient few-shot learning through self-supervision can achieve promising medical image segmentation results. However, few-shot segmentation models typically rely on prototype representations of the semantic classes, resulting in a loss of local information that can degrade performance. This is particularly problematic for the typically large and highly heterogeneous background class in medical image segmentation problems. Previous works have attempted to address this issue by learning additional prototypes for each class, but since the prototypes are based on a limited number of slices, we argue that this ad-hoc solution is insufficient to capture the background properties. Motivated by this, and the observation that the foreground class (e.g., one organ) is relatively homogeneous, we propose a novel anomaly detection-inspired approach to few-shot medical image segmentation in which we refrain from modeling the background explicitly. Instead, we rely solely on a single foreground prototype to compute anomaly scores for all query pixels. The segmentation is then performed by thresholding these anomaly scores using a learned threshold. Assisted by a novel self-supervision task that exploits the 3D structure of medical images through supervoxels, our proposed anomaly detection-inspired few-shot medical image segmentation model outperforms previous state-of-the-art approaches on two representative MRI datasets for the tasks of abdominal organ segmentation and cardiac segmentation.
Conditional Generation Net for Medication Recommendation

Medication recommendation targets to provide a proper set of medicines according to patients’ diagnoses, which is a critical task in clinics. Currently, the recommendation is manually conducted by doctors. However, for complicated cases, like patients with multiple diseases at the same time, it’s difficult to propose a considerate recommendation even for experienced doctors. This urges the emergence of automatic medication recommendation which can help treat the diagnosed diseases without causing harmful drug-drug interactions. Due to the clinical value, medication recommendation has attracted growing research interests. Existing works mainly formulate medication recommendation as a multi-label classification task to predict the set of medicines. In this paper, we propose the Conditional Generation Net (COGNet) which introduces a novel copy-or-predict mechanism to generate the set of medicines. Given a patient, the proposed model first retrieves his or her historical diagnoses and medication recommendations and mines their relationship with current diagnoses. Then in predicting each medicine, the proposed model decides whether to copy a medicine from previous recommendations or to predict a new one. This process is quite similar to the decision process of human doctors. We validate the proposed model on the public MIMIC data set, and the experimental results show that the proposed model can outperform state-of-the-art approaches.
Investigation of Effectiveness of Shuffled Frog-Leaping Optimizer in Training a Convolution Neural Network

One of the leading algorithms and architectures in deep learning is Convolution Neural Network (CNN). It represents a unique method for image processing, object detection, and classification. CNN has shown to be an efficient approach in the machine learning and computer vision fields. CNN is composed of several filters accompanied by nonlinear functions and pooling layers. It enforces limitations on the weights and interconnections of the neural network to create a good structure for processing spatial and temporal distributed data. A CNN can restrain the numbering of free parameters of the network through its weight-sharing property. However, the training of CNNs is a challenging approach. Some optimization techniques have been recently employed to optimize CNN’s weight and biases such as Ant Colony Optimization, Genetic, Harmony Search, and Simulated Annealing. This paper employs the well-known nature-inspired algorithm called Shuffled Frog-Leaping Algorithm (SFLA) for training a classical CNN structure (LeNet-5), which has not been experienced before. The training method is investigated by employing four different datasets. To verify the study, the results are compared with some of the most famous evolutionary trainers: Whale Optimization Algorithm (WO), Bacteria Swarm Foraging Optimization (BFSO), and Ant Colony Optimization (ACO). The outcomes demonstrate that the SFL technique considerably improves the performance of the original LeNet-5 although using this algorithm slightly increases the training computation time. The results also demonstrate that the suggested algorithm presents high accuracy in classification and approximation in its mechanism.
TubeDETR: Spatio-Temporal Video Grounding with Transformers

We consider the problem of localizing a spatio-temporal tube in a video corresponding to a given text query. This is a challenging task that requires the joint and efficient modeling of temporal, spatial and multi-modal interactions. To address this task, we propose TubeDETR, a transformer-based architecture inspired by the recent success of such models for text-conditioned object detection. Our model notably includes: (i) an efficient video and text encoder that models spatial multi-modal interactions over sparsely sampled frames and (ii) a space-time decoder that jointly performs spatio-temporal localization. We demonstrate the advantage of our proposed components through an extensive ablation study. We also evaluate our full approach on the spatio-temporal video grounding task and demonstrate improvements over the state of the art on the challenging VidSTG and HC-STVG benchmarks. Code and trained models are publicly available at https://antoyang.github.io/tubedetr.html.
The effect of big data on decision quality: Evidence from telecommunication industry

The aim of the research is to test the impact of big data on the quality of decision making. The necessary data was collected from telecommunication companies operating in Jordan. Three companies provide telecommunications services in Jordan: Zain, Umniah, and Orange. Non-probability purposive sampling was used. Hence, the study instrument was distributed to managers at the senior and middle levels of these companies. The structured equation modeling (SEM) technique was employed to test the study hypotheses. The results confirmed that big data impacts decision quality. Besides, it was determined that the highest impact was on velocity. The researchers suggest that Jordanian telecom companies invest in information technology that allows them to provide data with accuracy, reliability, and high quality, as well as improve the qualifications of their employees.
Blockchain and Federated Deep Reinforcement Learning Based Secure Cloud-Edge-End Collaboration in Power IoT

Cloud-edge-end collaboration enables harmonious and efficient resource allocation for the Power Internet of Things (PIoT). However, the security and complexity issues of computation offloading evolve into the main obstacles. In this article, we first propose a blockchain and AI-based secure cloud-edge-end collaboration PIoT (BASE-PIoT) architecture to ensure data security and intelligent computation offloading. Its advantages in flexible resource allocation, secure data sharing, and differentiated service guarantee are elaborated. Then the adaptability of three typical blockchains with PIoT is analyzed, and some typical application scenes of BASE-PIoT including computation offloading, energy scheduling, and access authentication are illustrated. Finally, we propose a blockchain-empowered federated deep actor-critic-based task offloading algorithm to address the secure and low-latency computation offloading problem. The coupling between the long-term security constraint and short-term queuing delay optimization is decoupled by using Lyapunov optimization. Numerical results verify its excellent performance in total queuing delay and consensus delay.
Hybrid Spatial-Temporal Entropy Modelling for Neural Video Compression

For neural video codec, it is critical, yet challenging, to design an efficient entropy model which can accurately predict the probability distribution of the quantized latent representation. However, most existing video codecs directly use the ready-made entropy model from image codec to encode the residual or motion, and do not fully leverage the spatial-temporal characteristics in video. To this end, this paper proposes a powerful entropy model which efficiently captures both spatial and temporal dependencies. In particular, we introduce the latent prior which exploits the correlation among the latent representation to squeeze the temporal redundancy. Meanwhile, the dual spatial prior is proposed to reduce the spatial redundancy in a parallel-friendly manner. In addition, our entropy model is also versatile. Besides estimating the probability distribution, our entropy model also generates the quantization step at spatial-channel-wise. This content-adaptive quantization mechanism not only helps our codec achieve the smooth rate adjustment in single model but also improves the final rate-distortion performance by dynamic bit allocation. Experimental results show that, powered by the proposed entropy model, our neural codec can achieve 18.2% bitrate saving on UVG dataset when compared with H.266 (VTM) using the highest compression ratio configuration. It makes a new milestone in the development of neural video codec. The codes are at https://github.com/microsoft/DCVC.
Deep neural networks compression: A comparative survey and choice recommendations

The state-of-the-art performance for several real-world problems is currently reached by deep and, in particular, convolutional neural networks (CNN). Such learning models exploit recent results in the field of deep learning, leading to highly performing, yet very large neural networks with typically millions to billions of parameters. As a result, such models are often redundant and excessively oversized, with a detrimental effect on the environment in terms of unnecessary energy consumption and a limitation to their deployment on low-resource devices. The necessity for compression techniques able to reduce the number of model parameters and their resource demand is thereby increasingly felt by the research community. In this paper we propose the first extensive comparison, to the best of our knowledge, of the main lossy and structure-preserving approaches to compress pre-trained CNNs, applicable in principle to any existing model. Our study is intended to provide a first and preliminary guidance to choose the most suitable compression technique when there is the need to reduce the occupancy of pre-trained models. Both convolutional and fully-connected layers are included in the analysis. Our experiments involved two pre-trained state-of-the-art CNNs (proposed to solve classification or regression problems) and five benchmarks, and gave rise to important insights about the applicability and performance of such techniques w.r.t. the type of layer to be compressed and the category of problem tackled.
MetaFSCIL: A Meta-Learning Approach for Few-Shot Class Incremental Learning

In this paper, we tackle the problem of few-shot class incremental learning (FSCIL). FSCIL aims to incrementally learn new classes with only a few samples in each class. Most existing methods only consider the incremental steps at test time. The learning objective of these methods is often hand-engineered and is not directly tied to the objective (i.e. incrementally learning new classes) during testing. Those methods are sub-optimal due to the misalignment between the training objectives and what the methods are expected to do during evaluation. In this work, we proposed a bi-level optimization based on meta-learning to directly optimize the network to learn how to incrementally learn in the setting of FSCIL. Concretely, we propose to sample sequences of incremental tasks from base classes for training to simulate the evaluation protocol. For each task, the model is learned using a meta-objective such that it is capable to perform fast adaptation without forgetting. Furthermore, we propose a bi-directional guided modulation, which is learned to automatically modulate the activations to reduce catastrophic forgetting. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the baseline and achieves the state-of-the-art results on CIFARIOO, MiniImageNet, and CUB200 datasets.
General Facial Representation Learning in a Visual-Linguistic Manner

How to learn a universal facial representation that boosts all face analysis tasks? This paper takes one step toward this goal. In this paper, we study the transfer performance of pre-trained models on face analysis tasks and introduce a framework, called FaRL, for general facial representation learning. On one hand, the framework involves a contrastive loss to learn high-level semantic meaning from image-text pairs. On the other hand, we propose exploring low-level information simultaneously to further enhance the face representation by adding a masked image modeling. We perform pre-training on LAION-FACE, a dataset containing a large amount of face image-text pairs, and evaluate the representation capability on multiple downstream tasks. We show that FaRL achieves better transfer performance compared with previous pre-trained models. We also verify its superiority in the low-data regime. More importantly, our model surpasses the state-of-the-art methods on face analysis tasks including face parsing and face alignment.
ASVspoof 2021: Towards Spoofed and Deepfake Speech Detection in the Wild

Benchmarkinginitiatives support the meaningful comparison of competing solutions to prominent problems in speech and language processing. Successive benchmarking evaluations typically reflect a progressive evolution from ideal lab conditions towards to those encountered in the wild. ASVspoof, the spoofing and deepfake detection initiative and challenge series, has followed the same trend. This article provides a summary of the ASVspoof 2021 challenge and the results of 54 participating teams that submitted to the evaluation phase. For the logical access (LA) task, results indicate that countermeasures are robust to newly introduced encoding and transmission effects. Results for the physical access (PA) task indicate the potential to detect replay attacks in real, as opposed to simulated physical spaces, but a lack of robustness to variations between simulated and real acoustic environments. The Deepfake (DF) task, new to the 2021 edition, targets solutions to the detection of manipulated, compressed speech data posted online. While detection solutions offer some resilience to compression effects, they lack generalization across different source datasets. In addition to a summary of the top-performing systems for each task, new analyses of influential data factors and results for hidden data subsets, the article includes a review of post-challenge results, an outline of the principal challenge limitations and a road-map for the future of ASVspoof.
Simple Robust Grammar Induction with Combinatory Categorial Grammars

We present a simple EM-based grammar induction algorithm for Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG) that achieves state-of-the-art performance by relying on a minimal number of very general linguistic principles. Unlike previous work on unsupervised parsing with CCGs, our approach has no prior language-specific knowledge, and discovers all categories automatically. Additionally, unlike other approaches, our grammar remains robust when parsing longer sentences, performing as well as or better than other systems. We believe this is a natural result of using an expressive grammar formalism with an extended domain of locality.
Scalable Distributed Monte-Carlo Tree Search

Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) is remarkably successful in two-player games, but parallelizing MCTS has been notoriously difficult to scale well, especially in distributed environments. For a distributed parallel search, transposition-table driven scheduling (TDS) is known to be efficient in several domains. We present a massively parallel MCTS algorithm, that applies the TDS parallelism to the Upper Confidence bound Applied to Trees (UCT) algorithm, which is the most representative MCTS algorithm. To drastically decrease communication overhead, we introduce a reformulation of UCT called Depth-First UCT. The parallel performance of the algorithm is evaluated on clusters using up to 1,200 cores in artificial game-trees. We show that this approach scales well, achieving 740-fold speedups in the best case.
Game-Tree Search over High-Level Game States in RTS Games

From an AI point of view, Real-Time Strategy (RTS) games are hard because they have enormous state spaces, they are real-time and partially observable. In this paper, we present an approach to deploy game-tree search in RTS games by using game state abstraction. We propose a high-level abstract representation of the game state, that significantly reduces the branching factor when used for game-tree search algorithms. Using this high-level representation, we evaluate versions of alpha-beta search and of Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS). We present experiments in the context of StarCraft showing promising results in dealing with the large branching factors present in RTS games.
Query-Oriented Multi-Document Summarization via Unsupervised Deep Learning

Extractive style query-oriented multi-document summarization generates the summary by extracting a proper set of sentences from multiple documents based on the pre-given query. This paper proposes a novel multi-document summarization framework via deep learning model. This uniform framework consists of three parts: concepts extraction, summary generation, and reconstruction validation, which work together to achieve the largest coverage of the documents content. A new query-oriented extraction technique is proposed to concentrate distributed information to hidden units layer by layer. Then, the whole deep architecture is fine-tuned by minimizing the information loss of reconstruction validation. According to the concentrated information, dynamic programming is used to seek most informative set of sentences as the summary. Experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework and algorithms.
Kiting in RTS Games Using Influence Maps

Influence Maps have been successfully used in controlling the navigation of multiple units. In this paper, we apply the idea to the problem of simulating a kiting behavior (also known as ¨attack and flee'¨) in the context of real-time strategy (RTS) games. We present our approach and evaluate it in the popular RTS game StarCraft, where we analyze the benefits that our approach brings to a StarCraft playing bot.