Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Not All Pixels Are Equal: Learning Pixel Hardness for Semantic Segmentation

Semantic segmentation has recently witnessed great progress. Despite the impressive overall results, the segmentation performance in some hard areas (e.g., small objects or thin parts) is still not promising. A straightforward solution is hard sample mining, which is widely used in object detection. Yet, most existing hard pixel mining strategies for semantic segmentation often rely on pixel's loss value, which tends to decrease during training. Intuitively, the pixel hardness for segmentation mainly depends on image structure and is expected to be stable. In this paper, we propose to learn pixel hardness for semantic segmentation, leveraging hardness information contained in global and historical loss values. More precisely, we add a gradient-independent branch for learning a hardness level (HL) map by maximizing hardness-weighted segmentation loss, which is minimized for the segmentation head. This encourages large hardness values in difficult areas, leading to appropriate and stable HL map. Despite its simplicity, the proposed method can be applied to most segmentation methods with no and marginal extra cost during inference and training, respectively. Without bells and whistles, the proposed method achieves consistent/significant improvement (1.37% mIoU on average) over most popular semantic segmentation methods on Cityscapes dataset, and demonstrates good generalization ability across domains. The source codes are available at https://github.com/Menoly-xin/Hardness-Level-Learning .
Exploiting Frequency Spectrum of Adversarial Images for General Robustness

In recent years, there has been growing concern over the vulnerability of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to image perturbations. However, achieving general robustness against different types of perturbations remains challenging, in which enhancing robustness to some perturbations (e.g., adversarial perturbations) may degrade others (e.g., common corruptions). In this paper, we demonstrate that adversarial training with an emphasis on phase components significantly improves model performance on clean, adversarial, and common corruption accuracies. We propose a frequency-based data augmentation method, Adversarial Amplitude Swap, that swaps the amplitude spectrum between clean and adversarial images to generate two novel training images: adversarial amplitude and adversarial phase images. These images act as substitutes for adversarial images and can be implemented in various adversarial training setups. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our method enables the CNNs to gain general robustness against different types of perturbations and results in a uniform performance against all types of common corruptions.
A Crosslingual Investigation of Conceptualization in 1335 Languages

Languages differ in how they divide up the world into concepts and words; e.g., in contrast to English, Swahili has a single concept for `belly' and `womb'. We investigate these differences in conceptualization across 1,335 languages by aligning concepts in a parallel corpus. To this end, we propose Conceptualizer, a method that creates a bipartite directed alignment graph between source language concepts and sets of target language strings. In a detailed linguistic analysis across all languages for one concept (`bird') and an evaluation on gold standard data for 32 Swadesh concepts, we show that Conceptualizer has good alignment accuracy. We demonstrate the potential of research on conceptualization in NLP with two experiments. (1) We define crosslingual stability of a concept as the degree to which it has 1-1 correspondences across languages, and show that concreteness predicts stability. (2) We represent each language by its conceptualization pattern for 83 concepts, and define a similarity measure on these representations. The resulting measure for the conceptual similarity of two languages is complementary to standard genealogical, typological, and surface similarity measures. For four out of six language families, we can assign languages to their correct family based on conceptual similarity with accuracy between 54% and 87%.
Masked Collaborative Contrast for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation

This study introduces an efficacious approach, Masked Collaborative Contrast (MCC), to highlight semantic regions in weakly supervised semantic segmentation. MCC adroitly draws inspiration from masked image modeling and contrastive learning to devise a novel framework that induces keys to contract toward semantic regions. Unlike prevalent techniques that directly eradicate patch regions in the input image when generating masks, we scrutinize the neighborhood relations of patch tokens by exploring masks considering keys on the affinity matrix. Moreover, we generate positive and negative samples in contrastive learning by utilizing the masked local output and contrasting it with the global output. Elaborate experiments on commonly employed datasets evidences that the proposed MCC mechanism effectively aligns global and local perspectives within the image, attaining impressive performance. The source code is available at \url{https://github.com/fwu11/MCC}.
Point-line geometries related to binary equidistant codes

We investigate point-line geometries whose singular subspaces correspond to binary equidistant codes. The main result is a description of automorphisms of these geometries. In some important cases, automorphisms induced by non-monomial linear automorphisms surprisingly arise.
Chain rules for one-shot entropic quantities via operational methods

We introduce a new operational technique for deriving chain rules for general information theoretic quantities. This technique is very different from the popular (and in some cases fairly involved) methods like SDP formulation and operator algebra or norm interpolation. Instead, our framework considers a simple information transmission task and obtains lower and upper bounds for it. The lower bounds are obtained by leveraging a successive cancellation encoding and decoding technique. Pitting the upper and lower bounds against each other gives us the desired chain rule. As a demonstration of this technique, we derive chain rules for the smooth max mutual information and the smooth-Hypothesis testing mutual information.
Geometrical causality: casting Feynman integrals into quantum algorithms

The calculation of higher-order corrections in Quantum Field Theories is a challenging task. In particular, dealing with multiloop and multileg Feynman amplitudes leads to severe bottlenecks and a very fast scaling of the computational resources required to perform the calculation. With the purpose of overcoming these limitations, we discuss efficient strategies based on the Loop-Tree Duality, its manifestly causal representation and the underlying geometrical interpretation. In concrete, we exploit the geometrical causal selection rules to define a Hamiltonian whose ground-state is directly related to the terms contributing to the causal representation. In this way, the problem can be translated into a minimization one and implemented in a quantum computer to search for a potential speed-up.
The Finite Model Property of Some Non-normal Modal Logics with the Transitivity Axiom

In 1997 Timothy J. Surendonk proved via algebraic semantics that all modal logics without iterative axioms are canonical and so strongly complete. In this paper, we continue the work done by Surendonk in this field. We use neighborhood semantics to show that some iterative logics (with the axiom $\Box p\rightarrow\Box\Box p$) are also strongly complete and have the finite model property.
ESAFL: Efficient Secure Additively Homomorphic Encryption for Cross-Silo Federated Learning

Cross-silo federated learning (FL) enables multiple clients to collaboratively train a machine learning model without sharing training data, but privacy in FL remains a major challenge. Techniques using homomorphic encryption (HE) have been designed to solve this but bring their own challenges. Many techniques using single-key HE (SKHE) require clients to fully trust each other to prevent privacy disclosure between clients. However, fully trusted clients are hard to ensure in practice. Other techniques using multi-key HE (MKHE) aim to protect privacy from untrusted clients but lead to the disclosure of training results in public channels by untrusted third parties, e.g., the public cloud server. Besides, MKHE has higher computation and communication complexity compared with SKHE. We present a new FL protocol ESAFL that leverages a novel efficient and secure additively HE (ESHE) based on the hard problem of ring learning with errors. ESAFL can ensure the security of training data between untrusted clients and protect the training results against untrusted third parties. In addition, theoretical analyses present that ESAFL outperforms current techniques using MKHE in computation and communication, and intensive experiments show that ESAFL achieves approximate 204 times-953 times and 11 times-14 times training speedup while reducing the communication burden by 77 times-109 times and 1.25 times-2 times compared with the state-of-the-art FL models using SKHE.
AdamR at SemEval-2023 Task 10: Solving the Class Imbalance Problem in Sexism Detection with Ensemble Learning

The Explainable Detection of Online Sexism task presents the problem of explainable sexism detection through fine-grained categorisation of sexist cases with three subtasks. Our team experimented with different ways to combat class imbalance throughout the tasks using data augmentation and loss alteration techniques. We tackled the challenge by utilising ensembles of Transformer models trained on different datasets, which are tested to find the balance between performance and interpretability. This solution ranked us in the top 40\% of teams for each of the tracks.
CompSuite: A Dataset of Java Library Upgrade Incompatibility Issues

Modern software systems heavily rely on external libraries developed by third-parties to ensure efficient development. However, frequent library upgrades can lead to compatibility issues between the libraries and their client systems. In this paper, we introduce CompSuite, a dataset that includes 123 real-world Java client-library pairs where upgrading the library causes an incompatibility issue in the corresponding client. Each incompatibility issue in CompSuite is associated with a test case authored by the developers, which can be used to reproduce the issue. The dataset also provides a command-line interface that simplifies the execution and validation of each issue. With this infrastructure, users can perform an inspection of any incompatibility issue with the push of a button, or reproduce an issue step-by-step for a more detailed investigation. We make CompSuite publicly available to promote open science. We believe that various software analysis techniques, such as compatibility checking, debugging, and regression test selection, can benefit from CompSuite.
Improved baselines for vision-language pre-training

Contrastive learning has emerged as an efficient framework to learn multimodal representations. CLIP, a seminal work in this area, achieved impressive results by training on paired image-text data using the contrastive loss. Recent work claims improvements over CLIP using additional non-contrastive losses inspired from self-supervised learning. However, it is sometimes hard to disentangle the contribution of these additional losses from other implementation details, e.g., data augmentation or regularization techniques, used to train the model. To shed light on this matter, in this paper, we first propose, implement and evaluate several baselines obtained by combining contrastive learning with recent advances in self-supervised learning. In particular, we use the loss functions that were proven successful for visual self-supervised learning to align image and text modalities. We find that these baselines outperform a basic implementation of CLIP. However, when a stronger training recipe is employed, the advantage disappears. Indeed, we find that a simple CLIP baseline can also be improved substantially, up to a 25% relative improvement on downstream zero-shot tasks, by using well-known training techniques that are popular in other subfields. Moreover, we discover that it is enough to apply image and text augmentations to make up for most of the improvement attained by prior works. With our improved training recipe for CLIP, we obtain state-of-the-art performance on four standard datasets, and consistently outperform prior work (up to +4% on the largest dataset), while being substantially simpler. The code is available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/clip-rocket
Global and Local Mixture Consistency Cumulative Learning for Long-tailed Visual Recognitions

In this paper, our goal is to design a simple learning paradigm for long-tail visual recognition, which not only improves the robustness of the feature extractor but also alleviates the bias of the classifier towards head classes while reducing the training skills and overhead. We propose an efficient one-stage training strategy for long-tailed visual recognition called Global and Local Mixture Consistency cumulative learning (GLMC). Our core ideas are twofold: (1) a global and local mixture consistency loss improves the robustness of the feature extractor. Specifically, we generate two augmented batches by the global MixUp and local CutMix from the same batch data, respectively, and then use cosine similarity to minimize the difference. (2) A cumulative head tail soft label reweighted loss mitigates the head class bias problem. We use empirical class frequencies to reweight the mixed label of the head-tail class for long-tailed data and then balance the conventional loss and the rebalanced loss with a coefficient accumulated by epochs. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on CIFAR10-LT, CIFAR100-LT, and ImageNet-LT datasets. Additional experiments on balanced ImageNet and CIFAR demonstrate that GLMC can significantly improve the generalization of backbones. Code is made publicly available at https://github.com/ynu-yangpeng/GLMC.
Natural Language Decomposition and Interpretation of Complex Utterances

Designing natural language interfaces has historically required collecting supervised data to translate user requests into carefully designed intent representations. This requires enumerating and labeling a long tail of user requests, which is challenging. At the same time, large language models (LLMs) encode knowledge about goals and plans that can help conversational assistants interpret user requests requiring numerous steps to complete. We introduce an approach to handle complex-intent-bearing utterances from a user via a process of hierarchical natural language decomposition and interpretation. Our approach uses a pre-trained language model to decompose a complex utterance into a sequence of simpler natural language steps and interprets each step using the language-to-program model designed for the interface. To test our approach, we collect and release DeCU -- a new NL-to-program benchmark to evaluate Decomposition of Complex Utterances. Experiments show that the proposed approach enables the interpretation of complex utterances with almost no complex training data, while outperforming standard few-shot prompting approaches.
M$^{6}$Doc: A Large-Scale Multi-Format, Multi-Type, Multi-Layout, Multi-Language, Multi-Annotation Category Dataset for Modern Document Layout Analysis

Document layout analysis is a crucial prerequisite for document understanding, including document retrieval and conversion. Most public datasets currently contain only PDF documents and lack realistic documents. Models trained on these datasets may not generalize well to real-world scenarios. Therefore, this paper introduces a large and diverse document layout analysis dataset called $M^{6}Doc$. The $M^6$ designation represents six properties: (1) Multi-Format (including scanned, photographed, and PDF documents); (2) Multi-Type (such as scientific articles, textbooks, books, test papers, magazines, newspapers, and notes); (3) Multi-Layout (rectangular, Manhattan, non-Manhattan, and multi-column Manhattan); (4) Multi-Language (Chinese and English); (5) Multi-Annotation Category (74 types of annotation labels with 237,116 annotation instances in 9,080 manually annotated pages); and (6) Modern documents. Additionally, we propose a transformer-based document layout analysis method called TransDLANet, which leverages an adaptive element matching mechanism that enables query embedding to better match ground truth to improve recall, and constructs a segmentation branch for more precise document image instance segmentation. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of $M^{6}Doc$ with various layout analysis methods and demonstrate its effectiveness. TransDLANet achieves state-of-the-art performance on $M^{6}Doc$ with 64.5% mAP. The $M^{6}Doc$ dataset will be available at https://github.com/HCIILAB/M6Doc.
Comparing Variation in Tokenizer Outputs Using a Series of Problematic and Challenging Biomedical Sentences

Background & Objective: Biomedical text data are increasingly available for research. Tokenization is an initial step in many biomedical text mining pipelines. Tokenization is the process of parsing an input biomedical sentence (represented as a digital character sequence) into a discrete set of word/token symbols, which convey focused semantic/syntactic meaning. The objective of this study is to explore variation in tokenizer outputs when applied across a series of challenging biomedical sentences. Method: Diaz [2015] introduce 24 challenging example biomedical sentences for comparing tokenizer performance. In this study, we descriptively explore variation in outputs of eight tokenizers applied to each example biomedical sentence. The tokenizers compared in this study are the NLTK white space tokenizer, the NLTK Penn Tree Bank tokenizer, Spacy and SciSpacy tokenizers, Stanza/Stanza-Craft tokenizers, the UDPipe tokenizer, and R-tokenizers. Results: For many examples, tokenizers performed similarly effectively; however, for certain examples, there were meaningful variation in returned outputs. The white space tokenizer often performed differently than other tokenizers. We observed performance similarities for tokenizers implementing rule-based systems (e.g. pattern matching and regular expressions) and tokenizers implementing neural architectures for token classification. Oftentimes, the challenging tokens resulting in the greatest variation in outputs, are those words which convey substantive and focused biomedical/clinical meaning (e.g. x-ray, IL-10, TCR/CD3, CD4+ CD8+, and (Ca2+)-regulated). Conclusion: When state-of-the-art, open-source tokenizers from Python and R were applied to a series of challenging biomedical example sentences, we observed subtle variation in the returned outputs.
Neural Oscillators are Universal

Coupled oscillators are being increasingly used as the basis of machine learning (ML) architectures, for instance in sequence modeling, graph representation learning and in physical neural networks that are used in analog ML devices. We introduce an abstract class of neural oscillators that encompasses these architectures and prove that neural oscillators are universal, i.e, they can approximate any continuous and casual operator mapping between time-varying functions, to desired accuracy. This universality result provides theoretical justification for the use of oscillator based ML systems. The proof builds on a fundamental result of independent interest, which shows that a combination of forced harmonic oscillators with a nonlinear read-out suffices to approximate the underlying operators.
Sentence Level Curriculum Learning for Improved Neural Conversational Models

Designing machine intelligence to converse with a human user necessarily requires an understanding of how humans participate in conversation, and thus conversation modeling is an important task in natural language processing. New breakthroughs in architecture and data gathering continue to push the performance of such conversational AI models. However, designs neglect the gradual buildup in sentence structure and complexity experienced by humans as we learn to communicate. During training, our model accepts one or more sentences as input and attempts to predict the next sentence in the conversation one word at a time, so our goal is to separate training into segments, with each segment's corpus comprised of longer sentence pairs than the previous one. This will mimic the desired "buildup" component of human learning. We begin with only "short" length sentence pairs, then only "medium" length pairs, and so on. A majority of our experiments were toward optimizing this technique, ensuring a proper representation of the technique's potential, since many of the details were new questions. Our segment-trained models were then able to achieve lower validation loss at the end of training than models trained with standard text preparation. This segmented training is straightforward to implement and our results provide a general direction for future research to implement and improve it.
Tweaking EfficientDet for frugal training

Object detection appears to be omnipresent nowadays with detectors being available for every problem available, covering solutions from extra-light to ultra resource demanding models. Yet, the vast majority of these approaches are based on large datasets to provide the required feature diversity. This work focuses on object detection solutions which do not rely heavily on abundant training datasets but rather on medium-sized data collections. It uses Efficientdet object detector as base for the application of novel modifications which achieve better performance both in efficiency as well in effectiveness. The focus on medium-sized datasets aim at representing more commonplace datasets which can be accumulated and compiled with relative ease.
A Survey on Steganography and Steganalysis Techniques in Secret Communication

This paper presents a survey on classical steganographic algorithms and detection techniques (i.e.,steganalysis techniques) along with their mathematical definitions. A little to no studies found thattried to provide mathematical definitions of these algorithms. Wheras, mathematical definitions andexamples of different existing algorithms could help researchers to develop better understand howprevious algorithms and their limitations. In-depth understaning is important to improve existing anddevelop new algorithms. Also, this paper presents a comparison chart of existing algorithms to showadvantages and disadvantages of each steganographic algorithm in terms of steganalysis or detectiontechniques.
The Students’ Perceptions of Using Worksheet in English Online Learning at Ninth Grade Junior High School Number 2 Jambi City

This study aims to determine the students' perception of using worksheet in English Online Learning at the Ninth Grade Junior High School Number 2 Jambi City. This research methodology in this study is qualitative research design whose analysis setting of the research requires in-depth observation. The subjects of this study were students of class ninth grade junior high school number 2 Jambi city, was used Purposive sampling totaling six students as participants consisting of two students from low scores, two students from minimum scores, and two students from high scores and two students with high grades, and active students who get ranks from one to six. In collecting data this research gave interviews in class. The results showed that class IX students of SMPN 2 Jambi City this researchs found some difficulties in capturing meaning in the learning process using online worksheets but can help children's success in the process of learning English online. Worksheet can be helps teachers and students in online learning so that students can use worksheet correctly and easily in implementing the application of worksheet in online learning.