Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Data Heterogeneity-Robust Federated Learning via Group Client Selection in Industrial IoT

Nowadays, the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has played an integral role in Industry 4.0 and produced massive amounts of data for industrial intelligence. These data locate on decentralized devices in modern factories. To protect the confidentiality of industrial data, federated learning (FL) was introduced to collaboratively train shared machine learning (ML) models. However, the local data collected by different devices skew in class distribution and degrade industrial FL performance. This challenge has been widely studied at the mobile edge, but they ignored the rapidly changing streaming data and clustering nature of factory devices, and more seriously, they may threaten data security. In this article, we propose FED GS, which is a hierarchical cloud-edge-end FL framework for 5G empowered industries, to improve industrial FL performance on non-independent and identically distributed (non-j) data. Taking advantage of naturally clustered factory devices, FED GS uses a gradient-based binary permutation algorithm (GBP-CS) to select a subset of devices within each factory and build homogeneous super nodes participating in FL training. Then, we propose a compound-step synchronization protocol to coordinate the training process within and among these super nodes, which shows great robustness against data heterogeneity. The proposed methods are time-efficient and can adapt to dynamic environments, without exposing confidential industrial data in risky manipulation. We prove that FED GS has better convergence performance than FedAvg and give a relaxed condition under which FED GS is more communication efficient. The extensive experiments show that FED GS improves accuracy by 3.5% and reduces training rounds by 59% on average, confirming its superior effectiveness and efficiency on non-i.i.d. data.
eFraudCom: An E-commerce Fraud Detection System via Competitive Graph Neural Networks

With the development of e-commerce, fraud behaviors have been becoming one of the biggest threats to the e-commerce business. Fraud behaviors seriously damage the ranking system of e-commerce platforms and adversely influence the shopping experience of users. It is of great practical value to detect fraud behaviors on e-commerce platforms. However, the task is non-trivial, since the adversarial action taken by fraudsters. Existing fraud detection systems used in the e-commerce industry easily suffer from performance decay and can not adapt to the upgrade of fraud patterns, as they take already known fraud behaviors as supervision information to detect other suspicious behaviors. In this article, we propose a competitive graph neural networks (CGNN)-based fraud detection system (eFraudCom) to detect fraud behaviors at one of the largest e-commerce platforms, “Taobao” 1 . In the eFraudCom system, (1) the competitive graph neural networks (CGNN) as the core part of eFraudCom can classify behaviors of users directly by modeling the distributions of normal and fraud behaviors separately; (2) some normal behaviors will be utilized as weak supervision information to guide the CGNN to build the profile for normal behaviors that are more stable than fraud behaviors. The algorithm dependency on fraud behaviors will be eliminated, which enables eFraudCom to detect fraud behaviors in presence of the new fraud patterns; (3) the mutual information regularization term can maximize the separability between normal and fraud behaviors to further improve CGNN. eFraudCom is implemented into a prototype system and the performance of the system is evaluated by extensive experiments. The experiments on two Taobao and two public datasets demonstrate that the proposed deep framework CGNN is superior to other baselines in detecting fraud behaviors. A case study on Taobao datasets verifies that CGNN is still robust when the fraud patterns have been upgraded.
Intelligent cathedrals: Using augmented reality, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence to provide an intense cultural, historical, and religious visitor experience

It is no longer possible to enter the Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris, the most visited monument in the world, since its fire on April 15, 2019. The COVID-19 pandemic has made tourism impossible for months and very difficult for years. However, virtual tours using immersive reality headsets provide a new alternative. This article studies how cathedrals can benefit from augmented and virtual reality and artificial intelligence to provide an intense cultural, historical, and religious experience for its visitors. A multiple case study is carried out in three cathedrals: Notre-Dame de Paris, France; the Cathedral Church of Saint Peter in Exeter, England; and the Catedral de Santa María de la Sede in Seville, Spain. The findings show how immersive technologies can be used to preserve cathedrals and allow visitors to access the inaccessible from the comfort of their homes, to follow their desires, including the impossible and the forbidden, resulting in a deep spiritual experience and a perception of the virtual as being at least as powerful as that of the real.
Implicit data crimes: Machine learning bias arising from misuse of public data

Significance Public databases are an important resource for machine learning research, but their growing availability sometimes leads to “off-label” usage, where data published for one task are used for another. This work reveals that such off-label usage could lead to biased, overly optimistic results of machine-learning algorithms. The underlying cause is that public data are processed with hidden processing pipelines that alter the data features. Here we study three well-known algorithms developed for image reconstruction from magnetic resonance imaging measurements and show they could produce biased results with up to 48% artificial improvement when applied to public databases. We relate to the publication of such results as implicit “data crimes” to raise community awareness of this growing big data problem.
Towards Unsupervised Deep Graph Structure Learning

In recent years, graph neural networks (GNNs) have emerged as a successful tool in a variety of graph-related applications. However, the performance of GNNs can be deteriorated when noisy connections occur in the original graph structures; besides, the dependence on explicit structures prevents GNNs from being applied to general unstructured scenarios. To address these issues, recently emerged deep graph structure learning (GSL) methods propose to jointly optimize the graph structure along with GNN under the supervision of a node classification task. Nonetheless, these methods focus on a supervised learning scenario, which leads to several problems, i.e., the reliance on labels, the bias of edge distribution, and the limitation on application tasks. In this paper, we propose a more practical GSL paradigm, unsupervised graph structure learning, where the learned graph topology is optimized by data itself without any external guidance (i.e., labels). To solve the unsupervised GSL problem, we propose a novel StrUcture Bootstrapping contrastive LearnIng fraMEwork (SUBLIME for abbreviation) with the aid of self-supervised contrastive learning. Specifically, we generate a learning target from the original data as an “anchor graph”, and use a contrastive loss to maximize the agreement between the anchor graph and the learned graph. To provide persistent guidance, we design a novel bootstrapping mechanism that upgrades the anchor graph with learned structures during model learning. We also design a series of graph learners and post-processing schemes to model the structures to learn. Extensive experiments on eight benchmark datasets demonstrate the significant effectiveness of our proposed SUBLIME and high quality of the optimized graphs.
Blockchain technology and gender equality: A systematic literature review

This study examines the literary corpus on the role and potential of blockchain technology in promoting gender equality through the lens of new technology-oriented corporate governance models. It investigates if and how corporate governance models can include blockchain technology to add value to gender equality and inclusion processes, in line with Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5. A bibliometric analysis of a database—containing 127 articles, 4 United Nations reports, 3 European institutions’ reports, 1 International Labour Office report, 1 World Economic Forum report, and 4 industry reports useful to our analysis—was conducted from 1990 to 2021, to provide a map of the knowledge generated and circulated by the literature. This study offers insights into publication activities, essential topics, citation trends, and the status of collaborations between contributors to previous research and aggregated contributions to the area of blockchain technology studies. Furthermore, the study offers a retrospective analysis of the content published in the blockchain technology field. The findings indicate that field research has focussed primarily on blockchain’s economic and financial attributes but not on social potential. This study emphasises the implementation of blockchain technology to manage gender equality and inclusion processes by orienting corporate governance models towards social and sustainable values.
Cooperative and Competitive Multi-Agent Systems: From Optimization to Games

Multi-agent systems can solve scientific issues related to complex systems that are difficult or impossible for a single agent to solve through mutual collaboration and cooperation optimization. In a multi-agent system, agents with a certain degree of autonomy generate complex interactions due to the correlation and coordination, which is manifested as cooperative/competitive behavior. This survey focuses on multi-agent cooperative optimization and cooperative/non-cooperative games. Starting from cooperative optimization, the studies on distributed optimization and federated optimization are summarized. The survey mainly focuses on distributed online optimization and its application in privacy protection, and overviews federated optimization from the perspective of privacy protection mechanisms. Then, cooperative games and non-cooperative games are introduced to expand the cooperative optimization problems from two aspects of minimizing global costs and minimizing individual costs, respectively. Multi-agent cooperative and non-cooperative behaviors are modeled by games from both static and dynamic aspects, according to whether each player can make decisions based on the information of other players. Finally, future directions for cooperative optimization, cooperative/non-cooperative games, and their applications are discussed.
PETR: Position Embedding Transformation for Multi-view 3D Object Detection

In this paper, we develop position embedding transformation (PETR) for multi-view 3D object detection. PETR encodes the position information of 3D coordinates into image features, producing the 3D position-aware features. Object query can perceive the 3D position-aware features and perform end-to-end object detection. PETR achieves state-of-the-art performance (50.4% NDS and 44.1% mAP) on standard nuScenes dataset and ranks 1st place on the benchmark. It can serve as a simple yet strong baseline for future research. Code is available at https://github.com/megvii-research/PETR .
A Reliable Sample Selection Strategy for Weakly Supervised Visual Tracking

Reliability is an important property in the applied engineering systems, especially in visual tracking. The supervised visual tracking method uses reliable ground truth that is manually annotated, which is hard to get in many applications. However, weakly supervised visual trackings are limited by the low-quality labels. Therefore, a reliable sample selection strategy is the most important issue for the weakly supervised visual trackings. In this article, we propose an optimal sample selection strategy and apply it to the visual tracking system. The strategy first assesses the reliability of the samples according to the score map, where the score map is the pseudolabel generated by the upstream task to meet the needs of the downstream task. Then, the unreliable pseudolabels are replaced by reliable ground truth or discarded to overcome the degraded modeling problem by filtering low-quality samples. Finally, through comparison with multiple selection strategies, it is verified that the model trained using this strategy has the best performance. The proposed visual tracking model achieves the best performance among multiple assessment metrics in multiple datasets. Experiments verify that the scientific sample quality assessment method is very important. It can guide the improvement of model performance, which is of great help to the weakly supervised learning systems based on data.
NAS-AMR: Neural Architecture Search-Based Automatic Modulation Recognition for Integrated Sensing and Communication Systems

Automatic modulation recognition (AMR) technique plays an important role in the identification of modulation types of unknown signal of integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) systems. Deep neural network (DNN) based AMR is considered as a promising method. Considering the complexity of a typical ISAC system, devising the DNN manually with limited knowledge of its various classifications will be very tasking. This paper proposes a neural architecture search (NAS) based AMR method to automatically adjust the structure and parameters of DNN and find the optimal structure under the combination of training and constraints. The proposed NAS-AMR method will improve the flexibility of model search and overcome the difficulty of gradient propagation caused by the non-differentiable quantization function in the process of back propagation. Simulation results are provided to confirm that the proposed NAS-AMR method can identify the modulation types in various ISAC electromagnetic environments. Furthermore, compared with other fixed structure networks, our proposed method delivers the highest recognition accuracy, under the condition of low parameters and floating-point operations (FLOPs).
Unsupervised Decomposition and Correction Network for Low-Light Image Enhancement

Vision-based intelligent driving assistance systems and transportation systems can be improved by enhancing the visibility of the scenes captured in extremely challenging conditions. In particular, many low-image image enhancement (LIE) algorithms have been proposed to facilitate such applications in low-light conditions. While deep learning-based methods have achieved substantial success in this field, most of them require paired training data, which is difficult to be collected. This paper advocates a novel Unsupervised Decomposition and Correction Network (UDCN) for LIE without depending on paired data for training. Inspired by the Retinex model, our method first decomposes images into illumination and reflectance components with an image decomposition network (IDN). Then, the decomposed illumination is processed by an illumination correction network (ICN) and fused with the reflectance to generate a primary enhanced result. In contrast with fully supervised learning approaches, UDCN is an unsupervised one which is trained only with low-light images and corresponding histogram equalized (HE) counterparts (can be derived from the low-light image itself) as input. Both the decomposition and correction networks are optimized under the guidance of hybrid no-reference quality-aware losses and inter-consistency constraints between the low-light image and its HE counterpart. In addition, we also utilize an unsupervised noise removal network (NRN) to remove the noise previously hidden in the darkness for further improving the primary result. Qualitative and quantitative comparison results are reported to demonstrate the efficacy of UDCN and its superiority over several representative alternatives in the literature. The results and code will be made public available at <uri xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://github.com/myd945/UDCN</uri> .
Blockchain and Accounting Governance: Emerging Issues and Considerations for Accounting and Assurance Professionals

ABSTRACT Blockchain technology has been a disruptive force in currency, supply chain, and information sharing practices across a variety of industries. Its usage has only recently expanded into assurance and financial reporting. This paper explores blockchain's impact in these areas and provides guidance for organizations and auditors utilizing blockchain by addressing financial data integrity issues, financial reporting risks, and implications for external auditors and firms' corporate governance practices. Organizations utilizing blockchain must adapt their policies and procedures over internal controls and counterparty risk assessment to address increasing regulation over the distribution of financial data, while their audit committees must be prepared to address these challenges leading up to financial statement preparation. External auditors need to assess blockchain implementation as a financial reporting risk and balance the potentially more reliable and timelier audit evidence obtained from blockchain-based reporting systems against the related increase in internal control testing.
A Resource Usage Intensity Aware Load Balancing Method for Virtual Machine Migration in Cloud Datacenters

To provide robust infrastructure as a service (IaaS), clouds currently perform load balancing by migrating virtual machines (VMs) from heavily loaded physical machines (PMs) to lightly loaded PMs. The unique features of clouds pose formidable challenges to achieving effective and efficient load balancing. First, VMs in clouds use different resources (e.g., CPU, bandwidth, memory) to serve a variety of services (e.g., high performance computing, web services, file services), resulting in different over utilized resources in different PMs. Also, the over utilized resources in a PM may vary over time due to the time-varying heterogeneous service requests. Second, there is intensive network communication between VMs. However, previous load balancing methods statically assign equal or predefined weights to different resources, which lead to degraded performance in terms of speed and cost to achieve load balance. Also, they do not strive to minimize the VM communications between PMs. We propose a Resource Intensity Aware Load balancing method (RIAL). For each PM, RIAL dynamically assigns different weights to different resources according to their usage intensity in the PM, which significantly reduces the time and cost to achieve load balance and avoids future load imbalance. It also tries to keep frequently communicating VMs in the same PM to reduce bandwidth cost, and migrates VMs to PMs with minimum VM performance degradation. We also propose an extended version of RIAL with three additional algorithms. First, it optimally determines the weights for considering communication cost and performance degradation due to VM migrations. Second, it has a more strict migration triggering algorithm to avoid unnecessary migrations while still satisfying Service Level Objects (SLOs). Third, it conducts destination PM selection in a decentralized manner to improve scalability. Our extensive trace-driven simulation results and real-world experimental results show the superior performance of RIAL compared to other load balancing methods.
Analysis and Classification of Cold Speech Using Variational Mode Decomposition

This paper presents analysis and classification of a pathological speech called cold speech, which is recorded when the person is suffering from common cold. Nose and throat are affected by the common cold. As nose and throat play an important role in speech production, the speech characteristics are altered during this pathology. In this work, variational mode decomposition (VMD) is used for analysis and classification of cold speech. VMD decomposes the speech signal into a number of sub-signals or modes. These sub-signals may better exploit the pathological information for characterization of cold speech. Various statistics, mean, variance, kurtosis and skewness are extracted from each of the decomposed sub-signals. Along with those statistics, center frequency, energy, peak amplitude, spectral entropy, permutation entropy and Renyi's entropy are evaluated, and used as features. Mutual information (MI) is further employed to assign the weight values to the features. In terms of classification rates, the proposed feature outperforms the linear prediction coefficients (LPC), mel frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC), Teager energy operator (TEO) based feature and ComParE feature sets (IS09-emotion and IS13-ComParE). The proposed feature shows an average recognition rate of 90.02 percent for IITG cold speech database and 66.84 percent for URTIC database.
Trained Behavior Trees: Programming by Demonstration to Support AI Game Designers

Programming by demonstration (PbD) has a straightforward application in the development of the artificial intelligence (AI) for nonplayer characters (NPCs) in a video game: a game designer controls the NPC during a training session in the game, and thus demonstrates the expected behavior for that character in different situations. Afterwards, applying some machine learning technique on the traces recorded during the demonstration, an AI for the NPC can be generated. Nevertheless, with this approach, it is very hard for the game designer to fully control the resulting behavior, which is a key requirement for game designers, who are responsible for putting together a fun experience for the player. In this paper, we present trained behavior trees (TBTs). TBTs are behavior trees (BTs) generated from traces obtained in a game through PbD. BTs are a technique widely used for AI game programming that are created and modified through special purpose visual editors. By inducing a BT from a PbD game session, we combine the ease of use of PbD with the ability to fine-tune the learned behavior of BTs. Furthermore, TBTs facilitate the use of BTs by game designers and promote their authoring control on game AI.
Ordinal Deep Learning for Facial Age Estimation

In this paper, we propose an ordinal deep learning approach for facial age estimation. Unlike conventional hand-crafted feature-based methods that require prior and expert knowledge, we propose an ordinal deep feature learning (ODFL) method to learn feature descriptors for face representation directly from raw pixels. Motivated by the fact that age labels are chronologically correlated and age estimation is an ordinal learning problem, our proposed ODFL enforces two criteria on the descriptors, which are learned at the top of the deep networks: 1) the topology-preserving ordinal relation is employed to exploit the order information in the learned feature space and 2) the age-difference cost information is leveraged to dynamically measure face pairs with different age value gaps. However, both the procedures of feature extraction and age estimation are learned independently in ODFL, which may lead to a sub-optimal problem. To address this, we further propose an end-to-end ordinal deep learning (ODL) framework, where the complementary information of both the procedures is exploited to reinforce our model. Extensive experimental results on five face aging datasets show that both our ODFL and ODL achieve superior performance in comparisons with most state-of-the-art methods.