Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Communication-Efficient Federated Deep Learning With Layerwise Asynchronous Model Update and Temporally Weighted Aggregation

Federated learning obtains a central model on the server by aggregating models trained locally on clients. As a result, federated learning does not require clients to upload their data to the server, thereby preserving the data privacy of the clients. One challenge in federated learning is to reduce the client-server communication since the end devices typically have very limited communication bandwidth. This article presents an enhanced federated learning technique by proposing an asynchronous learning strategy on the clients and a temporally weighted aggregation of the local models on the server. In the asynchronous learning strategy, different layers of the deep neural networks (DNNs) are categorized into shallow and deep layers, and the parameters of the deep layers are updated less frequently than those of the shallow layers. Furthermore, a temporally weighted aggregation strategy is introduced on the server to make use of the previously trained local models, thereby enhancing the accuracy and convergence of the central model. The proposed algorithm is empirically on two data sets with different DNNs. Our results demonstrate that the proposed asynchronous federated deep learning outperforms the baseline algorithm both in terms of communication cost and model accuracy.
Unbiased Scene Graph Generation From Biased Training

Today's scene graph generation (SGG) task is still far from practical, mainly due to the severe training bias, e.g., collapsing diverse "human walk on / sit on / lay on beach" into "human on beach". Given such SGG, the down-stream tasks such as VQA can hardly infer better scene structures than merely a bag of objects. However, debiasing in SGG is not trivial because traditional debiasing methods cannot distinguish between the good and bad bias, e.g., good context prior (e.g., "person read book" rather than "eat") and bad long-tailed bias (e.g., "near" dominating "behind / in front of"). In this paper, we present a novel SGG framework based on causal inference but not the conventional likelihood. We first build a causal graph for SGG, and perform traditional biased training with the graph. Then, we propose to draw the counterfactual causality from the trained graph to infer the effect from the bad bias, which should be removed. In particular, we use Total Direct Effect (TDE) as the proposed final predicate score for unbiased SGG. Note that our framework is agnostic to any SGG model and thus can be widely applied in the community who seeks unbiased predictions. By using the proposed Scene Graph Diagnosis toolkit on the SGG benchmark Visual Genome and several prevailing models, we observed significant improvements over the previous state-of-the-art methods.
Transformer Meets Tracker: Exploiting Temporal Context for Robust Visual Tracking

In video object tracking, there exist rich temporal contexts among successive frames, which have been largely overlooked in existing trackers. In this work, we bridge the individual video frames and explore the temporal contexts across them via a transformer architecture for robust object tracking. Different from classic usage of the transformer in natural language processing tasks, we separate its encoder and decoder into two parallel branches and carefully design them within the Siamese-like tracking pipelines. The transformer encoder promotes the target templates via attention-based feature reinforcement, which benefits the high-quality tracking model generation. The transformer decoder propagates the tracking cues from previous templates to the current frame, which facilitates the object searching process. Our transformer-assisted tracking framework is neat and trained in an end-to-end manner. With the proposed transformer, a simple Siamese matching approach is able to outperform the current top-performing trackers. By combining our transformer with the recent discriminative tracking pipeline, our method sets several new state-of-the-art records on prevalent tracking benchmarks.
Blockchain in global supply chains and cross border trade: a critical synthesis of the state-of-the-art, challenges and opportunities

Blockchain possesses the potential of transforming global supply chain management. Gartner predicts that blockchain could be able to track $2 T of goods and services in their movement across the globe by 2023, and blockchain will be a more than $3 trillion business by 2030. Nowadays, a growing number of blockchain initiatives are disrupting traditional business models in each sector. In this paper, we provide a timely and holistic overview of the state-of-the-art, challenges, gaps and opportunities in global supply chain and trade operations for both the private sector and governmental agencies, by synthesising a wide range of resources from business leaders, global international organisations, leading supply chain consulting firms, research articles, trade magazines and conferences. We then identify collaborative schema and future research directions for industry, government, and academia to jointly work together in ensuring that the full potential of blockchain is unleashed amidst the socioeconomic, geopolitical and technological disruptions that global supply chains and trade are facing.
Learning Rotation-Invariant and Fisher Discriminative Convolutional Neural Networks for Object Detection

The performance of object detection has recently been significantly improved due to the powerful features learnt through convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Despite the remarkable success, there are still several major challenges in object detection, including object rotation, within-class diversity, and between-class similarity, which generally degenerate object detection performance. To address these issues, we build up the existing state-of-the-art object detection systems and propose a simple but effective method to train rotation-invariant and Fisher discriminative CNN models to further boost object detection performance. This is achieved by optimizing a new objective function that explicitly imposes a rotation-invariant regularizer and a Fisher discrimination regularizer on the CNN features. Specifically, the first regularizer enforces the CNN feature representations of the training samples before and after rotation to be mapped closely to each other in order to achieve rotation-invariance. The second regularizer constrains the CNN features to have small within-class scatter but large between-class separation. We implement our proposed method under four popular object detection frameworks, including region-CNN (R-CNN), Fast R- CNN, Faster R- CNN, and R- FCN. In the experiments, we comprehensively evaluate the proposed method on the PASCAL VOC 2007 and 2012 data sets and a publicly available aerial image data set. Our proposed methods outperform the existing baseline methods and achieve the state-of-the-art results.
Blockchain's adoption in IoT: The challenges, and a way forward

The underlying technology of Bitcoin is blockchain, which was initially designed for financial value transfer only. Nonetheless, due to its decentralized architecture, fault tolerance and cryptographic security benefits such as pseudonymous identities, data integrity and authentication, researchers and security analysts around the world are focusing on the blockchain to resolve security and privacy issues of IoT. However, presently, not much work has been done to assess blockchain's viability for IoT and the associated challenges. Hence, to arrive at intelligible conclusions, this paper carries out a systematic study of the peculiarities of the IoT environment including its security and performance requirements and progression in blockchain technologies. We have identified the gaps by mapping the security and performance benefits inferred by the blockchain technologies and some of the blockchain-based IoT applications against the IoT requirements. We also discovered some practical issues involved in the integration of IoT devices with the blockchain. In the end, we propose a way forward to resolve some of the significant challenges to the blockchain's adoption in IoT.
MS-TCN: Multi-Stage Temporal Convolutional Network for Action Segmentation

Temporally locating and classifying action segments in long untrimmed videos is of particular interest to many applications like surveillance and robotics. While traditional approaches follow a two-step pipeline, by generating frame-wise probabilities and then feeding them to high-level temporal models, recent approaches use temporal convolutions to directly classify the video frames. In this paper, we introduce a multi-stage architecture for the temporal action segmentation task. Each stage features a set of dilated temporal convolutions to generate an initial prediction that is refined by the next one. This architecture is trained using a combination of a classification loss and a proposed smoothing loss that penalizes over-segmentation errors. Extensive evaluation shows the effectiveness of the proposed model in capturing long-range dependencies and recognizing action segments. Our model achieves state-of-the-art results on three challenging datasets: 50Salads, Georgia Tech Egocentric Activities (GTEA), and the Breakfast dataset.
Deep Unfolding Network for Image Super-Resolution

Learning-based single image super-resolution (SISR) methods are continuously showing superior effectiveness and efficiency over traditional model-based methods, largely due to the end-to-end training.However, different from model-based methods that can handle the SISR problem with different scale factors, blur kernels and noise levels under a unified MAP (maximum a posteriori) framework, learning-based methods generally lack such flexibility.To address this issue, this paper proposes an end-to-end trainable unfolding network which leverages both learningbased methods and model-based methods.Specifically, by unfolding the MAP inference via a half-quadratic splitting algorithm, a fixed number of iterations consisting of alternately solving a data subproblem and a prior subproblem can be obtained.The two subproblems then can be solved with neural modules, resulting in an end-to-end trainable, iterative network.As a result, the proposed network inherits the flexibility of model-based methods to super-resolve blurry, noisy images for different scale factors via a single model, while maintaining the advantages of learning-based methods.Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of the proposed deep unfolding network in terms of flexibility, effectiveness and also generalizability.
Multi-Task Feature Learning for Knowledge Graph Enhanced Recommendation

Collaborative filtering often suffers from sparsity and cold start problems in real recommendation scenarios, therefore, researchers and engineers usually use side information to address the issues and improve the performance of recommender systems. In this paper, we consider knowledge graphs as the source of side information. We propose MKR, a Multi-task feature learning approach for Knowledge graph enhanced Recommendation. MKR is a deep end-to-end framework that utilizes knowledge graph embedding task to assist recommendation task. The two tasks are associated by crosscompress units, which automatically share latent features and learn high-order interactions between items in recommender systems and entities in the knowledge graph. We prove that crosscompress units have sufficient capability of polynomial approximation, and show that MKR is a generalized framework over several representative methods of recommender systems and multi-task learning. Through extensive experiments on real-world datasets, we demonstrate that MKR achieves substantial gains in movie, book, music, and news recommendation, over state-of-the-art baselines. MKR is also shown to be able to maintain satisfactory performance even if user-item interactions are sparse.
Destruction and Construction Learning for Fine-Grained Image Recognition

Delicate feature representation about object parts plays a critical role in fine-grained recognition. For example, experts can even distinguish fine-grained objects relying only on object parts according to professional knowledge. In this paper, we propose a novel "Destruction and Construction Learning" (DCL) method to enhance the difficulty of fine-grained recognition and exercise the classification model to acquire expert knowledge. Besides the standard classification backbone network, another "destruction and construction" stream is introduced to carefully "destruct" and then "reconstruct" the input image, for learning discriminative regions and features. More specifically, for "destruction", we first partition the input image into local regions and then shuffle them by a Region Confusion Mechanism (RCM). To correctly recognize these destructed images, the classification network has to pay more attention to discriminative regions for spotting the differences. To compensate the noises introduced by RCM, an adversarial loss, which distinguishes original images from destructed ones, is applied to reject noisy patterns introduced by RCM. For "construction", a region alignment network, which tries to restore the original spatial layout of local regions, is followed to model the semantic correlation among local regions. By jointly training with parameter sharing, our proposed DCL injects more discriminative local details to the classification network. Experimental results show that our proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on three standard benchmarks. Moreover, our proposed method does not need any external knowledge during training, and there is no computation overhead at inference time except the standard classification network feed-forwarding. Source code: https://github.com/JDAI-CV/DCL.
How to Read Articles That Use Machine Learning

In recent years, many new clinical diagnostic tools have been developed using complicated machine learning methods. Irrespective of how a diagnostic tool is derived, it must be evaluated using a 3-step process of deriving, validating, and establishing the clinical effectiveness of the tool. Machine learning–based tools should also be assessed for the type of machine learning model used and its appropriateness for the input data type and data set size. Machine learning models also generally have additional prespecified settings called hyperparameters, which must be tuned on a data set independent of the validation set. On the validation set, the outcome against which the model is evaluated is termed the reference standard. The rigor of the reference standard must be assessed, such as against a universally accepted gold standard or expert grading.
An Improved Quantum-Inspired Differential Evolution Algorithm for Deep Belief Network

Deep belief network (DBN) is one of the most representative deep learning models. However, it has a disadvantage that the network structure and parameters are basically determined by experiences. In this article, an improved quantum-inspired differential evolution (MSIQDE), namely MSIQDE algorithm based on making use of the merits of the Mexh wavelet function, standard normal distribution, adaptive quantum state update, and quantum nongate mutation, is proposed to avoid premature convergence and improve the global search ability. Then, the MSIQDE with global optimization ability is used to optimize the parameters of the DBN to construct an optimal DBN model, which is further applied to propose a new fault classification, namely MSIQDE-DBN method. Finally, the vibration data of rolling bearings from the Case Western Reserve University and a real-world engineering application are carried out to verify the performance of the MSIQDE-DBN method. The experimental results show that the MSIQDE takes on better optimization performance, and the MSIQDE-DBN can obtain higher classification accuracy than the other comparison methods.
Acceptability of App-Based Contact Tracing for COVID-19: Cross-Country Survey Study

The COVID-19 pandemic is the greatest public health crisis of the last 100 years. Countries have responded with various levels of lockdown to save lives and stop health systems from being overwhelmed. At the same time, lockdowns entail large socioeconomic costs. One exit strategy under consideration is a mobile phone app that traces the close contacts of those infected with COVID-19. Recent research has demonstrated the theoretical effectiveness of this solution in different disease settings. However, concerns have been raised about such apps because of the potential privacy implications. This could limit the acceptability of app-based contact tracing in the general population. As the effectiveness of this approach increases strongly with app uptake, it is crucial to understand public support for this intervention.The objective of this study is to investigate the user acceptability of a contact-tracing app in five countries hit by the pandemic.We conducted a largescale, multicountry study (N=5995) to measure public support for the digital contact tracing of COVID-19 infections. We ran anonymous online surveys in France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States. We measured intentions to use a contact-tracing app across different installation regimes (voluntary installation vs automatic installation by mobile phone providers) and studied how these intentions vary across individuals and countries.We found strong support for the app under both regimes, in all countries, across all subgroups of the population, and irrespective of regional-level COVID-19 mortality rates. We investigated the main factors that may hinder or facilitate uptake and found that concerns about cybersecurity and privacy, together with a lack of trust in the government, are the main barriers to adoption.Epidemiological evidence shows that app-based contact tracing can suppress the spread of COVID-19 if a high enough proportion of the population uses the app and that it can still reduce the number of infections if uptake is moderate. Our findings show that the willingness to install the app is very high. The available evidence suggests that app-based contact tracing may be a viable approach to control the diffusion of COVID-19.
TFHE: Fast Fully Homomorphic Encryption Over the Torus

This work describes a fast fully homomorphic encryption scheme over the torus (TFHE) that revisits, generalizes and improves the fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) based on GSW and its ring variants. The simplest FHE schemes consist in bootstrapped binary gates. In this gate bootstrapping mode, we show that the scheme FHEW of Ducas and Micciancio (Eurocrypt, 2015) can be expressed only in terms of external product between a GSW and an LWE ciphertext. As a consequence of this result and of other optimizations, we decrease the running time of their bootstrapping from 690 to 13 ms single core, using 16 MB bootstrapping key instead of 1 GB, and preserving the security parameter. In leveled homomorphic mode, we propose two methods to manipulate packed data, in order to decrease the ciphertext expansion and to optimize the evaluation of lookup tables and arbitrary functions in $${\mathrm {RingGSW}}$$-based homomorphic schemes. We also extend the automata logic, introduced in Gama et al. (Eurocrypt, 2016), to the efficient leveled evaluation of weighted automata, and present a new homomorphic counter called $$\mathrm {TBSR}$$, that supports all the elementary operations that occur in a multiplication. These improvements speed up the evaluation of most arithmetic functions in a packed leveled mode, with a noise overhead that remains additive. We finally present a new circuit bootstrapping that converts $$\mathsf {LWE}$$ ciphertexts into low-noise $${\mathrm {RingGSW}}$$ ciphertexts in just 137 ms, which makes the leveled mode of TFHE composable and which is fast enough to speed up arithmetic functions, compared to the gate bootstrapping approach. Finally, we provide an alternative practical analysis of LWE based schemes, which directly relates the security parameter to the error rate of LWE and the entropy of the LWE secret key, and we propose concrete parameter sets and timing comparison for all our constructions.
Disentangling Monocular 3D Object Detection

In this paper we propose an approach for monocular 3D object detection from a single RGB image, which leverages a novel disentangling transformation for 2D and 3D detection losses and a novel, self-supervised confidence score for 3D bounding boxes. Our proposed loss disentanglement has the twofold advantage of simplifying the training dynamics in the presence of losses with complex interactions of parameters, and sidestepping the issue of balancing independent regression terms. Our solution overcomes these issues by isolating the contribution made by groups of parameters to a given loss, without changing its nature. We further apply loss disentanglement to another novel, signed Intersection-over-Union criterion-driven loss for improving 2D detection results. Besides our methodological innovations, we critically review the AP metric used in KITTI3D, which emerged as the most important dataset for comparing 3D detection results. We identify and resolve a flaw in the 11-point interpolated AP metric, affecting all previously published detection results and particularly biases the results of monocular 3D detection. We provide extensive experimental evaluations and ablation studies and set a new state-of-the-art on the KITTI3D Car class.
TransReID: Transformer-based Object Re-Identification

Extracting robust feature representation is one of the key challenges in object re-identification (ReID). Although convolution neural network (CNN)-based methods have achieved great success, they only process one local neighborhood at a time and suffer from information loss on details caused by convolution and downsampling operators (e.g. pooling and strided convolution). To overcome these limitations, we propose a pure transformer-based object ReID framework named TransReID. Specifically, we first encode an image as a sequence of patches and build a transformer-based strong baseline with a few critical improvements, which achieves competitive results on several ReID benchmarks with CNN-based methods. To further enhance the robust feature learning in the context of transformers, two novel modules are carefully designed. (i) The jigsaw patch module (JPM) is proposed to rearrange the patch embeddings via shift and patch shuffle operations which generates robust features with improved discrimination ability and more diversified coverage. (ii) The side information embeddings (SIE) is introduced to mitigate feature bias towards camera/view variations by plugging in learnable embeddings to incorporate these non-visual clues. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to adopt a pure transformer for ReID research. Experimental results of TransReID are superior promising, which achieve state-of-the-art performance on both person and vehicle ReID benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/heshuting555/TransReID.