Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
NFTs for Trusted Traceability and Management of Digital Twins for Shipping Containers

The distribution, traceability, and management of shipping container logistics require secure data flow and trusted transactions. Digital Twins (DTs) can realize these features by offering shipping tracking and traceability, process flow and status monitoring, and management of the physical containersall in a remote manner. However, the data of a DT itself is typically stored, controlled, and managed by a centralized entity, which is often the original creator of the physical container. Having a centralized entity can cause mistrust. The centralized entity may alter, tamper, or delete the digital twin data. To overcome this problem, this paper proposes trusted sharing and management of DTs for shipping containers by using Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). NFTs are digital tokens that hold unique data stored, controlled, and managed in a decentralized and immutable blockchain ledger. We extend in this paper the use of NFTs to tokenize shipping container DTs and their metadata. The proposed solution uses NFTs and Ethereum blockchain smart contracts to offer decentralization, security, transparency, traceability, and immutability to the data and processes involved in the creation, storage, and management of DTs of shipping containers. To demonstrate our solution, we create a DT of a shipping container using Microsoft Azure Digital Twins services and showed how to tokenize it using NFT. We assess the system using various test cases to evaluate its main functionalities. Furthermore, we analyze the cost of transactions and the security of the smart contracts code. We have made the code of our smart contracts publicly available on GitHub.
One-Shot Adaptation of GAN in Just One CLIP

There are many recent research efforts to fine-tune a pre-trained generator with a few target images to generate images of a novel domain. Unfortunately, these methods often suffer from overfitting or under-fitting when fine-tuned with a single target image. To address this, here we present a novel single-shot GAN adaptation method through unified CLIP space manipulations. Specifically, our model employs a two-step training strategy: reference image search in the source generator using a CLIP-guided latent optimization, followed by generator fine-tuning with a novel loss function that imposes CLIP space consistency between the source and adapted generators. To further improve the adapted model to produce spatially consistent samples with respect to the source generator, we also propose contrastive regularization for patchwise relationships in the CLIP space. Experimental results show that our model generates diverse outputs with the target texture and outperforms the baseline models both qualitatively and quantitatively. Furthermore, we show that our CLIP space manipulation strategy allows more effective attribute editing. Our Github source is as follows: <uri xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://github.com/cyclomon/OneshotCLIP</uri>
MoRSE: Deep Learning-based Arm Gesture Recognition for Search and Rescue Operations

Efficient and quick remote communication in search and rescue operations can be life-saving for the first responders. However, while operating on the field means of communication based on text, image and audio are not suitable for several disaster scenarios. In this paper, we present a smartwatch-based application, which utilizes a Deep Learning (DL) model, to recognize a set of predefined arm gestures, maps them into Morse code via vibrations enabling remote communication amongst first responders. The model performance was evaluated by training it using 4,200 gestures performed by 7 subjects (cross-validation) wearing a smartwatch on their dominant arm. Our DL model relies on convolutional pooling and surpasses the performance of existing DL approaches and common machine learning classifiers, obtaining gesture recognition accuracy above 95%. We conclude by discussing the results and providing future directions.
Lessons From the FTX Cryptocurrency Exchange Collapse

Governments and market regulators are debating and deliberating on matters of concern and benefits of treating cryptocurrencies as an asset or a currency so that they can tax them accordingly. 2022 has shaken the financial markets with the onset of the worst crypto winters in cryptocurrency history on one hand and the collapse of a few cryptocurrencies and the exchanges that facilitate investing and trading in them. These events brought chills to the stakeholders, who began questioning the stability of the cryptocurrency and the functioning of various exchanges. Cryptocurrencies promise to be the future of currency, and hence, there is an immediate need to protect investors by regulating them – especially those cryptocurrency exchanges running in a centralized form. The case examines the collapse of FTX and other financial institutions because they exposed the structural weaknesses existing in the system. The case also examines competitor business strategies to protect themselves from such incidents and stresses the need for governmental and regulatory interventions.
Deep-Fuzz: A synergistic integration of deep learning and fuzzy water flows for fine-grained nuclei segmentation in digital pathology

Robust semantic segmentation of tumour micro-environment is one of the major open challenges in machine learning enabled computational pathology. Though deep learning based systems have made significant progress, their task agnostic data driven approach often lacks the contextual grounding necessary in biomedical applications. We present a novel fuzzy water flow scheme that takes the coarse segmentation output of a base deep learning framework to then provide a more fine-grained and instance level robust segmentation output. Our two stage synergistic segmentation method, Deep-Fuzz, works especially well for overlapping objects, and achieves state-of-the-art performance in four public cell nuclei segmentation datasets. We also show through visual examples how our final output is better aligned with pathological insights, and thus more clinically interpretable.
A Robust Model for Translating Arabic Sign Language into Spoken Arabic Using Deep Learning

This study presents a novel and innovative approach to automatically translating Arabic Sign Language (ATSL) into spoken Arabic. The proposed solution utilizes a deep learning-based classification approach and the transfer learning technique to retrain 12 image recognition models. The image-based translation method maps sign language gestures to corresponding letters or words using distance measures and classification as a machine learning technique. The results show that the proposed model is more accurate and faster than traditional image-based models in classifying Arabic-language signs, with a translation accuracy of 93.7%. This research makes a significant contribution to the field of ATSL. It offers a practical solution for improving communication for individuals with special needs, such as the deaf and mute community. This work demonstrates the potential of deep learning techniques in translating sign language into natural language and highlights the importance of ATSL in facilitating communication for individuals with disabilities.
Graph test of controllability in qubit arrays: a systematic way to determine the minimum number of external controls

Abstract The ability to implement any desired quantum logic gate on a quantum processing unit is equivalent to evolution-operator controllability of the qubits. Conversely, controllability analysis can be used to minimize the resources, i.e. the number of external controls and qubit–qubit couplings, required for universal quantum computing. Standard controllability analysis, consisting in the construction of the dynamical Lie algebra, is, however, impractical already for a comparatively small number of qubits. Here, we show how to leverage an alternative approach, based on a graph representation of the Hamiltonian, to determine controllability of arrays of coupled qubits. We provide a complete computational framework and exemplify it for arrays of five qubits, inspired by the ibmq_quito architecture. We find that the number of controls can be reduced from five to one for complex qubit–qubit couplings and to two for standard qubit–qubit couplings.
LDFnet: Lightweight Dynamic Fusion Network for Face Forgery Detection by Integrating Local Artifacts and Global Texture Information

Face forgery detection has become a new research hotspot. Though existing detection works have achieved impressive performance, they are difficult to achieve a proper trade-off between detection accuracy and model complexity. To solve this problem, we design some low-complexity modules and construct a lightweight dynamic fusion network (LDFnet) to achieve high accuracy and lightweight face forgery detection. Firstly, we regard significant local visual artifacts as a correct semantic feature needed for detection. A spatial group-wise enhance (SGE) module is introduced as a supervision to suppress possible noise and capture local artifacts. Secondly, we design a manipulation trace extraction block (TraceBlock), which can replace vanilla convolution to achieve global inference, thus capturing the texture information in the global scope. Based on TraceBlock, we construct a global texture representation (GTR) network to extract global manipulation features hierarchically. Finally, we design a dynamic fusion mechanism (DFM) to fully fuse local and global clues, and dynamically generate a more discriminating feature representation. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed LDFnet is significantly superior to the previous detection works on some popular face forgery datasets, such as FF++, DFDC, CelebDF and HFF. In particular, LDFnet only uses 963k model parameters and 801M FLOPs, which is far lower than the calculation cost of face forgery detection based on large model, and achieves better detection results.
From low invasiveness to high control: how artificial intelligence allows to generate a large pool of standardized corpora at a lesser cost

The use of corpora represents a widespread methodology in interpersonal perception and impression formation studies. Nonetheless, the development of a corpus using the traditional approach involves a procedure that is both time- and cost-intensive and might lead to methodological flaws (e.g., high invasiveness). This might in turn lower the internal and external validities of the studies. Drawing on the technological advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning, we propose an innovative approach based on deepfake technology to develop corpora while tackling the challenges of the traditional approach. This technology makes it possible to generate synthetic videos showing individuals doing things that they have never done. Through an automatized process, this approach allows to create a large scale corpus at a lesser cost and in a short time frame. This method is characterized by a low degree of invasiveness given that it requires minimal input from participants (i.e., a single image or a short video) to generate a synthetic video of a person. Furthermore, this method allows a high degree of control over the content of the videos. As a first step, a referent video is created in which an actor performs the desired behavior. Then, based on this referent video and participant input, the videos that will compose the corpus are generated by a specific class of machine learning algorithms such that either the facial features or the behavior exhibited in the referent video are transposed to the face or the body of another person. In the present paper, we apply deepfake technology to the field of social skills and more specifically to interpersonal perception and impression formation studies and provide technical information to researchers who are interested in developing a corpus using this innovative technology.
Safety Helmet Detection Based on Optimized YOLOv5

Whether employees wear safety helmets is an important safety issue in power related work scenarios, and various safety issues can be avoided by monitoring this situation. However, traditional target detection methods are vulnerable to interference due to the weather, light, personnel density, location of surveillance cameras and other problems in the working environment, and the recognition and detection effect of such small targets is not very good. Therefore, this paper uses the high-precision YOLOv5 (You Only Look Once) as the target detection framework, and modifies its backbone network to improve its ability in small target recognition. The original backbone structure is cut and compressed, and the SwinT (Swin Transformer) modules are added to improve the overall recognition accuracy based on its powerful small target recognition ability. At the same time, SE (Squeeze and Excitation) and CBAM (Convolutional Block Attention Module) modules are added to further improve the recognition accuracy of the entire network. Finally, experiments are conducted on the SHWD (Safety Helmet Wearing Dataset) dataset. The experimental results show that compared to the network before modification, the accuracy of the optimized YOLO structure proposed in this paper is significantly improved on the validation dataset, with an average recognition accuracy of 93%.
Boosting Graph Neural Networks via Adaptive Knowledge Distillation

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have shown remarkable performance on diverse graph mining tasks. While sharing the same message passing framework, our study shows that different GNNs learn distinct knowledge from the same graph. This implies potential performance improvement by distilling the complementary knowledge from multiple models. However, knowledge distillation (KD) transfers knowledge from high-capacity teachers to a lightweight student, which deviates from our scenario: GNNs are often shallow. To transfer knowledge effectively, we need to tackle two challenges: how to transfer knowledge from compact teachers to a student with the same capacity; and, how to exploit student GNN's own learning ability. In this paper, we propose a novel adaptive KD framework, called BGNN, which sequentially transfers knowledge from multiple GNNs into a student GNN. We also introduce an adaptive temperature module and a weight boosting module. These modules guide the student to the appropriate knowledge for effective learning. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the effectiveness of BGNN. In particular, we achieve up to 3.05% improvement for node classification and 6.35% improvement for graph classification over vanilla GNNs.
DropMessage: Unifying Random Dropping for Graph Neural Networks

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are powerful tools for graph representation learning. Despite their rapid development, GNNs also face some challenges, such as over-fitting, over-smoothing, and non-robustness. Previous works indicate that these problems can be alleviated by random dropping methods, which integrate augmented data into models by randomly masking parts of the input. However, some open problems of random dropping on GNNs remain to be solved. First, it is challenging to find a universal method that are suitable for all cases considering the divergence of different datasets and models. Second, augmented data introduced to GNNs causes the incomplete coverage of parameters and unstable training process. Third, there is no theoretical analysis on the effectiveness of random dropping methods on GNNs. In this paper, we propose a novel random dropping method called DropMessage, which performs dropping operations directly on the propagated messages during the message-passing process. More importantly, we find that DropMessage provides a unified framework for most existing random dropping methods, based on which we give theoretical analysis of their effectiveness. Furthermore, we elaborate the superiority of DropMessage: it stabilizes the training process by reducing sample variance; it keeps information diversity from the perspective of information theory, enabling it become a theoretical upper bound of other methods. To evaluate our proposed method, we conduct experiments that aims for multiple tasks on five public datasets and two industrial datasets with various backbone models. The experimental results show that DropMessage has the advantages of both effectiveness and generalization, and can significantly alleviate the problems mentioned above.
Combating Unknown Bias with Effective Bias-Conflicting Scoring and Gradient Alignment

Models notoriously suffer from dataset biases which are detrimental to robustness and generalization. The identify-emphasize paradigm shows a promising effect in dealing with unknown biases. However, we find that it is still plagued by two challenges: A, the quality of the identified bias-conflicting samples is far from satisfactory; B, the emphasizing strategies just yield suboptimal performance. In this work, for challenge A, we propose an effective bias-conflicting scoring method to boost the identification accuracy with two practical strategies --- peer-picking and epoch-ensemble. For challenge B, we point out that the gradient contribution statistics can be a reliable indicator to inspect whether the optimization is dominated by bias-aligned samples. Then, we propose gradient alignment, which employs gradient statistics to balance the contributions of the mined bias-aligned and bias-conflicting samples dynamically throughout the learning process, forcing models to leverage intrinsic features to make fair decisions. Experiments are conducted on multiple datasets in various settings, demonstrating that the proposed solution can alleviate the impact of unknown biases and achieve state-of-the-art performance.
Semantics-Aware Dynamic Localization and Refinement for Referring Image Segmentation

Referring image segmentation segments an image from a language expression. With the aim of producing high-quality masks, existing methods often adopt iterative learning approaches that rely on RNNs or stacked attention layers to refine vision-language features. Despite their complexity, RNN-based methods are subject to specific encoder choices, while attention-based methods offer limited gains. In this work, we introduce a simple yet effective alternative for progressively learning discriminative multi-modal features. The core idea of our approach is to leverage a continuously updated query as the representation of the target object and at each iteration, strengthen multi-modal features strongly correlated to the query while weakening less related ones. As the query is initialized by language features and successively updated by object features, our algorithm gradually shifts from being localization-centric to segmentation-centric. This strategy enables the incremental recovery of missing object parts and/or removal of extraneous parts through iteration. Compared to its counterparts, our method is more versatile—it can be plugged into prior arts straightforwardly and consistently bring improvements. Experimental results on the challenging datasets of RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, and G-Ref demonstrate its advantage with respect to the state-of-the-art methods.
GPTR: Gestalt-Perception Transformer for Diagram Object Detection

Diagram object detection is the key basis of practical applications such as textbook question answering. Because the diagram mainly consists of simple lines and color blocks, its visual features are sparser than those of natural images. In addition, diagrams usually express diverse knowledge, in which there are many low-frequency object categories in diagrams. These lead to the fact that traditional data-driven detection model is not suitable for diagrams. In this work, we propose a gestalt-perception transformer model for diagram object detection, which is based on an encoder-decoder architecture. Gestalt perception contains a series of laws to explain human perception, that the human visual system tends to perceive patches in an image that are similar, close or connected without abrupt directional changes as a perceptual whole object. Inspired by these thoughts, we build a gestalt-perception graph in transformer encoder, which is composed of diagram patches as nodes and the relationships between patches as edges. This graph aims to group these patches into objects via laws of similarity, proximity, and smoothness implied in these edges, so that the meaningful objects can be effectively detected. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed GPTR achieves the best results in the diagram object detection task. Our model also obtains comparable results over the competitors in natural image object detection.
Painterly Image Harmonization in Dual Domains

Image harmonization aims to produce visually harmonious composite images by adjusting the foreground appearance to be compatible with the background. When the composite image has photographic foreground and painterly background, the task is called painterly image harmonization. There are only few works on this task, which are either time-consuming or weak in generating well-harmonized results. In this work, we propose a novel painterly harmonization network consisting of a dual-domain generator and a dual-domain discriminator, which harmonizes the composite image in both spatial domain and frequency domain. The dual-domain generator performs harmonization by using AdaIN modules in the spatial domain and our proposed ResFFT modules in the frequency domain. The dual-domain discriminator attempts to distinguish the inharmonious patches based on the spatial feature and frequency feature of each patch, which can enhance the ability of generator in an adversarial manner. Extensive experiments on the benchmark dataset show the effectiveness of our method. Our code and model are available at https://github.com/bcmi/PHDNet-Painterly-Image-Harmonization.
FedABC: Targeting Fair Competition in Personalized Federated Learning

Federated learning aims to collaboratively train models without accessing their client's local private data. The data may be Non-IID for different clients and thus resulting in poor performance. Recently, personalized federated learning (PFL) has achieved great success in handling Non-IID data by enforcing regularization in local optimization or improving the model aggregation scheme on the server. However, most of the PFL approaches do not take into account the unfair competition issue caused by the imbalanced data distribution and lack of positive samples for some classes in each client. To address this issue, we propose a novel and generic PFL framework termed Federated Averaging via Binary Classification, dubbed FedABC. In particular, we adopt the ``one-vs-all'' training strategy in each client to alleviate the unfair competition between classes by constructing a personalized binary classification problem for each class. This may aggravate the class imbalance challenge and thus a novel personalized binary classification loss that incorporates both the under-sampling and hard sample mining strategies is designed. Extensive experiments are conducted on two popular datasets under different settings, and the results demonstrate that our FedABC can significantly outperform the existing counterparts.