Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Performance Evaluation of Deep Neural Networks Applied to Speech Recognition: RNN, LSTM and GRU

Abstract Deep Neural Networks (DNN) are nothing but neural networks with many hidden layers. DNNs are becoming popular in automatic speech recognition tasks which combines a good acoustic with a language model. Standard feedforward neural networks cannot handle speech data well since they do not have a way to feed information from a later layer back to an earlier layer. Thus, Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) have been introduced to take temporal dependencies into account. However, the shortcoming of RNNs is that long-term dependencies due to the vanishing/exploding gradient problem cannot be handled. Therefore, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks were introduced, which are a special case of RNNs, that takes long-term dependencies in a speech in addition to short-term dependencies into account. Similarily, GRU (Gated Recurrent Unit) networks are an improvement of LSTM networks also taking long-term dependencies into consideration. Thus, in this paper, we evaluate RNN, LSTM, and GRU to compare their performances on a reduced TED-LIUM speech data set. The results show that LSTM achieves the best word error rates, however, the GRU optimization is faster while achieving word error rates close to LSTM.
Data quality challenges for sustainable fashion supply chain operations in emerging markets: Roles of blockchain, government sponsors and environment taxes

In emerging markets, there are data quality problems. In this paper, we establish theoretical models to explore how data quality problems affect sustainable fashion supply chain operations. We start with the decentralized supply chain and find that poor data quality lowers supply chain profit and social welfare. We consider the implementation of blockchain to help and identify the situation in which blockchain helps enhance social welfare but brings harm to supply chain profitability. We propose a government sponsor scheme as well as an environment taxation waiving scheme to help. We further extend the study to the centralized supply chain setting.
Automated and partly automated contact tracing: a systematic review to inform the control of COVID-19

<h2>Summary</h2> Evidence for the use of automated or partly automated contact-tracing tools to contain severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 is scarce. We did a systematic review of automated or partly automated contact tracing. We searched PubMed, EMBASE, OVID Global Health, EBSCO Medical COVID Information Portal, Cochrane Library, medRxiv, bioRxiv, arXiv, and Google Advanced for articles relevant to COVID-19, severe acute respiratory syndrome, Middle East respiratory syndrome, influenza, or Ebola virus, published from Jan 1, 2000, to April 14, 2020. We also included studies identified through professional networks up to April 30, 2020. We reviewed all full-text manuscripts. Primary outcomes were the number or proportion of contacts (or subsequent cases) identified. Secondary outcomes were indicators of outbreak control, uptake, resource use, cost-effectiveness, and lessons learnt. This study is registered with PROSPERO (CRD42020179822). Of the 4036 studies identified, 110 full-text studies were reviewed and 15 studies were included in the final analysis and quality assessment. No empirical evidence of the effectiveness of automated contact tracing (regarding contacts identified or transmission reduction) was identified. Four of seven included modelling studies that suggested that controlling COVID-19 requires a high population uptake of automated contact-tracing apps (estimates from 56% to 95%), typically alongside other control measures. Studies of partly automated contact tracing generally reported more complete contact identification and follow-up compared with manual systems. Automated contact tracing could potentially reduce transmission with sufficient population uptake. However, concerns regarding privacy and equity should be considered. Well designed prospective studies are needed given gaps in evidence of effectiveness, and to investigate the integration and relative effects of manual and automated systems. Large-scale manual contact tracing is therefore still key in most contexts.
Robust Sparse Linear Discriminant Analysis

Linear discriminant analysis (LDA) is a very popular supervised feature extraction method and has been extended to different variants. However, classical LDA has the following problems: 1) The obtained discriminant projection does not have good interpretability for features; 2) LDA is sensitive to noise; and 3) LDA is sensitive to the selection of number of projection directions. In this paper, a novel feature extraction method called robust sparse linear discriminant analysis (RSLDA) is proposed to solve the above problems. Specifically, RSLDA adaptively selects the most discriminative features for discriminant analysis by introducing the <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$l_{2,1}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> norm. An orthogonal matrix and a sparse matrix are also simultaneously introduced to guarantee that the extracted features can hold the main energy of the original data and enhance the robustness to noise, and thus RSLDA has the potential to perform better than other discriminant methods. Extensive experiments on six databases demonstrate that the proposed method achieves the competitive performance compared with other state-of-the-art feature extraction methods. Moreover, the proposed method is robust to the noisy data.
Comprehensive survey of image steganography: Techniques, Evaluations, and trends in future research

Storing and communicating secret and/or private information has become part of our daily life whether it is for our employment or personal well-being. Therefore, secure storage and transmission of the secret information have received the undivided attention of many researchers. The techniques for hiding confidential data in inconspicuous digital media such as video, audio, and image are collectively termed as Steganography. Among various media types used, the popularity and availability of digital images are high and in this research work and hence, our focus is on implementing digital image steganography. The main challenge in designing a steganographic system is to maintain a fair trade-off between robustness, security, imperceptibility and higher bit embedding rate. This research article provides a thorough review of existing types of image steganography and the recent contributions in each category in multiple modalities. The article also provides a complete overview of image steganography including general operation, requirements, different aspects, different types and their performance evaluations. Different performance analysis measures for evaluating steganographic system are also discussed here. Moreover, we also discuss the strategy to select different cover media for different applications and a few state-of-the-art steganalysis systems.
Deep Supervised Cross-Modal Retrieval

Cross-modal retrieval aims to enable flexible retrieval across different modalities. The core of cross-modal retrieval is how to measure the content similarity between different types of data. In this paper, we present a novel cross-modal retrieval method, called Deep Supervised Cross-modal Retrieval (DSCMR). It aims to find a common representation space, in which the samples from different modalities can be compared directly. Specifically, DSCMR minimises the discrimination loss in both the label space and the common representation space to supervise the model learning discriminative features. Furthermore, it simultaneously minimises the modality invariance loss and uses a weight sharing strategy to eliminate the cross-modal discrepancy of multimedia data in the common representation space to learn modality-invariant features. Comprehensive experimental results on four widely-used benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed method is effective in cross-modal learning and significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art cross-modal retrieval methods.
SG-One: Similarity Guidance Network for One-Shot Semantic Segmentation

One-shot image semantic segmentation poses a challenging task of recognizing the object regions from unseen categories with only one annotated example as supervision. In this article, we propose a simple yet effective similarity guidance network to tackle the one-shot (SG-One) segmentation problem. We aim at predicting the segmentation mask of a query image with the reference to one densely labeled support image of the same category. To obtain the robust representative feature of the support image, we first adopt a masked average pooling strategy for producing the guidance features by only taking the pixels belonging to the support image into account. We then leverage the cosine similarity to build the relationship between the guidance features and features of pixels from the query image. In this way, the possibilities embedded in the produced similarity maps can be adopted to guide the process of segmenting objects. Furthermore, our SG-One is a unified framework that can efficiently process both support and query images within one network and be learned in an end-to-end manner. We conduct extensive experiments on Pascal VOC 2012. In particular, our SG-One achieves the mIoU score of 46.3%, surpassing the baseline methods.
CGNet: A Light-Weight Context Guided Network for Semantic Segmentation

The demand of applying semantic segmentation model on mobile devices has been increasing rapidly. Current state-of-the-art networks have enormous amount of parameters hence unsuitable for mobile devices, while other small memory footprint models follow the spirit of classification network and ignore the inherent characteristic of semantic segmentation. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel Context Guided Network (CGNet), which is a light-weight and efficient network for semantic segmentation. We first propose the Context Guided (CG) block, which learns the joint feature of both local feature and surrounding context effectively and efficiently, and further improves the joint feature with the global context. Based on the CG block, we develop CGNet which captures contextual information in all stages of the network. CGNet is specially tailored to exploit the inherent property of semantic segmentation and increase the segmentation accuracy. Moreover, CGNet is elaborately designed to reduce the number of parameters and save memory footprint. Under an equivalent number of parameters, the proposed CGNet significantly outperforms existing light-weight segmentation networks. Extensive experiments on Cityscapes and CamVid datasets verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Specifically, without any post-processing and multi-scale testing, the proposed CGNet achieves 64.8% mean IoU on Cityscapes with less than 0.5 M parameters.
MaX-DeepLab: End-to-End Panoptic Segmentation with Mask Transformers

We present MaX-DeepLab, the first end-to-end model for panoptic segmentation. Our approach simplifies the current pipeline that depends heavily on surrogate sub-tasks and hand-designed components, such as box detection, non-maximum suppression, thing-stuff merging, etc. Although these sub-tasks are tackled by area experts, they fail to comprehensively solve the target task. By contrast, our MaX-DeepLab directly predicts class-labeled masks with a mask transformer, and is trained with a panoptic quality inspired loss via bipartite matching. Our mask transformer employs a dual-path architecture that introduces a global memory path in addition to a CNN path, allowing direct communication with any CNN layers. As a result, MaX-DeepLab shows a significant 7.1% PQ gain in the box-free regime on the challenging COCO dataset, closing the gap between box-based and box-free methods for the first time. A small variant of MaX-DeepLab improves 3.0% PQ over DETR with similar parameters and M-Adds. Furthermore, MaX-DeepLab, without test time augmentation, achieves new state-of-the-art 51.3% PQ on COCO test-dev set.
Tackling the Qubit Mapping Problem for NISQ-Era Quantum Devices

Due to little considerations in the hardware constraints, e.g., limited connections between physical qubits to enable two-qubit gates, most quantum algorithms cannot be directly executed on the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices. Dynamically remapping logical qubits to physical qubits in the compiler is needed to enable the two-qubit gates in the algorithm, which introduces additional operations and inevitably reduces the fidelity of the algorithm. Previous solutions in finding such remapping suffer from high complexity, poor initial mapping quality, and limited flexibility and control. To address these drawbacks mentioned above, this paper proposes a SWAP-based Bidirectional heuristic search algorithm (SABRE), which is applicable to NISQ devices with arbitrary connections between qubits. By optimizing every search attempt, globally optimizing the initial mapping using a novel reverse traversal technique, introducing the decay effect to enable the trade-off between the depth and the number of gates of the entire algorithm, SABRE outperforms the best known algorithm with exponential speedup and comparable or better results on various benchmarks.
A Secure Charging Scheme for Electric Vehicles With Smart Communities in Energy Blockchain

The smart community (SC), as an important part of the Internet of Energy (IoE), can facilitate integration of distributed renewable energy sources and electric vehicles (EVs) in the smart grid. However, due to the potential security and privacy issues caused by untrusted and opaque energy markets, it becomes a great challenge to optimally schedule the charging behaviors of EVs with distinct energy consumption preferences in SC. In this paper, we propose a contract-based energy blockchain for secure EV charging in SC. First, a permissioned energy blockchain system is introduced to implement secure charging services for EVs with the execution of smart contracts. Second, a reputation-based delegated Byzantine fault tolerance consensus algorithm is proposed to efficiently achieve the consensus in the permissioned blockchain. Third, based on the contract theory, the optimal contracts are analyzed and designed to satisfy EVs' individual needs for energy sources while maximizing the operator's utility. Furthermore, a novel energy allocation mechanism is proposed to allocate the limited renewable energy for EVs. Finally, extensive numerical results are carried out to evaluate and demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed scheme through comparison with other conventional schemes.
Particle swarm optimization of deep neural networks architectures for image classification

Deep neural networks have been shown to outperform classical machine learning algorithms in solving real-world problems. However, the most successful deep neural networks were handcrafted from scratch taking the problem domain knowledge into consideration. This approach often consumes very significant time and computational resources. In this work, we propose a novel algorithm based on particle swarm optimization (PSO), capable of fast convergence when compared with others evolutionary approaches, to automatically search for meaningful deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) architectures for image classification tasks, named psoCNN. A novel directly encoding strategy and a velocity operator were devised allowing the optimization use of PSO with CNNs. Our experimental results show that psoCNN can quickly find good CNN architectures that achieve quality performance comparable to the state-of-the-art designs.
STAT: Spatial-Temporal Attention Mechanism for Video Captioning

Video captioning refers to automatic generate natural language sentences, which summarize the video contents. Inspired by the visual attention mechanism of human beings, temporal attention mechanism has been widely used in video description to selectively focus on important frames. However, most existing methods based on temporal attention mechanism suffer from the problems of recognition error and detail missing, because temporal attention mechanism cannot further catch significant regions in frames. In order to address above problems, we propose the use of a novel spatial-temporal attention mechanism (STAT) within an encoder-decoder neural network for video captioning. The proposed STAT successfully takes into account both the spatial and temporal structures in a video, so it makes the decoder to automatically select the significant regions in the most relevant temporal segments for word prediction. We evaluate our STAT on two well-known benchmarks: MSVD and MSR-VTT-10K. Experimental results show that our proposed STAT achieves the state-of-the-art performance with several popular evaluation metrics: BLEU-4, METEOR, and CIDEr.
Adaptive Pyramid Context Network for Semantic Segmentation

Recent studies witnessed that context features can significantly improve the performance of deep semantic segmentation networks. Current context based segmentation methods differ with each other in how to construct context features and perform differently in practice. This paper firstly introduces three desirable properties of context features in segmentation task. Specially, we find that Global-guided Local Affinity (GLA) can play a vital role in constructing effective context features, while this property has been largely ignored in previous works. Based on this analysis, this paper proposes Adaptive Pyramid Context Network (APCNet) for semantic segmentation. APCNet adaptively constructs multi-scale contextual representations with multiple well-designed Adaptive Context Modules (ACMs). Specifically, each ACM leverages a global image representation as a guidance to estimate the local affinity coefficients for each sub-region, and then calculates a context vector with these affinities. We empirically evaluate our APCNet on three semantic segmentation and scene parsing datasets, including PASCAL VOC 2012, Pascal-Context, and ADE20K dataset. Experimental results show that APCNet achieves state-of-the-art performance on all three benchmarks, and obtains a new record 84.2% on PASCAL VOC 2012 test set without MS COCO pre-trained and any post-processing.
Domain Adaptation for Structured Output via Discriminative Patch Representations

Predicting structured outputs such as semantic segmentation relies on expensive per-pixel annotations to learn supervised models like convolutional neural networks. However, models trained on one data domain may not generalize well to other domains without annotations for model finetuning. To avoid the labor-intensive process of annotation, we develop a domain adaptation method to adapt the source data to the unlabeled target domain. We propose to learn discriminative feature representations of patches in the source domain by discovering multiple modes of patch-wise output distribution through the construction of a clustered space. With such representations as guidance, we use an adversarial learning scheme to push the feature representations of target patches in the clustered space closer to the distributions of source patches. In addition, we show that our framework is complementary to existing domain adaptation techniques and achieves consistent improvements on semantic segmentation. Extensive ablations and results are demonstrated on numerous benchmark datasets with various settings, such as synthetic-to-real and cross-city scenarios.
StructureFlow: Image Inpainting via Structure-Aware Appearance Flow

Image inpainting techniques have shown significant improvements by using deep neural networks recently. However, most of them may either fail to reconstruct reasonable structures or restore fine-grained textures. In order to solve this problem, in this paper, we propose a two-stage model which splits the inpainting task into two parts: structure reconstruction and texture generation. In the first stage, edge-preserved smooth images are employed to train a structure reconstructor which completes the missing structures of the inputs. In the second stage, based on the reconstructed structures, a texture generator using appearance flow is designed to yield image details. Experiments on multiple publicly available datasets show the superior performance of the proposed network.
Time Interval Aware Self-Attention for Sequential Recommendation

Sequential recommender systems seek to exploit the order of users' interactions, in order to predict their next action based on the context of what they have done recently. Traditionally, Markov Chains(MCs), and more recently Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) and Self Attention (SA) have proliferated due to their ability to capture the dynamics of sequential patterns. However a simplifying assumption made by most of these models is to regard interaction histories as ordered sequences, without regard for the time intervals between each interaction (i.e., they model the time-order but not the actual timestamp). In this paper, we seek to explicitly model the timestamps of interactions within a sequential modeling framework to explore the influence of different time intervals on next item prediction. We propose TiSASRec (Time Interval aware Self-attention based sequential recommendation), which models both the absolute positions of items as well as the time intervals between them in a sequence. Extensive empirical studies show the features of TiSASRec under different settings and compare the performance of self-attention with different positional encodings. Furthermore, experimental results show that our method outperforms various state-of-the-art sequential models on both sparse and dense datasets and different evaluation metrics.
Differentiable Soft Quantization: Bridging Full-Precision and Low-Bit Neural Networks

Hardware-friendly network quantization (e.g., binary/uniform quantization) can efficiently accelerate the inference and meanwhile reduce memory consumption of the deep neural networks, which is crucial for model deployment on resource-limited devices like mobile phones. However, due to the discreteness of low-bit quantization, existing quantization methods often face the unstable training process and severe performance degradation. To address this problem, in this paper we propose Differentiable Soft Quantization (DSQ) to bridge the gap between the full-precision and low-bit networks. DSQ can automatically evolve during training to gradually approximate the standard quantization. Owing to its differentiable property, DSQ can help pursue the accurate gradients in backward propagation, and reduce the quantization loss in forward process with an appropriate clipping range. Extensive experiments over several popular network structures show that training low-bit neural networks with DSQ can consistently outperform state-of-the-art quantization methods. Besides, our first efficient implementation for deploying 2 to 4-bit DSQ on devices with ARM architecture achieves up to 1.7× speed up, compared with the open-source 8-bit high-performance inference framework NCNN [31].