Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Self-attention based speaker recognition using Cluster-Range Loss

Abstract Speaker recognition with short utterances is a challenging research topic in the natural language processing (NLP) field. Previous convolutional neural network (CNN) based models for speaker recognition usually utilize very deep or wide layers, resulting in many parameters and high computational cost. Besides, great training difficulty and inefficiency exist in the triplet loss, which is widely used in speaker recognition. In this work, we propose to combine the residual network (ResNet) with the self-attention mechanism to achieve better performance in text-independent speaker recognition with fewer parameters and lower computational cost. In addition, the Cluster-Range Loss based on a well-designed online exemplar mining is proposed to directly shrink the intra-class variation and to enlarge the inter-class distance. Experiments on Voxceleb dataset are conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed scheme. The proposed approach achieves a Top-1 accuracy of 89.1% for speaker identification by jointly training the network with the Cluster-Range Loss and softmax cross entropy loss. For speaker verification, we achieve a competitive EER of 5.5% without any heavy-tailed backend, compared with the state-of-the-art i-vector system, as well as the x-vector system.
Improved Superpixel-Based Fast Fuzzy C-Means Clustering for Image Segmentation

Superpixel-based fast fuzzy C-means clustering (SFFCM) is an efficient method for color image segmentation. However, it is sensitive to noise and blur. Its superpixel method called multiscale morphological gradient reconstruction (MMGR) is time consuming. In this paper, we propose an improved SFFCM method (ISFFCM) which replaces the MMGR in SFFCM with fuzzy simple linear iterative clustering (Fuzzy SLIC). Fuzzy SLIC is faster and more robust than MMGR for most types of noise, including salt and pepper noise, Gaussian noise and multiplicative noise. It is also more robust to image blur. In the validation experiments, we tested ISFFCM and SFFCM on the Berkeley benchmark. The experiment results show that our method outperforms SFFCM under noise and blurring environments.
Deep Inter Prediction Via Pixel-Wise Motion Oriented Reference Generation

Inter prediction is an important module in video coding for temporal redundancy removal, where the reference blocks are searched from the previously coded frames and employed to predict the block to be coded. However, apart from regular block-wise shift motion, there usually exists inconsistent pixel-wise motion such as rotation and deformation between blocks, which will largely degrade the prediction performance. In this paper, we propose a Multiscale Adaptive Separable Convolutional Neural Network (MASCNN) to generate pixel-wise closer reference frames for inter prediction. A multiscale network is built to interpolate the target frame from coarse to fine. Reconstruction losses are enforced on each scale to make the network infer the main structure at small scales, which improves the interpolation accuracy of the network. Furthermore, a sum of absolute transformed difference (SATD) loss function is proposed to regularize the network training, which further improves the coding performance. Compared with HEVC, our method can obtain on average 5.7% BD-rate saving and up to 9.9% BD-rate saving for the luma component under the random access configuration.
<i>A priori</i> prediction of breast tumour response to chemotherapy using quantitative ultrasound imaging and artificial neural networks

We demonstrate the clinical utility of combining quantitative ultrasound (QUS) imaging of the breast with an artificial neural network (ANN) classifier to predict the response of breast cancer patients to neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NAC) administration prior to the start of treatment. Using a 6 MHz ultrasound system, radiofrequency (RF) ultrasound data were acquired from 100 patients with biopsy-confirmed locally advanced breast cancer prior to the start of NAC. Quantitative ultrasound mean parameter intensity and texture features were computed from the tumour core and margin, and were compared to the clinical/pathological response and 5-year recurrence-free survival (RFS) of patients. A multi-parametric QUS model in conjunction with an ANN classifier predicted patient response with 96 ± 6% accuracy, and a 0.96 ± 0.08 area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC), compared to 65 ± 10 % accuracy and 0.67 ± 0.14 AUC achieved using a K-Nearest Neighbour (KNN) algorithm. A separate ANN model predicted patient RFS with 85 ± 7% accuracy, and a 0.89 ± 0.11 AUC, whereas the KNN methodology achieved a 58 ± 6 % accuracy and a 0.64 ± 0.09 AUC. The application of ANN for classifying patient response based on tumour QUS features performs well in terms of predicting response to chemotherapy. The findings here provide a framework for developing personalized a priori chemotherapy selection for patients that are candidates for NAC, potentially resulting in improved patient treatment outcomes and prognosis.
Socio-Cyber-Physical Systems: Models, Opportunities, Open Challenges

Almost without exception, cyber-physical systems operate alongside, for the benefit of, and supported by humans. Unsurprisingly, disregarding their social aspects during development and operation renders these systems ineffective. In this paper, we explore approaches to modelling and reasoning about the human involvement in socio-cyber-physical systems (SCPS). To provide an unbiased perspective, we describe both the opportunities afforded by the presence of human agents, and the challenges associated with ensuring that their modelling is sufficiently accurate to support decision making during SCPS development and, if applicable, at run-time. Using SCPS examples from emergency management and assisted living, we illustrate how recent advances in stochastic modelling, analysis and synthesis can be used to exploit human observations about the impact of natural and man-made disasters, and to support the efficient provision of assistive care.
Occlusion aware sensor fusion for early crossing pedestrian detection

Early and accurate detection of crossing pedestrians is crucial in automated driving to execute emergency manoeuvres in time. This is a challenging task in urban scenarios however, where people are often occluded (not visible) behind objects, e.g. other parked vehicles. In this paper, an occlusion aware multi-modal sensor fusion system is proposed to address scenarios with crossing pedestrians behind parked vehicles. Our proposed method adjusts the detection rate in different areas based on sensor visibility. We argue that using this occlusion information can help to evaluate the measurements. Our experiments on real world data show that fusing radar and stereo camera for such tasks is beneficial, and that including occlusion into the model helps to detect pedestrians earlier and more accurately.
Deep Learning-Based Reasoning With Multi-Ontology for IoT Applications

In the era of mobile big data, data driven intelligent Internet of Things (IoT) applications are becoming widespread, and knowledge-based reasoning is one of the essential tasks of these applications. While most knowledge-based reasoning work is conducted with knowledge graph, ontology-based reasoning method can inherently achieve higher level intelligence by leveraging both explicit and tacit knowledge in specific domains, and its performance is determined by precise refinement of the inference rules. However, most ontology-based reasoning work concentrates on semantic reasoning in a single ontology, and fail to utilize association of multiple ontologies in various domains to extend reasoning capacity. This is even the case for the IoT applications where knowledge from multiple domains needs to be utilized. To overcome this issue, we propose a deep learning-based method to associate multiple ontology rule bases, thereby discover new inference rules. In our method, we first use a regression tree model to determine the threshold value for parameters in inference rules that constitute the ontology rule base, avoiding the influence of uncertainty factors on knowledge reasoning results. Then, a two-way GRU (Gated Recurrent Unit) neural network with attention mechanism is used to discover semantic relations among the rule bases of ontologies. Therefore, the association of multiple ontology rule bases is realized, and the rule base of knowledge reasoning is expanded by acquiring some unspecified rules. To the best our knowledge, this work is the first one to leverage deep learning in reasoning with multiple ontologies. In order to verify the effectiveness of our method, we apply it in a real traffic safety monitoring application by relating rule bases of a vehicle ontology and a traffic management ontology, and achieve effective knowledge reasoning.
Updating graph databases with Cypher

The paper describes the present and the future of graph updates in Cypher, the language of the Neo4j property graph database and several other products. Update features include those with clear analogs in relational databases, as well as those that do not correspond to any relational operators. Moreover, unlike SQL, Cypher updates can be arbitrarily intertwined with querying clauses. After presenting the current state of update features, we point out their shortcomings, most notably violations of atomicity and non-deterministic behavior of updates. These have not been previously known in the Cypher community. We then describe the industry-academia collaboration on designing a revised set of Cypher update operations. Based on discovered shortcomings of update features, a number of possible solutions were devised. They were presented to key Cypher users, who were given the opportunity to comment on how update features are used in real life, and on their preferences for proposed fixes. As the result of the consultation, a new set of update operations for Cypher were designed. Those led to a streamlined syntax, and eliminated the unexpected and problematic behavior that original Cypher updates exhibited.
Software Defect Prediction Based on Ensemble Learning

Software defect prediction is one of the important ways to guarantee the quality of software systems. Combining various algorithms in machine learning to predict software defects has become a hot topic in the current study. The paper uses the datasets of MDP as the experimental research objects and takes ensemble learning as research focus to construct software defect prediction model. With experimenting five different types of ensemble algorithms and analyzing the features and procedures, this paper discusses the best ensemble algorithm which is Random Forest through experimental comparison. Then we utilize the SMOTE over-sampling and Resample methods to improve the quality of datasets to build a complete new software defect prediction model. Therefore, the results show that the model can improve defect classification performance effectively.
Cross Domain Adaptation for on-Road Object Detection Using Multimodal Structure-Consistent Image-to-Image Translation

Image-to-image translation is potential to boost the detection accuracy of a CNN-based object detector in a different domain. Despite recent GAN (Generative Adversarial Network) based methods have shown compelling visual results, they are prone to fail at preserving image-objects and maintaining structure consistency when faced with large and complex domain shifts such as day-to-night, which reduces their practicality on tasks such as generating large-scale training data for different domains. In this work, we introduce image-translation-structure and cycle-structure consistency for generating diverse and structure-preserved translated images across complex domains, such as between day and night, for object detector training. Given only a single/labelled image at daytime, our model could generate a diverse collection of images at nighttime with different ambient light levels and rear lamp conditions (on/off) but with the same vehicle type, color and locations. Qualitative results show that our model can generate diverse and realistic images in the target domain data. For quantitative comparisons, we evaluate other competing methods and ours by using the generated images to train the Faster R-CNN and YOLO detectors and prove that our model achieves significant improvement and outperforms other methods on detection accuracy.
Two-phase flow void fraction estimation based on bubble image segmentation using Randomized Hough Transform with Neural Network (RHTN)

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has been encouraging the use of passive cooling systems in new designs of nuclear power plants. Next nuclear reactor generations are intended to have simpler and robust safety resources. Natural Circulation based systems hold an undoubtedly prominent position among these. The study of limiting conditions of these systems has led to instability behavior analysis where many different two-phase flow patterns are present. Void fraction is a key parameter in thermal transfer analysis of these flow instability conditions. This work presents a new method to estimate void fraction from images captured of an experimental two-phase flow circuit. The method integrates a set of Artificial Neural Networks with a modified Randomized Hough Transform to make multiple scans over acquired images, using crescent-sized masks. This method was called Randomized Hough Transform with Neural Network (RHTN). Each different mask size is chosen according with bubble sizes, which are the main ‘objects of interest’ in this image analysis. Images are segmented using fuzzy inference with different parameters adjusted based on acquisition focus. Void fraction calculation considers the volume of the imaged geometrical section of flow inside cylindrical glass tubes considering the acquisition depth-of-field used. The bubble volume is estimated based on geometrical parameters inferred for each detected bubble. The image database is obtained from experiments performed on a vertical two-phase flow circuit made of cylindrical glass where flow-patterns visualization is possible. The results have shown that the estimation method had good agreement with increasing void fraction experimental values. RHTN has been very efficient as bubble detector with very low ‘false-positive’ cases (<0.004%) due robustness obtained through integration between Artificial Neural Networks with Randomized Hough Transforms.
A Convolutional Neural Network Approach for Classification of LPWAN Technologies: Sigfox, LoRA and IEEE 802.15.4g

This paper presents a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) approach for classification of low power wide area network (LPWAN) technologies such as Sigfox, LoRA and IEEE 802.15.4g. Since the technologies operate in unlicensed sub-GHz bands, their transmissions can interfere with each other and significantly degrade their performance. This situation further intensifies when the network density increases which will be the case of future LPWANs. In this regard, it becomes essential to classify coexisting technologies so that the impact of interference can be minimized by making optimal spectrum decisions. State-of-the-art technology classification approaches use signal processing approaches for solving the task. However, such techniques are not scalable and require domain-expertise knowledge for developing new rules for each new technology. On the contrary, we present a CNN approach for classification which requires limited domain-expertise knowledge, and it can be scalable to any number of wireless technologies. We present and compare two CNN based classifiers named CNN based on in-phase and quadrature (IQ) and CNN based on Fast Fourier Transform (FFT). The results illustrate that CNN based on IQ achieves classification accuracy close to 97% similar to CNN based on FFT and thus, avoiding the need for performing FFT.
ReActor: Real-time and Accurate Contactless Gesture Recognition with RFID

Contactless gesture recognition has emerged as a promising technique to enable diverse smart applications, e.g., novel human-machine interaction. Among others, gesture recognition based on radio frequency identification (RFID) is preferred due to its prevalent availability, low cost, and ease in deployment. However, current RFID-based gesture recognition approaches usually use profile template matching to distinguish different gestures, making them suffer from large recognition latency and fail to support real-time applications. In this paper, we propose a real-time and accurate contactless RFID-based gesture recognition approach called ReActor. ReActor uses machine learning rather than time-consuming profile template matching to distinguish different gestures, and thus achieves both very low recognition latency and high recognition accuracy. The major challenge of our approach is to determine a set of suitable attributes that can preserve the profile features of the signals related to different gestures. We combine two types of attributes in ReActor: the statistics of the signal profile that characterize coarse-grained features and the wavelet (transformation) coefficients of the signal profile that characterize fine-grained local features, both of which can be calculated fast. Experimental results demonstrate that ReActor can recognize a gesture with average latency less than 51ms, two orders of magnitude faster than state-of-the-art approaches based on profile template matching. Furthermore, ReActor also achieves higher recognition accuracy than previous works due to its optimized attribute set.
A Bi-Attention Adversarial Network for Prostate Cancer Segmentation

Prostate cancer is one of the most prevalent cancers among men.Early detection of this cancer could effectively increase the survival rate of the patient.In this paper, we propose a Bi-attention adversarial network for the prostate cancer segmentation automatically.The proposed architecture consists of the generator network and discriminator network.The generator network aims to generate the predicted mask of the input image, while the discriminator network aims to further improve the generator performance with adversarial learning by discriminating the generator predicted mask and the true label mask.For better improving the segmentation performance, we combine two attention mechanisms with the generator network to learn more global and local features.Extensive experiments on the T2-weighted (T2W) images have demonstrated our model could achieve state-of-the-art segmentation performance compared with other methods.
Tackling Partial Domain Adaptation with Self-supervision

Domain adaptation approaches have shown promising results in reducing the marginal distribution difference among visual domains. They allow to train reliable models that work over datasets of different nature (photos, paintings etc.), but they still struggle when the domains do not share an identical label space. In the partial domain adaptation setting, where the target covers only a subset of the source classes, it is challenging to reduce the domain gap without incurring in negative transfer. Many solutions just keep the standard domain adaptation techniques by adding heuristic sample weighting strategies. In this work we show how the self-supervisory signal obtained from the spatial co-location of patches can be used to define a side task that supports adaptation regardless of the exact label sharing condition across domains. We build over a recent work that introduced a jigsaw puzzle task for domain generalization: we describe how to reformulate this approach for partial domain adaptation and we show how it boosts existing adaptive solutions when combined with them. The obtained experimental results on three datasets supports the effectiveness of our approach.
Diversity and consistency learning guided spectral embedding for multi-view clustering

Multi-view clustering aims to group data points into their classes. Exploiting the complementary information underlying multiple views to benefit the clustering performance is one of the topics of multi-view clustering. Most of existing multi-view clustering methods only constrain diversity and consistency in the data space, but not consider the diversity and consistency in the learned label space. However, It is natural to take the impacts of diversity in the learned label matrix into consideration, because different view would generate different clustering label matrix, in which some labels are consistent and some are diverse. To overcome this issue, we propose a novel multi-view clustering method (DCMSC) by constraining diversity and consistency in both the learned clustering label matrix and data space. Specifically, in the learned label space, we relax the learned common label matrix into consistent part and diverse part. Meanwhile, by applying an introduced row-aware diversity representation and l2,1-norm to constrain diverse part, wrong-labels and the influences of noises on the consistent part are reduced. In the data space, we weight each view by using a self-weight strategy. Furthermore, we conduct clustering in spectral embedded spaces instead of original data spaces, which suppresses the effect of noises and decreases redundant information. An augmented Lagrangian multiplier with alternating direction minimization (ALM-ADM) based optimization solution can guarantee the convergence of our method. Extensive experimental results on both synthetic datasets and real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
Transfer learning across human activities using a cascade neural network architecture

Cascade Learning (CL) [20] is a new adaptive approach to train deep neural networks. It is particularly suited to transfer learning, as learning is achieved in a layerwise fashion, enabling the transfer of selected layers to optimize the quality of transferred features. In the domain of Human Activity Recognition (HAR), where the consideration of resource consumption is critical, CL is of particular interest as it has demonstrated the ability to achieve significant reductions in computational and memory costs with negligible performance loss. In this paper, we evaluate the use of CL and compare it to end to end (E2E) learning in various transfer learning experiments, all applied to HAR. We consider transfer learning across objectives, for example opening the door features transferred to opening the dishwasher. We additionally consider transfer across sensor locations on the body, as well as across datasets. Over all of our experiments, we find that CL achieves state of the art performance for transfer learning in comparison to previously published work, improving F1 scores by over 15%. In comparison to E2E learning, CL performs similarly considering F1 scores, with the additional advantage of requiring fewer parameters. Finally, the overall results considering HAR classification performance and memory requirements demonstrate that CL is a good approach for transfer learning.