Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Scene Text Recognition from Two-Dimensional Perspective

Inspired by speech recognition, recent state-of-the-art algorithms mostly consider scene text recognition as a sequence prediction problem. Though achieving excellent performance, these methods usually neglect an important fact that text in images are actually distributed in two-dimensional space. It is a nature quite different from that of speech, which is essentially a one-dimensional signal. In principle, directly compressing features of text into a one-dimensional form may lose useful information and introduce extra noise. In this paper, we approach scene text recognition from a two-dimensional perspective. A simple yet effective model, called Character Attention Fully Convolutional Network (CA-FCN), is devised for recognizing the text of arbitrary shapes. Scene text recognition is realized with a semantic segmentation network, where an attention mechanism for characters is adopted. Combined with a word formation module, CA-FCN can simultaneously recognize the script and predict the position of each character. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms previous methods on both regular and irregular text datasets. Moreover, it is proven to be more robust to imprecise localizations in the text detection phase, which are very common in practice.
Few-Example Object Detection with Model Communication

In this paper, we study object detection using a large pool of unlabeled images and only a few labeled images per category, named "few-example object detection". The key challenge consists in generating trustworthy training samples as many as possible from the pool. Using few training examples as seeds, our method iterates between model training and high-confidence sample selection. In training, easy samples are generated first and, then the poorly initialized model undergoes improvement. As the model becomes more discriminative, challenging but reliable samples are selected. After that, another round of model improvement takes place. To further improve the precision and recall of the generated training samples, we embed multiple detection models in our framework, which has proven to outperform the single model baseline and the model ensemble method. Experiments on PASCAL VOC'07, MS COCO'14, and ILSVRC'13 indicate that by using as few as three or four samples selected for each category, our method produces very competitive results when compared to the state-of-the-art weakly-supervised approaches using a large number of image-level labels.
Quantum Information Scrambling on a Superconducting Qutrit Processor

A quantum processor based on three-level ``qutrits,'' as opposed to two-level qubits, successfully runs a quantum teleportation algorithm in a proof-of-concept demonstration of resource-efficient three-level systems.
Exploring Entanglement and Optimization within the Hamiltonian Variational Ansatz

Quantum variational algorithms are one of the most promising applications of near-term quantum computers; however, recent studies have demonstrated that unless the variational quantum circuits are configured in a problem-specific manner, optimization of such circuits will most likely fail. In this paper, we focus on a special family of quantum circuits called the Hamiltonian variational ansatz (HVA), which its takes inspiration from the quantum approximate optimization algorithm and adiabatic quantum computation. Through the study of its entanglement spectrum and energy-gradient statistics, we find that the HVA exhibits favorable structural properties such as mild or entirely absent barren plateaus and a restricted state space that eases their optimization in comparison to the well-studied “hardware-efficient ansatz.” We also numerically observe that the optimization landscape of the HVA becomes almost trap free, i.e., there are no suboptimal minima, when the ansatz is overparametrized. We observe a size-dependent “computational phase transition” as the number of layers in the HVA circuit is increased where the optimization crosses over from a hard to an easy region in terms of the quality of the approximations and the speed of convergence to a good solution. In contrast to the analogous transitions observed in the learning of random unitaries, which occur at a number of layers that grows exponentially with the number of qubits, our variational-quantum-eigensolver experiments suggest that the threshold to achieve the overparametrization phenomenon scales at most polynomially in the number of qubits for the transverse-field Ising and XXZ models. Lastly, as a demonstration of its entangling power and effectiveness, we show that the HVA can find accurate approximations to the ground states of a modified Haldane-Shastry Hamiltonian on a ring, which has long-range interactions and has a power-law entanglement scaling.6 MoreReceived 10 August 2020Accepted 16 November 2020DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PRXQuantum.1.020319Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.Published by the American Physical SocietyPhysics Subject Headings (PhySH)Research AreasQuantum algorithmsQuantum computationQuantum entanglementCondensed Matter & Materials PhysicsQuantum Information
Outracing champion Gran Turismo drivers with deep reinforcement learning

Many potential applications of artificial intelligence involve making real-time decisions in physical systems while interacting with humans. Automobile racing represents an extreme example of these conditions; drivers must execute complex tactical manoeuvres to pass or block opponents while operating their vehicles at their traction limits1. Racing simulations, such as the PlayStation game Gran Turismo, faithfully reproduce the non-linear control challenges of real race cars while also encapsulating the complex multi-agent interactions. Here we describe how we trained agents for Gran Turismo that can compete with the world's best e-sports drivers. We combine state-of-the-art, model-free, deep reinforcement learning algorithms with mixed-scenario training to learn an integrated control policy that combines exceptional speed with impressive tactics. In addition, we construct a reward function that enables the agent to be competitive while adhering to racing's important, but under-specified, sportsmanship rules. We demonstrate the capabilities of our agent, Gran Turismo Sophy, by winning a head-to-head competition against four of the world's best Gran Turismo drivers. By describing how we trained championship-level racers, we demonstrate the possibilities and challenges of using these techniques to control complex dynamical systems in domains where agents must respect imprecisely defined human norms.
Research progress on virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) in tourism and hospitality

Purpose This paper aims to examine the main developments of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) research in hospitality and tourism. It also aims to pinpoint fruitful directions for tourism and hospitality research on VR and AR applications. Design/methodology/approach A selective literature review of full-length papers published in the period from 2000 to 2018 was conducted. A total of 60 journal papers were retrieved and thoroughly reviewed. Findings This paper first presents a summary of the distribution of published papers. Then, this paper synthesizes the stimuli, dimensions and consequences of VR/AR-related user behavior experience, upon which a theoretical framework is developed. Additionally, this paper provides a detailed report for the progress on the theories and research methodologies, offering a useful background concerning what remains to be achieved. Finally, this paper puts forward fruitful directions for advancing the current understanding of VR/AR and its management. Practical implications This research presents diverse positive outcomes of using VR/AR technologies, which encourage industry practitioners such as destination marketing organizations (DMOs) and marketing firms to incorporate recent technological developments into their strategic plans. Originality/value This paper represents one of the first endeavors that critically reviews research progress on VR/AR in tourism and hospitality from 2000 to 2018. Not only are information technology researchers provided with a comprehensive guide to the latest, influential VR/AR literature but also the proposals of wide-ranging directions for future research would stimulate further investigation of VR/AR.
Enhancing Pre-Trained Language Representations with Rich Knowledge for Machine Reading Comprehension

Machine reading comprehension (MRC) is a crucial and challenging task in NLP.Recently, pre-trained language models (LMs), especially BERT, have achieved remarkable success, presenting new state-of-the-art results in MRC.In this work, we investigate the potential of leveraging external knowledge bases (KBs) to further improve BERT for MRC.We introduce KT-NET, which employs an attention mechanism to adaptively select desired knowledge from KBs, and then fuses selected knowledge with BERT to enable context-and knowledgeaware predictions.We believe this would combine the merits of both deep LMs and curated KBs towards better MRC.Experimental results indicate that KT-NET offers significant and consistent improvements over BERT, outperforming competitive baselines on ReCoRD and SQuAD1.1 benchmarks.Notably, it ranks the 1st place on the ReCoRD leaderboard, and is also the best single model on the SQuAD1.1 leaderboard at the time of submission (March 4th, 2019).
Mask TextSpotter v3: Segmentation Proposal Network for Robust Scene Text Spotting

Recent end-to-end trainable methods for scene text spotting, integrating detection and recognition, showed much progress. However, most of the current arbitrary-shape scene text spotters use region proposal networks (RPN) to produce proposals. RPN relies heavily on manually designed anchors and its proposals are represented with axis-aligned rectangles. The former presents difficulties in handling text instances of extreme aspect ratios or irregular shapes, and the latter often includes multiple neighboring instances into a single proposal, in cases of densely oriented text. To tackle these problems, we propose Mask TextSpotter v3, an end-to-end trainable scene text spotter that adopts a Segmentation Proposal Network (SPN) instead of an RPN. Our SPN is anchor-free and gives accurate representations of arbitrary-shape proposals. It is therefore superior to RPN in detecting text instances of extreme aspect ratios or irregular shapes. Furthermore, the accurate proposals produced by SPN allow masked RoI features to be used for decoupling neighboring text instances. As a result, our Mask TextSpotter v3 can handle text instances of extreme aspect ratios or irregular shapes, and its recognition accuracy won’t be affected by nearby text or background noise. Specifically, we outperform state-of-the-art methods by 21.9% on the Rotated ICDAR 2013 dataset (rotation robustness), 5.9% on the Total-Text dataset (shape robustness), and achieve state-of-the-art performance on the MSRA-TD500 dataset (aspect ratio robustness). Code is available at: https://github.com/MhLiao/MaskTextSpotterV3
Quantum phase estimation of multiple eigenvalues for small-scale (noisy) experiments

Quantum phase estimation (QPE) is the workhorse behind any quantum algorithm and a promising method for determining ground state energies of strongly correlated quantum systems. Low-cost QPE techniques make use of circuits which only use a single ancilla qubit, requiring classical post-processing to extract eigenvalue details of the system. We investigate choices for phase estimation for a unitary matrix with low-depth noise-free or noisy circuits, varying both the phase estimation circuits themselves as well as the classical post-processing to determine the eigenvalue phases. We work in the scenario when the input state is not an eigenstate of the unitary matrix. We develop a new post-processing technique to extract eigenvalues from phase estimation data based on a classical time-series (or frequency) analysis and contrast this to an analysis via Bayesian methods. We calculate the variance in estimating single eigenvalues via the time-series analysis analytically, finding that it scales to first order in the number of experiments performed, and to first or second order (depending on the experiment design) in the circuit depth. Numerical simulations confirm this scaling for both estimators. We attempt to compensate for the noise with both classical post-processing techniques, finding good results in the presence of depolarizing noise, but smaller improvements in 9-qubit circuit-level simulations of superconducting qubits aimed at resolving the electronic ground state of a H4-molecule.
On the Integration of Optical Flow and Action Recognition

Most of the top performing action recognition methods use optical flow as a “black box” input. Here we take a deeper look at the combination of flow and action recognition, and investigate why optical flow is helpful, what makes a flow method good for action recognition, and how we can make it better. In particular, we investigate the impact of different flow algorithms and input transformations to better understand how these affect a state-of-the-art action recognition method. Furthermore, we fine tune two neural-network flow methods end-to-end on the most widely used action recognition dataset (UCF101). Based on these experiments, we make the following five observations: (1) optical flow is useful for action recognition because it is invariant to appearance, (2) optical flow methods are optimized to minimize end-point-error (EPE), but the EPE of current methods is not well correlated with action recognition performance, (3) for the flow methods tested, accuracy at boundaries and at small displacements is most correlated with action recognition performance, (4) training optical flow to minimize classification error instead of minimizing EPE improves recognition performance, and (5) optical flow learned for the task of action recognition differs from traditional optical flow especially inside the human body and at the boundary of the body. These observations may encourage optical flow researchers to look beyond EPE as a goal and guide action recognition researchers to seek better motion cues, leading to a tighter integration of the optical flow and action recognition communities.
A chaotic colour image encryption scheme combining Walsh–Hadamard transform and Arnold–Tent maps

The third party misuse and manipulation of digital images is a treat to security and privacy of human subjects. Image encryption in the internet of things era becomes more important with edge computing and growth in intelligent consumer electronic devices. In this paper, we report a chaos-based cryptographic algorithm using Walsh–Hadamard transform and chaotic maps for encrypting images. The images are processed channel-wise and two different chaotic maps called Arnold and Tent maps are used for enciphering. The experimental results show that the random chaotic ranges and complex behaviours of chaotic maps improved both the keyspace and security of image encryption–decryption system.
Optimized YOLOv3 Algorithm and Its Application in Traffic Flow Detections

In the intelligent traffic system, real-time and accurate detections of vehicles in images and video data are very important and challenging work. Especially in situations with complex scenes, different models, and high density, it is difficult to accurately locate and classify these vehicles during traffic flows. Therefore, we propose a single-stage deep neural network YOLOv3-DL, which is based on the Tensorflow framework to improve this problem. The network structure is optimized by introducing the idea of spatial pyramid pooling, then the loss function is redefined, and a weight regularization method is introduced, for that, the real-time detections and statistics of traffic flows can be implemented effectively. The optimization algorithm we use is the DL-CAR data set for end-to-end network training and experiments with data sets under different scenarios and weathers. The analyses of experimental data show that the optimized algorithm can improve the vehicles’ detection accuracy on the test set by 3.86%. Experiments on test sets in different environments have improved the detection accuracy rate by 4.53%, indicating that the algorithm has high robustness. At the same time, the detection accuracy and speed of the investigated algorithm are higher than other algorithms, indicating that the algorithm has higher detection performance.
Multi-Level Fine-Scaled Sentiment Sensing with Ambivalence Handling

Social media represent a rich source of information, such as critiques, feedback, and other opinions posted online by Internet users. Such information is typically a good reflection of users’ sentiments and attitudes towards various services, topics, or products. Sentiment analysis has become an increasingly important natural language processing (NLP) task to help users make sense of what is happening in the Internet blogosphere and it can be useful for companies as well as public organizations. However, most existing sentiment analysis techniques are only able to analyze data at the aggregate level, merely providing a binary classification (positive vs. negative), and are not able to generate finer characterizations of sentiments as well as emotions involved. This paper describes a new opinion analysis scheme, i.e., a multi-level fine-scaled sentiment sensing with ambivalence handling. The ambivalence handler is presented in detail along with the strength-level tune parameters for analyzing the strength and the fine-scale of both positive or negative sentiments. It is capable of drilling deeper into text in order to reveal multi-level fine-scaled sentiments as well as different types of emotions.
Semi-Supervised Learning under Class Distribution Mismatch

Semi-supervised learning (SSL) aims to avoid the need for collecting prohibitively expensive labelled training data. Whilst demonstrating impressive performance boost, existing SSL methods artificially assume that small labelled data and large unlabelled data are drawn from the same class distribution. In a more realistic scenario with class distribution mismatch between the two sets, they often suffer severe performance degradation due to error propagation introduced by irrelevant unlabelled samples. Our work addresses this under-studied and realistic SSL problem by a novel algorithm named Uncertainty-Aware Self-Distillation (UASD). Specifically, UASD produces soft targets that avoid catastrophic error propagation, and empower learning effectively from unconstrained unlabelled data with out-of-distribution (OOD) samples. This is based on joint Self-Distillation and OOD filtering in a unified formulation. Without bells and whistles, UASD significantly outperforms six state-of-the-art methods in more realistic SSL under class distribution mismatch on three popular image classification datasets: CIFAR10, CIFAR100, and TinyImageNet.
Extreme learning machine optimized by whale optimization algorithm using insulated gate bipolar transistor module aging degree evaluation

This study focuses on the aging evaluation of Insulated gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) modules to ensure their stability during operation. An aging degree evaluation model is proposed based on whale optimization algorithm optimized extreme learning machine (WOA-ELM) algorithm. This study is mainly concentrated on two aspects. One is to use WOA to optimize the input weights and hidden layer biases of ELM to improve its prediction performance. This study tested the performance of WOA-ELM on several benchmark datasets. The results show that the prediction performance of WOA-ELM is better than ELM, genetic algorithm optimized ELM, cuckoo search optimized ELM, and dandelion algorithm optimized ELM. The other is to measure the electrical and thermal characteristic data of IGBT module under different aging conditions by accelerated aging test. Based on the analysis of the experimental data under different aging degrees, a method for evaluating the aging degree of IGBT modules based on WOA-ELM is proposed. Simulation results based on experimental data show that WOA-ELM still has better accuracy and generalization performance than others. In summary, the WOA-ELM algorithm is applicable to the aging evaluation method of IGBT modules proposed in this study which has good practical value.
Convolutional neural network based detection and judgement of environmental obstacle in vehicle operation

Precise real-time obstacle recognition is both vital to vehicle automation and extremely resource intensive. Current deep-learning based recognition techniques generally reach high recognition accuracy, but require extensive processing power. This study proposes a region of interest extraction method based on the maximum difference method and morphology, and a target recognition solution created with a deep convolutional neural network. In the proposed solution, the central processing unit and graphics processing unit work collaboratively. Compared with traditional deep learning solutions, the proposed solution decreases the complexity of algorithm, and improves both calculation efficiency and recognition accuracy. Overall it achieves a good balance between accuracy and computation.
Leveraging Graph to Improve Abstractive Multi-Document Summarization

Graphs that capture relations between textual units have great benefits for detecting salient information from multiple documents and generating overall coherent summaries.In this paper, we develop a neural abstractive multidocument summarization (MDS) model which can leverage well-known graph representations of documents such as similarity graph and discourse graph, to more effectively process multiple input documents and produce abstractive summaries.Our model utilizes graphs to encode documents in order to capture cross-document relations, which is crucial to summarizing long documents.Our model can also take advantage of graphs to guide the summary generation process, which is beneficial for generating coherent and concise summaries.Furthermore, pre-trained language models can be easily combined with our model, which further improve the summarization performance significantly.Empirical results on the WikiSum and MultiNews dataset show that the proposed architecture brings substantial improvements over several strong baselines.