Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
The New Trend of State Estimation: From Model-Driven to Hybrid-Driven Methods

State estimation is widely used in various automated systems, including IoT systems, unmanned systems, robots, etc. In traditional state estimation, measurement data are instantaneous and processed in real time. With modern systems’ development, sensors can obtain more and more signals and store them. Therefore, how to use these measurement big data to improve the performance of state estimation has become a hot research issue in this field. This paper reviews the development of state estimation and future development trends. First, we review the model-based state estimation methods, including the Kalman filter, such as the extended Kalman filter (EKF), unscented Kalman filter (UKF), cubature Kalman filter (CKF), etc. Particle filters and Gaussian mixture filters that can handle mixed Gaussian noise are discussed, too. These methods have high requirements for models, while it is not easy to obtain accurate system models in practice. The emergence of robust filters, the interacting multiple model (IMM), and adaptive filters are also mentioned here. Secondly, the current research status of data-driven state estimation methods is introduced based on network learning. Finally, the main research results for hybrid filters obtained in recent years are summarized and discussed, which combine model-based methods and data-driven methods. This paper is based on state estimation research results and provides a more detailed overview of model-driven, data-driven, and hybrid-driven approaches. The main algorithm of each method is provided so that beginners can have a clearer understanding. Additionally, it discusses the future development trends for researchers in state estimation.
Attention, please! A survey of neural attention models in deep learning

In humans, Attention is a core property of all perceptual and cognitive operations. Given our limited ability to process competing sources, attention mechanisms select, modulate, and focus on the information most relevant to behavior. For decades, concepts and functions of attention have been studied in philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and computing. For the last 6 years, this property has been widely explored in deep neural networks. Currently, the state-of-the-art in Deep Learning is represented by neural attention models in several application domains. This survey provides a comprehensive overview and analysis of developments in neural attention models. We systematically reviewed hundreds of architectures in the area, identifying and discussing those in which attention has shown a significant impact. We also developed and made public an automated methodology to facilitate the development of reviews in the area. By critically analyzing 650 works, we describe the primary uses of attention in convolutional, recurrent networks, and generative models, identifying common subgroups of uses and applications. Furthermore, we describe the impact of attention in different application domains and their impact on neural networks’ interpretability. Finally, we list possible trends and opportunities for further research, hoping that this review will provide a succinct overview of the main attentional models in the area and guide researchers in developing future approaches that will drive further improvements.
A Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning for Multiparty Data Sharing in Social IoTs

As 5G and mobile computing are growing rapidly, deep learning services in the Social Computing and Social Internet of Things (IoT) have enriched our lives over the past few years. Mobile devices and IoT devices with computing capabilities can join social computing anytime and anywhere. Federated learning allows for the full use of decentralized training devices without the need for raw data, providing convenience in breaking data silos further and delivering more precise services. However, the various attacks illustrate that the current training process of federal learning is still threatened by disclosures at both the data and content levels. In this paper, we propose a new hybrid privacy-preserving method for federal learning to meet the challenges above. First, we employ an advanced function encryption algorithm that not only protects the characteristics of the data uploaded by each client, but also protects the weight of each participant in the weighted summation procedure. By designing local Bayesian differential privacy, the noise mechanism can effectively improve the adaptability of different distributed data sets. In addition, we also use Sparse Differential Gradient to improve the transmission and storage efficiency in federal learning training. Experiments show that when we use the sparse differential gradient to improve the transmission efficiency, the accuracy of the model is only dropped by 3% at most.
Hybrid algorithms based on combining reinforcement learning and metaheuristic methods to solve global optimization problems

This paper introduces three hybrid algorithms that help in solving global optimization problems using reinforcement learning along with metaheuristic methods. Using the algorithms presented, the search agents try to find a global optimum avoiding the local optima trap. Compared to the classical metaheuristic approaches, the proposed algorithms display higher success in finding new areas as well as exhibiting a more balanced performance while in the exploration and exploitation phases. The algorithms employ reinforcement agents to select an environment based on predefined actions and tasks. A reward and penalty system is used by the agents to discover the environment, done dynamically without following a predetermined model or method. The study makes use of Q-Learning method in all three metaheuristic algorithms, so-called RLI−GWO, RLEx−GWO, and RLWOA algorithms, so as to check and control exploration and exploitation with Q-Table. The Q-Table values guide the search agents of the metaheuristic algorithms to select between the exploration and exploitation phases. A control mechanism is used to get the reward and penalty values for each action. The algorithms presented in this paper are simulated over 30 benchmark functions from CEC 2014, 2015 and the results obtained are compared with well-known metaheuristic and hybrid algorithms (GWO, RLGWO, I-GWO, Ex-GWO, and WOA). The proposed methods have also been applied to the inverse kinematics of the robot arms problem. The results of the used algorithms demonstrate that RLWOA provides better solutions for relevant problems.
Tiny Object Detection in Aerial Images

Object detection in Earth Vision has achieved great progress in recent years. However, tiny object detection in aerial images remains a very challenging problem since the tiny objects contain a small number of pixels and are easily confused with the background. To advance tiny object detection research in aerial images, we present a new dataset for Tiny Object Detection in Aerial Images (AI-TOD). Specifically, AI-TOD comes with 700,621 object instances for eight categories across 28,036 aerial images. Compared to existing object detection datasets in aerial images, the mean size of objects in AI-TOD is about 12.8 pixels, which is much smaller than others. To build a benchmark for tiny object detection in aerial images, we evaluate the state-of-the-art object detectors on our AI-TOD dataset. Experimental results show that direct application of these approaches on AI-TOD produces suboptimal object detection results, thus new specialized detectors for tiny object detection need to be designed. Therefore, we propose a multiple center points based learning network (M-CenterNet) to improve the localization performance of tiny object detection, and experimental results show the significant performance gain over the competitors.
A Generalized Voronoi Diagram-Based Efficient Heuristic Path Planning Method for RRTs in Mobile Robots

The rapidly exploring random tree and its variants (RRTs) have been widely adopted as the motion planning algorithms for mobile robots. However, the trap space problem, such as mazes and S-shaped corridors, hinders their planning efficiency. In this article, we present a generalized Voronoi diagram (GVD)-based heuristic path planning algorithm to generate a heuristic path, guide the sampling process of RRTs, and further improve the motion planning efficiency of RRTs. Different from other heuristic algorithms that only work in certain environments or depend on specified parameter setting, the proposed algorithm can automatically identify the environment feature and provide a reasonable heuristic path. First, the given environment is initialized with a lightweight feature extraction from the GVD, which guarantees that any state in the free space can be connected to the feature graph without any collision. Second, to remove the redundancy of feature nodes, a feature matrix is proposed to represent connections among feature nodes and a corresponding feature node fusion technique is utilized to delete the redundant nodes. Third, based on the GVD feature matrix, a heuristic path planning algorithm is presented. This heuristic path is then used to guide the sampling process of RRTs and achieve real-time motion planning. The proposed GVD feature matrix can be also utilized to improve the efficiency of the replanning. Through a series of simulation studies and real-world implementations, it is confirmed that the proposed algorithm achieves better performance in heuristic path planning, feature extraction of free space, and real-time motion planning.
Seen and Unseen Emotional Style Transfer for Voice Conversion with A New Emotional Speech Dataset

Emotional voice conversion aims to transform emotional prosody in speech while preserving the linguistic content and speaker identity. Prior studies show that it is possible to disentangle emotional prosody using an encoder-decoder network conditioned on discrete representation, such as one-hot emotion labels. Such networks learn to remember a fixed set of emotional styles. In this paper, we propose a novel framework based on variational auto-encoding Wasserstein generative adversarial network (VAW-GAN), which makes use of a pre-trained speech emotion recognition (SER) model to transfer emotional style during training and at run-time inference. In this way, the network is able to transfer both seen and unseen emotional style to a new utterance. We show that the proposed framework achieves remarkable performance by consistently outperforming the baseline framework. This paper also marks the release of an emotional speech dataset (ESD) for voice conversion, which has multiple speakers and languages.
A privacy-preserving aggregation scheme based on negative survey for vehicle fuel consumption data

The vehicle fuel consumption gauge is a vehicle’s basic device that usually records the instantaneous as well as average fuel consumption of the vehicle, which brings a lot of convenience during the driving process. The individual real-time fuel consumption data are meaningless, but its continuous real-time fuel consumption data contains some information that may reveal the user’s privacy, which is sensitive information for users. There are hot topics on privacy protection of sensitive user information, however, most of the studies have focused on privacy protection at the time of data release and the need for a trusted third party. In this paper, we propose a negative survey-based approach that can be utilized to protect aggregated vehicle fuel consumption data against time-series-based differential attacks. Its anonymous algorithm on the user side and estimation algorithm on the server side are able to protect the user’s privacy regardless of changes in the user’s fuel consumption data. The experiment results show that our method can achieve better privacy protection with better application prospects in a simpler and more effective way.
Chiller fault detection and diagnosis with anomaly detective generative adversarial network

Data augmentation is one of the necessary steps in the process of automated data-driven fault detection and diagnosis (FDD) for chillers, while real-world operational training samples are usually imbalanced. Faulty data samples are usually more difficult for collection than normal operation data. Existing works show that the generative adversarial networks (GAN) are useful generating synthetic faulty data samples to enrich the training dataset. However, it remains a problem for the automated FDD applications to select high-quality synthetic faulty samples generated by GAN. The FDD accuracy becomes unstable when the quality of synthetic fault data samples cannot be controlled entirely. In this study, we proposed to use the classic definition of anomaly detection to select high-quality synthetic fault data samples with the generative adversarial networks. Two anomaly detection methods were investigated, including the traditional variational auto-encoder (VAE) and the GANomaly. Through a series of experiments, it is justified that, with a small amount of real fault data, the proposed GAN-based chiller FDD framework with GANomaly achieves the highest FDD accuracy than all compared methods.
Counting mitoses: SI(ze) matters!

Mitoses are often assessed by pathologists to assist the diagnosis of cancer, and to grade malignancy, informing prognosis. Historically, this has been done by expressing the number of mitoses per n high power fields (HPFs), ignoring the fact that microscope fields may differ substantially, even at the same high power (×400) magnification. Despite a requirement to define HPF size in scientific papers, many authors fail to address this issue adequately. The problem is compounded by the switch to digital pathology systems, where ×400 equivalent fields are rectangular and also vary in the area displayed. The potential for error is considerable, and at times this may affect patient care. This is easily solved by the use of standardized international (SI) units. We, therefore, recommend that features such as mitoses are always counted per mm2, with an indication of the area to be counted and the method used (usually “hotspot” or “average”) to obtain the results.
Construction of Statistical SVM based Recognition Model for Handwritten Character Recognition

There are many applications of the handwritten character recognition (HCR) approach still exist. Reading postal addresses in various states contains different languages in any union government like India. Bank check amounts and signature verification is one of the important application of HCR in the automatic banking system in all developed countries. The optical character recognition of the documents is comparing with handwriting documents by a human. This OCR is used for translation purposes of characters from various types of files such as image, word document files. The main aim of this research article is to provide the solution for various handwriting recognition approaches such as touch input from the mobile screen and picture file. The recognition approaches performing with various methods that we have chosen in artificial neural networks and statistical methods so on and to address nonlinearly divisible issues. This research article consisting of various approaches to compare and recognize the handwriting characters from the image documents. Besides, the research paper is comparing statistical approach support vector machine (SVM) classifiers network method with statistical, template matching, structural pattern recognition, and graphical methods. It has proved Statistical SVM for OCR system performance that is providing a good result that is configured with machine learning approach. The recognition rate is higher than other methods mentioned in this research article. The proposed model has tested on a training section that contained various stylish letters and digits to learn with a higher accuracy level. We obtained test results of 91% of accuracy to recognize the characters from documents. Finally, we have discussed several future tasks of this research further.
Deep K-SVD Denoising

This work considers noise removal from images, focusing on the well-known K-SVD denoising algorithm. This sparsity-based method was proposed in 2006, and for a short while it was considered as state-of-the-art. However, over the years it has been surpassed by other methods, including the recent deep-learning-based newcomers. The question we address in this paper is whether K-SVD was brought to its peak in its original conception, or whether it can be made competitive again. The approach we take in answering this question is to redesign the algorithm to operate in a supervised manner. More specifically, we propose an end-to-end deep architecture with the exact K-SVD computational path, and train it for optimized denoising. Our work shows how to overcome difficulties arising in turning the K-SVD scheme into a differentiable, and thus learnable, machine. With a small number of parameters to learn and while preserving the original K-SVD essence, the proposed architecture is shown to outperform the classical K-SVD algorithm substantially, and getting closer to recent state-of-the-art learning-based denoising methods. Adopting a broader context, this work touches on themes around the design of deep-learning solutions for image processing tasks, while paving a bridge between classic methods and novel deep-learning-based ones.
A Comprehensive Survey on Word Representation Models: From Classical to State-of-the-Art Word Representation Language Models

Word representation has always been an important research area in the history of natural language processing (NLP). Understanding such complex text data is imperative, given that it is rich in information and can be used widely across various applications. In this survey, we explore different word representation models and its power of expression, from the classical to modern-day state-of-the-art word representation language models (LMS). We describe a variety of text representation methods, and model designs have blossomed in the context of NLP, including SOTA LMs. These models can transform large volumes of text into effective vector representations capturing the same semantic information. Further, such representations can be utilized by various machine learning (ML) algorithms for a variety of NLP-related tasks. In the end, this survey briefly discusses the commonly used ML- and DL-based classifiers, evaluation metrics, and the applications of these word embeddings in different NLP tasks.
RSN: Range Sparse Net for Efficient, Accurate LiDAR 3D Object Detection

The detection of 3D objects from LiDAR data is a critical component in most autonomous driving systems. Safe, high speed driving needs larger detection ranges, which are enabled by new LiDARs. These larger detection ranges require more efficient and accurate detection models. Towards this goal, we propose Range Sparse Net (RSN) – a simple, efficient, and accurate 3D object detector – in order to tackle real time 3D object detection in this extended detection regime. RSN predicts foreground points from range images and applies sparse convolutions on the selected foreground points to detect objects. The lightweight 2D convolutions on dense range images results in significantly fewer selected foreground points, thus enabling the later sparse convolutions in RSN to efficiently operate. Combining features from the range image further enhance detection accuracy. RSN runs at more than 60 frames per second on a 150m × 150m detection region on Waymo Open Dataset (WOD) while being more accurate than previously published detectors. As of 11/2020, RSN is ranked first in the WOD leaderboard based on the APH/LEVEL_1 metrics for LiDAR-based pedestrian and vehicle detection, while being several times faster than alternatives.
Social Network Search for Global Optimization

In this paper, a novel metaheuristic algorithm called Social Network Search (SNS) is developed for solving optimization problems. The SNS algorithm simulates the attempts of users in social networks to gain more popularity by modeling the moods of users in expressing their opinions. These moods are named Imitation, Conversation, Disputation, and Innovation, which are real-world behaviors of users in social networks. These moods are used as optimization operators and model how users are affected and motivated to share their new views. To evaluate the performance of the SNS algorithm, two comparative studies with different properties were conducted. In the first step, 210 mathematical functions have been chosen, which include 120 fixed-dimension, 60 N-dimension, and 30 CEC 2014 problems. Seven metaheuristics are selected from the literature, and the statistical results of these methods are calculated and analyzed. Also, to provide a valid judgment about the performance of the new algorithm, four nonparametric statistical tests have been used. In the next step, the performance of the proposed algorithm is compared to some state-of-the-art algorithms in dealing with CEC 2017 problems. According to the performance of algorithms, the SNS method is capable of achieving better results compared to the other metaheuristics in 101 cases (48%) and performed the same or comparatively in dealing with the other problems.
SimPoE: Simulated Character Control for 3D Human Pose Estimation

Accurate estimation of 3D human motion from monocular video requires modeling both kinematics (body motion without physical forces) and dynamics (motion with physical forces). To demonstrate this, we present SimPoE, a Simulation-based approach for 3D human Pose Estimation, which integrates image-based kinematic inference and physics-based dynamics modeling. SimPoE learns a policy that takes as input the current-frame pose estimate and the next image frame to control a physically-simulated character to output the next-frame pose estimate. The policy contains a learnable kinematic pose refinement unit that uses 2D keypoints to iteratively refine its kinematic pose estimate of the next frame. Based on this refined kinematic pose, the policy learns to compute dynamics-based control (e.g., joint torques) of the character to advance the current-frame pose estimate to the pose estimate of the next frame. This design couples the kinematic pose refinement unit with the dynamics-based control generation unit, which are learned jointly with reinforcement learning to achieve accurate and physically-plausible pose estimation. Furthermore, we propose a meta-control mechanism that dynamically adjusts the character’s dynamics parameters based on the character state to attain more accurate pose estimates. Experiments on large-scale motion datasets demonstrate that our approach establishes the new state of the art in pose accuracy while ensuring physical plausibility.
Boosting Monocular Depth Estimation Models to High-Resolution via Content-Adaptive Multi-Resolution Merging

Neural networks have shown great abilities in estimating depth from a single image. However, the inferred depth maps are well below one-megapixel resolution and often lack fine-grained details, which limits their practicality. Our method builds on our analysis on how the input resolution and the scene structure affects depth estimation performance. We demonstrate that there is a trade-off between a consistent scene structure and the high-frequency details, and merge low- and high-resolution estimations to take advantage of this duality using a simple depth merging network. We present a double estimation method that improves the whole-image depth estimation and a patch selection method that adds local details to the final result. We demonstrate that by merging estimations at different resolutions with changing context, we can generate multi-megapixel depth maps with a high level of detail using a pre-trained model.