Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Feature Selection Using a Neural Network With Group Lasso Regularization and Controlled Redundancy

We propose a neural network-based feature selection (FS) scheme that can control the level of redundancy in the selected features by integrating two penalties into a single objective function. The Group Lasso penalty aims to produce sparsity in features in a grouped manner. The redundancy-control penalty, which is defined based on a measure of dependence among features, is utilized to control the level of redundancy among the selected features. Both the penalty terms involve the $L_{2,1}$ -norm of weight matrix between the input and hidden layers. These penalty terms are nonsmooth at the origin, and hence, one simple but efficient smoothing technique is employed to overcome this issue. The monotonicity and convergence of the proposed algorithm are specified and proved under suitable assumptions. Then, extensive experiments are conducted on both artificial and real data sets. Empirical results explicitly demonstrate the ability of the proposed FS scheme and its effectiveness in controlling redundancy. The empirical simulations are observed to be consistent with the theoretical results.
Secure large-scale genome-wide association studies using homomorphic encryption

Genome-wide association studies (GWASs) seek to identify genetic variants associated with a trait, and have been a powerful approach for understanding complex diseases. A critical challenge for GWASs has been the dependence on individual-level data that typically have strict privacy requirements, creating an urgent need for methods that preserve the individual-level privacy of participants. Here, we present a privacy-preserving framework based on several advances in homomorphic encryption and demonstrate that it can perform an accurate GWAS analysis for a real dataset of more than 25,000 individuals, keeping all individual data encrypted and requiring no user interactions. Our extrapolations show that it can evaluate GWASs of 100,000 individuals and 500,000 single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in 5.6 h on a single server node (or in 11 min on 31 server nodes running in parallel). Our performance results are more than one order of magnitude faster than prior state-of-the-art results using secure multiparty computation, which requires continuous user interactions, with the accuracy of both solutions being similar. Our homomorphic encryption advances can also be applied to other domains where large-scale statistical analyses over encrypted data are needed.
Blockchain Technology Secures Robot Swarms: A Comparison of Consensus Protocols and Their Resilience to Byzantine Robots

Consensus achievement is a crucial capability for robot swarms, for example, for path selection, spatial aggregation, or collective sensing. However, the presence of malfunctioning and malicious robots (Byzantine robots) can make it impossible to achieve consensus using classical consensus protocols. In this work, we show how a swarm of robots can achieve consensus even in the presence of Byzantine robots by exploiting blockchain technology. Bitcoin and later blockchain frameworks, such as Ethereum, have revolutionized financial transactions. These frameworks are based on decentralized databases (blockchains) that can achieve secure consensus in peer-to-peer networks. We illustrate our approach in a collective sensing scenario where robots in a swarm are controlled via blockchain-based smart contracts (decentralized protocols executed via blockchain technology) that serve as 'meta-controllers' and we compare it to state-of-the-art consensus protocols using a robot swarm simulator. Additionally, we show that our blockchain-based approach can prevent attacks where robots forge a large number of identities (Sybil attacks). The developed robot-blockchain interface is released as open-source software in order to facilitate future research in blockchain-controlled robot swarms. Besides increasing security, we expect the presented approach to be important for data analysis, digital forensics, and robot-to-robot financial transactions in robot swarms.
The Effect of Training and Testing Process on Machine Learning in Biomedical Datasets

Training and testing process for the classification of biomedical datasets in machine learning is very important. The researcher should choose carefully the methods that should be used at every step. However, there are very few studies on method choices. The studies in the literature are generally theoretical. Besides, there is no useful model for how to select samples in the training and testing process. Therefore, there is a need for resources in machine learning that discuss the training and testing process in detail and offer new recommendations. This article provides a detailed analysis of the training and testing process in machine learning. The article has the following sections. The third section describes how to prepare the datasets. Four balanced datasets were used for the application. The fourth section describes the rate and how to select samples at the training and testing stage. The fundamental sampling theorem is the subject of statistics. It shows how to select samples. In this article, it has been proposed to use sampling methods in machine learning training and testing process. The fourth section covers the theoretic expression of four different sampling theorems. Besides, the results section has the results of the performance of sampling theorems. The fifth section describes the methods by which training and pretest features can be selected. In the study, three different classifiers control the performance. The results section describes how the results should be analyzed. Additionally, this article proposes performance evaluation methods to evaluate its results. This article examines the effect of the training and testing process on performance in machine learning in detail and proposes the use of sampling theorems for the training and testing process. According to the results, datasets, feature selection algorithms, classifiers, training, and test ratio are the criteria that directly affect performance. However, the methods of selecting samples at the training and testing stages are vital for the system to work correctly. In order to design a stable system, it is recommended that samples should be selected with a stratified systematic sampling theorem.
Application of a Novel and Improved VGG-19 Network in the Detection of Workers Wearing Masks

Abstract In order to work and travel safely during the outbreak of COVID-19, a method of security detection based on deep learning is proposed by using machine vision instead of manual monitoring. To detect the illegal behaviors of workers without masks in workplaces and densely populated areas, an improved convolutional neural network VGG-19 algorithm is proposed under the framework of tensorflow, and more than 3000 images are collected for model training and testing. Using VGG-19 network model, three FC layers are optimized into one flat layer and two FC layers with reduced parameters. The softmax classification layer of the original model is replaced by a 2-label softmax classifier. The experimental results show that the precision of the model is 97.62% and the recall is 96.31%. The precision of identifying the workers without masks is 96.82%, the recall is 94.07%, and the data set provided has a high precision. For the future social health and safety to provide favorable test data.
Image Based Virtual Try-On Network From Unpaired Data

This paper presents a new image-based virtual try-on approach (Outfit-VITON) that helps visualize how a composition of clothing items selected from various reference images form a cohesive outfit on a person in a query image. Our algorithm has two distinctive properties. First, it is inexpensive, as it simply requires a large set of single (non-corresponding) images (both real and catalog) of people wearing various garments without explicit 3D information. The training phase requires only single images, eliminating the need for manually creating image pairs, where one image shows a person wearing a particular garment and the other shows the same catalog garment alone. Secondly, it can synthesize images of multiple garments composed into a single, coherent outfit; and it enables control of the type of garments rendered in the final outfit. Once trained, our approach can then synthesize a cohesive outfit from multiple images of clothed human models, while fitting the outfit to the body shape and pose of the query person. An online optimization step takes care of fine details such as intricate textures and logos. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations on an image dataset containing large shape and style variations demonstrate superior accuracy compared to existing state-of-the-art methods, especially when dealing with highly detailed garments.
An end-to-end three-dimensional reconstruction framework of porous media from a single two-dimensional image based on deep learning

Stochastically reconstructing a three-dimensional (3D) structure of porous media from a given two-dimensional (2D) image is an outstanding problem. For such problem, despite that the big progress has been made on reconstruction methods such as optimization-based and multi-point statistics-based algorithms, however, the reconstruction of topologically complex or non-stationary materials is still not well addressed. Besides, the reconstruction efficiency is another remarkable challenge, and a 1283 reconstruction using these methods generally requires several hours. In this paper, to overcome these problems, we propose a general end-to-end deep learning-based 3D reconstruction framework. Specially, the mapping (function) between a 2D slice and its 3D structure is first learned by a neural network. Then, the 3D reconstruction of a new 2D image using this mapping is instantaneous. For a 1283 reconstruction, our method only requires 0.2s, thus achieving a 3.6×104 speedup factor compared with the classical methods. Besides, to yield diverse 3D structures for the same 2D input, a Gaussian noise is introduced into the network. Our approach is tested on two statistically isotropic materials and a non-stationary porous material, and evaluated in terms of both visual and quantitative comparisons. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method is accurate, fast, and stable. The proposed framework also enables that theoretically an arbitrary number of constraints can be incorporated to further improve the reconstruction accuracy.
DOA-GAN: Dual-Order Attentive Generative Adversarial Network for Image Copy-Move Forgery Detection and Localization

Images can be manipulated for nefarious purposes to hide content or to duplicate certain objects through copy-move operations. Discovering a well-crafted copy-move forgery in images can be very challenging for both humans and machines; for example, an object on a uniform background can be replaced by an image patch of the same background. In this paper, we propose a Generative Adversarial Network with a dual-order attention model to detect and localize copy-move forgeries. In the generator, the first-order attention is designed to capture copy-move location information, and the second-order attention exploits more discriminative features for the patch co-occurrence. Both attention maps are extracted from the affinity matrix and are used to fuse location-aware and co-occurrence features for the final detection and localization branches of the network. The discriminator network is designed to further ensure more accurate localization results. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose such a network architecture with the 1st-order attention mechanism from the affinity matrix. We have performed extensive experimental validation and our state-of-the-art results strongly demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approach.
Unsupervised Learning for Intrinsic Image Decomposition From a Single Image

Intrinsic image decomposition, which is an essential task in computer vision, aims to infer the reflectance and shading of the scene. It is challenging since it needs to separate one image into two components. To tackle this, conventional methods introduce various priors to constrain the solution, yet with limited performance. Meanwhile, the problem is typically solved by supervised learning methods, which is actually not an ideal solution since obtaining ground truth reflectance and shading for massive general natural scenes is challenging and even impossible. In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised intrinsic image decomposition framework, which relies on neither labeled training data nor hand-crafted priors. Instead, it directly learns the latent feature of reflectance and shading from unsupervised and uncorrelated data. To enable this, we explore the independence between reflectance and shading, the domain invariant content constraint and the physical constraint. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real image datasets demonstrate consistently superior performance of the proposed method.
The Knowledge Within: Methods for Data-Free Model Compression

Background: Recently, an extensive amount of research has been focused on compressing and accelerating Deep Neural Networks (DNN). So far, high compression rate algorithms require part of the training dataset for a low precision calibration, or a fine-tuning process. However, this requirement is unacceptable when the data is unavailable or contains sensitive information, as in medical and biometric use-cases. Contributions: We present three methods for generating synthetic samples from trained models. Then, we demonstrate how these samples can be used to calibrate and fine-tune quantized models without using any real data in the process. Our best performing method has a negligible accuracy degradation compared to the original training set. This method, which leverages intrinsic batch normalization layers' statistics of the trained model, can be used to evaluate data similarity. Our approach opens a path towards genuine data-free model compression, alleviating the need for training data during model deployment.
State-Relabeling Adversarial Active Learning

Active learning is to design label-efficient algorithms by sampling the most representative samples to be labeled by an oracle. In this paper, we propose a state relabeling adversarial active learning model (SRAAL), that leverages both the annotation and the labeled/unlabeled state information for deriving the most informative unlabeled samples. The SRAAL consists of a representation generator and a state discriminator. The generator uses the complementary annotation information with traditional reconstruction information to generate the unified representation of samples, which embeds the semantic into the whole data representation. Then, we design an online uncertainty indicator in the discriminator, which endues unlabeled samples with different importance. As a result, we can select the most informative samples based on the discriminator's predicted state. We also design an algorithm to initialize the labeled pool, which makes subsequent sampling more efficient. The experiments conducted on various datasets show that our model outperforms the previous state-of-art active learning methods and our initially sampling algorithm achieves better performance.
Digital photoelasticity: Recent developments and diverse applications

In the last three decades of developments, the technique of Digital Photoelasticity (DP) has been stabilized and the methodology has been successfully applied to a wide range of problems in Engineering and science. This review succinctly summarizes both the techniques and their applications. Sufficient attention is paid to bring out the problem-solving capability of photoelasticity in each of the domains so as to motivate the reader to extrapolate these ideas to the uncharted territory of new problems they may come across in their domains.
Continuous‐time mean–variance portfolio selection: A reinforcement learning framework

Abstract We approach the continuous‐time mean–variance portfolio selection with reinforcement learning (RL). The problem is to achieve the best trade‐off between exploration and exploitation, and is formulated as an entropy‐regularized, relaxed stochastic control problem. We prove that the optimal feedback policy for this problem must be Gaussian, with time‐decaying variance. We then prove a policy improvement theorem, based on which we devise an implementable RL algorithm. We find that our algorithm and its variant outperform both traditional and deep neural network based algorithms in our simulation and empirical studies.
Single-Shot 3D Shape Reconstruction Using Structured Light and Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

Single-shot 3D imaging and shape reconstruction has seen a surge of interest due to the ever-increasing evolution in sensing technologies. In this paper, a robust single-shot 3D shape reconstruction technique integrating the structured light technique with the deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) is proposed. The input of the technique is a single fringe-pattern image, and the output is the corresponding depth map for 3D shape reconstruction. The essential training and validation datasets with high-quality 3D ground-truth labels are prepared by using a multi-frequency fringe projection profilometry technique. Unlike the conventional 3D shape reconstruction methods which involve complex algorithms and intensive computation to determine phase distributions or pixel disparities as well as depth map, the proposed approach uses an end-to-end network architecture to directly carry out the transformation of a 2D image to its corresponding 3D depth map without extra processing. In the approach, three CNN-based models are adopted for comparison. Furthermore, an accurate structured-light-based 3D imaging dataset used in this paper is made publicly available. Experiments have been conducted to demonstrate the validity and robustness of the proposed technique. It is capable of satisfying various 3D shape reconstruction demands in scientific research and engineering applications.
Deep Hash Learning for Remote Sensing Image Retrieval

The content-based remote sensing image retrieval (CBRSIR) has attracted increasing attention with the number of remote sensing (RS) images growing explosively. Benefiting from the strong capacity of the deep convolutional neural network (DCNN), the performance of CBRSIR has been improved in recent years. Although great successes have been obtained, learning the RS images' representative features and enhancing the retrieval efficiency for the large-scale CBRSIR tasks are still two challenging problems. In this article, we propose a new CBRSIR method named feature and hash (FAH) learning, which consists of a deep feature learning model (DFLM) and an adversarial hash learning model (AHLM). The DFLM aims at learning the RS images' dense features to guarantee the retrieval precision. In the DFLM, the DCNN and the proposed feature aggregation are integrated to capture the multiscale features. Then, the discrimination of the obtained features can be highlighted by the attention map in the developed attention branch. The AHLM maps the dense features onto the compact hash codes so that the retrieval efficiency can be improved. The AHLM contains a hash learning submodel and an adversarial regularization submodel. In particular, the hash learning submodel learns the real-valued hash codes that are similarity preserved by semantic supervisions. The adversarial regularization submodel regularizes the real-valued hash codes to learn the discrete uniform distribution with possible values 0 and 1. In this way, the hash codes are coding-balanced and the quantization errors are reduced. Encouraging experimental results counted on three public benchmark data sets demonstrate that our FAH can achieve competitive performance in the CBRSIR task compared with many existing hash learning methods.
Face Recognition: Too Bias, or Not Too Bias?

We reveal critical insights into problems of bias in state-of-the-art facial recognition (FR) systems using a novel Balanced Faces In the Wild (BFW) dataset: data balanced for gender and ethnic groups. We show variations in the optimal scoring threshold for face-pairs across different subgroups. Thus, the conventional approach of learning a global threshold for all pairs results in performance gaps between subgroups. By learning subgroup-specific thresholds, we reduce performance gaps, and also show a notable boost in overall performance. Furthermore, we do a human evaluation to measure bias in humans, which supports the hypothesis that an analogous bias exists in human perception. For the BFW database, source code, and more, visit https://github.com/visionjo/facerec-bias-bfw.
COVID-19 impact on city and region: what’s next after lockdown?

COVID-19 is unique in that it is spread through everyday contact with other people. Therefore, social protective measures, beyond medical protective measures, such as social distancing, lockdowns, border closures, and human tracing are initiated to control the spread of COVID-19. Such responses have produced secondary issues such as drastic changes in people's way of life and work, housing instability, economic shock, and privacy issues. This paper examines the four domains of urban and regional issues related to the secondary impact of COVID-19, including (1) social distancing, urban structure, community, and density; (2) housing affordability; (3) lockdowns, border closures, reshoring, and regional economic recovery; and (4) smart city technology, contact tracing, and privacy. The following six recommendations have been proposed. First, institutional and cultural factors are more important than urban features, such as population density. To handle infectious diseases such as COVID-19, it is important to build systems, technology, infrastructure, and urban structures that can strengthen resilience instead of implementing a directionless policy of dispersion. Second, it is necessary to improve accessibility to essential services at the community level, including medical facilities and food supply. Third, continuous effort should be made to boost housing affordability, as it is directly related to people's basic life. Fourth, measures are needed to protect those people who are socioeconomically disadvantaged. There is also the need to restore global trade and economic relations. Fifth, since data technology-based COVID-19 control raises the human tracing and privacy issue, we must ensure the principles of privacy management, such as transparency and voluntary consent, are being met. Finally, since COVID-19 is spread through people, individuals may become anxious and fearful of others without grounds; this may increase prejudice and hatred, including xenophobia. Significant social effort is needed to overcome such ill-defined anxiety and fear and maintain a healthy civil society.
Hybrid electro search with genetic algorithm for task scheduling in cloud computing

Cloud computing is on-demand Internet-based computing, which is a highly scalable service adopted by different working and non-working classes of people around the globe. Task scheduling one of the critical applications used by end-users and cloud service providers. The significant challenging in the task scheduler is to find an optimal resource for the given input task. In this paper, we proposed Hybrid Electro Search with a genetic algorithm (HESGA) to improve the behavior of task scheduling by considering parameters such as makespan, load balancing, utilization of resources, and cost of the multi-cloud. The proposed method combined the advantage of a genetic algorithm and an electro search algorithm. The genetic algorithm provides the best local optimal solutions, whereas the Electro search algorithm provides the best global optima solutions. The proposed algorithm outperforms than existing scheduling algorithms such as Hybrid Particle Swarm Optimization Genetic Algorithm (HPSOGA), GA, ES, and ACO.