Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
LAD: Language Models as Data for Zero-Shot Dialog

To facilitate zero-shot generalization in taskoriented dialog, this paper proposes Language Models as Data (LAD). LAD is a paradigm for creating diverse and accurate synthetic data which conveys the necessary structural constraints and can be used to train a downstream neural dialog model. LAD leverages GPT-3 to induce linguistic diversity. LAD achieves significant performance gains in zero-shot settings on intent prediction (+15%), slot filling (+31.4 F-1) and next action prediction (+11 F1). Furthermore, an interactive human evaluation shows that training with LAD is competitive with training on human dialogs. LAD is open-sourced, with the code and data available at https://github.com/Shikib/lad.
Contact tracing Inspired Efficient Computation by Energy Tracing

Inspired by the epidemic contact tracing technique, we propose a method to efficiently solve electromagnetics by tracing the energy distribution. The computational domain is adaptively decomposed, and the available computational resources are focused on those energy-active (infections) and their adjacent (exposed) domains, while avoiding the unnecessary computation of energy-null (unexposed) domains. As an example, we employ this method to solve several optics problems. The proposed method shows high efficiency while maintaining a good accuracy. The energy tracing method is based on the causality principle, and therefore is potentially transformative into other computational physics and associated algorithms.
SLUE: New Benchmark Tasks for Spoken Language Understanding Evaluation on Natural Speech

Progress in speech processing has been facilitated by shared datasets and benchmarks. Historically these have focused on automatic speech recognition (ASR), speaker identification, or other lower-level tasks. Interest has been growing in higher-level spoken language understanding tasks, including using end-to-end models, but there are fewer annotated datasets for such tasks. At the same time, recent work shows the possibility of pre-training generic representations and then fine-tuning for several tasks using relatively little labeled data. We propose to create a suite of benchmark tasks for Spoken Language Understanding Evaluation (SLUE) consisting of limited-size labeled training sets and corresponding evaluation sets. This resource would allow the research community to track progress, evaluate pre-trained representations for higher-level tasks, and study open questions such as the utility of pipeline versus end-to-end approaches. We present the first phase of the SLUE benchmark suite, consisting of named entity recognition, sentiment analysis, and ASR on the corresponding datasets. We focus on naturally produced (not read or synthesized) speech, and freely available datasets. We provide new transcriptions and annotations on subsets of the VoxCeleb and VoxPopuli datasets, evaluation metrics and results for baseline models, and an open-source toolkit to reproduce the baselines and evaluate new models.
Average-Case Verification of the Quantum Fourier Transform Enables Worst-Case Phase Estimation

The quantum Fourier transform (QFT) is a key primitive for quantum computing that is typically used as a subroutine within a larger computation, for instance for phase estimation. As such, we may have little control over the state that is input to the QFT. Thus, in implementing a good QFT, we may imagine that it needs to perform well on arbitrary input states. Verifying this worst-case correct behaviour of a QFT-implementation would be exponentially hard (in the number of qubits) in general, raising the concern that this verification would be impossible in practice on any useful-sized system. In this paper we show that, in fact, we only need to have good average-case performance of the QFT to achieve good worst-case performance for key tasks -- phase estimation, period finding and amplitude estimation. Further we give a very efficient procedure to verify this required average-case behaviour of the QFT.
Graphing else matters: exploiting aspect opinions and ratings in explainable graph-based recommendations

The success of neural network embeddings has entailed a renewed interest in using knowledge graphs for a wide variety of machine learning and information retrieval tasks. In particular, current recommendation methods based on graph embeddings have shown state-of-the-art performance. These methods commonly encode latent rating patterns and content features. Different from previous work, in this paper, we propose to exploit embeddings extracted from graphs that combine information from ratings and aspect-based opinions expressed in textual reviews. We then adapt and evaluate state-of-the-art graph embedding techniques over graphs generated from Amazon and Yelp reviews on six domains, outperforming baseline recommenders. Our approach has the advantage of providing explanations which leverage aspect-based opinions given by users about recommended items. Furthermore, we also provide examples of the applicability of recommendations utilizing aspect opinions as explanations in a visualization dashboard, which allows obtaining information about the most and least liked aspects of similar users obtained from the embeddings of an input graph.
Spliced Binned-Pareto Distribution for Robust Modeling of Heavy-tailed Time Series

This work proposes a novel method to robustly and accurately model time series with heavy-tailed noise, in non-stationary scenarios. In many practical application time series have heavy-tailed noise that significantly impacts the performance of classical forecasting models; in particular, accurately modeling a distribution over extreme events is crucial to performing accurate time series anomaly detection. We propose a Spliced Binned-Pareto distribution which is both robust to extreme observations and allows accurate modeling of the full distribution. Our method allows the capture of time dependencies in the higher order moments of the distribution such as the tail heaviness. We compare the robustness and the accuracy of the tail estimation of our method to other state of the art methods on Twitter mentions count time series.
Kullback-Leibler-Based Discrete Failure Time Models for Integration of Published Prediction Models with New Time-To-Event Dataset

Prediction of time-to-event data often suffers from rare event rates, small sample sizes, high dimensionality and low signal-to-noise ratios. Incorporating published prediction models from large-scale studies is expected to improve the performance of prognosis prediction on internal individual-level time-to-event data. However, existing integration approaches typically assume that underlying distributions from the external and internal data sources are similar, which is often invalid. To account for challenges including heterogeneity, data sharing, and privacy constraints, we propose a discrete failure time modeling procedure, which utilizes a discrete hazard-based Kullback-Leibler discriminatory information measuring the discrepancy between the published models and the internal dataset. Simulations show the advantage of the proposed method compared with those solely based on the internal data or published models. We apply the proposed method to improve prediction performance on a kidney transplant dataset from a local hospital by integrating this small-scale dataset with published survival models obtained from the national transplant registry.
The Transfer Hypothesis *

The Transfer Hypothesis and the general cognitive machinery are applied to experiments in which the college student has been the subject. Problem-to-problem improvement in the concept-identification experiment has been demonstrated by Paul Fingerman. Typically, in these experiments the S is given minimal instructions. Certain procedural details of the learning-to-learn experiments make it extremely likely that S will experience the solution to each problem. He receives a large number of trials in which to discover the solution, and he must manifest a long criterion run before the problem is ended. According to the Transfer Hypothesis, therefore, with each successive problem the S is more and more likely to sample only from the simple domain. It follows that the group of Ss, because they are going from sampling in the universe at large to sampling in a limited domain.
Further Applications of Blank Trials

The blank-trial probe provided an aperture through which underlying processes could be viewed. Blank trials were employed with four-dimensional, two-response tasks. Two studies were subsequently performed in which the probe was applied to eight-dimensional and three-response problems, respectively. These may be briefly described. The S’s memory for the stimuli of individual feedback trials was also determined from the H-probe data. A typical serial-position curve was obtained: Ss tended to remember some of the stimulus information both from the first and from the most recent trials. No memory was evident for intermediate stimuli. The results not only demonstrated memory effects in this more complex problem, but suggested that Ss remembered Hs primarily, that most of the stimuli were forgotten. The applications of blank-trial probes are less exploratory and more concerned with the properties of probes.
Forecasting Bitcoin Price Using Interval Graph and ANN Model: A Novel Approach

The accurate prediction of the Bitcoin price can provide decision support for investors and a reference for governments to make regulatory policies. The Bitcoin price prediction requires a careful analysis and representation due to its data characteristics such as highly volatile, highly non-linear, non-stationary, non-linear dynamics, no periodicity, and existence of spectrum of scaling components, noisy data, and randomness. The price can be effectively forecasted by transforming the original data into another amenable form along with AI tools. In this paper, we used Interval Graph (IG) for transforming original data which is amenable for applying Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) model to predict Bitcoin price. The Bitcoin price, which is a time-series data, is captured in the form of windows representing price of day, week, and month, respectively. We have used three evaluation metrics, such as MAPE, RMSE, and Dstat. The empirical study has clearly demonstrated the encouraging performance and effectiveness of the IG-ANN. The performance is compared with traditional ANN techniques on bitcoin time-series data spanning 2013-2019 and found that IG-ANN is outperforming all.
Quantifying coherence in terms of Fisher information

In quantum metrology, the parameter estimation accuracy is bounded by quantum Fisher information. In this paper, we present coherence measures in terms of (quantum) Fisher information by directly considering the post-selective non-unitary parametrization process. This coherence measure demonstrates the apparent operational meaning by the exact connection between coherence and parameter estimation accuracy. We also discuss the distinction between our coherence measure and the quantum Fisher information subject to unitary parametrization. The analytic coherence measure is given for qubit states.
ACM Multimedia Grand Challenge on Detecting Cheapfakes

Cheapfake is a recently coined term that encompasses non-AI (``cheap'') manipulations of multimedia content. Cheapfakes are known to be more prevalent than deepfakes. Cheapfake media can be created using editing software for image/video manipulations, or even without using any software, by simply altering the context of an image/video by sharing the media alongside misleading claims. This alteration of context is referred to as out-of-context (OOC) misuse of media. OOC media is much harder to detect than fake media, since the images and videos are not tampered. In this challenge, we focus on detecting OOC images, and more specifically the misuse of real photographs with conflicting image captions in news items. The aim of this challenge is to develop and benchmark models that can be used to detect whether given samples (news image and associated captions) are OOC, based on the recently compiled COSMOS dataset.
GPU-accelerated SIFT-aided source identification of stabilized videos

Video stabilization is an in-camera processing commonly applied by modern acquisition devices. While significantly improving the visual quality of the resulting videos, it has been shown that such operation typically hinders the forensic analysis of video signals. In fact, the correct identification of the acquisition source usually based on Photo Response non-Uniformity (PRNU) is subject to the estimation of the transformation applied to each frame in the stabilization phase. A number of techniques have been proposed for dealing with this problem, which however typically suffer from a high computational burden due to the grid search in the space of inversion parameters. Our work attempts to alleviate these shortcomings by exploiting the parallelization capabilities of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), typically used for deep learning applications, in the framework of stabilised frames inversion. Moreover, we propose to exploit SIFT features {to estimate the camera momentum and} %to identify less stabilized temporal segments, thus enabling a more accurate identification analysis, and to efficiently initialize the frame-wise parameter search of consecutive frames. Experiments on a consolidated benchmark dataset confirm the effectiveness of the proposed approach in reducing the required computational time and improving the source identification accuracy. {The code is available at \url{https://github.com/AMontiB/GPU-PRNU-SIFT}}.
Restoring Vision in Adverse Weather Conditions with Patch-Based Denoising Diffusion Models

Image restoration under adverse weather conditions has been of significant interest for various computer vision applications. Recent successful methods rely on the current progress in deep neural network architectural designs (e.g., with vision transformers). Motivated by the recent progress achieved with state-of-the-art conditional generative models, we present a novel patch-based image restoration algorithm based on denoising diffusion probabilistic models. Our patch-based diffusion modeling approach enables size-agnostic image restoration by using a guided denoising process with smoothed noise estimates across overlapping patches during inference. We empirically evaluate our model on benchmark datasets for image desnowing, combined deraining and dehazing, and raindrop removal. We demonstrate our approach to achieve state-of-the-art performances on both weather-specific and multi-weather image restoration, and experimentally show strong generalization to real-world test images.
Uncertainty-Driven Action Quality Assessment

Automatic action quality assessment (AQA) has attracted increasing attention due to its wide applications. However, most existing AQA methods employ deterministic models to predict the final score for each action, while overlooking the subjectivity and diversity among expert judges during the scoring process. In this paper, we propose a novel probabilistic model, named Uncertainty-Driven AQA (UD-AQA), to utilize and capture the diversity among multiple judge scores. Specifically, we design a Conditional Variational Auto-Encoder (CVAE)-based module to encode the uncertainty in expert assessment, where multiple judge scores can be produced by sampling latent features from the learned latent space multiple times. To further utilize the uncertainty, we generate the estimation of uncertainty for each prediction, which is employed to re-weight AQA regression loss, effectively reducing the influence of uncertain samples during training. Moreover, we further design an uncertainty-guided training strategy to dynamically adjust the learning order of the samples from low uncertainty to high uncertainty. The experiments show that our proposed method achieves competitive results on three benchmarks including the Olympic events MTL-AQA and FineDiving, and the surgical skill JIGSAWS datasets.
Effectiveness of Transformer Models on IoT Security Detection in StackOverflow Discussions

The Internet of Things (IoT) is an emerging concept that directly links to the billions of physical items, or "things", that are connected to the Internet and are all gathering and exchanging information between devices and systems. However, IoT devices were not built with security in mind, which might lead to security vulnerabilities in a multi-device system. Traditionally, we investigated IoT issues by polling IoT developers and specialists. This technique, however, is not scalable since surveying all IoT developers is not feasible. Another way to look into IoT issues is to look at IoT developer discussions on major online development forums like Stack Overflow (SO). However, finding discussions that are relevant to IoT issues is challenging since they are frequently not categorized with IoT-related terms. In this paper, we present the "IoT Security Dataset", a domain-specific dataset of 7147 samples focused solely on IoT security discussions. As there are no automated tools to label these samples, we manually labeled them. We further employed multiple transformer models to automatically detect security discussions. Through rigorous investigations, we found that IoT security discussions are different and more complex than traditional security discussions. We demonstrated a considerable performance loss (up to 44%) of transformer models on cross-domain datasets when we transferred knowledge from a general-purpose dataset "Opiner", supporting our claim. Thus, we built a domain-specific IoT security detector with an F1-Score of 0.69. We have made the dataset public in the hope that developers would learn more about the security discussion and vendors would enhance their concerns about product security.
Simplifying a classical-quantum algorithm interpolation with quantum singular value transformations

The problem of Phase Estimation (or Amplitude Estimation) admits a quadratic quantum speedup. Wang, Higgott and Brierley [2019, Phys. Rev. Lett. 122 140504] have shown that there is a continuous trade-off between quantum speedup and circuit depth (by defining a family of algorithms known as $α$-QPE). In this work, we show that the scaling of $α$-QPE can be naturally and succinctly derived within the framework of Quantum Singular Value Transformation (QSVT). From the QSVT perspective, a greater number of coherent oracle calls translates into a better polynomial approximation to the sign function, which is the key routine for solving Phase Estimation. The better the approximation to the sign function, the fewer samples one needs to determine the sign accurately. With this idea, we simplify the proof of $α$-QPE, while providing a new interpretation of the interpolation parameters, and show that QSVT is a promising framework for reasoning about classical-quantum interpolations.
Experimental demonstration of Quantum Overlapping Tomography

Quantum tomography is one of the major challenges of large-scale quantum information research due to the exponential time complexity. In this work, we develop and apply a Bayesian state estimation method to experimentally demonstrate quantum overlapping tomography [Phys. Rev. Lett. \textbf{124}, 100401 (2020)], a scheme intent on characterizing critical information of a many-body quantum system in logarithmic time complexity. By comparing the measurement results of full state tomography and overlapping tomography, we show that overlapping tomography gives accurate information of the system with much fewer state measurements than full state tomography.
Can Shuffling Video Benefit Temporal Bias Problem: A Novel Training Framework for Temporal Grounding

Temporal grounding aims to locate a target video moment that semantically corresponds to the given sentence query in an untrimmed video. However, recent works find that existing methods suffer a severe temporal bias problem. These methods do not reason the target moment locations based on the visual-textual semantic alignment but over-rely on the temporal biases of queries in training sets. To this end, this paper proposes a novel training framework for grounding models to use shuffled videos to address temporal bias problem without losing grounding accuracy. Our framework introduces two auxiliary tasks, cross-modal matching and temporal order discrimination, to promote the grounding model training. The cross-modal matching task leverages the content consistency between shuffled and original videos to force the grounding model to mine visual contents to semantically match queries. The temporal order discrimination task leverages the difference in temporal order to strengthen the understanding of long-term temporal contexts. Extensive experiments on Charades-STA and ActivityNet Captions demonstrate the effectiveness of our method for mitigating the reliance on temporal biases and strengthening the model's generalization ability against the different temporal distributions. Code is available at https://github.com/haojc/ShufflingVideosForTSG.
WISE: Whitebox Image Stylization by Example-based Learning

Image-based artistic rendering can synthesize a variety of expressive styles using algorithmic image filtering. In contrast to deep learning-based methods, these heuristics-based filtering techniques can operate on high-resolution images, are interpretable, and can be parameterized according to various design aspects. However, adapting or extending these techniques to produce new styles is often a tedious and error-prone task that requires expert knowledge. We propose a new paradigm to alleviate this problem: implementing algorithmic image filtering techniques as differentiable operations that can learn parametrizations aligned to certain reference styles. To this end, we present WISE, an example-based image-processing system that can handle a multitude of stylization techniques, such as watercolor, oil or cartoon stylization, within a common framework. By training parameter prediction networks for global and local filter parameterizations, we can simultaneously adapt effects to reference styles and image content, e.g., to enhance facial features. Our method can be optimized in a style-transfer framework or learned in a generative-adversarial setting for image-to-image translation. We demonstrate that jointly training an XDoG filter and a CNN for postprocessing can achieve comparable results to a state-of-the-art GAN-based method.
Multiple-hypothesis RNN-T Loss for Unsupervised Fine-tuning and Self-training of Neural Transducer

This paper proposes a new approach to perform unsupervised fine-tuning and self-training using unlabeled speech data for recurrent neural network (RNN)-Transducer (RNN-T) end-to-end (E2E) automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. Conventional systems perform fine-tuning/self-training using ASR hypothesis as the targets when using unlabeled audio data and are susceptible to the ASR performance of the base model. Here in order to alleviate the influence of ASR errors while using unlabeled data, we propose a multiple-hypothesis RNN-T loss that incorporates multiple ASR 1-best hypotheses into the loss function. For the fine-tuning task, ASR experiments on Librispeech show that the multiple-hypothesis approach achieves a relative reduction of 14.2% word error rate (WER) when compared to the single-hypothesis approach, on the test_other set. For the self-training task, ASR models are trained using supervised data from Wall Street Journal (WSJ), Aurora-4 along with CHiME-4 real noisy data as unlabeled data. The multiple-hypothesis approach yields a relative reduction of 3.3% WER on the CHiME-4's single-channel real noisy evaluation set when compared with the single-hypothesis approach.