Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Probably Unknown: Deep Inverse Sensor Modelling Radar

Radar presents a promising alternative to lidar and vision in autonomous vehicle applications, able to detect objects at long range under a variety of weather conditions. However, distinguishing between occupied and free space from raw radar power returns is challenging due to complex interactions between sensor noise and occlusion. To counter this we propose to learn an Inverse Sensor Model (ISM) converting a raw radar scan to a grid map of occupancy probabilities using a deep neural network. Our network is selfsupervised using partial occupancy labels generated by lidar, allowing a robot to learn about world occupancy from past experience without human supervision. We evaluate our approach on five hours of data recorded in a dynamic urban environment. By accounting for the scene context of each grid cell our model is able to successfully segment the world into occupied and free space, outperforming standard CFAR filtering approaches. Additionally by incorporating heteroscedastic uncertainty into our model formulation, we are able to quantify the variance in the uncertainty throughout the sensor observation. Through this mechanism we are able to successfully identify regions of space that are likely to be occluded.
Simulating Light-Weight-Cryptography Implementation for IoT Healthcare Data Security Applications

Short period monitoring and emergency notification of healthcare signals is becoming affordable with existence of internet of things (IoT) support. However, IoT does not prevent challenges that may hinder the appropriate safe spread of medical solutions. Confidentiality of data is vital, making a real fear requesting cryptography. The limitations in memory, computations processing, power consumptions, and small-size devices contradict the robust encryption process asking for help of low-weight-cryptography to handle practically. This article presents a comparative analysis of performance evaluation of three trusted candidate encryption algorithms, namely AES, SPECK and SIMON, which are simulated and compared in details to distinguish who has the best behaviour to be nominated for a medical application. These encryption algorithms are implemented and evaluated in regard to the execution time, power consumption, memory occupation and speed. The implementation is carried out using the Cooja simulator running on Contiki operating system showing interesting attractive results.
Smart Generation System of Personalized Advertising Copy and Its Application to Advertising Practice and Research

Artificial intelligence in programmatic advertising constitutes fertile grounds for marketing communication with tremendous opportunities. Yet, despite its touted benefits, contemporary implementations of programmatic advertising do not harness self-generative technologies so much so that different consumers are exposed to identical content. Consequently, we advance a smart generation system of personalized advertising copy (SGS-PAC) that can automatically personalize advertising content to align with the needs of individual consumers. Analytical results from a user experiment involving about 80 subjects underscore that personalized advertising copies generated by SGS-PAC can bolster click rate in online advertising platforms. Findings from this study bear significant implications for the application of artificial intelligence in online advertising.
FashionAI: A Hierarchical Dataset for Fashion Understanding

Fine-grained attribute recognition is critical for fashion understanding, yet is missing in existing professional and comprehensive fashion datasets. In this paper, we present a large scale attribute dataset with manual annotation in high quality. To this end, complex fashion knowledge is disassembled into mutually exclusive concepts and form a hierarchical structure to describe the cognitive process. Such well-structured knowledge is reflected by dataset in terms of its clear definition and precise annotation. The problems which are common in the process of annotation, including structured noise, occlusion, uncertain problems, and attribute inconsistency, are well addressed instead of merely discarding those bad data. Further, we propose an iterative process of building a dataset with practical usefulness. With 24 key points, 245 labels that cover 6 categories of women's clothing, and a total of 41 subcategories, the creation of our dataset drew upon a large amount of crowd staff engagement. Extensive experiments quantitatively and qualitatively demonstrate its effectiveness.
Microscaler: Automatic Scaling for Microservices with an Online Learning Approach

Recently, the microservice becomes a popular architecture to construct cloud native systems due to its agility. In cloud native systems, autoscaling is a core enabling technique to adapt to workload changes by scaling out/in. However, it becomes a challenging problem in a microservice system, since such a system usually comprises a large number of different micro services with complex interactions. When bursty and unpredictable workloads arrive, it is difficult to pinpoint the scaling-needed services which need to scale and evaluate how much resource they need. In this paper, we present a novel system named Microscaler to automatically identify the scaling-needed services and scale them to meet the service level agreement (SLA) with an optimal cost for micro-service systems. Microscaler collects the quality of service metrics (QoS) with the help of the service mesh enabled infrastructure. Then, it determines the under-provisioning or over-provisioning services with a novel criterion named service power. By combining an online learning approach and a step-by-step heuristic approach, Microscaler could achieve the optimal service scale satisfying the SLA requirements. The experimental evaluations in a micro-service benchmark show that Microscaler converges to the optimal service scale faster than several state-of-the-art methods.
Cloud-native database systems at Alibaba

Cloud-native databases become increasingly important for the era of cloud computing, due to the needs for elasticity and on-demand usage by various applications. These challenges from cloud applications present new opportunities for cloud-native databases that cannot be fully addressed by traditional on-premise enterprise database systems. A cloud-native database leverages software-hardware co-design to explore accelerations offered by new hardware such as RDMA, NVM, kernel bypassing protocols such as DPDK. Meanwhile, new design architectures, such as shared storage, enable a cloud-native database to decouple computation from storage and provide excellent elasticity. For highly concurrent workloads that require horizontal scalability, a cloud-native database can leverage a shared-nothing layer to provide distributed query and transaction processing. Applications also require cloud-native databases to offer high availability through distributed consensus protocols. At Alibaba, we have explored a suite of technologies to design cloud-native database systems. Our storage engine, X-Engine and PolarFS, improves both write and read throughputs by using a LSM-tree design and self-adapted separation of hot and cold data records. Based on these efforts, we have designed and implemented POLARDB and its distributed version POLARDB-X, which has successfully supported the extreme transaction workloads during the 2018 Global Shopping Festival on November 11, 2018, and achieved commercial success on Alibaba Cloud. We have also designed an OLAP system called AnalyticDB (ADB in short) for enabling real-time interactive data analytics for big data. We have explored a self-driving database platform to achieve autoscaling and intelligent database management. We will report key technologies and lessons learned to highlight the technical challenges and opportunities for cloud-native database systems at Alibaba.
Cross-Modal Knowledge Distillation for Action Recognition

In this work, we address the problem how a network for action recognition that has been trained on a modality like RGB videos can be adapted to recognize actions for another modality like sequences of 3D human poses. To this end, we extract the knowledge of the trained teacher network for the source modality and transfer it to a small ensemble of student networks for the target modality. For the cross-modal knowledge distillation, we do not require any annotated data. Instead we use pairs of sequences of both modalities as supervision, which are straightforward to acquire. In contrast to previous works for knowledge distillation that use a KL-loss, we show that the cross-entropy loss together with mutual learning of a small ensemble of student networks performs better. In fact, the proposed approach for cross-modal knowledge distillation nearly achieves the accuracy of a student network trained with full supervision.
Hyperspectral Restoration via $L_0$ Gradient Regularized Low-Rank Tensor Factorization

Due to the mechanism of the data acquisition process, hyperspectral imagery (HSI) are usually contaminated by various noises, e.g., Gaussian noise, impulse noise, strips, and dead lines. In this article, a spectral-spatial L <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">0</sub> gradient regularized low-rank tensor factorization (LRTFL <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">0</sub> ) method is proposed for hyperspectral denoising, in which the restored HSI is approximated by low-rank block term decomposition (BTD). BTD factorizes a tensor into the sum of a series of component tensors, each of which is represented by the outer product of a matrix and a vector. From subspace learning point of view, the vector and matrix can be considered as a spectral atom and its corresponding coding coefficients. In the proposed method, the correlations in both spectral and spatial domains are taken into account via the small size of atom set and low-rankness of coding matrices. In addition, HSIs also have the local structure of piecewise smoothness in both spectral and spatial domains. Motivated by the supreme virtues of L <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">0</sub> gradient regularization in image structure exploitation, we develop a spectral-spatial L <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">0</sub> gradient regularization and embed it into BTD to explore the spectral-spatial texture information. The proposed method can simultaneously remove various types of noises, and the experimental results on both synthetic data and real-world data show its superiority when compared with several state-of-the-art approaches.
On the role of features in human activity recognition

Traditionally, the sliding window based activity recognition chain (ARC) has been dominating practical applications, in which features are carefully optimized towards scenario specifics. Recently, end-to-end, deep learning methods, that do not discriminate between representation learning and classifier optimization, have become very popular also for HAR using wearables, promising "out-of-the-box" modeling with superior recognition capabilities. In this paper, we revisit and analyze specifically the role feature representations play in HAR using wearables. In a systematic exploration we evaluate eight different feature extraction methods, including conventional heuristics and recent representation learning methods, and assess their capabilities for effective activity recognition on five benchmarks. Optimized feature learning integrated into the conventional ARC leads to comparable if not better recognition results as if using end-to-end learning methods, while at the same time offering practitioners more flexibility to optimize their systems towards specifics of wearables and their constraints and limitations.
Gated and Axis-Concentrated Localization Network for Remote Sensing Object Detection

In the multicategory object detection task of high-resolution remote sensing images, small objects are always difficult to detect. This happens because the influence of location deviation on small object detection is greater than on large object detection. The reason is that, with the same intersection decrease between a predicted box and a true box, Intersection over Union (IoU) of small objects drops more than those of large objects. In order to address this challenge, we propose a new localization model to improve the location accuracy of small objects. This model is composed of two parts. First, a global feature gating process is proposed to implement a channel attention mechanism on local feature learning. This process takes full advantages of global features’ abundant semantics and local features’ spatial details. In this case, more effective information is selected for small object detection. Second, an axis-concentrated prediction (ACP) process is adopted to project convolutional feature maps into different spatial directions, so as to avoid interference between coordinate axes and improve the location accuracy. Then, coordinate prediction is implemented with a regression layer using the learned object representation. In our experiments, we explore the relationship between the detection accuracy and the object scale, and the results show that the performance improvements of small objects are distinct using our method. Compared with the classical deep learning detection models, the proposed gated axis-concentrated localization network (GACL Net) has the characteristic of focusing on small objects.
Anisotropic Guided Filtering

The guided filter and its subsequent derivatives have been widely employed in many image processing and computer vision applications primarily brought about by their low complexity and good edge-preservation properties. Despite this success, the different variants of the guided filter are unable to handle more aggressive filtering strengths leading to the manifestation of “detail halos”. At the same time, these existing filters perform poorly when the input and guide images have structural inconsistencies. In this paper, we demonstrate that these limitations are due to the guided filter operating as a variable-strength locally-isotropic filter that, in effect, acts as a weak anisotropic filter on the image. Our analysis shows that this behaviour stems from the use of unweighted averaging in the final steps of guided filter variants including the adaptive guided filter (AGF), weighted guided image filter (WGIF), and gradient-domain guided image filter (GGIF). We propose a novel filter, the Anisotropic Guided Filter (AnisGF), that utilises weighted averaging to achieve maximum diffusion while preserving strong edges in the image. The proposed weights are optimised based on the local neighbourhood variances to achieve strong anisotropic filtering while preserving the low computational cost of the original guided filter. Synthetic tests show that the proposed method addresses the presence of detail halos and the handling of inconsistent structures found in previous variants of the guided filter. Furthermore, experiments in scale-aware filtering, detail enhancement, texture removal, and chroma upsampling demonstrate the improvements brought about by the technique.
Quantifying nonclassicality via Wigner-Yanase skew information

Identifying the classical-quantum divide and quantifying nonclassicality (quantumness) are fundamental issues in quantum exploration. By use of the Wigner-Yanase skew information [E. P. Wigner and M. M. Yanase, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 49, 910 (1963)], which is a version of quantum Fisher information with a well-established interpretation as quantum uncertainty, we introduce a simple and effective quantifier for nonclassicality of bosonic field states. This is achieved by simultaneously yet approximately measuring the canonical conjugate quadrature pair (equivalently, measuring the non-Hermitian annihilation operator in a generalized sense) from an information-theoretic perspective. This quantifier, apart from capturing the idea of nonclassicality as quantum uncertainty in a succinct way, is mathematically computable, physically intuitive, and possesses operational significance. We reveal its fundamental properties and illustrate its physical applications in quantifying nonclassicality of light. We compare it with various existent quantifiers for nonclassicality and illustrate its merits. A related quantifier for classicality, which is in some sense dual to nonclassicality, is also introduced. This pair of classicality and nonclassicality provides insight into the classical-quantum interplay.
3D Approaches and Challenges in Facial Expression Recognition Algorithms—A Literature Review

In recent years, facial expression analysis and recognition (FER) have emerged as an active research topic with applications in several different areas, including the human-computer interaction domain. Solutions based on 2D models are not entirely satisfactory for real-world applications, as they present some problems of pose variations and illumination related to the nature of the data. Thanks to technological development, 3D facial data, both still images and video sequences, have become increasingly used to improve the accuracy of FER systems. Despite the advance in 3D algorithms, these solutions still have some drawbacks that make pure three-dimensional techniques convenient only for a set of specific applications; a viable solution to overcome such limitations is adopting a multimodal 2D+3D analysis. In this paper, we analyze the limits and strengths of traditional and deep-learning FER techniques, intending to provide the research community an overview of the results obtained looking to the next future. Furthermore, we describe in detail the most used databases to address the problem of facial expressions and emotions, highlighting the results obtained by the various authors. The different techniques used are compared, and some conclusions are drawn concerning the best recognition rates achieved.
Universally Decodable Matrices for Distributed Matrix-Vector Multiplication

Coded computation is an emerging research area that leverages concepts from erasure coding to mitigate the effect of stragglers (slow nodes) in distributed computation clusters, especially for matrix computation problems. In this work, we present a class of distributed matrix-vector multiplication schemes that are based on codes in the Rosenbloom-Tsfasman metric and universally decodable matrices. Our schemes take into account the inherent computation order within a worker node. In particular, they allow us to effectively leverage partial computations performed by stragglers (a feature that many prior works lack). An additional main contribution of our work is a companion-matrix-based embedding of these codes that allows us to obtain sparse and numerically stable schemes for the problem at hand. Experimental results confirm the effectiveness of our techniques.
Curriculum Semi-supervised Segmentation

This study investigates a curriculum-style strategy for semi-supervised CNN segmentation, which devises a regression network to learn image-level information such as the size of a target region. These regressions are used to effectively regularize the segmentation network, constraining softmax predictions of the unlabeled images to match the inferred label distributions. Our framework is based on inequality constraints that tolerate uncertainties with inferred knowledge, e.g., regressed region size, and can be employed for a large variety of region attributes. We evaluated our proposed strategy for left ventricle segmentation in magnetic resonance images (MRI), and compared it to standard proposal-based semi-supervision strategies. Our strategy leverages unlabeled data in more efficiently, and achieves very competitive results, approaching the performance of full-supervision.
Unintended Bias in Misogyny Detection

During the last years, the phenomenon of hate against women increased exponentially especially in online environments such as microblogs. Although this alarming phenomenon has triggered many studies both from computational linguistic and machine learning points of view, less effort has been spent to analyze if those misogyny detection models are affected by an unintended bias. This can lead the models to associate unreasonably high misogynous scores to a non-misogynous text only because it contains certain terms, called identity terms. This work is the first attempt to address the problem of measuring and mitigating unintended bias in machine learning models trained for the misogyny detection task. We propose a novel synthetic test set that can be used as evaluation framework for measuring the unintended bias and different mitigation strategies specific for this task. Moreover, we provide a misogyny detection model that demonstrate to obtain the best classification performance in the state-of-the-art. Experimental results on recently introduced bias metrics confirm the ability of the bias mitigation treatment to reduce the unintended bias of the proposed misogyny detection model.
Opinion spam detection: Using multi-iterative graph-based model

The demand to detect opinionated spam, using opinion mining applications to prevent their damaging effects on e-commerce reputations is on the rise in many business sectors globally. The existing spam detection techniques in use nowadays, only consider one or two types of spam entities such as review, reviewer, group of reviewers, and product. Besides, they use a limited number of features related to behaviour, content and the relation of entities which reduces the detection's accuracy. Accordingly, these techniques mostly exploit synthetic datasets to analyse their model and are not able to be applied in the context of the real-world environment. As such, a novel graph-based model called "Multi-iterative Graph-based opinion Spam Detection" (MGSD) in which all various types of entities are considered simultaneously within a unified structure is proposed. Using this approach, the model reveals both implicit (i.e., similar entity's) and explicit (i.e., different entities') relationships. The MGSD model is able to evaluate the 'spamicity' effects of entities more efficiently given it applies a novel multi-iterative algorithm which considers different sets of factors to update the spamicity score of entities. To enhance the accuracy of the MGSD detection model, a higher number of existing weighted features along with the novel proposed features from different categories were selected using a combination of feature fusion techniques and machine learning (ML) algorithms. The MGSD model can also be generalised and applied in various opinionated documents due to employing domain independent features. The output of the MGSD model showed that our feature selection and feature fusion techniques showed a remarkable improvement in detecting spam. The findings of this study showed that MGSD could improve the accuracy of state-of-the-art ML and graph-based techniques by around 5.6% and 4.8%, respectively, also achieving an accuracy of 93% for the detection of spam detection in our synthetic crowdsourced dataset and 95.3% for Ott's crowdsourced dataset.