Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Intelligent Intrusion Detection Based on Federated Learning for Edge-Assisted Internet of Things

As an innovative strategy, edge computing has been considered a viable option to address the limitations of cloud computing in supporting the Internet-of-Things applications. However, due to the instability of the network and the increase of the attack surfaces, the security in edge-assisted IoT needs to be better guaranteed. In this paper, we propose an intelligent intrusion detection mechanism, FedACNN, which completes the intrusion detection task by assisting the deep learning model CNN through the federated learning mechanism. In order to alleviate the communication delay limit of federal learning, we innovatively integrate the attention mechanism, and the FedACNN can achieve ideal accuracy with a 50% reduction of communication rounds.
Striking a Balance between Stability and Plasticity for Class-Incremental Learning

Class-incremental learning (CIL) aims at continuously updating a trained model with new classes (plasticity) without forgetting previously learned old ones (stability). Contemporary studies resort to storing representative exemplars for rehearsal or preventing consolidated model parameters from drifting, but the former requires an additional space for storing exemplars at every incremental phase while the latter usually shows poor model generalization. In this paper, we focus on resolving the stability-plasticity dilemma in class-incremental learning where no exemplars from old classes are stored. To make a trade-off between learning new information and maintaining old knowledge, we reformulate a simple yet effective baseline method based on a cosine classifier framework and reciprocal adaptive weights. With the reformulated baseline, we present two new approaches to CIL by learning class-independent knowledge and multi-perspective knowledge, respectively. The former exploits class-independent knowledge to bridge learning new and old classes, while the latter learns knowledge from different perspectives to facilitate CIL. Extensive experiments on several widely used CIL benchmark datasets show the superiority of our approaches over the state-of-the-art methods.
MosaicOS: A Simple and Effective Use of Object-Centric Images for Long-Tailed Object Detection

Many objects do not appear frequently enough in complex scenes (e.g., certain handbags in living rooms) for training an accurate object detector, but are often found frequently by themselves (e.g., in product images). Yet, these object-centric images are not effectively leveraged for improving object detection in scene-centric images. In this paper, we propose Mosaic of Object-centric images as Scene-centric images (MosaicOS), a simple and novel framework that is surprisingly effective at tackling the challenges of long-tailed object detection. Keys to our approach are three-fold: (i) pseudo scene-centric image construction from object-centric images for mitigating domain differences, (ii) high-quality bounding box imputation using the object-centric images’ class labels, and (iii) a multi-stage training procedure. On LVIS object detection (and instance segmentation), MosaicOS leads to a massive 60% (and 23%) relative improvement in average precision for rare object categories. We also show that our framework can be compatibly used with other existing approaches to achieve even further gains. Our pre-trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/czhang0528/MosaicOS/.
Hybrid Group Anomaly Detection for Sequence Data: Application to Trajectory Data Analytics

Many research areas depend on group anomaly detection. The use of group anomaly detection can maintain and provide security and privacy to the data involved. This research attempts to solve the deficiency of the existing literature in outlier detection thus a novel hybrid framework to identify group anomaly detection from sequence data is proposed in this paper. It proposes two approaches for efficiently solving this problem: i) <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Hybrid Data Mining-based algorithm</i> , consists of three main phases: first, the clustering algorithm is applied to derive the micro-clusters. Second, the <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$kNN$ </tex-math></inline-formula> algorithm is applied to each micro-cluster to calculate the candidates of the group’s outliers. Third, a pattern mining framework gets applied to the candidates of the group’s outliers as a pruning strategy, to generate the groups of outliers, and ii) a <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">GPU-based</i> approach is presented, which benefits from the massively GPU computing to boost the runtime of the hybrid data mining-based algorithm. Extensive experiments were conducted to show the advantages of different sequence databases of our proposed model. Results clearly show the efficiency of a GPU direction when directly compared to a sequential approach by reaching a speedup of <monospace xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">451</monospace> . In addition, both approaches outperform the baseline methods for group detection.
Exploring Relational Context for Multi-Task Dense Prediction

The timeline of computer vision research is marked with advances in learning and utilizing efficient contextual representations. Most of them, however, are targeted at improving model performance on a single downstream task. We consider a multi-task environment for dense prediction tasks, represented by a common backbone and independent task-specific heads. Our goal is to find the most efficient way to refine each task prediction by capturing cross-task contexts dependent on tasks’ relations. We explore various attention-based contexts, such as global and local, in the multi-task setting and analyze their behavior when applied to refine each task independently. Empirical findings confirm that different source-target task pairs benefit from different context types. To automate the selection process, we propose an Adaptive Task-Relational Context (ATRC) module, which samples the pool of all available contexts for each task pair using neural architecture search and outputs the optimal configuration for deployment. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on two important multi-task benchmarks, namely NYUD-v2 and PASCAL-Context. The proposed ATRC has a low computational toll and can be used as a drop-in refinement module for any supervised multi-task architecture.
Efficient Anomaly Detection in Crowd Videos Using Pre-Trained 2D Convolutional Neural Networks

Surveillance of crowded places can benefit from improved techniques of anomaly detection in crowd videos.Several existing methods have detected various types of crowd abnormal behaviors by using spatial and temporal information got from videos.So far as real-time detection of anomalies is concerned, special attention must be given to reducing the model complexity that leads to computational and memory loads.This paper proposes a low computational cost approach to detect crowd anomalies.The proposed approach avoids the expensive optical flow calculations by adopting a pre-trained 2D convolutional neural network (CNN) for motion information and implements a lighter form of the 2D CNN to achieve high recognition accuracy at low computational cost.Experiments on public datasets show that the proposed model outperforms the existing approaches in terms of detection accuracy alongside providing better performance in generating input frames.
Learning Geometric Reasoning and Control for Long-Horizon Tasks from Visual Input

Long-horizon manipulation tasks require joint reasoning over a sequence of discrete actions and their associated continuous control parameters. While Task and Motion Planning (TAMP) approaches are capable of generating motion plans that account for this joint reasoning, they usually assume full knowledge about the environment (e.g. in terms of shapes, poses of objects) and often require computation times not suitable for real-time control.To overcome this, we propose a learning framework where a high-level reasoning network predicts, based on an image of the scene, a sequence of discrete actions and the parameter values of their associated low-level controllers. These controllers are parameterized in terms of a learned energy function, leading to time-invariant controllers for each phase. We train the whole framework end-to-end using a dataset of TAMP solutions computed using Logic Geometric Programming. A key feature is that the reasoning network determines the parameters of the controllers jointly, such that the overall task can be solved. Despite having no explicit representation of the geometry nor pose of the objects in the scene, our network is still able to accomplish geometrically precise manipulation tasks, including handovers and an accurate pointing task where the parameters of early actions are tightly coupled with those of later actions. Video: https://youtu.be/AcPWRTkr3_g
A calibration method of DVL in integrated navigation system based on particle swarm optimization

In the underwater SINS/DVL integrated navigation system, the calibration problem between SINS and DVL sensors is one of the critical factors affecting the accuracy of integrated navigation. Traditional calibration methods usually require long-term filter estimation or require the vehicle to operate specific maneuvers, which have limitations. In this paper, a DVL calibration algorithm using a particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is proposed. The SINS/GPS integrated navigation velocity and DVL output velocity are constructed into two point sets, thereby converting the calibration problem into a Wahba problem and using the particle swarm optimization algorithm to solve the optimal rotation matrix. Simulation experiments and semi-physical experiments show that the proposed calibration method can quickly and accurately estimate the scale factor and installation misalignment angle between SINS and DVL sensors, and the integrated navigation accuracy after calibration is significantly improved. Compared with the conventional calibration approaches, the calibration performance of the proposed method is better.
Learning Discrete Representations via Constrained Clustering for Effective and Efficient Dense Retrieval

Dense Retrieval (DR) has achieved state-of-the-art first-stage ranking effectiveness. However, the efficiency of most existing DR models is limited by the large memory cost of storing dense vectors and the time-consuming nearest neighbor search (NNS) in vector space. Therefore, we present RepCONC, a novel retrieval model that learns discrete Representations via CONstrained Clustering. RepCONC jointly trains dual-encoders and the Product Quantization (PQ) method to learn discrete document representations and enables fast approximate NNS with compact indexes. It models quantization as a constrained clustering process, which requires the document embeddings to be uniformly clustered around the quantization centroids and supports end-to-end optimization of the quantization method and dual-encoders. We theoretically demonstrate the importance of the uniform clustering constraint in RepCONC and derive an efficient approximate solution for constrained clustering by reducing it to an instance of the optimal transport problem. Besides constrained clustering, RepCONC further adopts a vector-based inverted file system (IVF) to support highly efficient vector search on CPUs. Extensive experiments on two popular ad-hoc retrieval benchmarks show that RepCONC achieves better ranking effectiveness than competitive vector quantization baselines under different compression ratio settings. It also substantially outperforms a wide range of existing retrieval models in terms of retrieval effectiveness, memory efficiency, and time efficiency.
Generalized Channels from Limited Blockchain Scripts and Adaptor Signatures

Decentralized and permissionless ledgers offer an inherently low transaction rate, as a result of their consensus protocol demanding the storage of each transaction on-chain. A prominent proposal to tackle this scalability issue is to utilize off-chain protocols, where parties only need to post a limited number of transactions on-chain. Existing solutions can roughly be categorized into: (i) application-specific channels (e.g., payment channels), offering strictly weaker functionality than the underlying blockchain; and (ii) state channels, supporting arbitrary smart contracts at the cost of being compatible only with the few blockchains having Turing-complete scripting languages (e.g., Ethereum).In this work, we introduce and formalize the notion of generalized channels allowing users to perform any operation supported by the underlying blockchain in an off-chain manner. Generalized channels thus extend the functionality of payment channels and relax the definition of state channels. We present a concrete construction compatible with any blockchain supporting transaction authorization, time-locks and constant number of Boolean \(\wedge \) and \(\vee \) operations – requirements fulfilled by many (non-Turing-complete) blockchains including the popular Bitcoin. To this end, we leverage adaptor signatures – a cryptographic primitive already used in the cryptocurrency literature but formalized as a standalone primitive in this work for the first time. We formally prove the security of our generalized channel construction in the Universal Composability framework.As an important practical contribution, our generalized channel construction outperforms the state-of-the-art payment channel construction, the Lightning Network, in efficiency. Concretely, it halves the off-chain communication complexity and reduces the on-chain footprint in case of disputes from linear to constant in the number of off-chain applications funded by the channel. Finally, we evaluate the practicality of our construction via a prototype implementation and discuss various applications including financially secured fair two-party computation.
Vision-Based Mobile Robotics Obstacle Avoidance With Deep Reinforcement Learning

Obstacle avoidance is a fundamental and challenging problem for autonomous navigation of mobile robots. In this paper, we consider the problem of obstacle avoidance in simple 3D environments where the robot has to solely rely on a single monocular camera. In particular, we are interested in solving this problem without relying on localization, mapping, or planning techniques. Most of the existing work consider obstacle avoidance as two separate problems, namely obstacle detection, and control. Inspired by the recent advantages of deep reinforcement learning in Atari games and understanding highly complex situations in Go, we tackle the obstacle avoidance problem as a data-driven end-to-end deep learning approach. Our approach takes raw images as input and generates control commands as output. We show that discrete action spaces are outperforming continuous control commands in terms of expected average reward in maze-like environments. Furthermore, we show how to accelerate the learning and increase the robustness of the policy by incorporating predicted depth maps by a generative adversarial network.
A Unified Framework of Deep Learning-Based Facial Expression Recognition System for Diversified Applications

This work proposes a facial expression recognition system for a diversified field of applications. The purpose of the proposed system is to predict the type of expressions in a human face region. The implementation of the proposed method is fragmented into three components. In the first component, from the given input image, a tree-structured part model has been applied that predicts some landmark points on the input image to detect facial regions. The detected face region was normalized to its fixed size and then down-sampled to its varying sizes such that the advantages, due to the effect of multi-resolution images, can be introduced. Then, some convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures were proposed in the second component to analyze the texture patterns in the facial regions. To enhance the proposed CNN model’s performance, some advanced techniques, such data augmentation, progressive image resizing, transfer-learning, and fine-tuning of the parameters, were employed in the third component to extract more distinctive and discriminant features for the proposed facial expression recognition system. The performance of the proposed system, due to different CNN models, is fused to achieve better performance than the existing state-of-the-art methods and for this reason, extensive experimentation has been carried out using the Karolinska-directed emotional faces (KDEF), GENKI-4k, Cohn-Kanade (CK+), and Static Facial Expressions in the Wild (SFEW) benchmark databases. The performance has been compared with some existing methods concerning these databases, which shows that the proposed facial expression recognition system outperforms other competing methods.
Low-overhead fault-tolerant quantum computing using long-range connectivity

Vast numbers of qubits will be needed for large-scale quantum computing because of the overheads associated with error correction. We present a scheme for low-overhead fault-tolerant quantum computation based on quantum low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes, where long-range interactions enable many logical qubits to be encoded with a modest number of physical qubits. In our approach, logic gates operate via logical Pauli measurements that preserve both the protection of the LDPC codes and the low overheads in terms of the required number of additional qubits. Compared with surface codes with the same code distance, we estimate order-of-magnitude improvements in the overheads for processing around 100 logical qubits using this approach. Given the high thresholds demonstrated by LDPC codes, our estimates suggest that fault-tolerant quantum computation at this scale may be achievable with a few thousand physical qubits at comparable error rates to what is needed for current approaches.
AARIN: Affordable, accurate, reliable and innovative mechanism to protect a medical cyber-physical system using blockchain technology

The enhancement (in the past decade) in electronics devices/technology, a rise in most of the accidents concerning security and surveillance intruding the private lives of the users question the existing systems being used to combat this challenge wherein, the third-parties gather and handle large amounts of individual details. As part of the constant evolution of the cyber physical system architecture, one of the goals of our system is to reduce the latency time for enrollment of new information. Generally, the efficiency and benefit of a Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) depends heavily on interconnection of individual devices or nodes. Exchange of data and information relevant to an overall task or functionality is the key to many applications such as smart grids, smart cities, and many others. Trustworthiness of data is needed to make such systems (especially in MCPS systems) successful. To be able to fulfill policies to guarantee the safety of all entities within a Medical Cyber Physical Systems (MCPS) and to provide security measures to enforce these cryptographic solutions have to be embedded. This paper describes a decentralized e-healthcare application framework for personal data management that ensures that users own and access their data. This work proposes a novel mechanism to secure Medical Cyber Physical Systems (MCPS), i.e., as an automated access-control manager (including building trust in a third party). This work also integrates some features in security building blocks in ultra-small devices to provide essential properties to secure embedded systems.
Bimanual Regrasping for Suture Needles using Reinforcement Learning for Rapid Motion Planning

Regrasping a suture needle is an important yet time-consuming process in suturing. To bring efficiency into regrasping, prior work either designs a task-specific mechanism or guides the gripper toward some specific pick-up point for proper grasping of a needle. Yet, these methods are usually not deployable when the working space is changed. Therefore, in this work, we present rapid trajectory generation for bimanual needle regrasping via reinforcement learning (RL). Demonstrations from a sampling-based motion planning algorithm is incorporated to speed up the learning. In addition, we propose the ego-centric state and action spaces for this bimanual planning problem, where the reference frames are on the end-effectors instead of some fixed frame. Thus, the learned policy can be directly applied to any feasible robot configuration. Our experiments in simulation show that the success rate of a single pass is 97%, and the planning time is 0.0212s on average, which outperforms other widely used motion planning algorithms. For the real-world experiments, the success rate is 73.3% if the needle pose is reconstructed from an RGB image, with a planning time of 0.0846s and a run time of 5.1454s. If the needle pose is known beforehand, the success rate becomes 90.5%, with a planning time of 0.0807s and a run time of 2.8801s.
ADTrack: Target-Aware Dual Filter Learning for Real-Time Anti-Dark UAV Tracking

Prior correlation filter (CF)-based tracking methods for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have virtually focused on tracking in the daytime. However, when the night falls, the trackers will encounter more harsh scenes, which can easily lead to tracking failure. In this regard, this work proposes a novel tracker with anti-dark function (ADTrack). The proposed method integrates an efficient and effective low-light image enhancer into a CF-based tracker. Besides, a target-aware mask is simultaneously generated by virtue of image illumination variation. The target-aware mask can be applied to jointly train a target-focused filter that assists the context filter for robust tracking. Specifically, ADTrack adopts dual regression, where the context filter and the target-focused filter restrict each other for dual filter learning. Exhaustive experiments are conducted on typical dark sceneries benchmark, consisting of 37 typical night sequences from authoritative benchmarks, i.e., UAVDark, and our newly constructed benchmark UAVDark70. The results have shown that ADTrack favorably outperforms other state-of-the-art trackers and achieves a real-time speed of 34 frames/s on a single CPU, greatly extending robust UAV tracking to night scenes.
Fine-grained Cross-modal Alignment Network for Text-Video Retrieval

Despite the recent progress of cross-modal text-to-video retrieval techniques, their performance is still unsatisfactory. Most existing works follow a trend of learning a joint embedding space to measure the distance between global-level or local-level textual and video representation. The fine-grained interactions between video segments and phrases are usually neglected in cross-modal learning, which results in suboptimal retrieval performances. To tackle the problem, we propose a novel Fine-grained Cross-modal Alignment Network (FCA-Net), which considers the interactions between visual semantic units (i.e., sub-actions/sub-events) in videos and phrases in sentences for cross-modal alignment. Specifically, the interactions between visual semantic units and phrases are formulated as a link prediction problem optimized by a graph auto-encoder to obtain the explicit relations between them and enhance the aligned feature representation for fine-grained cross-modal alignment. Experimental results on MSR-VTT, YouCook2, and VATEX datasets demonstrate the superiority of our model as compared to the state-of-the-art method.