Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Understanding rooftop PV panel semantic segmentation of satellite and aerial images for better using machine learning

The photovoltaic (PV) industry boom and increased PV applications call for better planning based on accurate and updated data on the installed capacity. Compared with the manual statistical approach, which is often time-consuming and labor-intensive, using satellite/aerial images to estimate the existing PV installed capacity offers a new method with cost-effective and data-consistent features. Previous studies investigated the feasibility of segmenting PV panels from images involving machine learning technologies. However, due to the particular characteristics of PV panel semantic-segmentation, the machine learning tools need to be designed and applied with careful considerations of the issue formulation, data quality, and model explainability. This paper investigated the characteristics of PV panel semantic-segmentation from the perspective of computer vision. The results reveal that the PV panel image data has several specific characteristics: highly class-imbalance and non-concentrated distribution; homogeneous texture and heterogenous color features; and the notable resolution threshold for effective semantic-segmentation. Moreover, this paper provided recommendations for data obtaining and model design, aiming at each observed character from the viewpoints of recent solutions in computer vision, which can be helpful for future improvement of the PV panel semantic-segmentation.
MADER: Trajectory Planner in Multiagent and Dynamic Environments

This article presents MADER, a 3-D decentralized and asynchronous trajectory planner for UAVs that generates collision-free trajectories in environments with static obstacles, dynamic obstacles, and other planning agents. Real-time collision avoidance with other dynamic obstacles or agents is done by performing outer polyhedral representations of every interval of the trajectories and then including the plane that separates each pair of polyhedra as a decision variable in the optimization problem. MADER uses our recently developed MINVO basis to obtain outer polyhedral representations with volumes 2.36 and 254.9 times, respectively, smaller than the Bernstein or B-Spline bases used extensively in the planning literature. Our decentralized and asynchronous algorithm guarantees safety with respect to other agents by including their committed trajectories as constraints in the optimization and then executing a collision check-recheck scheme. Finally, extensive simulations in challenging cluttered environments show up to a 33.9% reduction in the flight time, and a 88.8% reduction in the number of stops compared to the Bernstein and B-Spline bases, shorter flight distances than centralized approaches, and shorter total times on average than synchronous decentralized approaches.
Multiple Instance Active Learning for Object Detection

Despite the substantial progress of active learning for image recognition, there still lacks an instance-level active learning method specified for object detection. In this paper, we propose Multiple Instance Active Object Detection (MI-AOD), to select the most informative images for detector training by observing instance-level uncertainty. MI-AOD defines an instance uncertainty learning module, which leverages the discrepancy of two adversarial instance classifiers trained on the labeled set to predict instance uncertainty of the unlabeled set. MI-AOD treats unlabeled images as instance bags and feature anchors in images as instances, and estimates the image uncertainty by re-weighting instances in a multiple instance learning (MIL) fashion. Iterative instance uncertainty learning and re-weighting facilitate suppressing noisy instances, toward bridging the gap between instance uncertainty and image-level uncertainty. Experiments validate that MI-AOD sets a solid baseline for instance-level active learning. On commonly used object detection datasets, MI-AOD outperforms state-of-the-art methods with significant margins, particularly when the labeled sets are small. Code is available at https://github.com/yuantn/MI-AOD.
A survey of Deep Neural Network watermarking techniques

Protecting the Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) associated to Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) is a pressing need pushed by the high costs required to train such networks and by the importance that DNNs are gaining in our society. Following its use for Multimedia (MM) IPR protection, digital watermarking has recently been considered as a mean to protect the IPR of DNNs. While DNN watermarking inherits some basic concepts and methods from MM watermarking, there are significant differences between the two application areas, thus calling for the adaptation of media watermarking techniques to the DNN scenario and the development of completely new methods. In this paper, we overview the most recent advances in DNN watermarking, by paying attention to cast them into the bulk of watermarking theory developed during the last two decades, while at the same time highlighting the new challenges and opportunities characterising DNN watermarking. Rather than trying to present a comprehensive description of all the methods proposed so far, we introduce a new taxonomy of DNN watermarking and present a few exemplary methods belonging to each class. We hope that this paper will inspire new research in this exciting area and will help researchers to focus on the most innovative and challenging problems in the field.
High quality 3D reconstruction based on fusion of polarization imaging and binocular stereo vision

Polarization imaging can retrieve inaccurate objects’ 3D shapes with fine textures, whereas coarse but accurate depths can be provided by binocular stereo vision. To take full advantage of these two complementary techniques, we investigate a novel 3D reconstruction method based on the fusion of polarization imaging and binocular stereo vision for high quality 3D reconstruction. We first generate the polarization surface by correcting the azimuth angle errors on the basis of registered binocular depth, to solve the azimuthal ambiguity in the polarization imaging. Then we propose a joint 3D reconstruction model for depth fusion, including a data fitting term and a robust low-rank matrix factorization constraint. The former is to transfer textures from the polarization surface to the fused depth by assuming their relationship linear, whereas the latter is to utilize the low-frequency part of binocular depth to improve the accuracy of the fused depth considering the influences of missing-entries and outliers. To solve the optimization problem in the proposed model, we adopt an efficient solution based on the alternating direction method of multipliers. Extensive experiments have been conducted to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method in comparison with state-of-the-art methods and to exhibit its wide application prospects in 3D reconstruction.
A selective ensemble learning based two-sided cross-domain collaborative filtering algorithm

Recently, various Cross-Domain Collaborative Filtering (CDCF) algorithms are presented to address the sparsity problem, leveraging ratings of auxiliary domains to improve target domain’s recommendation performance. Therein, two-sided CDCF algorithms have shown better performance, given the fact that they can extract both user and item information. However, as the auxiliary domains are not all related to the target domain, utilizing information from all the auxiliary domains may not be optimal and would lead to low efficiency. A Two-Sided CDCF model based on Selective Ensemble learning considering both Accuracy and Efficiency (TSSEAE) is proposed to balance recommendation accuracy and efficiency. In TSSEAE, user-sided and item-sided auxiliary domains are firstly combined to improve performance of target domain. Then, CDCF problems are converted to ensemble learning problems, with each combination corresponding to a classifier. In this way, the problem of selecting combinations can be converted to that of selecting classifiers, which is a selective ensemble learning problem. Finally, a bi-objective optimization problem is solved to obtain Pareto optimal solutions for the selective ensemble learning problem. The experimental result on Amazon dataset shows the effectiveness of TSSEAE.
How to process local and global consensus? A large-scale group decision making model based on social network analysis with probabilistic linguistic information

With the rapid development of societal and technological paradigms, large-scale group decision making becomes an emerging topic. In conventional group decision making methods, it is often assumed that all experts are independent. However, with the expansion of social media, experts usually have some relationships and get together for some reasons such as the academic relationship, working relationship or common interests. In these cases, experts are no longer independent individuals. To address the issue, this study introduces a large-scale group decision making model based on the social network analysis. In this model, experts can provide trust values on other experts. Due to the scale and complexity of the large-scale group decision making problems, the dimensional reduction, which uses community detection to classify experts into local communities, is deemed essential. Based on this process, the whole group can be divided into two layers. The first layer is the global network containing all communities, and the second layer is the local network within a community. This study develops a model to address large-scale group decision-making problems considering the local and global consensus in two layers simultaneously. This model allows experts to use probabilistic linguistic preference relations to express their cognitive complex evaluation information. An illustrative example is presented to show the usefulness of the proposed model.
A Learning Sparrow Search Algorithm

This paper solves the drawbacks of traditional intelligent optimization algorithms relying on 0 and has good results on CEC 2017 and benchmark functions, which effectively improve the problem of algorithms falling into local optimality. The sparrow search algorithm (SSA) has significant optimization performance, but still has the problem of large randomness and is easy to fall into the local optimum. For this reason, this paper proposes a learning sparrow search algorithm, which introduces the lens reverse learning strategy in the discoverer stage. The random reverse learning strategy increases the diversity of the population and makes the search method more flexible. In the follower stage, an improved sine and cosine guidance mechanism is introduced to make the search method of the discoverer more detailed. Finally, a differential-based local search is proposed. The strategy is used to update the optimal solution obtained each time to prevent the omission of high-quality solutions in the search process. LSSA is compared with CSSA, ISSA, SSA, BSO, GWO, and PSO in 12 benchmark functions to verify the feasibility of the algorithm. Furthermore, to further verify the effectiveness and practicability of the algorithm, LSSA is compared with MSSCS, CSsin, and FA-CL in CEC 2017 test function. The simulation results show that LSSA has good universality. Finally, the practicability of LSSA is verified by robot path planning, and LSSA has good stability and safety in path planning.
A Systematic Review of the Benefits and Challenges of Mobile Learning during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Following the COVID-19 outbreak, teaching and learning have been forced to move fully to the Internet rather than the conventional offline medium. As a result, the use of M-learning has risen dramatically, which was neither expected or anticipated. The challenges and benefits of such widespread usage are beginning to emerge in front of us. Thus, in this paper, we systematically review the benefits and challenges of leveraging M-learning for Science and Technology courses during the COVID-19 pandemic by educators and learners. Related articles were obtained from various databases, namely, IEEE, ACM Digital Library, ScienceDirect, and Springer. In total, 4210 related articles were initially found. Upon executing careful selection criteria, 22 articles were selected for review. After that, the advantages and threats were identified and discussed. As per our findings, it was determined that M-learning has excellent potential to be an effective platform for education provided that the identified shortcomings are resolved. This review will be helpful for education stakeholders and institutions to gauge the impact of leveraging M-learning as the only means for education to proceed. Moreover, it reveals the strengths and shortcomings that would aid in adjusting the relevant policies administered by the institutions. Furthermore, application developers will be able to comprehend the expected features that should be included in novel M-learning platforms.
A Federated Learning Approach to Anomaly Detection in Smart Buildings

Internet of Things (IoT) sensors in smart buildings are becoming increasingly ubiquitous, making buildings more livable, energy efficient, and sustainable. These devices sense the environment and generate multivariate temporal data of paramount importance for detecting anomalies and improving the prediction of energy usage in smart buildings. However, detecting these anomalies in centralized systems is often plagued by a huge delay in response time. To overcome this issue, we formulate the anomaly detection problem in a federated learning setting by leveraging the multi-task learning paradigm, which aims at solving multiple tasks simultaneously while taking advantage of the similarities and differences across tasks. We propose a novel privacy-by-design federated learning model using a stacked long short-time memory (LSTM) model, and we demonstrate that it is more than twice as fast during training convergence compared to the centralized LSTM. The effectiveness of our federated learning approach is demonstrated on three real-world datasets generated by the IoT production system at General Electric Current smart building, achieving state-of-the-art performance compared to baseline methods in both classification and regression tasks. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework in reducing the overall training cost without compromising the prediction performance.
Scalable error mitigation for noisy quantum circuits produces competitive expectation values

Noise in existing quantum processors only enables an approximation to ideal quantum computation. However, these approximations can be vastly improved by error mitigation, for the computation of expectation values, as shown by small-scale experimental demonstrations. However, the practical scaling of these methods to larger system sizes remains unknown. Here, we demonstrate the utility of zero-noise extrapolation for relevant quantum circuits using up to 26 qubits, circuit depths of 60, and 1080 CNOT gates. We study the scaling of the method for canonical examples of product states and entangling Clifford circuits of increasing size, and extend it to the quench dynamics of 2-D Ising spin lattices with varying couplings. We show that the efficacy of the error mitigation is greatly enhanced by additional error suppression techniques and native gate decomposition that reduce the circuit time. By combining these methods, we demonstrate an accuracy in the approximate quantum simulation of the quench dynamics that surpasses the classical approximations obtained from a state-of-the-art 2-D tensor network method. These results reveal a path to a relevant quantum advantage with noisy, digital, quantum processors.
Hybrid Deep Learning Models for Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment analysis on public opinion expressed in social networks, such as Twitter or Facebook, has been developed into a wide range of applications, but there are still many challenges to be addressed. Hybrid techniques have shown to be potential models for reducing sentiment errors on increasingly complex training data. This paper aims to test the reliability of several hybrid techniques on various datasets of different domains. Our research questions are aimed at determining whether it is possible to produce hybrid models that outperform single models with different domains and types of datasets. Hybrid deep sentiment analysis learning models that combine long short-term memory (LSTM) networks, convolutional neural networks (CNN), and support vector machines (SVM) are built and tested on eight textual tweets and review datasets of different domains. The hybrid models are compared against three single models, SVM, LSTM, and CNN. Both reliability and computation time were considered in the evaluation of each technique. The hybrid models increased the accuracy for sentiment analysis compared with single models on all types of datasets, especially the combination of deep learning models with SVM. The reliability of the latter was significantly higher.
Digital transformation in the healthcare sector through blockchain technology. Insights from academic research and business developments

Healthcare research is a multidisciplinary field that looks at the entire stakeholder ecosystem. Digital transformation could assist in the resolution of problems in medical practice by introducing new value creation trends. Blockchain technology has the potential to help speed up this digital transformation process by reducing certain elements, such as data management issues. As with any new technology, its actual value must be shown because it is based on expectations rather than solid facts. This study compares the findings of a content analysis focused on papers and patents with the aim of presenting data on the expectations for blockchain implementation in the healthcare sector. While the papers provide the perspective of researchers, patents should depict the expectation of the companies and investors patenting their inventions. Comparing data from papers and patents, this paper aims to help close the research-practice gap by showing how the two expectations for blockchain application in the healthcare sector are evolving.
Role of Artificial Intelligence in the Early Diagnosis of Oral Cancer. A Scoping Review

The early diagnosis of cancer can facilitate subsequent clinical patient management. Artificial intelligence (AI) has been found to be promising for improving the diagnostic process. The aim of the present study is to increase the evidence on the application of AI to the early diagnosis of oral cancer through a scoping review. A search was performed in the PubMed, Web of Science, Embase and Google Scholar databases during the period from January 2000 to December 2020, referring to the early non-invasive diagnosis of oral cancer based on AI applied to screening. Only accessible full-text articles were considered. Thirty-six studies were included on the early detection of oral cancer based on images (photographs (optical imaging and enhancement technology) and cytology) with the application of AI models. These studies were characterized by their heterogeneous nature. Each publication involved a different algorithm with potential training data bias and few comparative data for AI interpretation. Artificial intelligence may play an important role in precisely predicting the development of oral cancer, though several methodological issues need to be addressed in parallel to the advances in AI techniques, in order to allow large-scale transfer of the latter to population-based detection protocols.
All-optical synthesis of an arbitrary linear transformation using diffractive surfaces

Abstract Spatially-engineered diffractive surfaces have emerged as a powerful framework to control light-matter interactions for statistical inference and the design of task-specific optical components. Here, we report the design of diffractive surfaces to all-optically perform arbitrary complex-valued linear transformations between an input ( N i ) and output ( N o ), where N i and N o represent the number of pixels at the input and output fields-of-view (FOVs), respectively. First, we consider a single diffractive surface and use a matrix pseudoinverse-based method to determine the complex-valued transmission coefficients of the diffractive features/neurons to all-optically perform a desired/target linear transformation. In addition to this data-free design approach, we also consider a deep learning-based design method to optimize the transmission coefficients of diffractive surfaces by using examples of input/output fields corresponding to the target transformation. We compared the all-optical transformation errors and diffraction efficiencies achieved using data-free designs as well as data-driven (deep learning-based) diffractive designs to all-optically perform (i) arbitrarily-chosen complex-valued transformations including unitary, nonunitary, and noninvertible transforms, (ii) 2D discrete Fourier transformation, (iii) arbitrary 2D permutation operations, and (iv) high-pass filtered coherent imaging. Our analyses reveal that if the total number ( N ) of spatially-engineered diffractive features/neurons is ≥ N i × N o , both design methods succeed in all-optical implementation of the target transformation, achieving negligible error. However, compared to data-free designs, deep learning-based diffractive designs are found to achieve significantly larger diffraction efficiencies for a given N and their all-optical transformations are more accurate for N &lt; N i × N o . These conclusions are generally applicable to various optical processors that employ spatially-engineered diffractive surfaces.
Meta-Learning with Task-Adaptive Loss Function for Few-Shot Learning

In few-shot learning scenarios, the challenge is to generalize and perform well on new unseen examples when only very few labeled examples are available for each task. Model-agnostic meta-learning (MAML) has gained the popularity as one of the representative few-shot learning methods for its flexibility and applicability to diverse problems. However, MAML and its variants often resort to a simple loss function without any auxiliary loss function or regularization terms that can help achieve better generalization. The problem lies in that each application and task may require different auxiliary loss function, especially when tasks are diverse and distinct. Instead of attempting to hand-design an auxiliary loss function for each application and task, we introduce a new meta-learning framework with a loss function that adapts to each task. Our proposed framework, named Meta-Learning with Task-Adaptive Loss Function (MeTAL), demonstrates the effectiveness and the flexibility across various domains, such as few-shot classification and few-shot regression.