Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
A WOA-Based Optimization Approach for Task Scheduling in Cloud Computing Systems

Task scheduling in cloud computing can directly affect the resource usage and operational cost of a system. To improve the efficiency of task executions in a cloud, various metaheuristic algorithms, as well as their variations, have been proposed to optimize the scheduling. In this article, for the first time, we apply the latest metaheuristics whale optimization algorithm (WOA) for cloud task scheduling with a multiobjective optimization model, aiming at improving the performance of a cloud system with given computing resources. On that basis, we propose an advanced approach called Improved WOA for Cloud task scheduling (IWC) to further improve the optimal solution search capability of the WOA-based method. We present the detailed implementation of IWC and our simulation-based experiments show that the proposed IWC has better convergence speed and accuracy in searching for the optimal task scheduling plans, compared to the current metaheuristic algorithms. Moreover, it can also achieve better performance on system resource utilization, in the presence of both small and large-scale tasks.
Incremental Few-Shot Object Detection

Existing object detection methods typically rely on the availability of abundant labelled training samples per class and offline model training in a batch mode. These requirements substantially limit their scalability to open-ended accommodation of novel classes with limited labelled training data, both in terms of model accuracy and training efficiency during deployment. We present the first study aiming to go beyond these limitations by considering the Incremental Few-Shot Detection (iFSD) problem setting, where new classes must be registered incrementally (without revisiting base classes) and with few examples. To this end we propose OpeN-ended Centre nEt (ONCE), a detector designed for incrementally learning to detect novel class objects with few examples. This is achieved by an elegant adaptation of the efficient CentreNet detector to the few-shot learning scenario, and meta-learning a class-wise code generator model for registering novel classes. ONCE fully respects the incremental learning paradigm, with novel class registration requiring only a single forward pass of few-shot training samples, and no access to base classes - thus making it suitable for deployment on embedded devices, etc. Extensive experiments conducted on both the standard object detection (COCO, PASCAL VOC) and fashion landmark detection (DeepFashion2) tasks show the feasibility of iFSD for the first time, opening an interesting and very important line of research.
Non-iterative and Fast Deep Learning: Multilayer Extreme Learning Machines

In the past decade, deep learning techniques have powered many aspects of our daily life, and drawn ever-increasing research interests. However, conventional deep learning approaches, such as deep belief network (DBN), restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM), and convolutional neural network (CNN), suffer from time-consuming training process due to fine-tuning of a large number of parameters and the complicated hierarchical structure. Furthermore, the above complication makes it difficult to theoretically analyze and prove the universal approximation of those conventional deep learning approaches. In order to tackle the issues, multilayer extreme learning machines (ML-ELM) were proposed, which accelerate the development of deep learning. Compared with conventional deep learning, ML-ELMs are non-iterative and fast due to the random feature mapping mechanism. In this paper, we perform a thorough review on the development of ML-ELMs, including stacked ELM autoencoder (ELM-AE), residual ELM, and local receptive field based ELM (ELM-LRF), as well as address their applications. In addition, we also discuss the connection between random neural networks and conventional deep learning.
Application of local fully Convolutional Neural Network combined with YOLO v5 algorithm in small target detection of remote sensing image

This exploration primarily aims to jointly apply the local FCN (fully convolution neural network) and YOLO-v5 (You Only Look Once-v5) to the detection of small targets in remote sensing images. Firstly, the application effects of R-CNN (Region-Convolutional Neural Network), FRCN (Fast Region-Convolutional Neural Network), and R-FCN (Region-Based-Fully Convolutional Network) in image feature extraction are analyzed after introducing the relevant region proposal network. Secondly, YOLO-v5 algorithm is established on the basis of YOLO algorithm. Besides, the multi-scale anchor mechanism of Faster R-CNN is utilized to improve the detection ability of YOLO-v5 algorithm for small targets in the image in the process of image detection, and realize the high adaptability of YOLO-v5 algorithm to different sizes of images. Finally, the proposed detection method YOLO-v5 algorithm + R-FCN is compared with other algorithms in NWPU VHR-10 data set and Vaihingen data set. The experimental results show that the YOLO-v5 + R-FCN detection method has the optimal detection ability among many algorithms, especially for small targets in remote sensing images such as tennis courts, vehicles, and storage tanks. Moreover, the YOLO-v5 + R-FCN detection method can achieve high recall rates for different types of small targets. Furthermore, due to the deeper network architecture, the YOL v5 + R-FCN detection method has a stronger ability to extract the characteristics of image targets in the detection of remote sensing images. Meanwhile, it can achieve more accurate feature recognition and detection performance for the densely arranged target images in remote sensing images. This research can provide reference for the application of remote sensing technology in China, and promote the application of satellites for target detection tasks in related fields.
Smart healthcare support for remote patient monitoring during covid-19 quarantine

Social distancing and quarantining are now standard practices which are implemented worldwide since the outbreak of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) disease pandemic in 2019. Due to the full acceptance of the above control practices, frequent hospital contact visits are being discouraged. However, there are people whose physiological vital needs still require routine monitoring for improved healthy living. Interestingly, with the recent technological advancements in the areas of Internet of Things (IoT) technology, smart home automation, and healthcare systems, contact-based hospital visits are now regarded as non-obligatory. To this end, a remote smart home healthcare support system (ShHeS) is proposed for monitoring patients' health status and receiving doctors’ prescriptions while staying at home. Besides this, doctors can also carry out the diagnosis of ailments using the data collected remotely from the patient. An Android based mobile application that interfaces with a web-based application is implemented for efficient patients-doctors dual real-time communication. Sensors are incorporated in the system for automatic capturing of physiological health parameters of patients. Also, a hyperspace analogue to context (HAC) was incorporated into the current monitoring framework for service discovery and context change in the home environment towards accurate readings of the physiological parameters and improved system performance. With the proposed system, patients can be remotely monitored from their homes, and can also live a more comfortable life through the use of some features of smart home automation devices on their phones. Therefore, one main significant contribution of this study is that patients in self-isolation or self-quarantine can use the new platform to send daily health symptoms and challenges to doctors via their mobile phones. Thus, improved healthy living and a comfortable lifestyle can still be achieved even during such a problematic period of the 2019 COVID-19 pandemic that has already recorded 20,026,186 million cases so far with 734,020 thousand deaths globally.
What Makes for Good Views for Contrastive Learning

Contrastive learning between multiple views of the data has recently achievedstate of the art performance in the field of self-supervised representationlearning. Despite its success, the influence of different view choices has beenless studied. In this paper, we use theoretical and empirical analysis tobetter understand the importance of view selection, and argue that we shouldreduce the mutual information (MI) between views while keeping task-relevantinformation intact. To verify this hypothesis, we devise unsupervised andsemi-supervised frameworks that learn effective views by aiming to reduce theirMI. We also consider data augmentation as a way to reduce MI, and show thatincreasing data augmentation indeed leads to decreasing MI and improvesdownstream classification accuracy. As a by-product, we achieve a newstate-of-the-art accuracy on unsupervised pre-training for ImageNetclassification ($73\%$ top-1 linear readout with a ResNet-50). In addition,transferring our models to PASCAL VOC object detection and COCO instancesegmentation consistently outperforms supervised pre-training.Code:http://github.com/HobbitLong/PyContrast
Verizon: Data Breach Investigations Report 2020

The publication of Verizon's annual Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) has become something of a major event in the information security calendar. Its data is regarded as a kind of benchmark, with year-on-year figures being seen as a reliable indication of the changing (usually worsening) state of cyber security.
Overcoming Noise in Entanglement Distribution

Noise can be considered the natural enemy of quantum information. An often implied benefit of high-dimensional entanglement is its increased resilience to noise. However, manifesting this potential in an experimentally meaningful fashion is challenging and has never been done before. In infinite dimensional spaces, discretization is inevitable and renders the effective dimension of quantum states a tunable parameter. Owing to advances in experimental techniques and theoretical tools, we demonstrate an increased resistance to noise by identifying two pathways to exploit high-dimensional entangled states. Our study is based on two separate experiments utilizing canonical spatiotemporal properties of entangled photon pairs. Following these different pathways to noise resilience, we are able to certify entanglement in the photonic orbital-angular-momentum and energy-time degrees of freedom up to noise conditions corresponding to a noise fraction of 72% and 92%, respectively. Our work paves the way toward practical quantum communication systems that are able to surpass current noise and distance limitations, while not compromising on potential device independence.Received 1 August 2019Revised 11 October 2019DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevX.9.041042Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.Published by the American Physical SocietyPhysics Subject Headings (PhySH)Research AreasQuantum communicationQuantum entanglementQuantum Information
Research on image classification method based on improved multi-scale relational network

Small sample learning aims to learn information about object categories from a single or a few training samples. This learning style is crucial for deep learning methods based on large amounts of data. The deep learning method can solve small sample learning through the idea of meta-learning “how to learn by using previous experience.” Therefore, this paper takes image classification as the research object to study how meta-learning quickly learns from a small number of sample images. The main contents are as follows: After considering the distribution difference of data sets on the generalization performance of measurement learning and the advantages of optimizing the initial characterization method, this paper adds the model-independent meta-learning algorithm and designs a multi-scale meta-relational network. First, the idea of META-SGD is adopted, and the inner learning rate is taken as the learning vector and model parameter to learn together. Secondly, in the meta-training process, the model-independent meta-learning algorithm is used to find the optimal parameters of the model. The inner gradient iteration is canceled in the process of meta-validation and meta-test. The experimental results show that the multi-scale meta-relational network makes the learned measurement have stronger generalization ability, which further improves the classification accuracy on the benchmark set and avoids the need for fine-tuning of the model-independent meta-learning algorithm.
DDFlow: Learning Optical Flow with Unlabeled Data Distillation

We present DDFlow, a data distillation approach to learning optical flow estimation from unlabeled data. The approach distills reliable predictions from a teacher network, and uses these predictions as annotations to guide a student network to learn optical flow. Unlike existing work relying on handcrafted energy terms to handle occlusion, our approach is data-driven, and learns optical flow for occluded pixels. This enables us to train our model with a much simpler loss function, and achieve a much higher accuracy. We conduct a rigorous evaluation on the challenging Flying Chairs, MPI Sintel, KITTI 2012 and 2015 benchmarks, and show that our approach significantly outperforms all existing unsupervised learning methods, while running at real time.
Hierarchical Incentive Mechanism Design for Federated Machine Learning in Mobile Networks

In recent years, the enhanced sensing and computation capabilities of Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices have opened the doors to several mobile crowdsensing applications. In mobile crowdsensing, a model owner announces a sensing task following which interested workers collect the required data. However, in some cases, a model owner may have insufficient data samples to build an effective machine learning model. To this end, we propose a federated learning (FL)-based privacy-preserving approach to facilitate collaborative machine learning among multiple model owners in mobile crowdsensing. Our system model allows collaborative machine learning without compromising data privacy given that only the model parameters instead of the raw data are exchanged within the federation. However, there are two main challenges of incentive mismatches between workers and model owners, as well as among model owners. For the former, we leverage on the self-revealing mechanism in the contract theory under information asymmetry. For the latter, to ensure the stability of a federation through preventing free-riding attacks, we use the coalitional game theory approach that rewards model owners based on their marginal contributions. Considering the inherent hierarchical structure of the involved entities, we propose a hierarchical incentive mechanism framework. Using the backward induction, we first solve the contract formulation and then proceed to solve the coalitional game with the merge and split algorithm. The numerical results validate the performance efficiency of our proposed hierarchical incentive mechanism design, in terms of incentive compatibility of our contract design and fair payoffs of model owners in stable federation formation.
Induction Networks for Few-Shot Text Classification

Text classification tends to struggle when data is deficient or when it needs to adapt to unseen classes.In such challenging scenarios, recent studies have used meta-learning to simulate the few-shot task, in which new queries are compared to a small support set at the samplewise level.However, this sample-wise comparison may be severely disturbed by the various expressions in the same class.Therefore, we should be able to learn a general representation of each class in the support set and then compare it to new queries.In this paper, we propose a novel Induction Network to learn such a generalized class-wise representation, by innovatively leveraging the dynamic routing algorithm in meta-learning.In this way, we find the model is able to induce and generalize better.We evaluate the proposed model on a well-studied sentiment classification dataset (English) and a real-world dialogue intent classification dataset (Chinese).Experiment results show that on both datasets, the proposed model significantly outperforms the existing state-of-the-art approaches, proving the effectiveness of class-wise generalization in few-shot text classification.
FedVision: An Online Visual Object Detection Platform Powered by Federated Learning

Visual object detection is a computer vision-based artificial intelligence (AI) technique which has many practical applications (e.g., fire hazard monitoring). However, due to privacy concerns and the high cost of transmitting video data, it is highly challenging to build object detection models on centrally stored large training datasets following the current approach. Federated learning (FL) is a promising approach to resolve this challenge. Nevertheless, there currently lacks an easy to use tool to enable computer vision application developers who are not experts in federated learning to conveniently leverage this technology and apply it in their systems. In this paper, we report FedVision - a machine learning engineering platform to support the development of federated learning powered computer vision applications. The platform has been deployed through a collaboration between WeBank and Extreme Vision to help customers develop computer vision-based safety monitoring solutions in smart city applications. Over four months of usage, it has achieved significant efficiency improvement and cost reduction while removing the need to transmit sensitive data for three major corporate customers. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first real application of FL in computer vision-based tasks.
Comparative analysis of deep learning image detection algorithms

Abstract A computer views all kinds of visual media as an array of numerical values. As a consequence of this approach, they require image processing algorithms to inspect contents of images. This project compares 3 major image processing algorithms: Single Shot Detection (SSD), Faster Region based Convolutional Neural Networks (Faster R-CNN), and You Only Look Once (YOLO) to find the fastest and most efficient of three. In this comparative analysis, using the Microsoft COCO (Common Object in Context) dataset, the performance of these three algorithms is evaluated and their strengths and limitations are analysed based on parameters such as accuracy, precision and F1 score. From the results of the analysis, it can be concluded that the suitability of any of the algorithms over the other two is dictated to a great extent by the use cases they are applied in. In an identical testing environment, YOLO-v3 outperforms SSD and Faster R-CNN, making it the best of the three algorithms.
Automated brain histology classification using machine learning

<h2>Abstract</h2> Brain and breast tumors cause significant morbidity and mortality worldwide. Accurate and expedient histological diagnosis of patients' tumor specimens is required for subsequent treatment and prognostication. Currently, histology slides are visually inspected by trained pathologists, but this process is both time and labor-intensive. In this paper, we propose an automated process to classify histology slides of both brain and breast tissues using the Google Inception V3 convolutional neural network (CNN). We report successful automated classification of brain histology specimens into normal, low grade glioma (LGG) or high grade glioma (HGG). We also report for the first time the benefit of transfer learning across different tissue types. Pre-training on a brain tumor classification task improved CNN performance accuracy in a separate breast tumor classification task, with the F1 score improving from 0.547 to 0.913. We constructed a dataset using brain histology images from our own hospital and a public breast histology image dataset. Our proposed method can assist human pathologists in the triage and inspection of histology slides to expedite medical care. It can also improve CNN performance in cases where the training data is limited, for example in rare tumors, by applying the learned model weights from a more common tissue type.
A dummy-based user privacy protection approach for text information retrieval

Text retrieval enables people to efficiently obtain the desired data from massive text data, so has become one of the most popular services in information retrieval community. However, while providing great convenience for users, text retrieval results in a serious issue on user privacy. In this paper, we propose a dummy-based approach for text retrieval privacy protection. Its basic idea is to use well-designed dummy queries to cover up user queries and thus protect user privacy. First, we present a client-based system framework for the protection of user privacy, which requires no change to the existing algorithm of text retrieval, and no compromise to the accuracy of text retrieval. Second, we define a user privacy model to formulate the requirements that ideal dummy queries should meet, i.e., (1) having highly similar feature distributions with user queries, and (2) effectively reducing the significance of user query topics. Third, by means of the knowledge derived from Wikipedia, we present an implementation algorithm to construct a group of ideal dummy queries that can well meet the privacy model. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by theoretical analysis and experimental evaluation. The results show that by constructing dummy queries that have similar feature distributions but unrelated topics with user queries, the privacy behind users’ textual queries can be effectively protected, under the precondition of not compromising the accuracy and usability of text retrieval.
Improving Adversarial Robustness Requires Revisiting Misclassified Examples

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are vulnerable to adversarial examples crafted by imperceptible perturbations. A range of defense techniques have been proposed to improve DNN robustness to adversarial examples, among which adversarial training has been demonstrated to be the most effective. Adversarial training is often formulated as a min-max optimization problem, with the inner maximization for generating adversarial examples. However, there exists a simple, yet easily overlooked fact that adversarial examples are only defined on correctly classified (natural) examples, but inevitably, some (natural) examples will be misclassified during training. In this paper, we investigate the distinctive influence of misclassified and correctly classified examples on the final robustness of adversarial training. Specifically, we find that misclassified examples indeed have a significant impact on the final robustness. More surprisingly, we find that different maximization techniques on misclassified examples may have a negligible influence on the final robustness, while different minimization techniques are crucial. Motivated by the above discovery, we propose a new defense algorithm called {\em Misclassification Aware adveRsarial Training} (MART), which explicitly differentiates the misclassified and correctly classified examples during the training. We also propose a semi-supervised extension of MART, which can leverage the unlabeled data to further improve the robustness. Experimental results show that MART and its variant could significantly improve the state-of-the-art adversarial robustness.