Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Virtual Tours Encourage Intentions to Travel and Willingness to Pay via Spatial Presence, Enjoyment, and Destination Image

Virtual reality (VR) tourism provides individuals with a brief, but realistic, preview of travel destinations. Despite the increasing popularity of VR tourism in destination advertising, outcomes and underlying mechanisms of virtual tours remain underexplored. Guided by the theoretical framework of spatial presence, this experiment (N = 118) investigated how VR tourism affected behavioral intention to travel to a physical destination depicted in the virtual world and people’s willingness to pay for travel in the context of destination advertising. Results revealed that VR tourism led to greater spatial presence, enjoyment, destination image, intentions to travel, and willingness to pay compared to reading an e-brochure. Spatial presence, enjoyment, and destination image mediated the impact of virtual tours on intentions to travel and willingness to pay, shedding light on the psychological mechanisms of virtual tours. Theoretical and managerial implications of VR tourism are discussed.
Cryptanalysis and Improvement of the Image Encryption Scheme Based on Feistel Network and Dynamic DNA Encoding

In order to improve the security and efficiency of image encryption, many researchers have continuously proposed new image encryption schemes in recent years.However, these image encryption schemes have not been fully analyzed and evaluated.In this paper, a newly reported image encryption scheme based on Feistel network and dynamic Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA) encoding is deeply and comprehensively investigated.This encryption scheme mainly adopts four encryption steps to encrypt the plain image, which are Generation of chaotic sequences, Hill encryption, Feistel network and Pixel diffusion.Our analyses show that there are some problems in the secret key design and encryption process of this encryption scheme.After pointing out and analyzing these problems, we have made several necessary improvements to this encryption scheme and proposed the corresponding chosen-plaintext attack algorithm.The subsequent simulation tests and analyses have confirmed the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed attack algorithm.Finally, for the problems in this encryption scheme and some current image encryption schemes, improvement suggestions are presented to provide references for the designers of future image encryption schemes.
A novel Domain Adaptive Deep Recurrent Network for multivariate time series prediction

Multivariate time series prediction has attracted growing interest in many research fields. Recently, deep learning has been applied to multivariate time series prediction and has achieved encouraging results. However, in real-world scenarios, the insufficient data of multivariate time series at the beginning of the observation causes the deep learning model unable to exert its expected performance. Furthermore, there is the distribution discrepancy between different multivariate time series caused by many factors, making it unfeasible to reuse existing data or models directly. Therefore, a novel Domain Adaptive Deep Recurrent Network (DADRN) is proposed for multivariate time series prediction with insufficient data, which transferring the knowledge of the target-related time series (source domain) to the target time series (target domain) by minimizing distribution mismatch in the feature sharing space. The DADRN automatically learns the temporal dependence of predictive time series and the dynamic dependencies between multiple time variables through the deep recurrent neural network. Besides, a special transfer learning method, domain adaptation, is embedded in the constructed deep recurrent network to reduce the distribution discrepancy between different domains. The proposed domain independence strategy and domain weighted loss further enhance the DADRN’s transfer learning capability by improving the distribution estimation of the target domain and balancing the network’s learning on two domains. The reasonable combination of deep recurrent network and domain adaptation endows DADRN with favorable transfer learning capability, and its effectiveness is demonstrated by the experimental results on two real-world datasets.
xCos: An Explainable Cosine Metric for Face Verification Task

We study the XAI (explainable AI) on the face recognition task, particularly the face verification. Face verification has become a crucial task in recent days and it has been deployed to plenty of applications, such as access control, surveillance, and automatic personal log-on for mobile devices. With the increasing amount of data, deep convolutional neural networks can achieve very high accuracy for the face verification task. Beyond exceptional performances, deep face verification models need more interpretability so that we can trust the results they generate. In this article, we propose a novel similarity metric, called explainable cosine ( xCos ), that comes with a learnable module that can be plugged into most of the verification models to provide meaningful explanations. With the help of xCos , we can see which parts of the two input faces are similar, where the model pays its attention to, and how the local similarities are weighted to form the output xCos score. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method on LFW and various competitive benchmarks, not only resulting in providing novel and desirable model interpretability for face verification but also ensuring the accuracy as plugging into existing face recognition models.
Research on service robot adoption under different service scenarios

In the future, service robots are expected to become an integral part of people's experience in the service field. However, customer adoption of service robots is still low due to factors such as mismatched service scenarios and customer perception barriers. Through three experiments, this study explored the effect of different service scenarios on service robot adoption and the underlying mechanisms. For credence service, customers had a significantly lower service robot adoption intention in the core component than in the peripheral component; however, customers' service robot adoption intentions in both the core and peripheral components for experience service were relatively high. Further, perceived uncertainty mediated the interaction effect between the service type and service component on service robot adoption intention. This study deepens our understanding of customer responses to service robots and provides actionable strategic support for service providers to implement service robots.
A Hierarchical Incentive Design Toward Motivating Participation in Coded Federated Learning

Federated Learning (FL) is a privacy-preserving collaborative learning approach that trains artificial intelligence (AI) models without revealing local datasets of the FL workers. While FL ensures the privacy of the FL workers, its performance is limited by several bottlenecks, which become significant given the increasing amounts of data generated and the size of the FL network. One of the main challenges is the straggler effects where the significant computation delays are caused by the slow FL workers. As such, Coded Federated Learning (CFL), which leverages coding techniques to introduce redundant computations to the FL server, has been proposed to reduce the computation latency. In CFL, the FL server helps to compute a subset of the partial gradients based on the composite parity data and aggregates the computed partial gradients with those received from the FL workers. In order to implement the coding schemes over the FL network, incentive mechanisms are important to allocate the resources of the FL workers and data owners efficiently in order to complete the CFL training tasks. In this paper, we consider a two-level incentive mechanism design problem. In the lower level, the data owners are allowed to support the FL training tasks of the FL workers by contributing their data. To model the dynamics of the selection of FL workers by the data owners, an evolutionary game is adopted to achieve an equilibrium solution. In the upper level, a deep learning based auction is proposed to model the competition among the model owners.
AF: An Association-Based Fusion Method for Multi-Modal Classification

Multi-modal classification (MMC) aims to integrate the complementary information from different modalities to improve classification performance. Existing MMC methods can be grouped into two categories: traditional methods and deep learning-based methods. The traditional methods often implement fusion in a low-level original space. Besides, they mostly focus on the inter-modal fusion and neglect the intra-modal fusion. Thus, the representation capacity of fused features induced by them is insufficient. The deep learning-based methods implement the fusion in a high-level feature space where the associations among features are considered, while the whole process is implicit and the fused space lacks interpretability. Based on these observations, we propose a novel interpretative association-based fusion method for MMC, named AF. In AF, both the association information and the high-order information extracted from feature space are simultaneously encoded into a new feature space to help to train an MMC model in an explicit manner. Moreover, AF is a general fusion framework, and most existing MMC methods can be embedded into it to improve their performance. Finally, the effectiveness and the generality of AF are validated on 22 datasets, four typically traditional MMC methods adopting best modality, early, late and model fusion strategies and a deep learning-based MMC method.
Flexible Data Integrity Checking With Original Data Recovery in IoT-Enabled Maritime Transportation Systems

Internet of things (IoT) has emerged as a promising technology that can be widely used in various industries to realize real-time information collection, so as to improve production efficiency and reduce running costs. By combining the technology of IoT, maritime transportation systems (MTS) can prevent vessels collision, improve the efficiency of maritime transportation and reduce the loss of revenue for ports and shipbuilders. The large amount of real-time data generated in IoT-enabled MTS can be efficiently utilized to predict the future trajectories and hotspots of vessels on the sea combined with historical data. However, the maritime traffic data in MTS cannot be effectively processed in traditional big data analysis methods, and the integrity of it needs to be checked before being used to achieve the prediction of trajectories and high-density areas of vessels. In this paper, we propose a flexible data integrity checking scheme with original data recovery in IoT-enabled MTS. In the proposed scheme, the data blocks of vessels are encoded based on the technology of erasure coding. To ensure the availability of the historical data, the existence and the integrity of the data elements stored in the cloud can be checked. Moreover, the original data blocks can be recovered efficiently if the encoded data elements have been corrupted or deleted. Security analysis demonstrates that the proposed scheme can be proved to be correct and is secure against malicious attacks. Performance analysis shows that our scheme is more efficient than the previous schemes.
OnionPIR: Response Efficient Single-Server PIR

This paper presents OnionPIR and stateful OnionPIR, two single-server PIR schemes that significantly improve the response size and computation cost over state-of-the-art schemes. OnionPIR scheme utilizes recent advances in somewhat homomorphic encryption (SHE) and carefully composes two lattice-based SHE schemes and homomorphic operations to control the noise growth and response size. Stateful OnionPIR uses a technique based on the homomorphic evaluation of copy networks. OnionPIR achieves a response overhead of just 4.2x over the insecure baseline, in contrast to the 100x response overhead of state-of-the-art schemes. Our stateful OnionPIR scheme improves upon the recent stateful PIR framework of Patel et al. and drastically reduces its response overhead by avoiding downloading the entire database in the offline stage. Compared to stateless OnionPIR, Stateful OnionPIR reduces the computation cost by 1.8~x for different database sizes.
AvatarMe<sup>++</sup>: Facial Shape and BRDF Inference With Photorealistic Rendering-Aware GANs

Over the last years, with the advent of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), many face analysis tasks have accomplished astounding performance, with applications including, but not limited to, face generation and 3D face reconstruction from a single “in-the-wild” image. Nevertheless, to the best of our knowledge, there is no method which can produce render-ready high-resolution 3D faces from “in-the-wild” images and this can be attributed to the: (a) scarcity of available data for training, and (b) lack of robust methodologies that can successfully be applied on very high-resolution data. In this paper, we introduce the first method that is able to reconstruct photorealistic render-ready 3D facial geometry and BRDF from a single “in-the-wild” image. To achieve this, we capture a large dataset of facial shape and reflectance, which we have made public. Moreover, we define a fast and photorealistic differentiable rendering methodology with accurate facial skin diffuse and specular reflection, self-occlusion and subsurface scattering approximation. With this, we train a network that disentangles the facial diffuse and specular reflectance components from a mesh and texture with baked illumination, scanned or reconstructed with a 3DMM fitting method. As we demonstrate in a series of qualitative and quantitative experiments, our method outperforms the existing arts by a significant margin and reconstructs authentic, 4K by 6K-resolution 3D faces from a single low-resolution image, that are ready to be rendered in various applications and bridge the uncanny valley.
High resolution histopathology image generation and segmentation through adversarial training

Semantic segmentation of histopathology images can be a vital aspect of computer-aided diagnosis, and deep learning models have been effectively applied to this task with varying levels of success. However, their impact has been limited due to the small size of fully annotated datasets. Data augmentation is one avenue to address this limitation. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have shown promise in this respect, but previous work has focused mostly on classification tasks applied to MR and CT images, both of which have lower resolution and scale than histopathology images. There is limited research that applies GANs as a data augmentation approach for large-scale image semantic segmentation, which requires high-quality image-mask pairs. In this work, we propose a multi-scale conditional GAN for high-resolution, large-scale histopathology image generation and segmentation. Our model consists of a pyramid of GAN structures, each responsible for generating and segmenting images at a different scale. Using semantic masks, the generative component of our model is able to synthesize histopathology images that are visually realistic. We demonstrate that these synthesized images along with their masks can be used to boost segmentation performance, especially in the semi-supervised scenario.
Detect Faces Efficiently: A Survey and Evaluations

Face detection is to search all the possible regions for faces in images and locate the faces if there are any. Many applications including face recognition, facial expression recognition, face tracking and head-pose estimation assume that both the location and the size of faces are known in the image. In recent decades, researchers have created many typical and efficient face detectors from the Viola-Jones face detector to current CNN-based ones. However, with the tremendous increase in images and videos with variations in face scale, appearance, expression, occlusion and pose, traditional face detectors are challenged to detect various "in the wild" faces. The emergence of deep learning techniques brought remarkable breakthroughs to face detection along with the price of a considerable increase in computation. This paper introduces representative deep learning-based methods and presents a deep and thorough analysis in terms of accuracy and efficiency. We further compare and discuss the popular and challenging datasets and their evaluation metrics. A comprehensive comparison of several successful deep learning-based face detectors is conducted to uncover their efficiency using two metrics: FLOPs and latency. The paper can guide to choose appropriate face detectors for different applications and also to develop more efficient and accurate detectors.
Combining the advantages of radiomic features based feature extraction and hyper parameters tuned RERNN using LOA for breast cancer classification

This paper proposes Combining the Advantages of Radiomic features based Feature Extraction and Hyper Parameters tuned Recalling Enhanced Recurrent Neural Network (RERNN) using Lizard optimization Algorithm (LOA) for Breast cancer Classification. Here, breast cancer images are taken from the real time dataset collected from VPS hospital and then the images are preprocessed using Altered Phase Preserving Dynamic Range Compression (APPDRC) to remove the noises. Then the radiomic features, such as morphologic features, grayscale statistic features and Haralick texture features have been extracted utilizing Entropy Based Local Binary Pattern (ELBP). These extracted features have presented to Recalling Enhanced Recurrent Neural Network (RERNN) classifier. Hence, Lizard optimization Algorithm (LOA) is utilized to optimize the Recalling Enhanced Recurrent Neural Network (RERNN). The proposed approach is executed in MATLAB platform, then the performance is compared with different existing approaches. This approach is applicable in real time applications for screening the abnormalities of the breast cancer at initial stage, thus, determining the proper treatment to be given to the patient for decreasing deaths caused by breast cancer. The novelty or aim of this paper is to diagnose the breast cancer in early stage by extracting the radiomic features and to classify the types (Malignant, Benign, normal) of breast cancer with high accuracy by reducing the computational time and error rate. The simulation outcomes demonstrate that the proposed FE-APPDRC-ELBP-RERNN-LOA attains the accuracy of45.75%, 37.64%, 24.64 %is higher than the existing methods.
AVLSM: Adaptive Variational Level Set Model for Image Segmentation in the Presence of Severe Intensity Inhomogeneity and High Noise

Intensity inhomogeneity and noise are two common issues in images but inevitably lead to significant challenges for image segmentation and is particularly pronounced when the two issues simultaneously appear in one image. As a result, most existing level set models yield poor performance when applied to this images. To this end, this paper proposes a novel hybrid level set model, named adaptive variational level set model (AVLSM) by integrating an adaptive scale bias field correction term and a denoising term into one level set framework, which can simultaneously correct the severe inhomogeneous intensity and denoise in segmentation. Specifically, an adaptive scale bias field correction term is first defined to correct the severe inhomogeneous intensity by adaptively adjusting the scale according to the degree of intensity inhomogeneity while segmentation. More importantly, the proposed adaptive scale truncation function in the term is model-agnostic, which can be applied to most off-the-shelf models and improves their performance for image segmentation with severe intensity inhomogeneity. Then, a denoising energy term is constructed based on the variational model, which can remove not only common additive noise but also multiplicative noise often occurred in medical image during segmentation. Finally, by integrating the two proposed energy terms into a variational level set framework, the AVLSM is proposed. The experimental results on synthetic and real images demonstrate the superiority of AVLSM over most state-of-the-art level set models in terms of accuracy, robustness and running time.
Reducing Label Effort: Self-Supervised meets Active Learning

Active learning is a paradigm aimed at reducing the annotation effort by training the model on actively selected informative and/or representative samples. Another paradigm to reduce the annotation effort is self-training that learns from a large amount of unlabeled data in an unsupervised way and fine-tunes on few labeled samples. Recent developments in self-training have achieved very impressive results rivaling supervised learning on some datasets. The current work focuses on whether the two paradigms can benefit from each other. We studied object recognition datasets including CIFAR10, CIFAR100 and Tiny ImageNet with several labeling budgets for the evaluations. Our experiments reveal that self-training is remarkably more efficient than active learning at reducing the labeling effort, that for a low labeling budget, active learning offers no benefit to self-training, and finally that the combination of active learning and self-training is fruitful when the labeling budget is high. The performance gap between active learning trained either with self-training or from scratch diminishes as we approach to the point where almost half of the dataset is labeled.
Prime+Scope

Modern processors expose software to information leakage through shared microarchitectural state. One of the most severe leakage channels is cache contention, exploited by attacks referred to as PRIME+PROBE, which can infer fine-grained memory access patterns while placing only limited assumptions on attacker capabilities.
Doubly Efficient Interactive Proofs for General Arithmetic Circuits with Linear Prover Time

We propose a new doubly efficient interactive proof protocol for general arithmetic circuits. The protocol generalizes the interactive proof for layered circuits proposed by Goldwasser, Kalai and Rothblum to arbitrary circuits, while preserving the optimal prover complexity that is strictly linear to the size of the circuits. The proof size remains succinct for low depth circuits and the verifier time is sublinear for structured circuits. We then construct a new zero knowledge argument scheme for general arithmetic circuits using our new interactive proof protocol together with polynomial commitments. Our key technique is a new sumcheck equation that reduces a claim about the output of one layer to claims about its input only, instead of claims about all the layers above which inevitably incurs an overhead proportional to the depth of the circuit. We developed efficient algorithms for the prover to run this sumcheck protocol and to combine multiple claims back into one in linear time in the size of the circuit. Not only does our new protocol achieve optimal prover complexity asymptotically, but it is also efficient in practice. Our experiments show that it only takes 0.3 seconds to generate the proof for a circuit with more than 600,000 gates, which is 13 times faster than the original interactive proof protocol on the corresponding layered circuit. The proof size is 208 kilobytes and the verifier time is 66 milliseconds. Our implementation can take general arithmetic circuits directly, without transforming them to layered circuits with a high overhead on the size of the circuit.