Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Towards Making the Most of BERT in Neural Machine Translation

GPT-2 and BERT demonstrate the effectiveness of using pre-trained language models (LMs) on various natural language processing tasks. However, LM fine-tuning often suffers from catastrophic forgetting when applied to resource-rich tasks. In this work, we introduce a concerted training framework (CTnmt) that is the key to integrate the pre-trained LMs to neural machine translation (NMT). Our proposed CTnmt} consists of three techniques: a) asymptotic distillation to ensure that the NMT model can retain the previous pre-trained knowledge; b) a dynamic switching gate to avoid catastrophic forgetting of pre-trained knowledge; and c) a strategy to adjust the learning paces according to a scheduled policy. Our experiments in machine translation show CTnmt gains of up to 3 BLEU score on the WMT14 English-German language pair which even surpasses the previous state-of-the-art pre-training aided NMT by 1.4 BLEU score. While for the large WMT14 English-French task with 40 millions of sentence-pairs, our base model still significantly improves upon the state-of-the-art Transformer big model by more than 1 BLEU score.
Progressive Feature Polishing Network for Salient Object Detection

Feature matters for salient object detection. Existing methods mainly focus on designing a sophisticated structure to incorporate multi-level features and filter out cluttered features. We present Progressive Feature Polishing Network (PFPN), a simple yet effective framework to progressively polish the multi-level features to be more accurate and representative. By employing multiple Feature Polishing Modules (FPMs) in a recurrent manner, our approach is able to detect salient objects with fine details without any post-processing. A FPM parallelly updates the features of each level by directly incorporating all higher level context information. Moreover, it can keep the dimensions and hierarchical structures of the feature maps, which makes it flexible to be integrated with any CNN-based models. Empirical experiments show that our results are monotonically getting better with increasing number of FPMs. Without bells and whistles, PFPN outperforms the state-of-the-art methods significantly on five benchmark datasets under various evaluation metrics. Our code is available at: https://github.com/chenquan-cq/PFPN.
A Secure AI-Driven Architecture for Automated Insurance Systems: Fraud Detection and Risk Measurement

The private insurance sector is recognized as one of the fastest-growing industries. This rapid growth has fueled incredible transformations over the past decade. Nowadays, there exist insurance products for most high-value assets such as vehicles, jewellery, health/life, and homes. Insurance companies are at the forefront in adopting cutting-edge operations, processes, and mathematical models to maximize profit whilst servicing their customers claims. Traditional methods that are exclusively based on human-in-the-loop models are very time-consuming and inaccurate. In this paper, we develop a secure and automated insurance system framework that reduces human interaction, secures the insurance activities, alerts and informs about risky customers, detects fraudulent claims, and reduces monetary loss for the insurance sector. After presenting the blockchain-based framework to enable secure transactions and data sharing among different interacting agents within the insurance network, we propose to employ the extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) machine learning algorithm for the aforementioned insurance services and compare its performances with those of other state-of-the-art algorithms. The obtained results reveal that, when applied to an auto insurance dataset, the XGboost achieves high performance gains compared to other existing learning algorithms. For instance, it reaches 7% higher accuracy compared to decision tree models when detecting fraudulent claims. The obtained results reveal that, when applied to an auto insurance dataset, the XGboost achieves high performance gains compared to other existing learning algorithms. For instance, it reaches 7% higher accuracy compared to decision tree models when detecting fraudulent claims. Furthermore, we propose an online learning solution to automatically deal with real-time updates of the insurance network and we show that it outperforms another online state-of-the-art algorithm. Finally, we combine the developed machine learning modules with the hyperledger fabric composer to implement and emulate the artificial intelligence and blockchain-based framework.
LFNet: Light Field Fusion Network for Salient Object Detection

In this work, we propose a novel light field fusion network-LFNet, a CNNs-based light field saliency model using 4D light field data containing abundant spatial and contextual information. The proposed method can reliably locate and identify salient objects even in a complex scene. Our LFNet contains a light field refinement module (LFRM) and a light field integration module (LFIM) which can fully refine and integrate focusness, depths and objectness cues from light field image. The LFRM learns the light field residual between light field and RGB images for refining features with useful light field cues, and then the LFIM weights each refined light field feature and learns spatial correlation between them to predict saliency maps. Our method can take full advantage of light field information and achieve excellent performance especially in complex scenes, e.g., similar foreground and background, multiple or transparent objects and low-contrast environment. Experiments show our method outperforms the state-of-the-art 2D, 3D and 4D methods across three light field datasets.
Adaptive quantum approximate optimization algorithm for solving combinatorial problems on a quantum computer

The quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA) is a hybrid variational quantum-classical algorithm that solves combinatorial optimization problems. While there is evidence suggesting that the fixed form of the standard QAOA Ansatz is not optimal, there is no systematic approach for finding better Ans\"atze. We address this problem by developing an iterative version of QAOA that is problem tailored, and which can also be adapted to specific hardware constraints. We simulate the algorithm on a class of Max-Cut graph problems and show that it converges much faster than the standard QAOA, while simultaneously reducing the required number of CNOT gates and optimization parameters. We provide evidence that this speedup is connected to the concept of shortcuts to adiabaticity.
TextFuseNet: Scene Text Detection with Richer Fused Features

Arbitrary shape text detection in natural scenes is an extremely challenging task. Unlike existing text detection approaches that only perceive texts based on limited feature representations, we propose a novel framework, namely TextFuseNet, to exploit the use of richer features fused for text detection. More specifically, we propose to perceive texts from three levels of feature representations, i.e., character-, word- and global-level, and then introduce a novel text representation fusion technique to help achieve robust arbitrary text detection. The multi-level feature representation can adequately describe texts by dissecting them into individual characters while still maintaining their general semantics. TextFuseNet then collects and merges the texts’ features from different levels using a multi-path fusion architecture which can effectively align and fuse different representations. In practice, our proposed TextFuseNet can learn a more adequate description of arbitrary shapes texts, suppressing false positives and producing more accurate detection results. Our proposed framework can also be trained with weak supervision for those datasets that lack character-level annotations. Experiments on several datasets show that the proposed TextFuseNet achieves state-of-the-art performance. Specifically, we achieve an F-measure of 94.3% on ICDAR2013, 92.1% on ICDAR2015, 87.1% on Total-Text and 86.6% on CTW-1500, respectively.
ECPE-2D: Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction based on Joint Two-Dimensional Representation, Interaction and Prediction

In recent years, a new interesting task, called emotion-cause pair extraction (ECPE), has emerged in the area of text emotion analysis.It aims at extracting the potential pairs of emotions and their corresponding causes in a document.To solve this task, the existing research employed a two-step framework, which first extracts individual emotion set and cause set, and then pair the corresponding emotions and causes.However, such a pipeline of two steps contains some inherent flaws: 1) the modeling does not aim at extracting the final emotion-cause pair directly; 2) the errors from the first step will affect the performance of the second step.To address these shortcomings, in this paper we propose a new end-toend approach, called ECPE-Two-Dimensional (ECPE-2D), to represent the emotion-cause pairs by a 2D representation scheme.A 2D transformer module and two variants, windowconstrained and cross-road 2D transformers, are further proposed to model the interactions of different emotion-cause pairs.The 2D representation, interaction, and prediction are integrated into a joint framework.In addition to the advantages of joint modeling, the experimental results on the benchmark emotion cause corpus show that our approach improves the F1 score of the state-of-the-art from 61.28% to 68.89%.
A survey of empirical performance evaluation of permissioned blockchain platforms: Challenges and opportunities

Blockchain-based platforms, particularly those based on permissioned blockchain, are increasingly popular in a broad range of settings. In addition to security and privacy concerns, organizations seeking to implement such platforms also need to consider performance, especially in latency- or delay-sensitive applications. Performance is generally less studied in comparison to security and privacy, and therefore in this paper we survey existing empirical performance evaluations of different permissioned blockchain platforms published between 2015 and 2019, using a comparative framework. The framework comprises ten criteria. We then conclude the paper with a number of potential future research directions.
Entanglement Generation in Superconducting Qubits Using Holonomic Operations

We investigate a non-adiabatic holonomic operation that enables us to entangle two fixed-frequency superconducting transmon qubits attached to a common bus resonator. Two coherent microwave tones are applied simultaneously to the two qubits and drive transitions between the first excited resonator state and the second excited state of each qubit. The cyclic evolution within this effective 3-level $\Lambda$-system gives rise to a holonomic operation entangling the two qubits. Two-qubit states with 95\% fidelity, limited mainly by charge-noise of the current device, are created within $213~\rm{ns}$. This scheme is a step toward implementing a SWAP-type gate directly in an all-microwave controlled hardware platform. By extending the available set of two-qubit operations in the fixed-frequency qubit architecture, the proposed scheme may find applications in near-term quantum applications using variational algorithms to efficiently create problem-specific trial states.
MMGCN: Multimodal Fusion via Deep Graph Convolution Network for Emotion Recognition in Conversation

Emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) is a crucial component in affective dialogue systems, which helps the system understand users' emotions and generate empathetic responses.However, most works focus on modeling speaker and contextual information primarily on the textual modality or simply leveraging multimodal information through feature concatenation.In order to explore a more effective way of utilizing both multimodal and long-distance contextual information, we propose a new model based on multimodal fused graph convolutional network, MMGCN, in this work.MMGCN can not only make use of multimodal dependencies effectively, but also leverage speaker information to model inter-speaker and intra-speaker dependency.We evaluate our proposed model on two public benchmark datasets, IEMOCAP and MELD, and the results prove the effectiveness of MMGCN, which outperforms other SOTA methods by a significant margin under the multimodal conversation setting.
Knowledgeable Prompt-tuning: Incorporating Knowledge into Prompt Verbalizer for Text Classification

Tuning pre-trained language models (PLMs) with task-specific prompts has been a promising approach for text classification.Particularly, previous studies suggest that prompttuning has remarkable superiority in the lowdata scenario over the generic fine-tuning methods with extra classifiers.The core idea of prompt-tuning is to insert text pieces, i.e., template, to the input and transform a classification problem into a masked language modeling problem, where a crucial step is to construct a projection, i.e., verbalizer, between a label space and a label word space.A verbalizer is usually handcrafted or searched by gradient descent, which may lack coverage and bring considerable bias and high variances to the results.In this work, we focus on incorporating external knowledge into the verbalizer, forming a knowledgeable prompt-tuning (KPT), to improve and stabilize prompt-tuning.Specifically, we expand the label word space of the verbalizer using external knowledge bases (KBs) and refine the expanded label word space with the PLM itself before predicting with the expanded label word space.Extensive experiments on zero and few-shot text classification tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of knowledgeable prompt-tuning.
Blockchain Technology for Intelligent Transportation Systems: A Systematic Literature Review

The use of Blockchain technology has recently become widespread. It has emerged as an essential tool in various academic and industrial fields, such as healthcare, transportation, finance, cybersecurity, and supply chain management. It is regarded as a decentralized, trustworthy, secure, transparent, and immutable solution that innovates data sharing and management. This survey aims to provide a systematic review of Blockchain application to intelligent transportation systems in general and the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) in particular. The survey is divided into four main parts. First, the Blockchain technology including its opportunities, relative taxonomies, and applications is introduced; basic cryptography is also discussed. Next, the evolution of Blockchain is presented, starting from the primary phase of pre-Bitcoin (fundamentally characterized by classic cryptography systems), followed by the Blockchain 1.0 phase, (characterized by Bitcoin implementation and common consensus protocols), and finally, the Blockchain 2.0 phase (characterized by the implementation of smart contracts, Ethereum, and Hyperledger). We compared and identified the strengths and limitations of each of these implementations. Then, the state of the art of Blockchain-based IoV solutions (BIoV) is explored by referring to a large and trusted source database from the Scopus data bank. For a well-structured and clear discussion, the reviewed literature is classified according to the research direction and implemented IoV layer. Useful tables, statistics, and analysis are also presented. Finally, the open problems and future directions in BIoV research are summarized.
Rain Removal in Traffic Surveillance: Does it Matter?

Varying weather conditions, including rainfall and snowfall, are generally regarded as a challenge for computer vision algorithms. One proposed solution to the challenges induced by rain and snowfall is to artificially remove the rain from images or video using rain removal algorithms. It is the promise of these algorithms that the rain-removed image frames will improve the performance of subsequent segmentation and tracking algorithms. However, rain removal algorithms are typically evaluated on their ability to remove synthetic rain on a small subset of images. Currently, their behavior is unknown on real-world videos when integrated with a typical computer vision pipeline. In this paper, we review the existing rain removal algorithms and propose a new dataset that consists of 22 traffic surveillance sequences under a broad variety of weather conditions that all include either rain or snowfall. We propose a new evaluation protocol that evaluates the rain removal algorithms on their ability to improve the performance of subsequent segmentation, instance segmentation, and feature tracking algorithms under rain and snow. If successful, the de-rained frames of a rain removal algorithm should improve segmentation performance and increase the number of accurately tracked features. The results show that a recent single-frame-based rain removal algorithm increases the segmentation performance by 19.7% on our proposed dataset, but it eventually decreases the feature tracking performance and showed mixed results with recent instance segmentation methods. However, the best video-based rain removal algorithm improves the feature tracking accuracy by 7.72%.
Trainable Undersampling for Class-Imbalance Learning

Undersampling has been widely used in the class-imbalance learning area. The main deficiency of most existing undersampling methods is that their data sampling strategies are heuristic-based and independent of the used classifier and evaluation metric. Thus, they may discard informative instances for the classifier during the data sampling. In this work, we propose a meta-learning method built on the undersampling to address this issue. The key idea of this method is to parametrize the data sampler and train it to optimize the classification performance over the evaluation metric. We solve the non-differentiable optimization problem for training the data sampler via reinforcement learning. By incorporating evaluation metric optimization into the data sampling process, the proposed method can learn which instance should be discarded for the given classifier and evaluation metric. In addition, as a data level operation, this method can be easily applied to arbitrary evaluation metric and classifier, including non-parametric ones (e.g., C4.5 and KNN). Experimental results on both synthetic and realistic datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
The use of digital pathology and image analysis in clinical trials

Abstract Digital pathology and image analysis potentially provide greater accuracy, reproducibility and standardisation of pathology‐based trial entry criteria and endpoints, alongside extracting new insights from both existing and novel features. Image analysis has great potential to identify, extract and quantify features in greater detail in comparison to pathologist assessment, which may produce improved prediction models or perform tasks beyond manual capability. In this article, we provide an overview of the utility of such technologies in clinical trials and provide a discussion of the potential applications, current challenges, limitations and remaining unanswered questions that require addressing prior to routine adoption in such studies. We reiterate the value of central review of pathology in clinical trials, and discuss inherent logistical, cost and performance advantages of using a digital approach. The current and emerging regulatory landscape is outlined. The role of digital platforms and remote learning to improve the training and performance of clinical trial pathologists is discussed. The impact of image analysis on quantitative tissue morphometrics in key areas such as standardisation of immunohistochemical stain interpretation, assessment of tumour cellularity prior to molecular analytical applications and the assessment of novel histological features is described. The standardisation of digital image production, establishment of criteria for digital pathology use in pre‐clinical and clinical studies, establishment of performance criteria for image analysis algorithms and liaison with regulatory bodies to facilitate incorporation of image analysis applications into clinical practice are key issues to be addressed to improve digital pathology incorporation into clinical trials.
Robust Learning at Noisy Labeled Medical Images: Applied to Skin Lesion Classification

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved great success in a wide variety of medical image analysis tasks. However, these achievements indispensably rely on the accurately-annotated datasets. If with the noisy-labeled images, the training procedure will immediately encounter difficulties, leading to a suboptimal classifier. This problem is even more crucial in the medical field, given that the annotation quality requires great expertise. In this paper, we propose an effective iterative learning framework for noisy-labeled medical image classification, to combat the lacking of high quality annotated medical data. Specifically, an online uncertainty sample mining method is proposed to eliminate the disturbance from noisy-labeled images. Next, we design a sample re-weighting strategy to preserve the usefulness of correctly-labeled hard samples. Our proposed method is validated on skin lesion classification task, and achieved very promising results.
Improving the Robustness of Question Answering Systems to Question Paraphrasing

Despite the advancement of question answering (QA) systems and rapid improvements on held-out test sets, their generalizability is a topic of concern.We explore the robustness of QA models to question paraphrasing by creating two test sets consisting of paraphrased SQuAD questions.Paraphrased questions from the first test set are very similar to the original questions designed to test QA models' over-sensitivity, while questions from the second test set are paraphrased using context words near an incorrect answer candidate in an attempt to confuse QA models.We show that both paraphrased test sets lead to significant decrease in performance on multiple state-of-the-art QA models.Using a neural paraphrasing model trained to generate multiple paraphrased questions for a given source question and a set of paraphrase suggestions, we propose a data augmentation approach that requires no human intervention to re-train the models for improved robustness to question paraphrasing.
Multiple Kernel Clustering With Neighbor-Kernel Subspace Segmentation

Multiple kernel clustering (MKC) has been intensively studied during the last few decades. Even though they demonstrate promising clustering performance in various applications, existing MKC algorithms do not sufficiently consider the intrinsic neighborhood structure among base kernels, which could adversely affect the clustering performance. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective neighbor-kernel-based MKC algorithm to address this issue. Specifically, we first define a neighbor kernel, which can be utilized to preserve the block diagonal structure and strengthen the robustness against noise and outliers among base kernels. After that, we linearly combine these base neighbor kernels to extract a consensus affinity matrix through an exact-rank-constrained subspace segmentation. The naturally possessed block diagonal structure of neighbor kernels better serves the subsequent subspace segmentation, and in turn, the extracted shared structure is further refined through subspace segmentation based on the combined neighbor kernels. In this manner, the above two learning processes can be seamlessly coupled and negotiate with each other to achieve better clustering. Furthermore, we carefully design an efficient iterative optimization algorithm with proven convergence to address the resultant optimization problem. As a by-product, we reveal an interesting insight into the exact-rank constraint in ridge regression by careful theoretical analysis: it back-projects the solution of the unconstrained counterpart to its principal components. Comprehensive experiments have been conducted on several benchmark data sets, and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.