Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
CSDS: End-to-End Aerial Scenes Classification With Depthwise Separable Convolution and an Attention Mechanism

Compared with natural scenes, aerial scenes are usually composed of numerous objects densely distributed within the aerial view, and thus more key local semantic features are needed to describe them.However, when existing CNNs are used for remote sensing image classification, they typically focus on the global semantic features of the image, and especially for deep models, shallow and intermediate features are easily lost.This paper proposes a channel-spatial attention mechanism based on a depthwise separable convolution (CSDS) network for aerial scene classification to solve these challenges.First, we construct a depthwise separable convolution (DS-Conv) and pyramid residual connection architecture.DS-Conv extracts features from each channel and merges them, effectively reducing the number of necessary calculations, and the pyramid residual connections connect the features from multiple layers and create associations.Then, the channel-spatial attention algorithm causes the model to obtain more effective features in the channel and spatial domains.Finally, an improved cross-entropy loss function is used to reduce the impact of similar categories on backpropagation.Comparative experiments on three public data sets show that the CSDS network can achieve results comparable to those of other state-of-the-art methods.In addition, visualization of feature extraction results by the Grad-CAM algorithm and ablation experiments for each module reflect the powerful feature learning and representation capabilities of the proposed CSDS network.
A High-Effective Implementation of Ship Detector for SAR Images

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) can be applied to observe the sea surface and detect ship targets. Images obtained by SAR can be hard to read because of the denseness of ships, extremely unbalanced foreground–background, and small target size. The existing objective detection approaches achieve superior performance by sacrificing detection speed and flexibility on computational resource due to redundant model parameters. These features happens to be extremely crucial for SAR ship detection in real-time scenarios. To effectively tradeoff the issue on both time and space complexity, we propose a novel objective detection method tailored for SAR ship detection problem. We examine the effectiveness of our method on two open datasets: high resolution SAR images dataset (HRSID) and large-scale SAR ship detection dataset-v1.0 (LS-SSDD-V1.0). The results show better performance over the state-of-the-art You Only Look Once version 4 (YOLOv4) framework in terms of accuracy, efficiency, and model complexity.
IREM: High-Resolution Magnetic Resonance Image Reconstruction via Implicit Neural Representation

For collecting high-quality high-resolution (HR) MR image, we propose a novel image reconstruction network named IREM, which is trained on multiple low-resolution (LR) MR images and achieve an arbitrary up-sampling rate for HR image reconstruction. In this work, we suppose the desired HR image as an implicit continuous function of the 3D image spatial coordinate, and the thick-slice LR images as several sparse discrete samplings of this function. Then the super-resolution (SR) task is to learn the continuous volumetric function from a limited observation using a fully-connected neural network combined with Fourier feature positional encoding. By simply minimizing the error between the network prediction and the acquired LR image intensity across each imaging plane, IREM is trained to represent a continuous model of the observed tissue anatomy. Experimental results indicate that IREM succeeds in representing high-frequency image features, and in real scene data collection, IREM reduces scan time and achieves high-quality high-resolution MR imaging in terms of SNR and local image detail.
Structure-Preserving Multi-domain Stain Color Augmentation Using Style-Transfer with Disentangled Representations

In digital pathology, different staining procedures and scanners cause substantial color variations in whole-slide images (WSIs), especially across different laboratories. These color shifts result in a poor generalization of deep learning-based methods from the training domain to external pathology data. To increase test performance, stain normalization techniques are used to reduce the variance between training and test domain. Alternatively, color augmentation can be applied during training leading to a more robust model without the extra step of color normalization at test time. We propose a novel color augmentation technique, HistAuGAN, that can simulate a wide variety of realistic histology stain colors, thus making neural networks stain-invariant when applied during training. Based on a generative adversarial network (GAN) for image-to-image translation, our model disentangles the content of the image, i.e., the morphological tissue structure, from the stain color attributes. It can be trained on multiple domains and, therefore, learns to cover different stain colors as well as other domain-specific variations introduced in the slide preparation and imaging process. We demonstrate that HistAuGAN outperforms conventional color augmentation techniques on a classification task on the publicly available dataset Camelyon17 and show that it is able to mitigate present batch effects (Code and model weights are available at https://github.com/sophiajw/HistAuGAN.).
Achieving on-Mobile Real-Time Super-Resolution with Neural Architecture and Pruning Search

Though recent years have witnessed remarkable progress in single image super-resolution (SISR) tasks with the prosperous development of deep neural networks (DNNs), the deep learning methods are confronted with the computation and memory consumption issues in practice, especially for resource-limited platforms such as mobile devices. To overcome the challenge and facilitate the real-time deployment of SISR tasks on mobile, we combine neural architecture search with pruning search and propose an automatic search framework that derives sparse super-resolution (SR) models with high image quality while satisfying the real-time inference requirement. To decrease the search cost, we leverage the weight sharing strategy by introducing a supernet and decouple the search problem into three stages, including supernet construction, compiler-aware architecture and pruning search, and compiler-aware pruning ratio search. With the proposed framework, we are the first to achieve real-time SR inference (with only tens of milliseconds per frame) for implementing 720p resolution with competitive image quality (in terms of PSNR and SSIM) on mobile platforms (Samsung Galaxy S20).
IRVINE: A Design Study on Analyzing Correlation Patterns of Electrical Engines

In this design study, we present IRVINE, a Visual Analytics (VA) system, which facilitates the analysis of acoustic data to detect and understand previously unknown errors in the manufacturing of electrical engines. In serial manufacturing processes, signatures from acoustic data provide valuable information on how the relationship between multiple produced engines serves to detect and understand previously unknown errors. To analyze such signatures, IRVINE leverages interactive clustering and data labeling techniques, allowing users to analyze clusters of engines with similar signatures, drill down to groups of engines, and select an engine of interest. Furthermore, IRVINE allows to assign labels to engines and clusters and annotate the cause of an error in the acoustic raw measurement of an engine. Since labels and annotations represent valuable knowledge, they are conserved in a knowledge database to be available for other stakeholders. We contribute a design study, where we developed IRVINE in four main iterations with engineers from a company in the automotive sector. To validate IRVINE, we conducted a field study with six domain experts. Our results suggest a high usability and usefulness of IRVINE as part of the improvement of a real-world manufacturing process. Specifically, with IRVINE domain experts were able to label and annotate produced electrical engines more than 30% faster.
Federated Contrastive Learning for Volumetric Medical Image Segmentation

Supervised deep learning needs a large amount of labeled data to achieve high performance. However, in medical imaging analysis, each site may only have a limited amount of data and labels, which makes learning ineffective. Federated learning (FL) can help in this regard by learning a shared model while keeping training data local for privacy. Traditional FL requires fully-labeled data for training, which is inconvenient or sometimes infeasible to obtain due to high labeling cost and the requirement of expertise. Contrastive learning (CL), as a self-supervised learning approach, can effectively learn from unlabeled data to pre-train a neural network encoder, followed by fine-tuning for downstream tasks with limited annotations. However, when adopting CL in FL, the limited data diversity on each client makes federated contrastive learning (FCL) ineffective. In this work, we propose an FCL framework for volumetric medical image segmentation with limited annotations. More specifically, we exchange the features in the FCL pre-training process such that diverse contrastive data are provided to each site for effective local CL while keeping raw data private. Based on the exchanged features, global structural matching further leverages the structural similarity to align local features to the remote ones such that a unified feature space can be learned among different sites. Experiments on a cardiac MRI dataset show the proposed framework substantially improves the segmentation performance compared with state-of-the-art techniques.
Cost-Sensitive Model Evaluation Approach for Financial Fraud Detection System

Global statistics shows financial institutions lose millions of dollars due to transaction frauds every year. Fraud detection involving manual observations becomes impossible with millions of electronic transactions (e-tail) being done every minute. Fraud detection has been defined as a problem with huge scope of research, many academic researchers have designed and developed solutions for financial fraud detection but most of the work and their application gets scrapped by the financial institutions. The major reason observed and highlighted by many industry experts has been the lack of understanding about the working of the fraud systems and the cost calculation attached to each transaction. This article discusses the various machine learning algorithm used for fraud detection by the financial institutions along with the data processing techniques, and aims at providing an insight on the working of a financial fraud protection system, the process of raising a fraud flag, the cost components attached to each transaction and the impact of each misclassification made by the machine learning model.
A probabilistic framework for integrating sentence-level semantics via BERT into pseudo-relevance feedback

Existing pseudo-relevance feedback (PRF) methods often divide an original query into individual terms for processing and select expansion terms based on the term frequency, proximity, position, etc. This process may lose some contextual semantic information from the original query. In this work, based on the classic Rocchio model, we propose a probabilistic framework that incorporates sentence-level semantics via Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) into PRF. First, we obtain the importance of terms at the term level. Then, we use BERT to interactively encode the query and sentences in the feedback document to acquire the semantic similarity score of a sentence and the query. Next, the semantic scores of different sentences are summed as the term score at the sentence level. Finally, we balance the term-level and sentence-level weights by adjusting factors and combine the terms with the top-k scores to form a new query for the next-round processing. We apply this method to three Rocchio-based models (Rocchio, PRoc2, and KRoc). A series of experiments are conducted based on six official TREC data sets. Various evaluation indicators suggest that the improved models achieve a significant improvement over the corresponding baseline models. Our proposed models provide a promising avenue for incorporating sentence-level semantics into PRF, which is feasible and robust. Through comparison and analysis of a case study, expansion terms obtained from the proposed models are shown to be more semantically consistent with the query.
Parallel Multi-Resolution Fusion Network for Image Inpainting

Conventional deep image inpainting methods are based on auto-encoder architecture, in which the spatial details of images will be lost in the down-sampling process, leading to the degradation of generated results. Also, the structure information in deep layers and texture information in shallow layers of the auto-encoder architecture can not be well integrated. Differing from the conventional image inpainting architecture, we design a parallel multi-resolution inpainting network with multi-resolution partial convolution, in which low-resolution branches focus on the global structure while high-resolution branches focus on the local texture details. All these high- and low-resolution streams are in parallel and fused repeatedly with multi-resolution masked representation fusion so that the reconstructed images are semantically robust and textually plausible. Experimental results show that our method can effectively fuse structure and texture information, producing more realistic results than state-of-the-art methods.
Normalization Matters in Weakly Supervised Object Localization

Weakly-supervised object localization (WSOL) enables finding an object using a dataset without any localization information. By simply training a classification model using only image-level annotations, the feature map of the model can be utilized as a score map for localization. In spite of many WSOL methods proposing novel strategies, there has not been any de facto standard about how to normalize the class activation map (CAM). Consequently, many WSOL methods have failed to fully exploit their own capacity because of the misuse of a normalization method. In this paper, we review many existing normalization methods and point out that they should be used according to the property of the given dataset. Additionally, we propose a new normalization method which substantially enhances the performance of any CAM-based WSOL methods. Using the proposed normalization method, we provide a comprehensive evaluation over three datasets (CUB, ImageNet and OpenImages) on three different architectures and observe significant performance gains over the conventional min-max normalization method in all the evaluated cases (See Fig. 1).
Weapons Detection for Security and Video Surveillance Using CNN and YOLO-V5s

In recent years, the number of Gun-related incidents has crossed over 250,000 per year and over 85% of the existing 1 billion firearms are in civilian hands, manual monitoring has not proven effective in detecting firearms. which is why an automated weapon detection system is needed. Various automated convolutional neural networks (CNN) weapon detection systems have been proposed in the past to generate good results. However, These techniques have high computation overhead and are slow to provide real-time detection which is essential for the weapon detection system. These models have a high rate of false negatives because they often fail to detect the guns due to the low quality and visibility issues of surveillance videos. This research work aims to minimize the rate of false negatives and false positives in weapon detection while keeping the speed of detection as a key parameter. The proposed framework is based on You Only Look Once (YOLO) and Area of Interest (AOI). Initially, the models take pre-processed frames where the background is removed by the use of the Gaussian blur algorithm. The proposed architecture will be assessed through various performance parameters such as False Negative, False Positive, precision, recall rate, and F1 score. The results of this research work make it clear that due to YOLO-v5s high recall rate and speed of detection are achieved. Speed reached 0.010 s per frame compared to the 0.17 s of the Faster R-CNN. It is promising to be used in the field of security and weapon detection.
Towards a Robust Deep Neural Network against Adversarial Texts: A Survey

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved remarkable success in various tasks (e.g., image classification, speech recognition, and natural language processing (NLP)). However, researchers have demonstrated that DNN-based models are vulnerable to adversarial examples, which cause erroneous predictions by adding imperceptible perturbations into legitimate inputs. Recently, studies have revealed adversarial examples in the text domain, which could effectively evade various DNN-based text analyzers and further bring the threats of the proliferation of disinformation. In this paper, we give a comprehensive survey on the existing studies of adversarial techniques for generating adversarial texts written by both English and Chinese characters and the corresponding defense methods. More importantly, we hope that our work could inspire future studies to develop more robust DNN-based text analyzers against known and unknown adversarial techniques. We classify the existing adversarial techniques for crafting adversarial texts based on the perturbation units, helping to better understand the generation of adversarial texts and build robust models for defense. In presenting the taxonomy of adversarial attacks and defenses in the text domain, we introduce the adversarial techniques from the perspective of different NLP tasks. Finally, we discuss the existing challenges of ad-versarial attacks and defenses in texts and present the future research directions in this emerging and challenging field.
Exploring Geometry-aware Contrast and Clustering Harmonization for Self-supervised 3D Object Detection

Current 3D object detection paradigms highly rely on extensive annotation efforts, which makes them not practical in many real-world industrial applications. Inspired by that a human driver can keep accumulating experiences from self-exploring the roads without any tutor’s guidance, we first step forwards to explore a simple yet effective self-supervised learning framework tailored for LiDAR-based 3D object detection. Although the self-supervised pipeline has achieved great success in 2D domain, the characteristic challenges (e.g., complex geometry structure and various 3D object views) encountered in the 3D domain hinder the direct adoption of existing techniques that often contrast the 2D augmented data or cluster single-view features. Here we present a novel self-supervised 3D Object detection framework that seamlessly integrates the geometry-aware contrast and clustering harmonization to lift the unsupervised 3D representation learning, named GCC-3D. First, GCC-3D introduces a Geometric-Aware Contrastive objective to learn spatial-sensitive local structure representation. This objective enforces the spatially close voxels to have high feature similarity. Second, a Pseudo-Instance Clustering harmonization mechanism is proposed to encourage that different views of pseudo-instances should have consistent similarities to clustering prototype centers. This module endows our model semantic discriminative capacity. Extensive experiments demonstrate our GCC-3D achieves significant performance improvement on data-efficient 3D object detection benchmarks (nuScenes and Waymo). Moreover, our GCC-3D framework can achieve state-of-the art performances on all popular 3D object detection benchmarks.
Provable Limitations of Acquiring Meaning from Ungrounded Form: What Will Future Language Models Understand?

Abstract Language models trained on billions of tokens have recently led to unprecedented results on many NLP tasks. This success raises the question of whether, in principle, a system can ever “understand” raw text without access to some form of grounding. We formally investigate the abilities of ungrounded systems to acquire meaning. Our analysis focuses on the role of “assertions”: textual contexts that provide indirect clues about the underlying semantics. We study whether assertions enable a system to emulate representations preserving semantic relations like equivalence. We find that assertions enable semantic emulation of languages that satisfy a strong notion of semantic transparency. However, for classes of languages where the same expression can take different values in different contexts, we show that emulation can become uncomputable. Finally, we discuss differences between our formal model and natural language, exploring how our results generalize to a modal setting and other semantic relations. Together, our results suggest that assertions in code or language do not provide sufficient signal to fully emulate semantic representations. We formalize ways in which ungrounded language models appear to be fundamentally limited in their ability to “understand”.
Probing tripartite entanglement and coherence dynamics in pure and mixed independent classical environments

The type of environments to which a quantum system is exposed has a significant impact on the quantum system’s entanglement and coherence protection. In this regard, we investigate the time evolution of tripartite entanglement and coherence in GHZ-like state when subject to independent classical environments. In particular, we focus on local environments with the same and mixed disorders, resulting in various Gaussian noisy conditions, namely pure power-law noise, pure fractional Gaussian noise, power-law noise maximized, and fractional Gaussian noise maximized configurations. We show that the environments with mixed disorders are more detrimental than those having single kind of disorder for entanglement and coherence preservation using time-dependent quantum negativity, entanglement witnesses, purity, and decoherence metrics. Besides, there is no ultimate solution for avoiding the negative consequences of fractional Gaussian noise-assisted classical environments in both pure and mixed noise conditions. Not only the noise, but also the number of qubits driven by a certain noise, has been discovered to strongly influence the amount, nature of the decay, and preservation intervals. We also show that the GHZ-like states can be modelled in classical channels driven by pure power-law noise for extended quantum correlations, coherence, and quantum information preservation. In addition, we compare the entanglement measurement efficiency between entanglement witness and negativity measures.