Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
BLOCK-DBSCAN: Fast clustering for large scale data

We analyze the drawbacks of DBSCAN and its variants, and find the grid technique, which is used in Fast-DBSCAN and ρ-approximate DBSCAN, is almost useless in high dimensional data space. Because it usually yields considerable redundant distance computations. In order to tame these problems, two techniques are proposed: one is to use ϵ2-norm ball to identify Inner Core Blocks within which all points are core points, it has higher efficiency than grid technique for finding more core points at one time; the other is a fast approximate algorithm for judging whether two Inner Core Blocks are density-reachable from each other. Besides, cover tree is also used to accelerate the process of density computations. Based on the three techniques, an approximate approach, namely BLOCK-DBSCAN, is proposed for large scale data, which runs in about O(nlog (n)) expected time and obtains almost the same result as DBSCAN. BLOCK-DBSCAN has two versions, i.e., L2 version can work well for relatively high dimensional data, and L∞ version is suitable for high dimensional data. Experimental results show that BLOCK-DBSCAN is promising and outperforms NQDBSCAN, ρ-approximate DBSCAN and AnyDBC.
6-PACK: Category-level 6D Pose Tracker with Anchor-Based Keypoints

We present 6-PACK, a deep learning approach to category-level 6D object pose tracking on RGB-D data. Our method tracks in real time novel object instances of known object categories such as bowls, laptops, and mugs. 6-PACK learns to compactly represent an object by a handful of 3D keypoints, based on which the interframe motion of an object instance can be estimated through keypoint matching. These keypoints are learned end-to-end without manual supervision in order to be most effective for tracking. Our experiments show that our method substantially outperforms existing methods on the NOCS category-level 6D pose estimation benchmark and supports a physical robot to perform simple vision-based closed-loop manipulation tasks. Our code and video are available at https://sites.google.com/view/6packtracking.
Search-based User Interest Modeling with Lifelong Sequential Behavior Data for Click-Through Rate Prediction

Rich user behavior data has been proven to be of great value for click-through rate prediction tasks, especially in industrial applications such as recommender systems and online advertising. Both industry and academy have paid much attention to this topic and propose different approaches to modeling with long sequential user behavior data. Among them, memory network based model MIMN proposed by Alibaba, achieves SOTA with the co-design of both learning algorithm and serving system. MIMN is the first industrial solution that can model sequential user behavior data with length scaling up to 1000. However, MIMN fails to precisely capture user interests given a specific candidate item when the length of user behavior sequence increases further, say, by 10 times or more. This challenge exists widely in previously proposed approaches.
COVID-19 Antibody Test/Vaccination Certification: There's an App for That

Goal: As the Coronavirus Pandemic of 2019/2020 unfolds, a COVID-19 'Immunity Passport' has been mooted as a way to enable individuals to return back to work. While the quality of antibody testing, the availability of vaccines, and the likelihood of even attaining COVID-19 immunity continue to be researched, we address the issues involved in providing tamper-proof and privacy-preserving certification for test results and vaccinations. Methods: We developed a prototype mobile phone app and requisite decentralized server architecture that facilitates instant verification of tamper-proof test results. Personally identifiable information is only stored at the user's discretion, and the app allows the end-user selectively to present only the specific test result with no other personal information revealed. The architecture, designed for scalability, relies upon (a) the 2019 World Wide Web Consortium standard called 'Verifiable Credentials', (b) Tim Berners-Lee's decentralized personal data platform 'Solid', and (c) a Consortium Ethereum-based blockchain. Results: Our mobile phone app and decentralized server architecture enable the mixture of verifiability and privacy in a manner derived from public/private key pairs and digital signatures, generalized to avoid restrictive ownership of sensitive digital keys and/or data. Benchmark performance tests show it to scale linearly in the worst case, as significant processing is done locally on each app. For the test certificate Holder, Issuer (e.g. healthcare staff, pharmacy) and Verifier (e.g. employer), it is 'just another app' which takes only minutes to use. Conclusions: The app and decentralized server architecture offer a prototype proof of concept that is readily scalable, applicable generically, and in effect 'waiting in the wings' for the biological issues, plus key ethical issues raised in the discussion section, to be resolved.
Self-Perception of the Digital Competence of Educators during the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Cross-Analysis of Different Educational Stages

The objective of this research is to measure the perception that teachers had about their own performance when they were forced to carry out Emergency Remote Teaching due to the COVID-19 pandemic. A questionnaire was provided to teachers of every educational stage in the Basque Country (Pre-school, Primary and Secondary Education, Professional Training, and Higher Education) obtaining a total of 4586 responses. The statistical analysis of the data shows that the greatest difficulties reported by educators are shortcomings in their training in digital skills, which has made them perceive a higher workload during the lockdown along with negative emotions. Another finding is the existing digital divide between teachers based on their gender, age, and type of school. A further worrying result is the lower technological competence at lower educational levels, which are the most vulnerable in remote teaching. These results invite us to reflect on the measures to be taken to improve equity, social justice, and the resilience of the educational system, which align with some of the Sustainable Development Goals.
An Efficient Framework for Clustered Federated Learning

We address the problem of federated learning (FL) where users are distributed and partitioned into clusters. This setup captures settings where different groups of users have their own objectives (learning tasks) but by aggregating their data with others in the same cluster (same learning task), they can leverage the strength in numbers in order to perform more efficient federated learning. For this new framework of clustered federated learning, we propose the Iterative Federated Clustering Algorithm (IFCA), which alternately estimates the cluster identities of the users and optimizes model parameters for the user clusters via gradient descent. We analyze the convergence rate of this algorithm first in a linear model with squared loss and then for generic strongly convex and smooth loss functions. We show that in both settings, with good initialization, IFCA is guaranteed to converge, and discuss the optimality of the statistical error rate. In particular, for the linear model with two clusters, we can guarantee that our algorithm converges as long as the initialization is slightly better than random. When the clustering structure is ambiguous, we propose to train the models by combining IFCA with the weight sharing technique in multi-task learning. In the experiments, we show that our algorithm can succeed even if we relax the requirements on initialization with random initialization and multiple restarts. We also present experimental results showing that our algorithm is efficient in non-convex problems such as neural networks. We demonstrate the benefits of IFCA over the baselines on several clustered FL benchmarks.
What Matters in Unsupervised Optical Flow

We systematically compare and analyze a set of key components in unsupervised optical flow to identify which photometric loss, occlusion handling, and smoothness regularization is most effective. Alongside this investigation we construct a number of novel improvements to unsupervised flow models, such as cost volume normalization, stopping the gradient at the occlusion mask, encouraging smoothness before upsampling the flow field, and continual self-supervision with image resizing. By combining the results of our investigation with our improved model components, we are able to present a new unsupervised flow technique that significantly outperforms the previous unsupervised state-of-the-art and performs on par with supervised FlowNet2 on the KITTI 2015 dataset, while also being significantly simpler than related approaches.
Mapping the research trends on blockchain technology in food and agriculture industry: A bibliometric analysis

Blockchain is an undeniably ingenious leading technology that has attracted the attention of academics and practitioners in different industries and disciplines. Due to the increasing interest of academic scholars in agri-food supply chain, this research aims to examine blockchain technology with a focus on the food and agriculture studies. Therefore, a bibliometric technique was adopted to detect the prominent trends and themes in this domain through analysing the substantial articles, authors, countries, and keywords. This research attempts to expand a graphical mapping of the bibliographic information of food and agriculture research using the R package bibliometrix and Visualisation of Similarities (VOS) viewer application. Thus, the present research performed the following analyses: the co-occurrence of author keywords, multiple correspondence analysis, bibliographic coupling analysis, co-citation analysis, and network view map analysis. The findings of the network view map revealed that food and agriculture studies have been categorised into three clusters, and the terms mostly used in the title and abstract of the articles were traceability, transaction, Internet of Things (IoT), safety, and food supply chain.
Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation with Pixel-Level Contrastive Learning from a Class-wise Memory Bank

This work presents a novel approach for semi-supervised semantic segmentation. The key element of this approach is our contrastive learning module that enforces the segmentation network to yield similar pixel-level feature representations for same-class samples across the whole dataset. To achieve this, we maintain a memory bank which is continuously updated with relevant and high-quality feature vectors from labeled data. In an end-to-end training, the features from both labeled and unlabeled data are optimized to be similar to same-class samples from the memory bank. Our approach not only outperforms the current state-of-the-art for semi-supervised semantic segmentation but also for semi-supervised domain adaptation on well-known public benchmarks, with larger improvements on the most challenging scenarios, i.e., less available labeled data. Code is available at https://github.com/Shathe/SemiSeg-Contrastive
Multi-Stage CNN Architecture for Face Mask Detection

Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) broke out at the end of 2019, and it's still wreaking havoc on millions of people's lives and businesses in 2020. There is an upsurge of uneasiness among people who plan to return to their daily activities in person, as the world recovers from the pandemic and plans to get back to a state of regularity. Wearing a face mask significantly reduces the risk of viral transmission and provides a sense of protection, according to several studies. However, manually tracking the implementation of this policy is not possible. The key here is technology. We present a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based architecture for detecting instances of improper use of face masks. Our system uses two-stage CNN architecture that can detect both masked and unmasked faces and is compatible with CCTV cameras. This will aid in the tracking of safety violations, the promotion of face mask use, and the creation of a safe working environment.
RobustNet: Improving Domain Generalization in Urban-Scene Segmentation via Instance Selective Whitening

Enhancing the generalization capability of deep neural networks to unseen domains is crucial for safety-critical applications in the real world such as autonomous driving. To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel instance selective whitening loss to improve the robustness of the segmentation networks for unseen domains. Our approach disentangles the domain-specific style and domain-invariant content encoded in higher-order statistics (i.e., feature covariance) of the feature representations and selectively removes only the style information causing domain shift. As shown in Fig. 1, our method provides reasonable predictions for (a) low-illuminated, (b) rainy, and (c) unseen structures. These types of images are not included in the training dataset, where the baseline shows a significant performance drop, contrary to ours. Being simple yet effective, our approach improves the robustness of various backbone networks without additional computational cost. We conduct extensive experiments in urban-scene segmentation and show the superiority of our approach to existing work. Our code is available at this link <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sup> .
Yolo V4 for Advanced Traffic Sign Recognition With Synthetic Training Data Generated by Various GAN

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) achieves perfection in traffic sign identification with enough annotated training data.The dataset determines the quality of the complete visual system based on CNN.Unfortunately, databases for traffic signs from the majority of the world's nations are few.In this scenario, Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) may be employed to produce more realistic and varied training pictures to supplement the actual arrangement of images.The purpose of this research is to describe how the quality of synthetic pictures created by DCGAN, LSGAN, and WGAN is determined.Our work combines synthetic images with original images to enhance datasets and verify the effectiveness of synthetic datasets.We use different numbers and sizes of images for training.Likewise, the Structural Similarity Index (SSIM) and Mean Square Error (MSE) were employed to assess picture quality.Our study quantifies the SSIM difference between the synthetic and actual images.When additional images are used for training, the synthetic image exhibits a high degree of resemblance to the genuine image.The highest SSIM value was achieved when using 200 total images as input and 32 × 32 image size.Further, we augment the original picture dataset with synthetic pictures and compare the original image model to the synthesis image model.For this experiment, we are using the latest iterations of Yolo, Yolo V3, and Yolo V4.After mixing the real image with the synthesized image produced by LSGAN, the recognition performance has been improved, achieving an accuracy of 84.9% on Yolo V3 and an accuracy of 89.33% on Yolo V4.
Seeing Out of tHe bOx: End-to-End Pre-training for Vision-Language Representation Learning

We study joint learning of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Transformer for vision-language pre-training (VLPT) which aims to learn cross-modal alignments from millions of image-text pairs. State-of-the-art approaches extract salient image regions and align regions with words step-by-step. As region-based visual features usually represent parts of an image, it is challenging for existing vision-language models to fully understand the semantics from paired natural languages. In this paper, we propose SOHO to "Seeing Out of tHe bOx" that takes a whole image as input, and learns vision-language representation in an end-to-end manner. SOHO does not require bounding box annotations which enables inference 10 times faster than region-based approaches. In particular, SOHO learns to extract comprehensive yet compact image features through a visual dictionary (VD) that facilitates cross-modal understanding. VD is designed to represent consistent visual abstractions of similar semantics. It is updated on-the-fly and utilized in our proposed pre-training task Masked Visual Modeling (MVM). We conduct experiments on four well-established vision-language tasks by following standard VLPT settings. In particular, SOHO achieves absolute gains of 2.0% R@1 score on MSCOCO text retrieval 5k test split, 1.5% accuracy on NLVR <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> test-P split, 6.7% accuracy on SNLI-VE test split, respectively.
Fast Parameter-Free Multi-View Subspace Clustering With Consensus Anchor Guidance

Multi-view subspace clustering has attracted intensive attention to effectively fuse multi-view information by exploring appropriate graph structures. Although existing works have made impressive progress in clustering performance, most of them suffer from the cubic time complexity which could prevent them from being efficiently applied into large-scale applications. To improve the efficiency, anchor sampling mechanism has been proposed to select vital landmarks to represent the whole data. However, existing anchor selecting usually follows the heuristic sampling strategy, e.g. k -means or uniform sampling. As a result, the procedures of anchor selecting and subsequent subspace graph construction are separated from each other which may adversely affect clustering performance. Moreover, the involved hyper-parameters further limit the application of traditional algorithms. To address these issues, we propose a novel subspace clustering method termed Fast Parameter-free Multi-view Subspace Clustering with Consensus Anchor Guidance (FPMVS-CAG). Firstly, we jointly conduct anchor selection and subspace graph construction into a unified optimization formulation. By this way, the two processes can be negotiated with each other to promote clustering quality. Moreover, our proposed FPMVS-CAG is proved to have linear time complexity with respect to the sample number. In addition, FPMVS-CAG can automatically learn an optimal anchor subspace graph without any extra hyper-parameters. Extensive experimental results on various benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method against the existing state-of-the-art multi-view subspace clustering competitors. These merits make FPMVS-CAG more suitable for large-scale subspace clustering. The code of FPMVS-CAG is publicly available at https://github.com/wangsiwei2010/FPMVS-CAG.
Expansion-Squeeze-Excitation Fusion Network for Elderly Activity Recognition

This work focuses on the task of elderly activity recognition, which is a challenging task due to the existence of individual actions and human-object interactions in elderly activities. Thus, we attempt to effectively aggregate the discriminative information of actions and interactions from both RGB videos and skeleton sequences by attentively fusing multi-modal features. Recently, some nonlinear multi-modal fusion approaches are proposed by utilizing nonlinear attention mechanism that is extended from Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks (SENet). Inspired by this, we propose a novel Expansion-Squeeze-Excitation Fusion Network (ESE-FN) to effectively address the problem of elderly activity recognition, which learns modal and channel-wise Expansion-Squeeze-Excitation (ESE) attentions for attentively fusing the multi-modal features in the modal and channel-wise ways. Specifically, ESE-FN firstly implements the modal-wise fusion with the Modal-wise ESE Attention (M-ESEA) to aggregate discriminative information in modal-wise way, and then implements the channel-wise fusion with the Channel-wise ESE Attention (C-ESEA) to aggregate the multi-channel discriminative information in channel-wise way (referring to <xref ref-type="fig" rid="fig1" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Figure 1</xref> ). Furthermore, we design a new Multi-modal Loss (ML) to keep the consistency between the single-modal features and the fused multi-modal features by adding the penalty of difference between the minimum prediction losses on single modalities and the prediction loss on the fused modality. Finally, we conduct experiments on a largest-scale elderly activity dataset, i.e., ETRI-Activity3D (including 110,000+ videos, and 50+ categories), to demonstrate that the proposed ESE-FN achieves the best accuracy compared with the state-of-the-art methods. In addition, more extensive experimental results show that the proposed ESE-FN is also comparable to the other methods in terms of normal action recognition task.
An Efficient Ciphertext-Policy Weighted Attribute-Based Encryption for the Internet of Health Things

The Internet of Health Things (IoHT) is a medical concept that describes uniquely identifiable devices connected to the Internet that can communicate with each other. As one of the most important components of smart health monitoring and improvement systems, the IoHT presents numerous challenges, among which cybersecurity is a priority. As a well-received security solution to achieve fine-grained access control, ciphertext-policy weighted attribute-based encryption (CP-WABE) has the potential to ensure data security in the IoHT. However, many issues remain, such as inflexibility, poor computational capability, and insufficient storage efficiency in attributes comparison. To address these issues, we propose a novel access policy expression method using 0-1 coding technology. Based on this method, a flexible and efficient CP-WABE is constructed for the IoHT. Our scheme supports not only weighted attributes but also any form of comparison of weighted attributes. Furthermore, we use offline/online encryption and outsourced decryption technology to ensure that the scheme can run on an inefficient IoT terminal. Both theoretical and experimental analyses show that our scheme is more efficient and feasible than other schemes. Moreover, security analysis indicates that our scheme achieves security against a chosen-plaintext attack.
A survey on data compression techniques: From the perspective of data quality, coding schemes, data type and applications

Explosive growth of data in digital world leads to the requirement of efficient technique to store and transmit data. Due to limited resources, data compression (DC) techniques are proposed to minimize the size of data being stored or communicated. As DC concepts results to effective utilization of available storage area and communication bandwidth, numerous approaches were developed in several aspects. In order to analyze how DC techniques and its applications have evolved, a detailed survey on many existing DC techniques is carried out to address the current requirements in terms of data quality, coding schemes, type of data and applications. A comparative analysis is also performed to identify the contribution of reviewed techniques in terms of their characteristics, underlying concepts, experimental factors and limitations. Finally, this paper insight to various open issues and research directions to explore the promising areas for future developments.