Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
In Times of Crisis: Public Perceptions Towards COVID-19 Contact Tracing Apps in China, Germany and the US

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Multi-loss Rebalancing Algorithm for Monocular Depth Estimation

An algorithm to combine multiple loss terms adaptively for training a monocular depth estimator is proposed in this work. We construct a loss function space containing tens of losses. Using more losses can improve inference capability without any additional complexity in the test phase. However, when many losses are used, some of them may be neglected during training. Also, since each loss decreases at a different speed, adaptive weighting is required to balance the contributions of the losses. To address these issues, we propose the loss rebalancing algorithm that initializes and rebalances the weight for each loss function adaptively in the course of training. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm provides state-of-the-art depth estimation results on various datasets. Codes are available at https://github.com/jaehanlee-mcl/multi-loss-rebalancing-depth .
Attribute Graph Neural Networks for Strict Cold Start Recommendation

Rating prediction is a classic problem underlying recommender systems. It is traditionally tackled with matrix factorization. Recently, deep learning based methods, especially graph neural networks, have made impressive progress on this problem. Despite their effectiveness, existing methods focus on modeling the user-item interaction graph. The inherent drawback of such methods is that their performance is bound to the density of the interactions, which is however usually of high sparsity. More importantly, for a strict cold start user/item that neither appears in the training data nor has any interactions in the test stage, such methods are unable to learn the preference embedding of the user/item since there is no link to this user/item in the graph. In this work, we develop a novel framework <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Attribute Graph Neural Networks</i> (AGNN) by exploiting the attribute graph rather than the commonly used interaction graph. This leads to the capability of learning embeddings for the strict cold start users/items. Our AGNN can produce the preference embedding for a strict cold user/item by learning on the distribution of attributes with an extended variational auto-encoder (eVAE) structure. Moreover, we propose a new graph neural network variant, i.e., gated-GNN, to effectively aggregate various attributes of different modalities in a neighborhood. Empirical results on three real-world datasets demonstrate that our model yields significant improvements for strict cold start recommendations and outperforms or matches the state-of-the-art performance in the warm start scenario.
Systematic Analysis of Randomization-based Protected Cache Architectures

Recent secure cache designs aim to mitigate side-channel attacks by randomizing the mapping from memory addresses to cache sets. As vendors investigate deployment of these caches, it is crucial to understand their actual security.In this paper, we consolidate existing randomization-based secure caches into a generic cache model. We then comprehensively analyze the security of existing designs, including CEASER-S and SCATTERCACHE, by mapping them to instances of this model. We tailor cache attacks for randomized caches using a novel PRIME+PRUNE+PROBE technique, and optimize it using burst accesses, bootstrapping, and multi-step profiling. PRIME+ PRUNE+PROBE constructs probabilistic but reliable eviction sets, enabling attacks previously assumed to be computationally infeasible. We also simulate an end-to-end attack, leaking secrets from a vulnerable AES implementation. Finally, a case study of CEASER-S reveals that cryptographic weaknesses in the randomization algorithm can lead to a complete security subversion.Our systematic analysis yields more realistic and comparable security levels for randomized caches. As we quantify how design parameters influence the security level, our work leads to important conclusions for future work on secure cache designs.
Breaking medical data sharing boundaries by using synthesized radiographs

Distributed adversarial networks can generate synthesized radiographs, yielding better classification while maintaining privacy.
A hybrid network for automatic hepatocellular carcinoma segmentation in H&amp;E-stained whole slide images

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), as the most common type of primary malignant liver cancer, has become a leading cause of cancer deaths in recent years. Accurate segmentation of HCC lesions is critical for tumor load assessment, surgery planning, and postoperative examination. As the appearance of HCC lesions varies greatly across patients, traditional manual segmentation is a very tedious and time-consuming process, the accuracy of which is also difficult to ensure. Therefore, a fully automated and reliable HCC segmentation system is in high demand. In this work, we present a novel hybrid neural network based on multi-task learning and ensemble learning techniques for accurate HCC segmentation of hematoxylin and eosin (H&E)-stained whole slide images (WSIs). First, three task-specific branches are integrated to enlarge the feature space, based on which the network is able to learn more general features and thus reduce the risk of overfitting. Second, an ensemble learning scheme is leveraged to perform feature aggregation, in which selective kernel modules (SKMs) and spatial and channel-wise squeeze-and-excitation modules (scSEMs) are adopted for capturing the features from different spaces and scales. Our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on three publicly available datasets, with segmentation accuracies of 0.797, 0.923, and 0.765 in the PAIP, CRAG, and UHCMC&CWRU datasets, respectively, which demonstrates its effectiveness in addressing the HCC segmentation problem. To the best of our knowledge, this is also the first work on the pixel-wise HCC segmentation of H&E-stained WSIs.
Knowledge Transfer via Dense Cross-Layer Mutual-Distillation

Knowledge Distillation (KD) based methods adopt the one-way Knowledge Transfer (KT) scheme in which training a lower-capacity student network is guided by a pre-trained high-capacity teacher network. Recently, Deep Mutual Learning (DML) presented a two-way KT strategy, showing that the student network can be also helpful to improve the teacher network. In this paper, we propose Dense Cross-layer Mutual-distillation (DCM), an improved two-way KT method in which the teacher and student networks are trained collaboratively from scratch. To augment knowledge representation learning, well-designed auxiliary classifiers are added to certain hidden layers of both teacher and student networks. To boost KT performance, we introduce dense bidirectional KD operations between the layers appended with classifiers. After training, all auxiliary classifiers are discarded, and thus there are no extra parameters introduced to final models. We test our method on a variety of KT tasks, showing its superiorities over related methods. Code is available at https://github.com/sundw2014/DCM .
A novel direct measure of exploration and exploitation based on attraction basins

Exploration, the process of visiting a new region in a search space, and exploitation, the process of searching in the neighborhood of previously visited regions, are two centerpieces of any metaheuristic algorithm. It is a common belief that good results can be obtained only if there is a good balance between exploration and exploitation. Hence, there is an urgent need to control the balance between exploration and exploitation in a direct manner. But, currently, direct measures of exploration and exploitation are almost non-existent, and researchers rely on indirect measures of exploration and exploitation, such as diversity, entropy, and fitness improvements. To remedy this situation, in this paper, a novel direct measure of exploration and exploitation is proposed that is based on attraction basins — parts of a search space where each part has its own point called an attractor, to which neighboring points tend to evolve. Each search point can be associated with a particular attraction basin. If a newly generated search point belongs to the same attraction basin as its parent then the search process is identified as exploitation, otherwise as exploration. In this paper, a new technique to compute attraction basins is presented, as well as a novel direct measure (ExpBas) of exploration and exploitation based on attraction basins. On the selected set of unimodal and multimodal optimization problems it is shown that the newly proposed direct measure of exploration and exploitation is more accurate than our previously proposed direct measure (ExpDist), as well as the common indirect measure based on diversity (Diversity).
Multi-level Wavelet-Based Generative Adversarial Network for Perceptual Quality Enhancement of Compressed Video

The past few years have witnessed fast development in video quality enhancement via deep learning. Existing methods mainly focus on enhancing the objective quality of compressed video while ignoring its perceptual quality. In this paper, we focus on enhancing the perceptual quality of compressed video. Our main observation is that enhancing the perceptual quality mostly relies on recovering high-frequency sub-bands in wavelet domain. Accordingly, we propose a novel generative adversarial network (GAN) based on multi-level wavelet packet transform (WPT) to enhance the perceptual quality of compressed video, which is called multi-level wavelet-based GAN (MW-GAN). In MW-GAN, we first apply motion compensation with a pyramid architecture to obtain temporal information. Then, we propose a wavelet reconstruction network with wavelet-dense residual blocks (WDRB) to recover the high-frequency details. In addition, the adversarial loss of MW-GAN is added via WPT to further encourage high-frequency details recovery for video frames. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our method.
Recalibration convolutional networks for learning interaction knowledge graph embedding

Knowledge graph embedding aims to learn the embedded representation of entities and relations in knowledge graphs which is very important for the subsequent link prediction task. However, two key issues are existed for learning knowledge graph embedding: 1) How to take full advantage of the deep learning algorithms to generate expressive embeddings? 2) How to solve the polysemy phenomenon caused by multi-relations knowledge graphs that entities and relations show different semantics after involving different predictions? In this article, to tackle the first problem, the multi-layer convolutional networks are adopted to generate features about entities and relations then used to predict candidate entity. Moreover, the representation power of the networks is strengthened by integrating an effective recalibration mechanism which can accentuate informative features selectively. To tackle the second problem, we propose to learn multiple specific interaction embeddings. Instead of directly learning one general embedding to preserve all information for each entity and relation, their interactions are captured to model the cross-semantic influence from relations to entities and from entities to relations. Compared to traditional embedding models, the proposed model can provide more generalization capabilities and effectively capture potential links between entities and relations. Experimental results have revealed that the proposed model achieves the state-of-the-art performance for general evaluation metrics on link prediction tasks.
SMAP: Single-Shot Multi-person Absolute 3D Pose Estimation

Recovering multi-person 3D poses with absolute scales from a single RGB image is a challenging problem due to the inherent depth and scale ambiguity from a single view. Addressing this ambiguity requires to aggregate various cues over the entire image, such as body sizes, scene layouts, and inter-person relationships. However, most previous methods adopt a top-down scheme that first performs 2D pose detection and then regresses the 3D pose and scale for each detected person individually, ignoring global contextual cues. In this paper, we propose a novel system that first regresses a set of 2.5D representations of body parts and then reconstructs the 3D absolute poses based on these 2.5D representations with a depth-aware part association algorithm. Such a single-shot bottom-up scheme allows the system to better learn and reason about the inter-person depth relationship, improving both 3D and 2D pose estimation. The experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the CMU Panoptic and MuPoTS-3D datasets and is applicable to in-the-wild videos.
Deformable Style Transfer

Both geometry and texture are fundamental aspects of visual style. Existing style transfer methods, however, primarily focus on texture, almost entirely ignoring geometry. We propose deformable style transfer (DST), an optimization-based approach that jointly stylizes the texture and geometry of a content image to better match a style image. Unlike previous geometry-aware stylization methods, our approach is neither restricted to a particular domain (such as human faces), nor does it require training sets of matching style/content pairs. We demonstrate our method on a diverse set of content and style images including portraits, animals, objects, scenes, and paintings. Code has been made publicly available at https://github.com/sunniesuhyoung/DST .
Active Crowd Counting with Limited Supervision

To learn a reliable people counter from crowd images, head center annotations are normally required. Annotating head centers is however a laborious and tedious process in dense crowds. In this paper, we present an active learning framework which enables accurate crowd counting with limited supervision: given a small labeling budget, instead of randomly selecting images to annotate, we first introduce an active labeling strategy to annotate the most informative images in the dataset and learn the counting model upon them. The process is repeated such that in every cycle we select the samples that are diverse in crowd density and dissimilar to previous selections. In the last cycle when the labeling budget is met, the large amount of unlabeled data are also utilized: a distribution classifier is introduced to align the labeled data with unlabeled data; furthermore, we propose to mix up the distribution labels and latent representations of data in the network to particularly improve the distribution alignment in-between training samples. We follow the popular density estimation pipeline for crowd counting. Extensive experiments are conducted on standard benchmarks i.e. ShanghaiTech, UCF_CC_50, MAll, TRANCOS, and DCC. By annotating limited number of images (e.g. 10% of the dataset), our method reaches levels of performance not far from the state of the art which utilize full annotations of the dataset.
Phantom of the ADAS: Securing Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems from Split-Second Phantom Attacks

In this paper, we investigate "split-second phantom attacks," a scientific gap that causes two commercial advanced driver-assistance systems (ADASs), Telsa Model X (HW 2.5 and HW 3) and Mobileye 630, to treat a depthless object that appears for a few milliseconds as a real obstacle/object. We discuss the challenge that split-second phantom attacks create for ADASs. We demonstrate how attackers can apply split-second phantom attacks remotely by embedding phantom road signs into an advertisement presented on a digital billboard which causes Tesla's autopilot to suddenly stop the car in the middle of a road and Mobileye 630 to issue false notifications. We also demonstrate how attackers can use a projector in order to cause Tesla's autopilot to apply the brakes in response to a phantom of a pedestrian that was projected on the road and Mobileye 630 to issue false notifications in response to a projected road sign. To counter this threat, we propose a countermeasure which can determine whether a detected object is a phantom or real using just the camera sensor. The countermeasure (GhostBusters) uses a "committee of experts" approach and combines the results obtained from four lightweight deep convolutional neural networks that assess the authenticity of an object based on the object's light, context, surface, and depth. We demonstrate our countermeasure's effectiveness (it obtains a TPR of 0.994 with an FPR of zero) and test its robustness to adversarial machine learning attacks.
Transmon platform for quantum computing challenged by chaotic fluctuations

From the perspective of many body physics, the transmon qubit architectures currently developed for quantum computing are systems of coupled nonlinear quantum resonators. A significant amount of intentional frequency detuning (disorder) is required to protect individual qubit states against the destabilizing effects of nonlinear resonator coupling. Here we investigate the stability of this variant of a many-body localized (MBL) phase for system parameters relevant to current quantum processors of two different types, those using untunable qubits (IBM type) and those using tunable qubits (Delft/Google type). Applying three independent diagnostics of localization theory -- a Kullback-Leibler analysis of spectral statistics, statistics of many-body wave functions (inverse participation ratios), and a Walsh transform of the many-body spectrum -- we find that these computing platforms are dangerously close to a phase of uncontrollable chaotic fluctuations.
Photovoltaic Power Prediction Using Artificial Neural Networks and Numerical Weather Data

The monitoring of power generation installations is key for modelling and predicting their future behaviour. Many renewable energy generation systems, such as photovoltaic panels and wind turbines, strongly depend on weather conditions. However, in situ measurements of relevant weather variables are not always taken into account when designing monitoring systems, and only power output is available. This paper aims to combine data from a Numerical Weather Prediction model with machine learning tools in order to accurately predict the power generation from a photovoltaic system. An Artificial Neural Network (ANN) model is used to predict power outputs from a real installation located in Puglia (southern Italy) using temperature and solar irradiation data taken from the Global Data Assimilation System (GDAS) sflux model outputs. Power outputs and weather monitoring data from the PV installation are used as a reference dataset. Three training and testing scenarios are designed. In the first one, weather data monitoring is used to both train the ANN model and predict power outputs. In the second one, training is done with monitoring data, but GDAS data is used to predict the results. In the last set, both training and result prediction are done by feeding GDAS weather data into the ANN model. The results show that the tested numerical weather model can be combined with machine learning tools to model the output of PV systems with less than 10% error, even when in situ weather measurements are not available.
Heavy mobile crane lift path planning in congested modular industrial plants using a robotics approach

Lift path planning is a significant subtask in constructability analysis, sequencing, and scheduling of congested industrial modular projects, impacting project cost, and safety. Although intuitive lift planning is still prevalent among the practitioners, this manual process might be tedious and error-prone for hundreds of lifts. This research presents an automated lift path planning method for heavy crawler cranes in no-walk scenarios employing a robotics approach. This method treats the lifted object as a three-degree-of-freedom convex mobile robot with discretized rotational and continuous translational motions. The proposed resolution-complete method models the crane capacity chart, tail-swing, and boom clearances as pseudo-obstacles in the lifted object's configuration space. By reducing the lift path planning to a graph search problem, if any, the shortest path for the planar motion of the heavy-lift, along with its optimal pick-point, is identified. The developed heavy-lift path planning method is validated via two practical case studies.
Measuring the Effectiveness of Privacy Policies for Voice Assistant Applications

Voice Assistants (VA) such as Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant are quickly and seamlessly integrating into people’s daily lives. The increased reliance on VA services raises privacy concerns such as the leakage of private conversations and sensitive information. Privacy policies play an important role in addressing users’ privacy concerns and informing them about the data collection, storage, and sharing practices. VA platforms (both Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant) allow third-party developers to build new voice-apps and publish them to app stores. Voice-app developers are required to provide privacy policies to disclose their apps’ data practices. However, little is known whether these privacy policies are informative and trustworthy or not on emerging VA platforms. On the other hand, many users invoke voice-apps through voice and thus there exists a usability challenge for users to access these privacy policies.
Two-Stage Copy-Move Forgery Detection With Self Deep Matching and Proposal SuperGlue

Copy-move forgery detection identifies a tampered image by detecting pasted and source regions in the same image. In this paper, we propose a novel two-stage framework specially for copy-move forgery detection. The first stage is a backbone self deep matching network, and the second stage is named as Proposal SuperGlue. In the first stage, atrous convolution and skip matching are incorporated to enrich spatial information and leverage hierarchical features. Spatial attention is built on self-correlation to reinforce the ability to find appearance similar regions. In the second stage, Proposal SuperGlue is proposed to remove false-alarmed regions and remedy incomplete regions. Specifically, a proposal selection strategy is designed to enclose highly suspected regions based on proposal generation and backbone score maps. Then, pairwise matching is conducted among candidate proposals by deep learning based keypoint extraction and matching, i.e., SuperPoint and SuperGlue. Integrated score map generation and refinement methods are designed to integrate results of both stages and obtain optimized results. Our two-stage framework unifies end-to-end deep matching and keypoint matching by obtaining highly suspected proposals, and opens a new gate for deep learning research in copy-move forgery detection. Experiments on publicly available datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our two-stage framework.