Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
COVID-19 digitization in maritime: understanding cyber risks

Digitization is reshaping the maritime industry which is under increasing pressure to transform. Technology is more common as it offers improvements and carves out early adapters as more competitive. COVID-19 hastens digitization and creates new digital opportunity structures which increase cyber risks. Cyber attacks, which can cripple critical systems and services at significant cost, motivate stakeholders to engage with these risks. This paper reviews current events and introduces an exercise where participants at a NATO Centre of Excellency were shown scenarios involving maritime cyber incidents and evaluated on cyber risk perception. Our findings lend insight on how to assess group cyber risk perception—and how this impacts response. They highlight the need to plan for cyberspace operations and ground cyber risks as a intricate governing factor in maritime.
Fast UAV Trajectory Optimization Using Bilevel Optimization With Analytical Gradients

In the article, we present an efficient optimization framework that solves trajectory optimization problems by decoupling state variables from timing variables, thereby decomposing a challenging nonlinear programming (NLP) problem into two easier subproblems. With timing fixed, the state variables can be optimized efficiently using convex optimization, and the timing variables can be optimized in a separate NLP, which forms a bilevel optimization problem. The challenge of obtaining the gradient of the timing variables is solved by sensitivity analysis of parametric NLPs. The exact analytic gradient is computed from the dual solution as a by-product, whereas existing finite-difference techniques require additional optimization. The bilevel optimization framework efficiently optimizes both timing and state variables which is demonstrated on generating trajectories for an UAV. Numerical experiments demonstrate that bilevel optimization converges significantly more reliably than a standard NLP solver, and analytical gradients outperform finite differences in terms of computation speed and accuracy. Physical experiments demonstrate its real-time applicability for reactive target tracking tasks.
On the Applicability of Synthetic Data for Face Recognition

Face verification has come into increasing focus in various applications including the European Entry/Exit System, which integrates face recognition mechanisms. At the same time, the rapid advancement of biometric authentication requires extensive performance tests in order to inhibit the discriminatory treatment of travellers due to their demographic background. However, the use of face images collected as part of border controls is restricted by the European General Data Protection Law to be processed for no other reason than its original purpose. Therefore, this paper investigates the suitability of synthetic face images generated with StyleGAN and StyleGAN2 to compensate for the urgent lack of publicly available largescale test data. Specifically, two deep learning-based (SER-FIQ, FaceQnet v1) and one standard-based (ISO/IEC TR 29794-5) face image quality assessment algorithm is utilized to compare the applicability of synthetic face images compared to real face images extracted from the FRGC dataset. Finally, based on the analysis of impostor score distributions and utility score distributions, our experiments reveal negligible differences between StyleGAN vs. StyleGAN2, and further also minor discrepancies compared to real face images.
CRSLab: An Open-Source Toolkit for Building Conversational Recommender System

In recent years, conversational recommender systems (CRSs) have drawn a wide attention in the research community, which focus on providing high-quality recommendations to users via natural language conversations.However, due to diverse scenarios and data formats, existing studies on CRSs lack unified and standardized implementation or comparison.To tackle this challenge, we release an open-source toolkit CRSLab, which provides a unified and extensible framework with highly-decoupled modules to develop CRSs.Based on this framework, we collect 6 commonly used human-annotated CRS datasets and implement 19 models that include advanced techniques such as graph neural networks and pre-training models.Besides, our toolkit provides a series of automatic evaluation protocols and a human-machine interaction interface to evaluate and compare different CRS methods.The project and documents are released at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/CRSLab.
Noise-resistant Deep Metric Learning with Ranking-based Instance Selection

The existence of noisy labels in real-world data negatively impacts the performance of deep learning models. Although much research effort has been devoted to improving robustness to noisy labels in classification tasks, the problem of noisy labels in deep metric learning (DML) remains open. In this paper, we propose a noise-resistant training technique for DML, which we name Probabilistic Ranking-based Instance Selection with Memory (PRISM). PRISM identifies noisy data in a minibatch using average similarity against image features extracted by several previous versions of the neural network. These features are stored in and retrieved from a memory bank. To alleviate the high computational cost brought by the memory bank, we introduce an acceleration method that replaces individual data points with the class centers. In extensive comparisons with 12 existing approaches under both synthetic and real-world label noise, PRISM demonstrates superior performance of up to 6.06% in Precision@1.
A Hierarchical Superpixel-Based Approach for DIBR View Synthesis

View synthesis allows observers to explore static scenes using aligned color images and depth maps captured in a preset camera path. Among the options, depth-image-based rendering (DIBR) approaches have been effective and efficient since only one pair of color and depth map is required, saving storage and bandwidth. The present work proposes a novel DIBR pipeline for view synthesis that properly tackles the different artifacts that arise from 3D warping, such as cracks, disocclusions, ghosts, and out-of-field areas. A key aspect of our contributions relies on the adaptation and usage of a hierarchical image superpixel algorithm that helps to maintain structural characteristics of the scene during image reconstruction. We compare our approach with state-of-the-art methods and show that it attains the best average results in two common assessment metrics under public still-image and video-sequence datasets. Visual results are also provided, illustrating the potential of our technique in real-world applications.
Secure Yannakakis

In this paper, we describe a secure version of the classical Yannakakis algorithm for computing free-connex join-aggregate queries. This protocol can be used in the secure two-party computation model, where the parties would like to evaluate a query without revealing their own data. Our protocol presents a dramatic improvement over the state-of-the-art protocol based on Yao's garbled circuit. In theory, its cost (both running time and communication) is linear in data size and polynomial in query size, whereas that of the garbled circuit is polynomial in data size and exponential in query size. This translates to a reduction in running time in practice from years to minutes, as tested on a number of TPC-H queries of varying complexity.
Bridging the Visual Gap: Wide-Range Image Blending

In this paper we propose a new problem scenario in image processing, wide-range image blending, which aims to smoothly merge two different input photos into a panorama by generating novel image content for the intermediate region between them. Although such problem is closely related to the topics of image inpainting, image outpainting, and image blending, none of the approaches from these topics is able to easily address it. We introduce an effective deep-learning model to realize wide-range image blending, where a novel Bidirectional Content Transfer module is proposed to perform the conditional prediction for the feature representation of the intermediate region via recurrent neural networks. In addition to ensuring the spatial and semantic consistency during the blending, we also adopt the contextual attention mechanism as well as the adversarial learning scheme in our proposed method for improving the visual quality of the resultant panorama. We experimentally demonstrate that our proposed method is not only able to produce visually appealing results for wide-range image blending, but also able to provide superior performance with respect to several baselines built upon the state-of-the-art image inpainting and outpainting approaches.
Multi-View Label Prediction for Unsupervised Learning Person Re-Identification

Person re-identification (ReID) aims to match pedestrian images across disjoint cameras. Existing supervised ReID methods utilize deep networks and train them with identity-labeled images, which suffer from limited annotations. Recently, clustering-based unsupervised ReID attracts more and more attention. It first clusters unlabeled images and assigns cluster index to the pseudo-identity-labels, then trains a ReID model with the pseudo-identity-labels. However, considering the slight inter-class variations and significant intra-class variations, pseudo-identity-labels learned from clustering algorithms are usually noisy and coarse. To alleviate the problems above, besides clustering pseudo-identity-labels, we propose to learn pseudo-patch-labels, which brings two advantages: (1) Patch naturally alleviates the effect of backgrounds, occlusions, and carryings since they usually occupy small parts in images, thus overcome noisy labels. (2) It is plausible that patches from different pedestrians belong to the same pseudo-identity-label. For example, pedestrians have a high probability of wearing either the same shoes or pants but a low possibility of wearing both. The experiments demonstrate our proposed method achieves the best performance by a large margin on both image- and video-based datasets.
Sparse Needlets for Lighting Estimation with Spherical Transport Loss

Accurate lighting estimation is challenging yet critical to many computer vision and computer graphics tasks such as high-dynamic-range (HDR) relighting. Existing approaches model lighting in either frequency domain or spatial domain which is insufficient to represent the complex lighting conditions in scenes and tends to produce inaccurate estimation. This paper presents NeedleLight, a new lighting estimation model that represents illumination with needlets and allows lighting estimation in both frequency domain and spatial domain jointly. An optimal thresholding function is designed to achieve sparse needlets which trims redundant lighting parameters and demonstrates superior localization properties for illumination representation. In addition, a novel spherical transport loss is designed based on optimal transport theory which guides to regress lighting representation parameters with consideration of the spatial information. Furthermore, we propose a new metric that is concise yet effective by directly evaluating the estimated illumination maps rather than rendered images. Extensive experiments show that NeedleLight achieves superior lighting estimation consistently across multiple evaluation metrics as compared with state-of-the-art methods.
From Evaluation to Verification: Towards Task-oriented Relevance Metrics for Pedestrian Detection in Safety-critical Domains

Whenever a visual perception system is employed in safety-critical applications such as automated driving, a thorough, task-oriented experimental evaluation is necessary to guarantee safe system behavior. While most standard evaluation methods in computer vision provide a good comparability on benchmarks, they tend to fall short on assessing the system performance that is actually relevant for the given task. In our work, we consider pedestrian detection as a highly relevant perception task, and we argue that standard measures such as Intersection over Union (IoU) give insufficient results, mainly because they are insensitive to important physical cues including distance, speed, and direction of motion. Therefore, we investigate so-called relevance metrics, where specific domain knowledge is exploited to obtain a task-oriented performance measure focusing on distance in this initial work. Our experimental setup is based on the CARLA simulator and allows a controlled evaluation of the impact of that domain knowledge. Our first results indicate a linear decrease of the IoU related to the pedestrians’ distance, leading to the proposal of a first relevance metric that is also conditioned on the distance.
Self-supervised multi-image super-resolution for push-frame satellite images

Recent constellations of optical satellites are adopting multi-image super-resolution (MISR) from bursts of push-frame images as a way to increase the resolution and reduce the noise of their products while maintaining a lower cost of operation. Most MISR techniques are currently based on the aggregation of samples from registered low resolution images. A promising research trend aimed at incorporating natural image priors in MISR consists in using data-driven neural networks. However, due to the unavailability of ground truth high resolution data, these networks cannot be trained on real satellite images. In this paper, we present a framework for training MISR algorithms from bursts of satellite images without requiring high resolution ground truth. This is achieved by adapting the recently proposed frame-to-frame framework to process bursts of satellite images. In addition we propose an architecture based on feature aggregation that allows to fuse a variable number of frames and is capable of handling degenerate samplings while also reducing noise. On synthetic datasets, the proposed self-supervision strategy attains results on par with those obtained with a supervised training. We applied our framework to real SkySat satellite image bursts leading to results that are more resolved and less noisy than the L1B product from Planet.
Exploring Multi-List User Interfaces for Similar-Item Recommendations

On many e-commerce and media streaming sites, the user interface (UI) consists of multiple lists of item suggestions. The items in each list are usually chosen based on pre-defined strategies and, e.g., show movies of the same genre or category. Such interfaces are common in practice, but there is almost no academic research regarding the optimal design and arrangement of such multi-list UIs for recommenders. In this paper, we report the results of an exploratory user study that examined the effects of various design alternatives on the decision-making behavior of users in the context of similar-item recommendations. Our investigations showed, among other aspects, that decision-making is slower and more demanding with multi-list interfaces, but that users also explore more options before making a decision. Regarding the selection of the algorithm to retrieve similar items, our study furthermore reveals the importance of considering social-based similarity measures.
Incremental learning using generative-rehearsal strategy for fault detection and classification

In this study, we propose a novel pseudorehearsal method for modeling fault detection and classification. As manufacturing processes become increasingly advanced, it is often necessary to model the architecture when the data change over time. Particularly, learning with the addition of new fault types is called class incremental learning. Although learning systems must acquire new information from new data, this includes problems that can lead to catastrophic forgetting and class imbalance, wherein the number of instances in a particular class is greater than those in the other classes. Classification performance degrades when the existing model is trained under such conditions. Therefore, we propose a generative-rehearsal strategy that combines a pseudorehearsal strategy with independent generative models for each fault type. This method overcomes catastrophic forgetting and enables incremental learning with unbalanced data. The performance of the proposed method was superior to that of existing incremental and nonincremental methods while being memory efficient.
Ranking Neural Checkpoints

This paper is concerned with ranking many pre-trained deep neural networks (DNNs), called checkpoints, for the transfer learning to a downstream task. Thanks to the broad use of DNNs, we may easily collect hundreds of checkpoints from various sources. Which of them transfers the best to our downstream task of interest? Striving to answer this question thoroughly, we establish a neural checkpoint ranking benchmark (NeuCRaB) and study some intuitive ranking measures. These measures are generic, applying to the checkpoints of different output types without knowing how the checkpoints are pre-trained on which datasets. They also incur low computation cost, being practically meaningful. Our results suggest that the linear separability of the features extracted by the checkpoints is a strong indicator of transferability. We also arrive at a new ranking measure, ${\mathcal{N}}$LEEP, which gives rise to the best performance in the experiments. Code will be made publicly available.
A novel data augmentation approach for mask detection using deep transfer learning

At the onset of 2020, the world saw the rise and spread of a global pandemic named COVID-19 which caused numerous deaths and affected millions of people around the world. Due to its highly contagious nature, this disease spread across the world within a short span of time. It forced almost all the nations to implement strict social distancing rules along with use of face masks to reduce the risk of getting infected. While the virus is still on loose, markets and business firms have reopened to keep the economy alive. This calls for modification of existing technological models to cater for the safety of individuals and stop the spread of virus in public places. One such stringent implementation to achieve this safety would be deployment of a mask detection model. The proposed mask detection models can serve as a vital utility in the coming years for ensuring proper enforcement of safety protocols. This research paper explores the use of state of the art YOLOv3 model, a deep transfer learning object detection technique, to develop a mask detection model. Along with the implementation of a standard approach of any object detection algorithm, this paper has proposed the use of a data augmentation approach for mask detection. The proposed model focuses on generating an augmented dataset from the standard dataset with the help of data augmentation done by using image filtering techniques such as grayscale and Gaussian blur. This augmented dataset is used for training the object detection model for mask detection. The mean average precision for the Data augmentation based mask detection model is observed to be 99.8% while training. Finally, a comparison on the model performance is evaluated for the standard and proposed augmented data approach. The experiment conducted showed that the average confidence level for Standard mask detection model was 0.94, 0.93, 0.91 for images of individuals (type A), images with groups of people (type B) and video with the group of people (type C) respectively. The average confidence levels for the Data augmentation based mask detection model for types A, B and C are 0.97, 0.96 0.93 respectively. This paper therefore concludes that the proposed Data augmentation based mask detection model performs better than the Standard mask detection model.
SVDistNet: Self-Supervised Near-Field Distance Estimation on Surround View Fisheye Cameras

A 360° perception of scene geometry is essential for automated driving, notably for parking and urban driving scenarios. Typically, it is achieved using surround-view fisheye cameras, focusing on the near-field area around the vehicle. The majority of current depth estimation approaches focus on employing just a single camera, which cannot be straightforwardly generalized to multiple cameras. The depth estimation model must be tested on a variety of cameras equipped to millions of cars with varying camera geometries. Even within a single car, intrinsics vary due to manufacturing tolerances. Deep learning models are sensitive to these changes, and it is practically infeasible to train and test on each camera variant. As a result, we present novel camera-geometry adaptive multi-scale convolutions which utilize the camera parameters as a conditional input, enabling the model to generalize to previously unseen fisheye cameras. Additionally, we improve the distance estimation by pairwise and patchwise vector-based self-attention encoder networks. We evaluate our approach on the Fisheye WoodScape surround-view dataset, significantly improving over previous approaches. We also show a generalization of our approach across different camera viewing angles and perform extensive experiments to support our contributions. To enable comparison with other approaches, we evaluate the front camera data on the KITTI dataset (pinhole camera images) and achieve state-of-the-art performance among self-supervised monocular methods. An overview video with qualitative results is provided at <uri xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://youtu.be/bmX0UcU9wtA</uri> . Baseline code and dataset will be made public. <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><xref ref-type="fn" rid="fn1">1</xref></sup>
A heuristic-based task scheduling algorithm for scientific workflows in heterogeneous cloud computing platforms

Task scheduling problem in a cloud computing environment is one of the most important issues in this field. Because task schedulers should be aware of underlying platform heterogeneity, task interdependencies, and virtual machine (VM) variable configurations. An efficient task scheduling algorithm can potentially increase the efficiency of cloud computing, by choosing the appropriate virtual machine to do a specific task-scheduling problem, for dependent tasks on heterogeneous resources which is a well-known NP-Hard problem. To reduce minimum total execution time, makespan, in cloud computing many heuristics were presented in literature but lots of them suffer from low efficiency. In this article, a new task priority strategy and applying task duplication methods are proposed, for solving the task scheduling problem of the dependent tasks in heterogeneous cloud computing systems. The novelty of the current paper is to present a new list scheduling algorithm with a new task priority strategy and applying pertinent task duplication techniques. This paper uses optimistic cost table downward (OCTd) and optimistic cost table upward (OCTu) procedures to prioritize tasks in an efficient ordered list; then, it utilizes Heterogeneous Earliest Finish Time (HEFT)-duplication method for performing task duplication technique which significantly reduces makespan. To validate the proposal, we experimentally analyzed the proposed scheduling algorithm with different scientific workflows such as Molecular, LU-Like, FFT, and Montage datasets. The performance comparison of the novel heuristic scheduling algorithm against other existing approaches proved the superiority of proposed algorithm in terms of makespan, speedup, SLR, and efficiency which are prominent scheduling evaluation metrics.