Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Deep compressive offloading

With recent advances, neural networks have become a crucial building block in intelligent IoT systems and sensing applications. However, the excessive computational demand remains a serious impediment to their deployments on low-end IoT devices. With the emergence of edge computing, offloading grows into a promising technique to circumvent end-device limitations. However, transferring data between local and edge devices takes up a large proportion of time in existing offloading frameworks, creating a bottleneck for low-latency intelligent services. In this work, we propose a general framework, called deep compressive offloading. By integrating compressive sensing theory and deep learning, our framework can encode data for offloading into tiny sizes with negligible overhead on local devices and decode the data on the edge server, while offering theoretical guarantees on perfect reconstruction and lossless inference. By trading edge computing resources for data transmission time, our design can significantly reduce offloading latency with almost no accuracy loss. We build a deep compressive offloading system to serve state-of-the-art computer vision and speech recognition services. With comprehensive evaluations, our system can consistently reduce end-to-end latency by 2X to 4X with 1% accuracy loss, compared to state-of-the-art neural network offloading systems. In conditions of limited network bandwidth or intensive background traffic, our system can further speed up the neural network inference by up to 35X 1.
SipMask: Spatial Information Preservation for Fast Image and Video Instance Segmentation

Single-stage instance segmentation approaches have recently gained popularity due to their speed and simplicity, but are still lagging behind in accuracy, compared to two-stage methods. We propose a fast single-stage instance segmentation method, called SipMask, that preserves instance-specific spatial information by separating mask prediction of an instance to different sub-regions of a detected bounding-box. Our main contribution is a novel light-weight spatial preservation (SP) module that generates a separate set of spatial coefficients for each sub-region within a bounding-box, leading to improved mask predictions. It also enables accurate delineation of spatially adjacent instances. Further, we introduce a mask alignment weighting loss and a feature alignment scheme to better correlate mask prediction with object detection. On COCO test-dev, our SipMask outperforms the existing single-stage methods. Compared to the state-of-the-art single-stage TensorMask, SipMask obtains an absolute gain of 1.0% (mask AP), while providing a four-fold speedup. In terms of real-time capabilities, SipMask outperforms YOLACT with an absolute gain of 3.0% (mask AP) under similar settings, while operating at comparable speed on a Titan Xp. We also evaluate our SipMask for real-time video instance segmentation, achieving promising results on YouTube-VIS dataset. The source code is available at https://github.com/JialeCao001/SipMask .
Learning to Demodulate From Few Pilots via Offline and Online Meta-Learning

This paper considers an Internet-of-Things (IoT) scenario in which devices sporadically transmit short packets with few pilot symbols over a fading channel. Devices are characterized by unique transmission non-idealities, such as I/Q imbalance. The number of pilots is generally insufficient to obtain an accurate estimate of the end-to-end channel, which includes the effects of fading and of the transmission-side distortion. This paper proposes to tackle this problem by using meta-learning. Accordingly, pilots from previous IoT transmissions are used as meta-training data in order to train a demodulator that is able to quickly adapt to new end-to-end channel conditions from few pilots. Various state-of-the-art meta-learning schemes are adapted to the problem at hand and evaluated, including Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML), First-Order MAML (FOMAML), REPTILE, and fast Context Adaptation VIA meta-learning (CAVIA). Both offline and online solutions are developed. In the latter case, an integrated online meta-learning and adaptive pilot number selection scheme is proposed. Numerical results validate the advantages of meta-learning as compared to training schemes that either do not leverage prior transmissions or apply a standard joint learning algorithms on previously received data.
Deep Reinforcement Adversarial Learning Against Botnet Evasion Attacks

As cybersecurity detectors increasingly rely on machine learning mechanisms, attacks to these defenses escalate as well. Supervised classifiers are prone to adversarial evasion, and existing countermeasures suffer from many limitations. Most solutions degrade performance in the absence of adversarial perturbations; they are unable to face novel attack variants; they are applicable only to specific machine learning algorithms. We propose the first framework that can protect botnet detectors from adversarial attacks through deep reinforcement learning mechanisms. It automatically generates realistic attack samples that can evade detection, and it uses these samples to produce an augmented training set for producing hardened detectors. In such a way, we obtain more resilient detectors that can work even against unforeseen evasion attacks with the great merit of not penalizing their performance in the absence of specific attacks. We validate our proposal through an extensive experimental campaign that considers multiple machine learning algorithms and public datasets. The results highlight the improvements of the proposed solution over the state-of-the-art. Our method paves the way to novel and more robust cybersecurity detectors based on machine learning applied to network traffic analytics.
Nature-Inspired Optimization Algorithms for Text Document Clustering—A Comprehensive Analysis

Text clustering is one of the efficient unsupervised learning techniques used to partition a huge number of text documents into a subset of clusters. In which, each cluster contains similar documents and the clusters contain dissimilar text documents. Nature-inspired optimization algorithms have been successfully used to solve various optimization problems, including text document clustering problems. In this paper, a comprehensive review is presented to show the most related nature-inspired algorithms that have been used in solving the text clustering problem. Moreover, comprehensive experiments are conducted and analyzed to show the performance of the common well-know nature-inspired optimization algorithms in solving the text document clustering problems including Harmony Search (HS) Algorithm, Genetic Algorithm (GA), Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) Algorithm, Ant Colony Optimization (ACO), Krill Herd Algorithm (KHA), Cuckoo Search (CS) Algorithm, Gray Wolf Optimizer (GWO), and Bat-inspired Algorithm (BA). Seven text benchmark datasets are used to validate the performance of the tested algorithms. The results showed that the performance of the well-known nurture-inspired optimization algorithms almost the same with slight differences. For improvement purposes, new modified versions of the tested algorithms can be proposed and tested to tackle the text clustering problems.
Exploring hotel guests' perceptions of using robot assistants

The growing popularity of robot services blurs the boundaries of robotics and human life. Concomitant to the trend, many hotel brands have adopted a robot-based automation system in their properties. This study attempted to understand the underlying perceptions of the hotel guests' robot-using behaviors. A sample of 494 potential users of a hotel robot assistant was examined and analyzed. The result showed six factors, including three functional aspects (i.e., facilitating conditions, performance expectancy, and innovativeness) and three emotional aspects (i.e., social presence, hedonic motivation, and perceived importance). Moreover, this study categorized the respondents into cohesive groups that show similar characteristics. Based on different levels of perceptions and demographic information, four clusters were named as ‘The ordinary,’ ‘Enthusiastic adopter,’ ‘Tech laggard,’ and ‘Value seeker.’ The result of this study is expected to help the hotel industry to better target potential customers by understanding the different types of users of robotic technology.
Hybrid Models for Open Set Recognition

Open set recognition requires a classifier to detect samples not belonging to any of the classes in its training set. Existing methods fit a probability distribution to the training samples on their embedding space and detect outliers according to this distribution. The embedding space is often obtained from a discriminative classifier. However, such discriminative representation focuses only on known classes, which may not be critical for distinguishing the unknown classes. We argue that the representation space should be jointly learned from the inlier classifier and the density estimator (served as an outlier detector). We propose the OpenHybrid framework, which is composed of an encoder to encode the input data into a joint embedding space, a classifier to classify samples to inlier classes, and a flow-based density estimator to detect whether a sample belongs to the unknown category. A typical problem of existing flow-based models is that they may assign a higher likelihood to outliers. However, we empirically observe that such an issue does not occur in our experiments when learning a joint representation for discriminative and generative components. Experiments on standard open set benchmarks also reveal that an end-to-end trained OpenHybrid model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods and flow-based baselines.
Sparse-Interest Network for Sequential Recommendation

Recent methods in sequential recommendation focus on learning an overall embedding vector from a user's behavior sequence for the next-item recommendation. However, from empirical analysis, we discovered that a user's behavior sequence often contains multiple conceptually distinct items, while a unified embedding vector is primarily affected by one's most recent frequent actions. Thus, it may fail to infer the next preferred item if conceptually similar items are not dominant in recent interactions. To this end, an alternative solution is to represent each user with multiple embedding vectors encoding different aspects of the user's intentions. Nevertheless, recent work on multi-interest embedding usually considers a small number of concepts discovered via clustering, which may not be comparable to the large pool of item categories in real systems. It is a non-trivial task to effectively model a large number of diverse conceptual prototypes, as items are often not conceptually well clustered in fine granularity. Besides, an individual usually interacts with only a sparse set of concepts. In light of this, we propose a novel Sparse Interest NEtwork (SINE) for sequential recommendation. Our sparse-interest module can adaptively infer a sparse set of concepts for each user from the large concept pool and output multiple embeddings accordingly. Given multiple interest embeddings, we develop an interest aggregation module to actively predict the user's current intention and then use it to explicitly model multiple interests for next-item prediction. Empirical results on several public benchmark datasets and one large-scale industrial dataset demonstrate that SINE can achieve substantial improvement over state-of-the-art methods.
Contrastive Learning for Weakly Supervised Phrase Grounding

Phrase grounding, the problem of associating image regions to caption words, is a crucial component of vision-language tasks. We show that phrase grounding can be learned by optimizing word-region attention to maximize a lower bound on mutual information between images and caption words. Given pairs of images and captions, we maximize compatibility of the attention-weighted regions and the words in the corresponding caption, compared to non-corresponding pairs of images and captions. A key idea is to construct effective negative captions for learning through language model guided word substitutions. Training with our negatives yields a $$\sim 10\%$$ absolute gain in accuracy over randomly-sampled negatives from the training data. Our weakly supervised phrase grounding model trained on COCO-Captions shows a healthy gain of $$5.7\%$$ to achieve $$76.7\%$$ accuracy on Flickr30K Entities benchmark. Our code and project material will be available at http://tanmaygupta.info/info-ground .
Financial development and entrepreneurship

We empirically investigate the effect of financial development on entrepreneurship for a panel of 136 countries between 2004 and 2017. We add to existing research on the nexus between financial development and entrepreneurship by (1) constructing a novel index of financial development to account for the various dimensions of financial development, (2) using an instrumental-variable approach that exploits the presence of heteroskedasticity in regression residuals to provide causal estimates of the effect of financial development on entrepreneurship and (3) examining the role of the quality of economic and political institutions in mediating this latter effect. As our main result, we show that higher levels of financial development cause higher levels of entrepreneurial activity, especially when economic and political institutions are sound. Our empirical results suggest that financial development beneficially contributes to entrepreneurial activity by satisfying the demand for accessible, cheap and extensive credit on the part of entrepreneurs as well as the demand for the efficient and cost-effective management of risk and information on the part of investors. At the same time, our results speak to the notion that national financial systems need to be imbedded into a sound institutional framework for the economic benefits of financial development to be fully realizable.
GLocalX - From Local to Global Explanations of Black Box AI Models

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has come to prominence as one of the major components of our society, with applications in most aspects of our lives. In this field, complex and highly nonlinear machine learning models such as ensemble models, deep neural networks, and Support Vector Machines have consistently shown remarkable accuracy in solving complex tasks. Although accurate, AI models often are "black boxes" which we are not able to understand. Relying on these models has a multifaceted impact and raises significant concerns about their transparency. Applications in sensitive and critical domains are a strong motivational factor in trying to understand the behavior of black boxes. We propose to address this issue by providing an interpretable layer on top of black box models by aggregating "local" explanations. We present GLocalX, a "local-first" model agnostic explanation method. Starting from local explanations expressed in form of local decision rules, GLocalX iteratively generalizes them into global explanations by hierarchically aggregating them. Our goal is to learn accurate yet simple interpretable models to emulate the given black box, and, if possible, replace it entirely. We validate GLocalX in a set of experiments in standard and constrained settings with limited or no access to either data or local explanations. Experiments show that GLocalX is able to accurately emulate several models with simple and small models, reaching state-of-the-art performance against natively global solutions. Our findings show how it is often possible to achieve a high level of both accuracy and comprehensibility of classification models, even in complex domains with high-dimensional data, without necessarily trading one property for the other. This is a key requirement for a trustworthy AI, necessary for adoption in high-stakes decision making applications.
Links between knowledge management and organisational sustainability: does the ISO 9001 certification have an effect?

This study’s aim is investigating the impacts of the determinants of knowledge management on organisational sustainability. It investigates the differences in performance among ISO 9001 certified and non-certified firms. The study uses data collected from 156 employees of various private firms in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. It uses the partial least squares method to test the hypothesised model and the independent samples t-test toelaborate on the differences between ISO 9001 certified and non-certified firms. The results show that knowledge storage plays a key role in knowledge generation, sharing, and utilisation. It is also observed that knowledge management has a significant impact on organisational sustainability. Firms in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq fail to generate management knowledge due to their weak document storage capacities. This paper discusses the theoretical and practical implications of their weak document storage capacities and makes some suggestions for improving this situation.
Toward fast and accurate human pose estimation via soft-gated skip connections

This paper is on highly accurate and highly efficient human pose estimation. Recent works based on Fully Convolutional Networks (FCNs) have demonstrated excellent results for this difficult problem. While residual connections within FCNs have proved to be quintessential for achieving high accuracy, we re-analyze this design choice in the context of improving both the accuracy and the efficiency over the state-of- the-art. In particular, we make the following contributions: (a) We propose gated skip connections with per-channel learnable parameters to control the data flow for each channel within the module within the macro-module. (b) We introduce a hybrid network that combines the HourGlass and U-Net architectures which minimizes the number of identity connections within the network and increases the performance for the same parameter budget. Our model achieves state-of-the-art results on the MPII and LSP datasets. In addition, with a reduction of 3× in model size and complexity, we show no decrease in performance when compared to the original HourGlass network.
Marginal loss and exclusion loss for partially supervised multi-organ segmentation

Annotating multiple organs in medical images is both costly and time-consuming; therefore, existing multi-organ datasets with labels are often low in sample size and mostly partially labeled, that is, a dataset has a few organs labeled but not all organs. In this paper, we investigate how to learn a single multi-organ segmentation network from a union of such datasets. To this end, we propose two types of novel loss function, particularly designed for this scenario: (i) marginal loss and (ii) exclusion loss. Because the background label for a partially labeled image is, in fact, a 'merged' label of all unlabelled organs and 'true' background (in the sense of full labels), the probability of this 'merged' background label is a marginal probability, summing the relevant probabilities before merging. This marginal probability can be plugged into any existing loss function (such as cross entropy loss, Dice loss, etc.) to form a marginal loss. Leveraging the fact that the organs are non-overlapping, we propose the exclusion loss to gauge the dissimilarity between labeled organs and the estimated segmentation of unlabelled organs. Experiments on a union of five benchmark datasets in multi-organ segmentation of liver, spleen, left and right kidneys, and pancreas demonstrate that using our newly proposed loss functions brings a conspicuous performance improvement for state-of-the-art methods without introducing any extra computation.
Online anomaly detection in surveillance videos with asymptotic bound on false alarm rate

Anomaly detection in surveillance videos is attracting an increasing amount of attention. Despite the competitive performance of recent methods, they lack theoretical performance analysis, particularly due to the complex deep neural network architectures used in decision making. Additionally, online decision making is an important but mostly neglected factor in this domain. Much of the existing methods that claim to be online, depend on batch or offline processing in practice. Motivated by these research gaps, we propose an online anomaly detection method in surveillance videos with asymptotic bounds on the false alarm rate, which in turn provides a clear procedure for selecting a proper decision threshold that satisfies the desired false alarm rate. Our proposed algorithm consists of a multi-objective deep learning module along with a statistical anomaly detection module, and its effectiveness is demonstrated on several publicly available data sets where we outperform the state-of-the-art algorithms. All codes are available at https://github.com/kevaldoshi17/Prediction-based-Video-Anomaly-Detection-.
Cybersecurity: Risk management framework and investment cost analysis

As organizations accelerate digital transformation with mobile devices, cloud services, social media, and Internet of Things services, cybersecurity has become a key priority in enterprise risk management. While improving cybersecurity leads to higher levels of customer trust and increased revenue opportunities, rapidly evolving data protection and privacy regulations have complicated cybersecurity management. Against the backdrop of rapidly rising cyberbreaches and the emergence of novel cybersecurity technologies such as machine learning and artificial intelligence, this article introduces a cyber risk management framework, discusses a cyber risk assessment process, and illustrates a continuous improvement of cybersecurity performance and cyberinvestment cost analysis with a real-world cybersecurity example.
Relational Graph Learning for Crowd Navigation

We present a relational graph learning approach for robotic crowd navigation using model-based deep reinforcement learning that plans actions by looking into the future. Our approach reasons about the relations between all agents based on their latent features and uses a Graph Convolutional Network to encode higher-order interactions in each agent's state representation, which is subsequently leveraged for state prediction and value estimation. The ability to predict human motion allows us to perform multi-step lookahead planning, taking into account the temporal evolution of human crowds. We evaluate our approach against a state-of-the-art baseline for crowd navigation and ablations of our model to demonstrate that navigation with our approach is more efficient, results in fewer collisions, and avoids failure cases involving oscillatory and freezing behaviors.