Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
CoDraw: Collaborative Drawing as a Testbed for Grounded Goal-driven Communication

In this work, we propose a goal-driven collaborative task that combines language, perception, and action.Specifically, we develop a Collaborative image-Drawing game between two agents, called CoDraw.Our game is grounded in a virtual world that contains movable clip art objects.The game involves two players: a Teller and a Drawer.The Teller sees an abstract scene containing multiple clip art pieces in a semantically meaningful configuration, while the Drawer tries to reconstruct the scene on an empty canvas using available clip art pieces.The two players communicate with each other using natural language.We collect the CoDraw dataset of ∼10K dialogs consisting of ∼138K messages exchanged between human players.We define protocols and metrics to evaluate learned agents in this testbed, highlighting the need for a novel crosstalk evaluation condition which pairs agents trained independently on disjoint subsets of the training data.We present models for our task and benchmark them using both fully automated evaluation and by having them play the game live with humans.
Knowledge-Driven Deep Unrolling for Robust Image Layer Separation

Single-image layer separation targets to decompose the observed image into two independent components in terms of different application demands. It is known that many vision and multimedia applications can be (re)formulated as a separation problem. Due to the fundamentally ill-posed natural of these separations, existing methods are inclined to investigate model priors on the separated components elaborately. Nevertheless, it is knotty to optimize the cost function with complicated model regularizations. Effectiveness is greatly conceded by the settled iteration mechanism, and the adaption cannot be guaranteed due to the poor data fitting. What is more, for a universal framework, the most taxing point is that one type of visual cue cannot be shared with different tasks. To partly overcome the weaknesses mentioned earlier, we delve into a generic optimization unrolling technique to incorporate deep architectures into iterations for adaptive image layer separation. First, we propose a general energy model with implicit priors, which is based on maximum a posterior, and employ the extensively accepted alternating direction method of multiplier to determine our elementary iteration mechanism. By unrolling with one general residual architecture prior and one task-specific prior, we attain a straightforward, flexible, and data-dependent image separation framework successfully. We apply our method to four different tasks, including single-image-rain streak removal, high-dynamic-range tone mapping, low-light image enhancement, and single-image reflection removal. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method is applicable to multiple tasks and outperforms the state of the arts by a large margin qualitatively and quantitatively.
Stochastic Beams and Where To Find Them: The Gumbel-Top-k Trick for Sampling Sequences Without Replacement

The well-known Gumbel-Max trick for sampling from a categorical distribution can be extended to sample k elements without replacement. We show how to implicitly apply this ’Gumbel-Top-k’ trick on a factorized distribution over sequences, allowing to draw exact samples without replacement using a Stochastic Beam Search. Even for exponentially large domains, the number of model evaluations grows only linear in k and the maximum sampled sequence length. The algorithm creates a theoretical connection between sampling and (deterministic) beam search and can be used as a principled intermediate alternative. In a translation task, the proposed method compares favourably against alternatives to obtain diverse yet good quality translations. We show that sequences sampled without replacement can be used to construct low-variance estimators for expected sentence-level BLEU score and model entropy.
Abnormality Diagnosis in Mammograms by Transfer Learning Based on ResNet18

Breast cancer is one of the common cancers threatening the health of women while the incident rate of it is quite low in men to contribute to a major killer of men. Early syndromes of breast cancer including micro-calcification, mass, and distortion in mammography images can be very helpful for rad iologists to make diagnosis of the cancer at early stage, which means the cancer can be treated or even be cured timely and thus make early diagnosis important. To assist radiologists with diagnosis, we set up a computer-aided diagnosis system to make diagnosis decision of breast cancer in this paper. We acquired regions of interests in mammographic images from public database, and labeled regions containing micro-calcification or mass as abnormality while regions without such abnormalities as normality. By transferring the state-of-the-art networks into our quest, we found that ResNet18 performed best and achieved mean accuracy of 95.91%.
A Novel Ensemble Algorithm for Solar Power Forecasting Based on Kernel Density Estimation

A novel ensemble algorithm based on kernel density estimation (KDE) is proposed to forecast distributed generation (DG) from renewable energy sources (RES). The proposed method relies solely on publicly available historical input variables (e.g., meteorological forecasts) and the corresponding local output (e.g., recorded power generation). Given a new case (with forecasted meteorological variables), the resulting power generation is forecasted. This is performed by calculating a KDE-based similarity index to determine a set of most similar cases from the historical dataset. Then, the outputs of the most similar cases are used to calculate an ensemble prediction. The method is tested using historical weather forecasts and recorded generation of a PV installation in Portugal. Despite only being given averaged data as input, the algorithm is shown to be capable of predicting uncertainties associated with high frequency weather variations, outperforming deterministic predictions based on solar irradiance forecasts. Moreover, the algorithm is shown to outperform a neural network (NN) in most test cases while being exceptionally faster (32 times). Given that the proposed model only relies on public locally-metered data, it is a convenient tool for DG owners/operators to effectively forecast their expected generation without depending on private/proprietary data or divulging their own.
Time-delay signature concealment of chaos and ultrafast decision making in mutually coupled semiconductor lasers with a phase-modulated Sagnac loop

We propose and experimentally demonstrate the generation of dual-channels chaos with time delay signature (TDS) concealment by introducing a phase-modulated Sagnac loop in mutually coupled semiconductor lasers (MCSL). Furthermore, we demonstrate the utilization of the dual-channels chaos to solve multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem in reinforcement learning. The experimental results agree well with the numerical simulations. For the purpose of comparison, the MCSL with a conventional Sagnac loop is also considered. It is found that the TDS of dual-channels chaotic signals can be better concealed in our proposed system. Besides, the proposed system allows for a better decision making performance in MAB problem. Moreover, compared with the one-channel chaotic system, the proposed dual-channels chaotic system achieves ultrafast decision making in parallel, and thus, is highly valuable for further improving the security of communication systems and the performance of photonic intelligence.
Learning With Interpretable Structure From Gated RNN

The interpretability of deep learning models has raised extended attention these years. It will be beneficial if we can learn an interpretable structure from deep learning models. In this article, we focus on recurrent neural networks (RNNs), especially gated RNNs whose inner mechanism is still not clearly understood. We find that finite-state automaton (FSA) that processes sequential data have a more interpretable inner mechanism according to the definition of interpretability and can be learned from RNNs as the interpretable structure. We propose two methods to learn FSA from RNN based on two different clustering methods. With the learned FSA and via experiments on artificial and real data sets, we find that FSA is more trustable than the RNN from which it learned, which gives FSA a chance to substitute RNNs in applications involving humans' lives or dangerous facilities. Besides, we analyze how the number of gates affects the performance of RNN. Our result suggests that gate in RNN is important but the less the better, which could be a guidance to design other RNNs. Finally, we observe that the FSA learned from RNN gives semantic aggregated states, and its transition graph shows us a very interesting vision of how RNNs intrinsically handle text classification tasks.
Impossible measurements require impossible apparatus

A well-recognized open conceptual problem in relativistic quantum field theory concerns the relation between measurement and causality. Naive generalizations of quantum measurement rules can allow for superluminal signaling (``impossible measurements''). This raises the problem of delineating physically allowed quantum measurements and operations. We analyze this issue in a recently proposed framework in which local measurements (in possibly curved spacetime) are described physically by coupling the system to a probe. We show that the state-update rule in this setting is consistent with causality provided that the coupling between the system and probe is local. Thus, by establishing a well-defined framework for successive measurements, we also provide a class of physically allowed operations. Conversely, impossible measurements can only be performed using impossible (nonlocal) apparatus.
SPMF-Net: Weakly Supervised Building Segmentation by Combining Superpixel Pooling and Multi-Scale Feature Fusion

The lack of pixel-level labeling limits the practicality of deep learning-based building semantic segmentation. Weakly supervised semantic segmentation based on image-level labeling results in incomplete object regions and missing boundary information. This paper proposes a weakly supervised semantic segmentation method for building detection. The proposed method takes the image-level label as supervision information in a classification network that combines superpixel pooling and multi-scale feature fusion structures. The main advantage of the proposed strategy is its ability to improve the intactness and boundary accuracy of a detected building. Our method achieves impressive results on two 2D semantic labeling datasets, which outperform some competing weakly supervised methods and are close to the result of the fully supervised method.
Performance Analysis of Clustering Based Image Segmentation Techniques

As the images are examined using the latest machine learning process, the techniques for computing the images become highly essential. This computation applied over the images allows one to have an assessable information’s or values from the images. Since segmentation plays a vital role in processing of images by enhancing or hypothetically altering the images making the examination of valuable insights easier. Several procedures and the methods for segmenting the images have been developed. However to have an better process it is important to sort out an effective segmentation procedure, so the paper performs the analysis of the clustering based image segmentation techniques applied on the magnetic resonance image of the human brain to detect the white matter hyper intensities part. The evaluation process take place in the MATLAB to evince the accurate valuation procedure. The optimal procedure is sorted out to be used in observing and examining the medical images by implementing over a computer assisted tool.
Automatic post-stroke lesion segmentation on MR images using 3D residual convolutional neural network

In this paper, we demonstrate the feasibility and performance of deep residual neural networks for volumetric segmentation of irreversibly damaged brain tissue lesions on T1-weighted MRI scans for chronic stroke patients. A total of 239 T1-weighted MRI scans of chronic ischemic stroke patients from a public dataset were retrospectively analyzed by 3D deep convolutional segmentation models with residual learning, using a novel zoom-in&out strategy. Dice similarity coefficient (DSC), average symmetric surface distance (ASSD), and Hausdorff distance (HD) of the identified lesions were measured by using manual tracing of lesions as the reference standard. Bootstrapping was employed for all metrics to estimate 95% confidence intervals. The models were assessed on a test set of 31 scans. The average DSC was 0.64 (0.51–0.76) with a median of 0.78. ASSD and HD were 3.6 mm (1.7–6.2 mm) and 20.4 mm (10.0–33.3 mm), respectively. The latest deep learning architecture and techniques were applied with 3D segmentation on MRI scans and demonstrated effectiveness for volumetric segmentation of chronic ischemic stroke lesions.
VisualEchoes: Spatial Image Representation Learning Through Echolocation

Several animal species (e.g., bats, dolphins, and whales) and even visually impaired humans have the remarkable ability to perform echolocation: a biological sonar used to perceive spatial layout and locate objects in the world. We explore the spatial cues contained in echoes and how they can benefit vision tasks that require spatial reasoning. First we capture echo responses in photo-realistic 3D indoor scene environments. Then we propose a novel interaction-based representation learning framework that learns useful visual features via echolocation. We show that the learned image features are useful for multiple downstream vision tasks requiring spatial reasoning—monocular depth estimation, surface normal estimation, and visual navigation—with results comparable or even better than heavily supervised pre-training. Our work opens a new path for representation learning for embodied agents, where supervision comes from interacting with the physical world.
Blockchain-Based Cyber-Physical Security for Electrical Vehicle Aided Smart Grid Ecosystem

The ever-growing trend of making the traditional power grids smarter than before has resulted in their gradual evolution to more sophisticated grids, referred to as Smart Grids (SGs) Cyber-Physical Systems with complex networking technologies. The integration of Information and Communication Technologies with power grids fosters seamless data sharing between different SG entities, which supports effective and smart governance in terms of demand response management, frequency support, and voltage stabilization. Nonetheless, this integration opens up several security and privacy concerns, namely, electricity theft, power loss, battery exhaustion, infrastructure mapping, etc. These issues become even more important with the addition of distributed energy sources, e.g. electric vehicles (EVs), battery energy storage systems, and renewable energy sources, into the SGs. We present a framework based on Software Defined Networking (SDN) and BlockChain (BC) to address two challenging issues of EV-aided SG ecosystems, namely, privacy assurance and power security. We leverage the capabilities of SDN to handle the complex interactions between different subsystems of the SG. Furthermore, we also employ BC and smart contracts' properties to secure energy transactions and data communications. We design a secure and efficient mutual authentication protocol based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) and BC for privacy preservation during smart energy trading. We also proposed a BC-based smart contract for effective Demand Response Management (DRM) during bidirectional energy transfer between EVs and SG. Finally, we present experimental evaluations to validate the proposed framework's performance. The results obtained demonstrate the improved performance of the proposed scheme compared with current state-of-the-art approaches. The mutual authentication protocol designed is not only secure against major attack vectors (namely, session key security, message integrity, anonymity, forward secrecy, and so on), but it is also cost-efficient in terms of communication and computational costs. Additionally, the SC designed assures power security and maintains an adequate balance between demand and supply.
Optimal data placement strategy considering capacity limitation and load balancing in geographically distributed cloud

At present, the amount of data from users is increasing exponentially, and most of the data is stored in data centers distributed in different geographic locations. The cost of transferring large amounts of data across geographically distributed data centers can become prohibitive. Therefore, to shorten the data transmission time and reduce the cost of data transmission bandwidth and maintain the load balance of the geographically distributed cloud system, an optimal data placement strategy considering capacity limitation and load balancing in a geographically distributed cloud is proposed. Firstly, the capacity limitation, load balancing, and bandwidth cost of each cloud data center in the geographically distributed cloud are considered, and the data placement problem in the geographically distributed cloud is mathematically modeled. Secondly, the Floyd algorithm is used to model the cost of data transmission bandwidth and find the minimum transmission bandwidth cost. Finally, the Lagrangian relaxation method is used to obtain the optimal data placement scheme for the transmission time. To show the performance advantages of the proposed algorithm, comparative experiments are carried out. When the bandwidth is 15 Mbps, in terms of the Load Balancing Degree (LBD), the proposed algorithm is 40.3% higher than the Hash on average, 35.6% higher than the Closest on average, and 25.7% higher than the CRANE on average. Moreover, the experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can reduce the data transmission cost, and improve the load balancing in a geographically distributed cloud system.
Analogies Explained: Towards Understanding Word Embeddings

Word embeddings generated by neural network methods such as word2vec (W2V) are well known to exhibit seemingly linear behaviour, e.g. the embeddings of analogy woman is to queen as man is to king approximately describe a parallelogram. This property is particularly intriguing since the embeddings are not trained to achieve it. Several explanations have been proposed, but each introduces assumptions that do not hold in practice. We derive a probabilistically grounded definition of paraphrasing that we re-interpret as word transformation, a mathematical description of $w_x$ is to $w_y$. From these concepts we prove existence of linear relationships between W2V-type embeddings that underlie the analogical phenomenon, identifying explicit error terms.
Sherlock - A tool for verification of neural network feedback systems

We present an approach for the synthesis and verification of neural network controllers for closed loop dynamical systems, modelled as an ordinary differential equation. Feedforward neural networks are ubiquitous when it comes to approximating functions, especially in the machine learning literature. The proposed verification technique tries to construct an over-approximation of the system trajectories using a combination of tools, such as, Sherlock and Flow*. In addition to computing reach sets, we incorporate counter examples or bad traces into the synthesis phase of the controller as well. We go back and forth between verification and counter example generation until the system outputs a fully verified controller, or the training fails to terminate in a neural network which is compliant with the desired specifications. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach over a suite of benchmarks ranging from 2 to 17 variables.
The U.S. National Quantum Initiative: From Act to action

Academia, agencies, and industry will work together
Blockchain hysteria: Adding “blockchain” to company’s name

Using a list of companies that changed their names to add “blockchain” or “bitcoin” to their names, we find that after changing the names, these firms have a significant abnormal positive return that lasts for 2 months. The abnormal return turns negative 5 months after the change. This suggests that these firms changed their names to take advantage of the hysteria surrounding the price rise of bitcoin.
An Optimization Model for Software Quality Prediction With Case Study Analysis Using MATLAB

Stakeholder satisfaction is the main motive of the software industry. Consumer and producer satisfaction means achieving a software-quality product. There are so many techniques, methods, and models are present for the software-quality prediction. Computational intelligence is also playing a crucial role in the prediction of quality characteristics. This paper gives a new optimal mathematical model for the prediction of the degree of stakeholder satisfaction (Q). Optimal models validate the real data using the relationship impacts of various quality attributes. It uses the equations of constraints. The optimal model gives the maximum and minimum values for Q. Constraints constitutes of software quality characteristics. In the given case study example, the idle value of Q is 30 but using optimal model it gives the maximum optimal value of Q = 22.788020075 for xLAB IT consulting services on their project In-Reg Molecule Registration using the MATLAB. It means if there is any change in the value of any software quality characteristics, then it will decrease the value of Q. It proves that the given result is an optimal solution.
Bayesian Inference of Linear Temporal Logic Specifications for Contrastive Explanations

Temporal logics are useful for providing concise descriptions of system behavior, and have been successfully used as a language for goal definitions in task planning. Prior works on inferring temporal logic specifications have focused on "summarizing" the input dataset - i.e., finding specifications that are satisfied by all plan traces belonging to the given set. In this paper, we examine the problem of inferring specifications that describe temporal differences between two sets of plan traces. We formalize the concept of providing such contrastive explanations, then present BayesLTL - a Bayesian probabilistic model for inferring contrastive explanations as linear temporal logic (LTL) specifications. We demonstrate the robustness and scalability of our model for inferring accurate specifications from noisy data and across various benchmark planning domains.
SELF: Learning to Filter Noisy Labels with Self-Ensembling

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have been shown to over-fit a dataset when being trained with noisy labels for a long enough time. To overcome this problem, we present a simple and effective method self-ensemble label filtering (SELF) to progressively filter out the wrong labels during training. Our method improves the task performance by gradually allowing supervision only from the potentially non-noisy (clean) labels and stops learning on the filtered noisy labels. For the filtering, we form running averages of predictions over the entire training dataset using the network output at different training epochs. We show that these ensemble estimates yield more accurate identification of inconsistent predictions throughout training than the single estimates of the network at the most recent training epoch. While filtered samples are removed entirely from the supervised training loss, we dynamically leverage them via semi-supervised learning in the unsupervised loss. We demonstrate the positive effect of such an approach on various image classification tasks under both symmetric and asymmetric label noise and at different noise ratios. It substantially outperforms all previous works on noise-aware learning across different datasets and can be applied to a broad set of network architectures.