Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
DeepTimeAnomalyViz: A Tool for Visualizing and Post-processing Deep Learning Anomaly Detection Results for Industrial Time-Series

Industrial processes are monitored by a large number of various sensors that produce time-series data. Deep Learning offers a possibility to create anomaly detection methods that can aid in preventing malfunctions and increasing efficiency. But creating such a solution can be a complicated task, with factors such as inference speed, amount of available data, number of sensors, and many more, influencing the feasibility of such implementation. We introduce the DeTAVIZ interface, which is a web browser based visualization tool for quick exploration and assessment of feasibility of DL based anomaly detection in a given problem. Provided with a pool of pretrained models and simulation results, DeTAVIZ allows the user to easily and quickly iterate through multiple post processing options and compare different models, and allows for manual optimisation towards a chosen metric.
Learning low-degree functions from a logarithmic number of random queries

We prove that every bounded function $f:\{-1,1\}^n\to[-1,1]$ of degree at most $d$ can be learned with $L_2$-accuracy $\varepsilon$ and confidence $1-\delta$ from $\log(\tfrac{n}{\delta})\,\varepsilon^{-d-1} C^{d^{3/2}\sqrt{\log d}}$ random queries, where $C>1$ is a universal finite constant.
Stabilizing Elastic Weight Consolidation method in practical ML tasks and using weight importances for neural network pruning

This paper is devoted to the features of the practical application of the Elastic Weight Consolidation (EWC) method for continual learning of neural networks on several training sets. We will more rigorously compare the well-known methodologies for calculating the importance of weights used in the EWC method. These are the Memory Aware Synapses (MAS), Synaptic Intelligence (SI) methodologies and the calculation of the importance of weights based on the Fisher information matrix from the original paper on EWC. We will consider these methodologies as applied to deep neural networks with fully connected and convolutional layers, find the optimal hyperparameters for each of the methodologies, and compare the results of continual neural network learning using these hyperparameters. Next, we will point out the problems that arise when applying the EWC method to deep neural networks with convolutional layers and self-attention layers, such as the "gradient explosion" and the loss of meaningful information in the gradient when using the constraint of its norm (gradient clipping). Then, we will propose a stabilization approach for the EWC method that helps to solve these problems, evaluate it in comparison with the original methodology and show that the proposed stabilization approach performs on the task of maintaining skills during continual learning no worse than the original EWC, but does not have its disadvantages. In conclusion, we present an interesting fact about the use of various types of weight importance in the problem of neural network pruning.
Enabling Large-Scale Federated Learning over Wireless Edge Networks

Major bottlenecks of large-scale Federated Learning(FL) networks are the high costs for communication and computation. This is due to the fact that most of current FL frameworks only consider a star network topology where all local trained models are aggregated at a single server (e.g., a cloud server). This causes significant overhead at the server when the number of users are huge and local models' sizes are large. This paper proposes a novel edge network architecture which decentralizes the model aggregation process at the server, thereby significantly reducing the aggregation latency of the whole network. In this architecture, we propose a highly-effective in-network computation protocol consisting of two components. First, an in-network aggregation process is designed so that the majority of aggregation computations can be offloaded from cloud server to edge nodes. Second, a joint routing and resource allocation optimization problem is formulated to minimize the aggregation latency for the whole system at every learning round. The problem turns out to be NP-hard, and thus we propose a polynomial time routing algorithm which can achieve near optimal performance with a theoretical bound. Numerical results show that our proposed framework can dramatically reduce the network latency, up to 4.6 times. Furthermore, this framework can significantly decrease cloud's traffic and computing overhead by a factor of K/M, where K is the number of users and M is the number of edge nodes, in comparison with conventional baselines.
SubseasonalClimateUSA: A Dataset for Subseasonal Forecasting and Benchmarking

Subseasonal forecasting of the weather two to six weeks in advance is critical for resource allocation and advance disaster notice but poses many challenges for the forecasting community. At this forecast horizon, physics-based dynamical models have limited skill, and the targets for prediction depend in a complex manner on both local weather variables and global climate variables. Recently, machine learning methods have shown promise in advancing the state of the art but only at the cost of complex data curation, integrating expert knowledge with aggregation across multiple relevant data sources, file formats, and temporal and spatial resolutions. To streamline this process and accelerate future development, we introduce SubseasonalClimateUSA, a curated dataset for training and benchmarking subseasonal forecasting models in the United States. We use this dataset to benchmark a diverse suite of models, including operational dynamical models, classical meteorological baselines, and ten state-of-the-art machine learning and deep learning-based methods from the literature. Overall, our benchmarks suggest simple and effective ways to extend the accuracy of current operational models. SubseasonalClimateUSA is regularly updated and accessible via the https://github.com/microsoft/subseasonal_data/ Python package.
Benchmarking Augmentation Methods for Learning Robust Navigation Agents: the Winning Entry of the 2021 iGibson Challenge

Recent advances in deep reinforcement learning and scalable photorealistic simulation have led to increasingly mature embodied AI for various visual tasks, including navigation. However, while impressive progress has been made for teaching embodied agents to navigate static environments, much less progress has been made on more dynamic environments that may include moving pedestrians or movable obstacles. In this study, we aim to benchmark different augmentation techniques for improving the agent's performance in these challenging environments. We show that adding several dynamic obstacles into the scene during training confers significant improvements in test-time generalization, achieving much higher success rates than baseline agents. We find that this approach can also be combined with image augmentation methods to achieve even higher success rates. Additionally, we show that this approach is also more robust to sim-to-sim transfer than image augmentation methods. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of this dynamic obstacle augmentation approach by using it to train an agent for the 2021 iGibson Challenge at CVPR, where it achieved 1st place for Interactive Navigation. Video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxUX2HeOSE4
Learning General Optimal Policies with Graph Neural Networks: Expressive Power, Transparency, and Limits

It has been recently shown that general policies for many classical planning domains can be expressed and learned in terms of a pool of features defined from the domain predicates using a description logic grammar. At the same time, most description logics correspond to a fragment of $k$-variable counting logic ($C_k$) for $k=2$, that has been shown to provide a tight characterization of the expressive power of graph neural networks. In this work, we make use of these results to understand the power and limits of using graph neural networks (GNNs) for learning optimal general policies over a number of tractable planning domains where such policies are known to exist. For this, we train a simple GNN in a supervised manner to approximate the optimal value function $V^{*}(s)$ of a number of sample states $s$. As predicted by the theory, it is observed that general optimal policies are obtained in domains where general optimal value functions can be defined with $C_2$ features but not in those requiring more expressive $C_3$ features. In addition, it is observed that the features learned are in close correspondence with the features needed to express $V^{*}$ in closed form. The theory and the analysis of the domains let us understand the features that are actually learned as well as those that cannot be learned in this way, and let us move in a principled manner from a combinatorial optimization approach to learning general policies to a potentially, more robust and scalable approach based on deep learning.
Ultrasound Domain Adaptation Using Frequency Domain Analysis

A common issue in exploiting simulated ultrasound data for training neural networks is the domain shift problem, where the trained models on synthetic data are not generalizable to clinical data. Recently, Fourier Domain Adaptation (FDA) has been proposed in the field of computer vision to tackle the domain shift problem by replacing the magnitude of the low-frequency spectrum of a synthetic sample (source) with a real sample (target). This method is attractive in ultrasound imaging given that two important differences between synthetic and real ultrasound data are caused by unknown values of attenuation and speed of sound (SOS) in real tissues. Attenuation leads to slow variations in the amplitude of the B-mode image, and SOS mismatch creates aberration and subsequent blurring. As such, both domain shifts cause differences in the low-frequency components of the envelope data, which are replaced in the proposed method. We demonstrate that applying the FDA method to the synthetic data, simulated by Field II, obtains an 3.5\% higher Dice similarity coefficient for a breast lesion segmentation task.
Single-photon-added coherent state based measurement transition and its advantages in precision measurement

In this work, the measurement transition as well as precision measurement advantages of single-photon-added coherent state after postselected von Neumann measurement are investigated. We noticed that the weak-to-strong measurement transition characterized by the shifts of pointer's position and momentum variables occurred in continuously by controlling a dimensionless parameter associated with system-pointer coupling. We calculate the ratio between the signal-to-noise ratio of nonpostselected and postselected measurements, and the latter is used to find the quantum Fisher information. We found that the single-photon-added coherent pointer state can improve the precision of the measurement processes such as signal-to-noise ratio and parameter estimation after postselected von Neumann measurement characterized by postselection and weak value. Furthermore, contrary to the results of several previous studies, we found that the anomalous large weak values can't improve the precision measurement processes related to single-photon-added coherent state.
Blockchain-based Covid Vaccination Registration and Monitoring

Covid-19 (SARS-CoV-2) has changed almost all the aspects of our living. Governments around the world have imposed lockdown to slow down the transmissions. In the meantime, researchers worked hard to find the vaccine. Fortunately, we have found the vaccine, in fact a good number of them. However, managing the testing and vaccination process of the total population is a mammoth job. There are multiple government and private sector organisations that are working together to ensure proper testing and vaccination. However, there is always delay or data silo problems in multi-organisational works. Therefore, streamlining this process is vital to improve the efficiency and save more lives. It is already proved that technology has a significant impact on the health sector, including blockchain. Blockchain provides a distributed system along with greater privacy, transparency and authenticity. In this article, we have presented a blockchain-based system that seamlessly integrates testing and vaccination system, allowing the system to be transparent. The instant verification of any tamper-proof result and a transparent and efficient vaccination system have been exhibited and implemented in the research. We have also implemented the system as "Digital Vaccine Passport" (DVP) and analysed its performance.
iRNN: Integer-only Recurrent Neural Network

Recurrent neural networks (RNN) are used in many real-world text and speech applications. They include complex modules such as recurrence, exponential-based activation, gate interaction, unfoldable normalization, bi-directional dependence, and attention. The interaction between these elements prevents running them on integer-only operations without a significant performance drop. Deploying RNNs that include layer normalization and attention on integer-only arithmetic is still an open problem. We present a quantization-aware training method for obtaining a highly accurate integer-only recurrent neural network (iRNN). Our approach supports layer normalization, attention, and an adaptive piecewise linear approximation of activations (PWL), to serve a wide range of RNNs on various applications. The proposed method is proven to work on RNN-based language models and challenging automatic speech recognition, enabling AI applications on the edge. Our iRNN maintains similar performance as its full-precision counterpart, their deployment on smartphones improves the runtime performance by $2\times$, and reduces the model size by $4\times$.
BERT Cannot Align Characters

In previous work, it has been shown that BERT can adequately align cross-lingual sentences on the word level. Here we investigate whether BERT can also operate as a char-level aligner. The languages examined are English, Fake-English, German and Greek. We show that the closer two languages are, the better BERT can align them on the character level. BERT indeed works well in English to Fake-English alignment, but this does not generalize to natural languages to the same extent. Nevertheless, the proximity of two languages does seem to be a factor. English is more related to German than to Greek and this is reflected in how well BERT aligns them; English to German is better than English to Greek. We examine multiple setups and show that the similarity matrices for natural languages show weaker relations the further apart two languages are.
DevOps Adoption: Eight Emergent Perspectives

DevOps is an approach based on lean and agile principles in which business, development, operations, and quality teams cooperate to deliver software continuously aiming at reducing time to market, and receiving constant feedback from customers. However, implementing DevOps can be a complex and challenging mission due it requires significant paradigm shift. Consequently, many failures and misconceptions can occur about DevOps adoption by organizations, despite its numerous benefits. This work identifies, describes, and compares different perspectives related to DevOps adoption in academy and industry. The perspectives can be understood as factors or variables that influence or help to understand the DevOps journey. We employed a sequential multi-method research approach, including Systematic Literature Review (SLR) and Case Study. As a result, eight perspectives were found: concepts, models, principles, practices, difficulties, challenges, benefits, and strategies. More specifically, the SLR produced 390 items, which can be understood as occurrences of a perspective. The conducted case study confirmed 75 items, corroborating the SLR findings, while another 29 items emerged. This global view on DevOps adoption may guide beginners, both theorists, and practitioners, to make the necessary organizational transformation less painful.
The Case for Claim Difficulty Assessment in Automatic Fact Checking

Fact-checking is the process of evaluating the veracity of claims (i.e., purported facts). In this opinion piece, we raise an issue that has received little attention in prior work -- that some claims are far more difficult to fact-check than others. We discuss the implications this has for both practical fact-checking and research on automated fact-checking, including task formulation and dataset design. We report a manual analysis undertaken to explore factors underlying varying claim difficulty and identify several distinct types of difficulty. We motivate this new claim difficulty prediction task as beneficial to both automated fact-checking and practical fact-checking organizations.
Trends in Publishing Blockchain Surveys: A Bibliometric Perspective

A large number of survey papers are being published in blockchain since the first survey appeared in 2017. A person entering into the field of blockchain is faced with the issue of which blockchain surveys to read and why? Who is publishing these surveys and what is the nature of these surveys? Which of the publishers are publishing more such surveys and what are the lengths of the published surveys? Which kind of survey is getting more citations? Which of the authors is collaborating on such surveys? etc. All these questions motivated us to analyze the trends in publishing blockchain surveys. In this paper, we have performed a bibliometric analysis on $801$ surveys or review papers published in the field of blockchain in the last approximately five years. We have analyzed the papers with respect to the publication type, publishers and venue, references, citations, paper length, different categories, year, countries, authors, and their collaborations and found interesting insights. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first of its kind and hope to provide better understanding of the field.
Incorporating Temporal Information in Entailment Graph Mining

We present a novel method for injecting temporality into entailment graphs to address the problem of spurious entailments, which may arise from similar but temporally distinct events involving the same pair of entities. We focus on the sports domain in which the same pairs of teams play on different occasions, with different outcomes. We present an unsupervised model that aims to learn entailments such as win/lose $\rightarrow$ play, while avoiding the pitfall of learning non-entailments such as win $\not\rightarrow$ lose. We evaluate our model on a manually constructed dataset, showing that incorporating time intervals and applying a temporal window around them, are effective strategies.
Incremental Learning Techniques for Online Human Activity Recognition

Unobtrusive and smart recognition of human activities using smartphones inertial sensors is an interesting topic in the field of artificial intelligence acquired tremendous popularity among researchers, especially in recent years. A considerable challenge that needs more attention is the real-time detection of physical activities, since for many real-world applications such as health monitoring and elderly care, it is required to recognize users' activities immediately to prevent severe damages to individuals' wellness. In this paper, we propose a human activity recognition (HAR) approach for the online prediction of physical movements, benefiting from the capabilities of incremental learning algorithms. We develop a HAR system containing monitoring software and a mobile application that collects accelerometer and gyroscope data and send them to a remote server via the Internet for classification and recognition operations. Six incremental learning algorithms are employed and evaluated in this work and compared with several batch learning algorithms commonly used for developing offline HAR systems. The Final results indicated that considering all performance evaluation metrics, Incremental K-Nearest Neighbors and Incremental Naive Bayesian outperformed other algorithms, exceeding a recognition accuracy of 95% in real-time.
Making the Most of Parallel Composition in Differential Privacy

We show that the `optimal' use of the parallel composition theorem corresponds to finding the size of the largest subset of queries that `overlap' on the data domain, a quantity we call the \emph{maximum overlap} of the queries. It has previously been shown that a certain instance of this problem, formulated in terms of determining the sensitivity of the queries, is NP-hard, but also that it is possible to use graph-theoretic algorithms, such as finding the maximum clique, to approximate query sensitivity. In this paper, we consider a significant generalization of the aforementioned instance which encompasses both a wider range of differentially private mechanisms and a broader class of queries. We show that for a particular class of predicate queries, determining if they are disjoint can be done in time polynomial in the number of attributes. For this class, we show that the maximum overlap problem remains NP-hard as a function of the number of queries. However, we show that efficient approximate solutions exist by relating maximum overlap to the clique and chromatic numbers of a certain graph determined by the queries. The link to chromatic number allows us to use more efficient approximate algorithms, which cannot be done for the clique number as it may underestimate the privacy budget. Our approach is defined in the general setting of $f$-differential privacy, which subsumes standard pure differential privacy and Gaussian differential privacy. We prove the parallel composition theorem for $f$-differential privacy. We evaluate our approach on synthetic and real-world data sets of queries. We show that the approach can scale to large domain sizes (up to $10^{20000}$), and that its application can reduce the noise added to query answers by up to 60\%.
Unsupervised Continual Learning in Streaming Environments

A deep clustering network is desired for data streams because of its aptitude in extracting natural features thus bypassing the laborious feature engineering step. While automatic construction of the deep networks in streaming environments remains an open issue, it is also hindered by the expensive labeling cost of data streams rendering the increasing demand for unsupervised approaches. This paper presents an unsupervised approach of deep clustering network construction on the fly via simultaneous deep learning and clustering termed Autonomous Deep Clustering Network (ADCN). It combines the feature extraction layer and autonomous fully connected layer in which both network width and depth are self-evolved from data streams based on the bias-variance decomposition of reconstruction loss. The self-clustering mechanism is performed in the deep embedding space of every fully connected layer while the final output is inferred via the summation of cluster prediction score. Further, a latent-based regularization is incorporated to resolve the catastrophic forgetting issue. A rigorous numerical study has shown that ADCN produces better performance compared to its counterparts while offering fully autonomous construction of ADCN structure in streaming environments with the absence of any labeled samples for model updates. To support the reproducible research initiative, codes, supplementary material, and raw results of ADCN are made available in \url{https://tinyurl.com/AutonomousDCN}.