Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Large gradients via correlation in random parameterized quantum circuits

Abstract Scaling of variational quantum algorithms to large problem sizes requires efficient optimization of random parameterized quantum circuits. For such circuits with uncorrelated parameters, the presence of exponentially vanishing gradients in cost function landscapes is an obstacle to optimization by gradient descent methods. In this work, we prove that reducing the dimensionality of the parameter space by utilizing circuit modules containing spatially or temporally correlated gate layers can allow one to circumvent the vanishing gradient phenomenon. Examples are drawn from random separable circuits and asymptotically optimal variational versions of Grover’s algorithm based on the quantum alternating operator ansatz. In the latter scenario, our bounds on cost function variation imply a transition between vanishing gradients and efficient trainability as the number of layers is increased toward <?CDATA $\mathcal{O}\left({2}^{n/2}\right)$?> <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline" overflow="scroll"> <mml:mi mathvariant="script">O</mml:mi> <mml:mrow> <mml:mo stretchy="false">(</mml:mo> <mml:mrow> <mml:msup> <mml:mrow> <mml:mn>2</mml:mn> </mml:mrow> <mml:mrow> <mml:mi>n</mml:mi> <mml:mo>/</mml:mo> <mml:mn>2</mml:mn> </mml:mrow> </mml:msup> </mml:mrow> <mml:mo stretchy="false">)</mml:mo> </mml:mrow> </mml:math> , the optimal oracle complexity of quantum unstructured search.
Deep Homography Estimation for Dynamic Scenes

Homography estimation is an important step in many computer vision problems. Recently, deep neural network methods have shown to be favorable for this problem when compared to traditional methods. However, these new methods do not consider dynamic content in input images. They train neural networks with only image pairs that can be perfectly aligned using homographies. This paper investigates and discusses how to design and train a deep neural network that handles dynamic scenes. We first collect a large video dataset with dynamic content. We then develop a multi-scale neural network and show that when properly trained using our new dataset, this neural network can already handle dynamic scenes to some extent. To estimate a homography of a dynamic scene in a more principled way, we need to identify the dynamic content. Since dynamic content detection and homography estimation are two tightly coupled tasks, we follow the multi-task learning principles and augment our multi-scale network such that it jointly estimates the dynamics masks and homographies. Our experiments show that our method can robustly estimate homography for challenging scenarios with dynamic scenes, blur artifacts, or lack of textures.
Understanding Adversarial Examples From the Mutual Influence of Images and Perturbations

A wide variety of works have explored the reason for the existence of adversarial examples, but there is no consensus on the explanation. We propose to treat the DNN logits as a vector for feature representation, and exploit them to analyze the mutual influence of two independent inputs based on the Pearson correlation coefficient (PCC). We utilize this vector representation to understand adversarial examples by disentangling the clean images and adversarial perturbations, and analyze their influence on each other. Our results suggest a new perspective towards the relationship between images and universal perturbations: Universal perturbations contain dominant features, and images behave like noise to them. This feature perspective leads to a new method for generating targeted universal adversarial perturbations using random source images. We are the first to achieve the challenging task of a targeted universal attack without utilizing original training data. Our approach using a proxy dataset achieves comparable performance to the state-of-the-art baselines which utilize the original training dataset.
USR: An Unsupervised and Reference Free Evaluation Metric for Dialog Generation

The lack of meaningful automatic evaluation metrics for dialog has impeded open-domain dialog research.Standard language generation metrics have been shown to be ineffective for evaluating dialog models.To this end, this paper presents USR, an UnSupervised and Reference-free evaluation metric for dialog.USR is a reference-free metric that trains unsupervised models to measure several desirable qualities of dialog.USR is shown to strongly correlate with human judgment on both Topical-Chat (turn-level: 0.42, systemlevel: 1.0) and PersonaChat (turn-level: 0.48 and system-level: 1.0).USR additionally produces interpretable measures for several desirable properties of dialog.
Auto-Encoding Twin-Bottleneck Hashing

Conventional unsupervised hashing methods usually take advantage of similarity graphs, which are either pre-computed in the high-dimensional space or obtained from random anchor points. On the one hand, existing methods uncouple the procedures of hash function learning and graph construction. On the other hand, graphs empirically built upon original data could introduce biased prior knowledge of data relevance, leading to sub-optimal retrieval performance. In this paper, we tackle the above problems by proposing an efficient and adaptive code-driven graph, which is updated by decoding in the context of an auto-encoder. Specifically, we introduce into our framework twin bottlenecks (i.e., latent variables) that exchange crucial information collaboratively. One bottleneck (i.e., binary codes) conveys the high-level intrinsic data structure captured by the code-driven graph to the other (i.e., continuous variables for low-level detail information), which in turn propagates the updated network feedback for the encoder to learn more discriminative binary codes. The auto-encoding learning objective literally rewards the code-driven graph to learn an optimal encoder. Moreover, the proposed model can be simply optimized by gradient descent without violating the binary constraints. Experiments on benchmarked datasets clearly show the superiority of our framework over the state-of-the-art hashing methods. Our source code can be found at https://github.com/ymcidence/TBH.
TAO: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Tracking Any Object

For many years, multi-object tracking benchmarks have focused on a handful of categories. Motivated primarily by surveillance and self-driving applications, these datasets provide tracks for people, vehicles, and animals, ignoring the vast majority of objects in the world. By contrast, in the related field of object detection, the introduction of large-scale, diverse datasets (e.g., COCO) have fostered significant progress in developing highly robust solutions. To bridge this gap, we introduce a similarly diverse dataset for Tracking Any Object (TAO) ( http://taodataset.org/ ). It consists of 2,907 high resolution videos, captured in diverse environments, which are half a minute long on average. Importantly, we adopt a bottom-up approach for discovering a large vocabulary of 833 categories, an order of magnitude more than prior tracking benchmarks. To this end, we ask annotators to label objects that move at any point in the video, and give names to them post factum. Our vocabulary is both significantly larger and qualitatively different from existing tracking datasets. To ensure scalability of annotation, we employ a federated approach that focuses manual effort on labeling tracks for those relevant objects in a video (e.g., those that move). We perform an extensive evaluation of state-of-the-art trackers and make a number of important discoveries regarding large-vocabulary tracking in an open-world. In particular, we show that existing single- and multi-object trackers struggle when applied to this scenario in the wild, and that detection-based, multi-object trackers are in fact competitive with user-initialized ones. We hope that our dataset and analysis will boost further progress in the tracking community.
Multipurpose self-configuration of programmable photonic circuits

Abstract Programmable integrated photonic circuits have been called upon to lead a new revolution in information systems by teaming up with high speed digital electronics and in this way, adding unique complementary features supported by their ability to provide bandwidth-unconstrained analog signal processing. Relying on a common hardware implemented by two-dimensional integrated photonic waveguide meshes, they can provide multiple functionalities by suitable programming of their control signals. Scalability, which is essential for increasing functional complexity and integration density, is currently limited by the need to precisely control and configure several hundreds of variables and simultaneously manage multiple configuration actions. Here we propose and experimentally demonstrate two different approaches towards management automation in programmable integrated photonic circuits. These enable the simultaneous handling of circuit self-characterization, auto-routing, self-configuration and optimization. By combining computational optimization and photonics, this work takes an important step towards the realization of high-density and complex integrated programmable photonics.
An Efficient Marine Predators Algorithm for Feature Selection

Feature Selection (F.S.) reduces the number of features by removing unnecessary, redundant, and noisy information while keeping a relatively decent classification accuracy. F.S. can be considered an optimization problem. As the problem is challenging and there are many local solutions, stochastic optimization algorithms may be beneficial. This paper proposes a novel approach to dimension reduction in feature selection. As a seminal attempt, this work uses binary variants of the recent Marine Predators Algorithm (MPA) to select the optimal feature subset to improve classification accuracy. MPA is a new and novel nature-inspired metaheuristic. This research proposes an algorithm that is a hybridization between MPA and k-Nearest Neighbors (k-NN) called MPA-KNN. K-Nearest Neighbors (k-NN) is used to evaluate the selected features on medical datasets with feature sizes ranging from tiny to massive. The proposed methods are evaluated on 18 well-known UCI medical dataset benchmarks and compared with eight well-regarded metaheuristic wrapper-based approaches. The core exploratory and exploitative processes are adapted in MPA to select the optimal and meaningful features for achieving the most accurate classification. The results show that the proposed MPA-KNN approach had a remarkable capability to select the optimal and significant features. It performed better than the well-established metaheuristic algorithms we tested. The algorithms we used for comparison are Grey Wolf Optimizer (GWO), MothFlame Optimization Algorithm (MFO), Sine Cosine Algorithm (SCA), Whale Optimization Algorithm (WOA), Slap Swarm Algorithm (SSA), Butterfly Optimization Algorithm (BFO), and Harris Hawks Optimization (HHO). This paper is the first work that implements MPA for Feature Selection problems. The results ensure that the proposed MPA-KNN approach has a remarkable capability to select the optimal and significant features and performed better than several metaheuristic algorithms. MPA-KNN achieves the best averages accuracy, Sensitivity, and Specificity rates of all datasets.
VOPRec: Vector Representation Learning of Papers with Text Information and Structural Identity for Recommendation

Finding relevant papers is a non-trivial problem for scholars due to the tremendous amount of academic information in the era of scholarly big data. Scientific paper recommendation systems have been developed to solve such problem by recommending relevant papers to scholars. However, previous paper recommendations calculate paper similarity based on hand-engineered features which are inflexible. To address this problem, we develop a scientific paper recommendation system, namely VOPRec, by vector representation learning of paper in citation networks. VOPRec takes advantages of recent research in both text and network representation learning for unsupervised feature design. In VOPRec, the text information is represented with word embedding to find papers of similar research interest. Then, the structural identity is converted into vectors to find papers of similar network topology. After bridging text information and structural identity with the citation network, vector representation of paper can be learned with network embedding. Finally, top-Q recommendation list is generated based on the similarity calculated with paper vectors. Through the APS data set, we show that VOPRec outperforms state-of-the-art paper recommendation baselines measured by precision, recall, F1, and NDCG.
Taming the Latency in Multi-User VR 360°: A QoE-Aware Deep Learning-Aided Multicast Framework

Immersive virtual reality (VR) applications require ultra-high data rate and low-latency for smooth operation. Hence in this paper, aiming to improve VR experience in multi-user VR wireless video streaming, a deep-learning aided scheme for maximizing the quality of the delivered video chunks with low-latency is proposed. Therein the correlations in the predicted field of view (FoV) and locations of viewers watching 360$^\circ$ HD VR videos are capitalized on to realize a proactive FoV-centric millimeter wave (mmWave) physical-layer multicast transmission. The problem is cast as a frame quality maximization problem subject to tight latency constraints and network stability. The problem is then decoupled into an HD frame request admission and scheduling subproblems and a matching theory game is formulated to solve the scheduling subproblem by associating requests from clusters of users to mmWave small cell base stations (SBSs) for their unicast/multicast transmission. Furthermore, for realistic modeling and simulation purposes, a real VR head-tracking dataset and a deep recurrent neural network (DRNN) based on gated recurrent units (GRUs) are leveraged. Extensive simulation results show how the content-reuse for clusters of users with highly overlapping FoVs brought in by multicasting reduces the VR frame delay in 12\%. This reduction is further boosted by proactiveness that cuts by half the average delays of both reactive unicast and multicast baselines while preserving HD delivery rates above 98\%. Finally, enforcing tight latency bounds shortens the delay-tail as evinced by 13\% lower delays in the 99th percentile.
Decomposition-Based Multiobjective Optimization for Constrained Evolutionary Optimization

Pareto dominance-based multiobjective optimization has been successfully applied to constrained evolutionary optimization during the last two decades. However, as another famous multiobjective optimization framework, decomposition-based multiobjective optimization has not received sufficient attention from constrained evolutionary optimization. In this paper, we make use of decomposition-based multiobjective optimization to solve constrained optimization problems (COPs). In our method, first of all, a COP is transformed into a biobjective optimization problem (BOP). Afterward, the transformed BOP is decomposed into a number of scalar optimization subproblems. After generating an offspring for each subproblem by differential evolution, the weighted sum method is utilized for selection. In addition, to make decomposition-based multiobjective optimization suit the characteristics of constrained evolutionary optimization, weight vectors are elaborately adjusted. Moreover, for some extremely complicated COPs, a restart strategy is introduced to help the population jump out of a local optimum in the infeasible region. Extensive experiments on three sets of benchmark test functions, namely, 24 test functions from IEEE CEC2006, 36 test functions from IEEE CEC2010, and 56 test functions from IEEE CEC2017, have demonstrated that the proposed method shows better or at least competitive performance against other state-of-the-art methods.
CReam: A Smart Contract Enabled Collusion-Resistant e-Auction

Auction is an effective way to allocate goods or services to bidders who value them the most. The rapid growth of e-auctions facilitates online transactions but poses new and distinctive challenges. It is difficult to establish trust among sellers, buyers, and auctioneers without centralized auction websites or platforms (the auctioneer) which collect bids and derive the auction results. However, these third parties may be untrustworthy, and malicious sellers or buyers may refuse to deliver the goods or payment according to the protocol. Moreover, the open and anonymous online environment may stimulate auction participants to form collusion coalitions to rig the auction and reap unfair profit. Many auction designs have been proposed to address these concerns, but they fall short of simultaneously achieving decentralization (i.e., held without a trusted third utility), strong consensus (i.e., the establishment of trust), collusion resistance, and practical implementation. We present CReam, the first decentralized collusion-resistant e-auction system that is implemented with smart contract on the blockchain. With the carefully designed smart auction contract, mutually distrustful and rational sellers and buyers are stimulated to operate properly, hence transact safely without trusted third parties. The auction mechanism in the smart contract can effectively prevent bidder collusion and realize economic robustness, i.e., truthfulness. We implement a fully functional CReam on the Ethereum network. Extensive experimental results confirm that CReam can greatly reduce the probability of collusion and achieve an approximate optimal revenue at a low cost of contract execution.
Simulation Model for Blockchain Systems Using Queuing Theory

In recent years, blockchains have obtained so much attention from researchers, engineers, and institutions; and the implementation of blockchains has started to revive a large number of applications ranging from e-finance, e-healthcare, smart home, Internet of Things, social security, logistics and so forth. In the literature on blockchains, it is found that most articles focused on their engineering implementation, while little attention has been devoted to the exploration of theoretical aspects of the system; however, the existing work is limited to model the mining process only. In this paper, a queuing theory-based model is proposed for understanding the working and theoretical aspects of the blockchain. We validate our proposed model using the actual statistics of two popular cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin and Ethereum, by running simulations for two months of transactions. The obtained performance measures parameters such as the Number of Transactions per block, Mining Time of Each Block, System Throughput, Memorypool count, Waiting Time in Memorypool, Number of Unconfirmed Transactions in the Whole System, Total Number of Transactions, and Number of Generated Blocks; these values are compared with actual statistics. It was found that the results gained from our proposed model are in good agreement with actual statistics. Although the simulation in this paper presents the modeling of blockchain-based cryptocurrencies only, the proposed model can be used to represent a wide range of blockchain-based systems.
Experimental Demonstration of High-Rate Measurement-Device-Independent Quantum Key Distribution over Asymmetric Channels

Measurement-device-independent quantum key distribution (MDI-QKD) can eliminate all detector side channels and it is practical with current technology. Previous implementations of MDI-QKD all used two symmetric channels with similar losses. However, the secret key rate is severely limited when different channels have different losses. Here we report the results of the first high-rate MDI-QKD experiment over asymmetric channels. By using the recent 7-intensity optimization approach, we demonstrate>10×higher key rate than the previous best-known protocols for MDI-QKD in the situation of large channel asymmetry, and extend the secure transmission distance by more than 20-50 km in standard telecom fiber. The results have moved MDI-QKD towards widespread applications in practical network settings, where the channel losses are asymmetric and user nodes could be dynamically added or deleted.
Are Red Roses Red? Evaluating Consistency of Question-Answering Models

Although current evaluation of questionanswering systems treats predictions in isolation, we need to consider the relationship between predictions to measure true understanding.A model should be penalized for answering "no" to "Is the rose red?" if it answers "red" to "What color is the rose?".We propose a method to automatically extract such implications for instances from two QA datasets, VQA and SQuAD, which we then use to evaluate the consistency of models.Human evaluation shows these generated implications are well formed and valid.Consistency evaluation provides crucial insights into gaps in existing models, and retraining with implicationaugmented data improves consistency on both synthetic and human-generated implications. How many birds?A: 1Is there 1 bird?A: no Are there 2 birds?A: yes Are there any birds?A: no (b) Model (Zhang et al., 2018) provides inconsistent answers.
NTIRE 2019 Challenge on Real Image Super-Resolution: Methods and Results

This paper reviewed the 3rd NTIRE challenge on single-image super-resolution (restoration of rich details in a low-resolution image) with a focus on proposed solutions and results. The challenge had 1 track, which was aimed at the real-world single image super-resolution problem with an unknown scaling factor. Participants were mapping low-resolution images captured by a DSLR camera with a shorter focal length to their high-resolution images captured at a longer focal length. With this challenge, we introduced a novel real-world super-resolution dataset (RealSR). The track had 403 registered participants, and 36 teams competed in the final testing phase. They gauge the state-of-the-art in real-world single image super-resolution.
Regional Blockchain for Vehicular Networks to Prevent 51% Attacks

The next generation of vehicles will be autonomous, connected, electric, and intelligent with distinct requirements such as high mobility, low latency, real-time applications, seamless connectivity, and security. Blockchain can provide a good solution to the issue of secure message dissemination or secure information sharing in vehicular networks with a weak trust relationship among the nodes. In this paper, we investigate the design of a regional blockchain for VANETs, where the blockchain is shared among nodes in a geographically bounded area. We investigate how to design the regional blockchain while achieving a low 51% attack success probability. We derive a condition that guarantees a low 51% attack success probability in terms of the numbers of good nodes and malicious nodes, the message delivery time, and the puzzle computation time. The condition can provide a useful guideline for selection of several control parameters guaranteeing the stable operation of the blockchain. We run several simulations to show the validity of the condition and investigate the effects of various parameters on the 51% attack success probability. Our analysis and simulation results show that maintaining a low message delivery time for good nodes is very important in protecting the stability of the blockchain system.