Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Online Knowledge Distillation via Collaborative Learning

This work presents an efficient yet effective online Knowledge Distillation method via Collaborative Learning, termed KDCL, which is able to consistently improve the generalization ability of deep neural networks (DNNs) that have different learning capacities. Unlike existing two-stage knowledge distillation approaches that pre-train a DNN with large capacity as the ''teacher'' and then transfer the teacher's knowledge to another ''student'' DNN unidirectionally (i.e. one-way), KDCL treats all DNNs as ''students'' and collaboratively trains them in a single stage (knowledge is transferred among arbitrary students during collaborative training), enabling parallel computing, fast computations, and appealing generalization ability. Specifically, we carefully design multiple methods to generate soft target as supervisions by effectively ensembling predictions of students and distorting the input images. Extensive experiments show that KDCL consistently improves all the ''students'' on different datasets, including CIFAR-100 and ImageNet. For example, when trained together by using KDCL, ResNet-50 and MobileNetV2 achieve 78.2% and 74.0% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet, outperforming the original results by 1.4% and 2.0% respectively. We also verify that models pre-trained with KDCL transfer well to object detection and semantic segmentation on MS COCO dataset. For instance, the FPN detector is improved by 0.9% mAP.
Visual Commonsense R-CNN

We present a novel unsupervised feature representation learning method, Visual Commonsense Region-based Convolutional Neural Network (VC R-CNN), to serve as an improved visual region encoder for high-level tasks such as captioning and VQA. Given a set of detected object regions in an image (e.g., using Faster R-CNN), like any other unsupervised feature learning methods (e.g., word2vec), the proxy training objective of VC R-CNN is to predict the contextual objects of a region. However, they are fundamentally different: the prediction of VC R-CNN is by using causal intervention: P(Y|do(X)), while others are by using the conventional likelihood: P(Y|X). This is also the core reason why VC R-CNN can learn “sense-making” knowledge like chair can be sat - while not just “common” co-occurrences such as chair is likely to exist if table is observed. We extensively apply VC R-CNN features in prevailing models of three popular tasks: Image Captioning, VQA, and VCR, and observe consistent performance boosts across them, achieving many new state-of-the-arts.
Secure and Provenance Enhanced Internet of Health Things Framework: A Blockchain Managed Federated Learning Approach

Recent advancements in the Internet of Health Things (IoHT) have ushered in the wide adoption of IoT devices in our daily health management. For IoHT data to be acceptable by stakeholders, applications that incorporate the IoHT must have a provision for data provenance, in addition to the accuracy, security, integrity, and quality of data. To protect the privacy and security of IoHT data, federated learning (FL) and differential privacy (DP) have been proposed, where private IoHT data can be trained at the owner's premises. Recent advancements in hardware GPUs even allow the FL process within smartphone or edge devices having the IoHT attached to their edge nodes. Although some of the privacy concerns of IoHT data are addressed by FL, fully decentralized FL is still a challenge due to the lack of training capability at all federated nodes, the scarcity of high-quality training datasets, the provenance of training data, and the authentication required for each FL node. In this paper, we present a lightweight hybrid FL framework in which blockchain smart contracts manage the edge training plan, trust management, and authentication of participating federated nodes, the distribution of global or locally trained models, the reputation of edge nodes and their uploaded datasets or models. The framework also supports the full encryption of a dataset, the model training, and the inferencing process. Each federated edge node performs additive encryption, while the blockchain uses multiplicative encryption to aggregate the updated model parameters. To support the full privacy and anonymization of the IoHT data, the framework supports lightweight DP. This framework was tested with several deep learning applications designed for clinical trials with COVID-19 patients. We present here the detailed design, implementation, and test results, which demonstrate strong potential for wider adoption of IoHT-based health management in a secure way.
What's next for COVID-19 apps? Governance and oversight

Adaptive governance can help earn social license
Part-Aware Prototype Network for Few-Shot Semantic Segmentation

Few-shot semantic segmentation aims to learn to segment new object classes with only a few annotated examples, which has a wide range of real-world applications. Most existing methods either focus on the restrictive setting of one-way few-shot segmentation or suffer from incomplete coverage of object regions. In this paper, we propose a novel few-shot semantic segmentation framework based on the prototype representation. Our key idea is to decompose the holistic class representation into a set of part-aware prototypes, capable of capturing diverse and fine-grained object features. In addition, we propose to leverage unlabeled data to enrich our part-aware prototypes, resulting in better modeling of intra-class variations of semantic objects. We develop a novel graph neural network model to generate and enhance the proposed part-aware prototypes based on labeled and unlabeled images. Extensive experimental evaluations on two benchmarks show that our method outperforms the prior art with a sizable margin (Code is available at: https://github.com/Xiangyi1996/PPNet-PyTorch ).
Depth Image Denoising Using Nuclear Norm and Learning Graph Model

Depth image denoising is increasingly becoming the hot research topic nowadays, because it reflects the three-dimensional scene and can be applied in various fields of computer vision. But the depth images obtained from depth camera usually contain stains such as noise, which greatly impairs the performance of depth-related applications. In this article, considering that group-based image restoration methods are more effective in gathering the similarity among patches, a group-based nuclear norm and learning graph (GNNLG) model was proposed. For each patch, we find and group the most similar patches within a searching window. The intrinsic low-rank property of the grouped patches is exploited in our model. In addition, we studied the manifold learning method and devised an effective optimized learning strategy to obtain the graph Laplacian matrix, which reflects the topological structure of image, to further impose the smoothing priors to the denoised depth image. To achieve fast speed and high convergence, the alternating direction method of multipliers is proposed to solve our GNNLG. The experimental results show that the proposed method is superior to other current state-of-the-art denoising methods in both subjective and objective criterion.
Convolutional neural networks for medical image analysis: State-of-the-art, comparisons, improvement and perspectives

Convolutional neural networks, are one of the most representative deep learning models. CNNs were extensively used in many aspects of medical image analysis, allowing for great progress in computer-aided diagnosis in recent years. In this paper, we provide a survey on convolutional neural networks in medical image analysis. First, we review the commonly used CNNs in medical image processing, including AlexNet, GoogleNet, ResNet, R-CNN, and FCNN. Then, we present an overview of the use of CNNs, for image classification, segmentation, detection, and other tasks such as registration, content-based image retrieval, image generation and enhancement, in some typical medical diagnosis areas such as brain, breast, and abdominal. Finally, we discuss the remaining challenges of CNNs in medical image analysis, and accordingly we present some ideas for future research directions.
SummEval: Re-evaluating Summarization Evaluation

Abstract The scarcity of comprehensive up-to-date studies on evaluation metrics for text summarization and the lack of consensus regarding evaluation protocols continue to inhibit progress. We address the existing shortcomings of summarization evaluation methods along five dimensions: 1) we re-evaluate 14 automatic evaluation metrics in a comprehensive and consistent fashion using neural summarization model outputs along with expert and crowd-sourced human annotations; 2) we consistently benchmark 23 recent summarization models using the aforementioned automatic evaluation metrics; 3) we assemble the largest collection of summaries generated by models trained on the CNN/DailyMail news dataset and share it in a unified format; 4) we implement and share a toolkit that provides an extensible and unified API for evaluating summarization models across a broad range of automatic metrics; and 5) we assemble and share the largest and most diverse, in terms of model types, collection of human judgments of model-generated summaries on the CNN/Daily Mail dataset annotated by both expert judges and crowd-source workers. We hope that this work will help promote a more complete evaluation protocol for text summarization as well as advance research in developing evaluation metrics that better correlate with human judgments.
Improved sine cosine algorithm with crossover scheme for global optimization

Sine Cosine Algorithm is a recently developed algorithm based on the characteristics of sine and cosine trigonometric functions, to solve global optimization problems. This paper introduces a novel improved version of sine cosine algorithm, which enhances the exploitation ability of solutions and reduces the overflow of diversity present in the search equations of classical SCA. The proposed algorithm is named as ISCA. The key feature in the proposed algorithm is the hybridization of exploitation skills of crossover with personal best state of individual solutions and integration of self-learning and global search mechanisms. To evaluate these skills in ISCA, a classical set of well-known benchmark problems, standard IEEE CEC 2014 benchmark test and a recent set of benchmark problems, IEEE CEC 2017 have been taken. Several performance metrics (such as convergence, statistical test, performance index), employed on ISCA, ensure the robustness and efficiency of the algorithm. In the paper, the proposed algorithm ISCA is also used to solve five well-known engineering optimization problems. At the end of the paper, the proposed algorithm is also used for multilevel thresholding in image segmentation. The numerical experiments and analysis demonstrate that the proposed algorithm (ISCA) can be highly effective in solving real-life optimization problems.
Nonlocal Low-Rank Regularized Tensor Decomposition for Hyperspectral Image Denoising

Hyperspectral image (HSI) enjoys great advantages over more traditional image types for various applications due to the extra knowledge available. For the nonideal optical and electronic devices, HSI is always corrupted by various noises, such as Gaussian noise, deadlines, and stripings. The global correlation across spectrum (GCS) and nonlocal self-similarity (NSS) over space are two important characteristics for HSI. In this paper, a nonlocal low-rank regularized CANDECOMP/PARAFAC (CP) tensor decomposition (NLR-CPTD) is proposed to fully utilize these two intrinsic priors. To make the rank estimation more accurate, a new manner of rank determination for the NLR-CPTD model is proposed. The intrinsic GCS and NSS priors can be efficiently explored under the low-rank regularized CPTD to avoid tensor rank estimation bias for denoising performance. Then, the proposed HSI denoising model is performed on tensors formed by nonlocal similar patches within an HSI. The alternating direction method of multipliers-based optimization technique is designed to solve the minimum problem. Compared with state-of-the-art methods, the proposed algorithm can greatly promote the denoising performance of an HSI in various quality assessments.
Silicon qubit fidelities approaching incoherent noise limits via pulse engineering

The performance requirements for fault-tolerant quantum computing are very stringent. Qubits must be manipulated, coupled, and measured with error rates well below 1%. For semiconductor implementations, silicon quantum dot spin qubits have demonstrated average single-qubit Clifford gate error rates that approach this threshold, notably with error rates of 0.14% in isotopically enriched $^{28}$Si/SiGe devices. This gate performance, together with high-fidelity two-qubit gates and measurements, is only known to meet the threshold for fault-tolerant quantum computing in some architectures when assuming that the noise is incoherent, and still lower error rates are needed to reduce overhead. Here we experimentally show that pulse engineering techniques, widely used in magnetic resonance, improve average Clifford gate error rates for silicon quantum dot spin qubits to 0.043%,a factor of 3 improvement on previous best results for silicon quantum dot devices. By including tomographically complete measurements in randomised benchmarking, we infer a higher-order feature of the noise called the unitarity, which measures the coherence of noise. This in turn allows us to theoretically predict that average gate error rates as low as 0.026% may be achievable with further pulse improvements. These fidelities are ultimately limited by Markovian noise, which we attribute to charge noise emanating from the silicon device structure itself, or the environment.
On deep learning as a remedy for the curse of dimensionality in nonparametric regression

Assuming that a smoothness condition and a suitable restriction on the structure of the regression function hold, it is shown that least squares estimates based on multilayer feedforward neural networks are able to circumvent the curse of dimensionality in nonparametric regression.The proof is based on new approximation results concerning multilayer feedforward neural networks with bounded weights and a bounded number of hidden neurons.The estimates are compared with various other approaches by using simulated data.
Mini-YOLOv3: Real-Time Object Detector for Embedded Applications

Real-time scene parsing through object detection running on an embedded device is very challenging, due to limited memory and computing power of embedded devices. To deal with these challenges, we redesign a lightweight network without notably reducing detection accuracy. Based on the Darknet-53, we use depth separable convolutions and pointwise group convolutions to reduce the parameter size of the network. A feature extraction backbone network with a parameter size of only 16 percent of darknet-53 is constructed. Meanwhile, in order to compensate for the degradation of accuracy, we have added a Multi-Scale Feature Pyramid Network based on a simple U-shaped structure to improve the performance of multi-scale object detection, which called it Mini-YOLOv3. It has smaller model size and fewer trainable parameters and floating point operations (FLOPs) in comparison of YOLOv3. We evaluate Mini-YOLOv3 on MS-COCO benchmark dataset; The parameter size of Mini-YOLOv3 is only 23% of YOLOv3 and achieves comparable detection accuracy as YOLOv3 but only requires 1/2 detect time, Specifically, Mini-YOLOv3 achieves mAP-50 of 52.1 at speed of 67 fps.
Genetic Algorithm- A Literature Review

Genetic Algorithm (GA) may be attributed as method for optimizing the search tool for difficult problems based on genetics selection principle. In additions to Optimization it also serves the purpose of machine learning and for Research and development. It is analogous to biology for chromosome generation with variables such as selection, crossover and mutation together constituting genetic operations which would be applicable on a random population initially. GA aims to yield solutions for the consecutive generations. The extent of success in individual production is directly in proportion to fitness of solution which is represented by it, thereby ensuring that quality in successive generations will be better. The process is concluded once an GA is most suitable for the issues that need optimization associated with some computable system.. John Holland may be regarded as funding father of original genetic algorithm and is attributed to year 1970's as funding date. Additionally a random search method represented by Charles Darwin for a defined search space in order to effetely solve a problem. In this paper, what is genetic algorithm and its basic workflow is discussed how a genetic algorithm work and what are the process is included in this is also discussed. Further, the features and application of genetic algorithm are mentioned in the paper.
Drop to Adapt: Learning Discriminative Features for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Recent works on domain adaptation exploit adversarial training to obtain domain-invariant feature representations from the joint learning of feature extractor and domain discriminator networks. However, domain adversarial methods render suboptimal performances since they attempt to match the distributions among the domains without considering the task at hand. We propose Drop to Adapt (DTA), which leverages adversarial dropout to learn strongly discriminative features by enforcing the cluster assumption. Accordingly, we design objective functions to support robust domain adaptation. We demonstrate efficacy of the proposed method on various experiments and achieve consistent improvements in both image classification and semantic segmentation tasks. Our source code is available at https://github.com/postBG/DTA.pytorch.
Deep Learning Based RF Fingerprint Identification Using Differential Constellation Trace Figure

This paper proposes a novel deep learning-based radio frequency fingerprint (RFF) identification method for internet of things (IoT) terminal authentications. Differential constellation trace figure (DCTF), a two-dimensional (2D) representation of differential relationship of signal time series, is utilized to extract RFF features without requiring any synchronization. A convolutional neural network (CNN) is then designed to identify different devices using DCTF features. Compared to the existing CNN-based RFF identification methods, the proposed DCTF-CNN possesses the merits of high identification accuracy, zero prior information and low complexity. Experimental results have demonstrated that the proposed DCTF-CNN can achieve an identification accuracy as high as 99.1% and 93.8% under SNR levels of 30 dB and 15 dB, respectively, when classifying 54 target ZigBee devices, which significantly outperforms the existing RFF identification methods.
ClothFlow: A Flow-Based Model for Clothed Person Generation

We present ClothFlow, an appearance-flow-based generative model to synthesize clothed person for posed-guided person image generation and virtual try-on. By estimating a dense flow between source and target clothing regions, ClothFlow effectively models the geometric changes and naturally transfers the appearance to synthesize novel images as shown in Figure 1. We achieve this with a three-stage framework: 1) Conditioned on a target pose, we first estimate a person semantic layout to provide richer guidance to the generation process. 2) Built on two feature pyramid networks, a cascaded flow estimation network then accurately estimates the appearance matching between corresponding clothing regions. The resulting dense flow warps the source image to flexibly account for deformations. 3) Finally, a generative network takes the warped clothing regions as inputs and renders the target view. We conduct extensive experiments on the DeepFashion dataset for pose-guided person image generation and on the VITON dataset for the virtual try-on task. Strong qualitative and quantitative results validate the effectiveness of our method.
Solving the Black Box Problem: A Normative Framework for Explainable Artificial Intelligence

Many of the computing systems programmed using Machine Learning are opaque: it is difficult to know why they do what they do or how they work. Explainable Artificial Intelligence aims to develop analytic techniques that render opaque computing systems transparent, but lacks a normative framework with which to evaluate these techniques’ explanatory successes. The aim of the present discussion is to develop such a framework, paying particular attention to different stakeholders’ distinct explanatory requirements. Building on an analysis of “opacity” from philosophy of science, this framework is modeled after accounts of explanation in cognitive science. The framework distinguishes between the explanation-seeking questions that are likely to be asked by different stakeholders, and specifies the general ways in which these questions should be answered so as to allow these stakeholders to perform their roles in the Machine Learning ecosystem. By applying the normative framework to recently developed techniques such as input heatmapping, feature-detector visualization, and diagnostic classification, it is possible to determine whether and to what extent techniques from Explainable Artificial Intelligence can be used to render opaque computing systems transparent and, thus, whether they can be used to solve the Black Box Problem.
A Blockchain-Based Framework for Lightweight Data Sharing and Energy Trading in V2G Network

The Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) network is, where the battery-powered vehicles provide energy to the power grid, is highly emerging. A robust, scalable, and cost-optimal mechanism that can support the increasing number of transactions in a V2G network is required. Existing studies use traditional blockchain as to achieve this requirement. Blockchain-enabled V2G networks require a high computation power and are not suitable for micro-transactions due to the mining reward being higher than the transaction value itself. Moreover, the transaction throughput in the generic blockchain is too low to support the increasing number of frequent transactions in V2G networks. To address these challenges, in this paper, a lightweight blockchain-based protocol called Directed Acyclic Graph-based V2G network (DV2G) is proposed. Here blockchain refers to any Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) and not just the bitcoin chain of blocks. A tangle data structure is used to record the transactions in the network in a secure and scalable manner. A game theory model is used to perform negotiation between the grid and vehicles at an optimized cost. The proposed model does not require the heavy computation associated to the addition of the transactions to the data structure and does not require any fees to post the transaction. The proposed model is shown to be highly scalable and supports the micro-transactions required in V2G networks.