Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Pretraining Federated Text Models for Next Word Prediction

Federated learning is a decentralized approach for training models on distributed devices, by summarizing local changes and sending aggregate parameters from local models to the cloud rather than the data itself. In this research we employ the idea of transfer learning to federated training of a language models for next word prediction (NWP) and conduct a number of experiments demonstrating enhancements to current baselines for which federated NWP models have been successful. Specifically, we compare federated training baselines from randomly initialized models to various combinations of pretraining approaches including pretrained word embeddings and transfer learning with whole model pretraining followed by federated fine-tuning for NWP on a dataset of Stack Overflow posts. We realize lift in performance using pretrained embeddings without exacerbating the number of required training rounds or memory footprint. We also observe notable differences using centrally pretrained networks, especially depending on the datasets used. Our research offers effective, yet inexpensive, improvements to federated NWP and paves the way for more rigorous experimentation with transfer learning techniques for federated learning.
Robust Vehicle Speed Measurement Based on Feature Information Fusion for Vehicle Multi-Characteristic Detection

A robust vehicle speed measurement system based on feature information fusion for vehicle multi-characteristic detection is proposed in this paper. A vehicle multi-characteristic dataset is constructed. With this dataset, seven CNN-based modern object detection algorithms are trained for vehicle multi-characteristic detection. The FPN-based YOLOv4 is selected as the best vehicle multi-characteristic detection algorithm, which applies feature information fusion of different scales with both rich high-level semantic information and detailed low-level location information. The YOLOv4 algorithm is improved by combing with the attention mechanism, in which the residual module in YOLOv4 is replaced by the ECA channel attention module with cross channel interaction. An improved ECA-YOLOv4 object detection algorithm based on both feature information fusion and cross channel interaction is proposed, which improves the performance of YOLOv4 for vehicle multi-characteristic detection and reduces the model parameter size and FLOPs as well. A multi-characteristic fused speed measurement system based on license plate, logo, and light is designed accordingly. The system performance is verified by experiments. The experimental results show that the speed measurement error rate of the proposed system meets the requirement of the China national standard GB/T 21555-2007 in which the speed measurement error rate should be less than 6%. The proposed system can efficiently enhance the vehicle speed measurement accuracy and effectively improve the vehicle speed measurement robustness.
Optically Enhanced Super-Resolution of Sea Surface Temperature Using Deep Learning

Sea surface temperature (SST) can be measured from space using infrared sensors on Earth-observing satellites. However, the tradeoff between spatial resolution and swath size (and hence revisit time) means that SST products derived from remote sensing measurements commonly only have a moderate resolution (>1 km). In this article, we adapt the design of a super-resolution neural network architecture [specifically very deep super-resolution (VDSR)] to enhance the resolution of both top-of-atmosphere thermal images of sea regions and bottom-of-atmosphere SST images by a factor of 5. When tested on an unseen dataset, the trained neural network yields thermal images that have an RMSE <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$2-3\times $ </tex-math></inline-formula> smaller than interpolation, with a 6–9 dB improvement in PSNR. A major contribution of the proposed neural network architecture is that it fuses optical and thermal images to propagate the high-resolution information present in the optical image to the restored thermal image. To illustrate the potential benefits of using super-resolution (SR) in the context of oceanography, we present super-resolved SST images of a gyre and an ocean front, revealing details and features otherwise poorly resolved by moderate resolution satellite images.
Distribution Aligned Multimodal and Multi-domain Image Stylization

Multimodal and multi-domain stylization are two important problems in the field of image style transfer. Currently, there are few methods that can perform multimodal and multi-domain stylization simultaneously. In this study, we propose a unified framework for multimodal and multi-domain style transfer with the support of both exemplar-based reference and randomly sampled guidance. The key component of our method is a novel style distribution alignment module that eliminates the explicit distribution gaps between various style domains and reduces the risk of mode collapse. The multimodal diversity is ensured by either guidance from multiple images or random style codes, while the multi-domain controllability is directly achieved by using a domain label. We validate our proposed framework on painting style transfer with various artistic styles and genres. Qualitative and quantitative comparisons with state-of-the-art methods demonstrate that our method can generate high-quality results of multi-domain styles and multimodal instances from reference style guidance or a random sampled style.
Review of NLP-based Systems in Digital Forensics and Cybersecurity

Over the years, there is an increase in the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) by digital forensics and cybersecurity professionals to combat cybercrime. Natural Language Processing (NLP) and AI applications for digital forensics and cybersecurity include data mining, knowledge representation, pattern recognition, and expert systems. This research paper focuses on a literature review of NLP-based systems in digital forensics and cybersecurity: role, applications, challenges, and future directions. This article serves as a guide for researchers and practitioners on the current state of cybersecurity and digital forensics and as well provides a roadmap for the future.
Modal completeness of sublogics of the interpretability logic IL

Abstract We study modal completeness and incompleteness of several sublogics of the interpretability logic . We introduce the sublogic , and prove that is sound and complete with respect to Veltman prestructures which are introduced by Visser. Moreover, we prove the modal completeness of twelve logics between and with respect to Veltman prestructures. On the other hand, we prove that eight natural sublogics of are modally incomplete. Finally, we prove that these incomplete logics are complete with respect to generalized Veltman prestructures. As a consequence of these investigations, we obtain that the twenty logics studied in this paper are all decidable.
Provably-Robust Runtime Monitoring of Neuron Activation Patterns

For deep neural networks (DNNs) to be used in safety-critical autonomous driving tasks, it is desirable to monitor in operation time if the input for the DNN is similar to the data used in DNN training. While recent results in monitoring DNN activation patterns provide a sound guarantee due to building an abstraction out of the training data set, reducing false positives due to slight input perturbation has been an issue towards successfully adapting the techniques. We address this challenge by integrating formal symbolic reasoning inside the monitor construction process. The algorithm performs a sound worst-case estimate of neuron values with inputs (or features) subject to perturbation, before the abstraction function is applied to build the monitor. The provable robustness is further generalized to cases where monitoring a single neuron can use more than one bit, implying that one can record activation patterns with a fine-grained decision on the neuron value interval.
Context-Aware Dynamic Feature Extraction for 3D Object Detection in Point Clouds

Varying density of point clouds increases the difficulty of 3D detection. In this paper, we present a context-aware dynamic network (CADNet) to capture the variance of density by considering both point context and semantic context. Point-level contexts are generated from original point clouds to enlarge the effective receptive filed. They are extracted around the voxelized pillars based on our extended voxelization method and processed with the context encoder in parallel with the pillar features. With a large perception range, we are able to capture the variance of features for potential objects and generate attentive spatial guidance to help adjust the strengths for different regions. In the region proposal network, considering the limited representation ability of traditional convolution where same kernels are shared among different samples and positions, we propose a decomposable dynamic convolutional layer to adapt to the variance of input features by learning from the local semantic context. It adaptively generates the position-dependent coefficients for multiple fixed kernels and combines them to convolve with local features. Based on our dynamic convolution, we design a dual-path convolution block to further improve the representation ability. We conduct experiments on KITTI dataset and the proposed CADNet has achieved superior performance of 3D detection outperforming SECOND and PointPillars by a large margin at the speed of 30 FPS.
Parallel Hierarchical Composition Conflict-Based Search for Optimal Multi-Agent Pathfinding

In this letter, we present the following optimal multi-agent pathfinding (MAPF) algorithms: Hierarchical Composition Conflict-Based Search, Parallel Hierarchical Composition Conflict-Based Search, and Dynamic Parallel Hierarchical Composition Conflict-Based Search. MAPF is the task of finding an optimal set of valid path plans for a set of agents such that no agents collide with present obstacles or each other. The presented algorithms are an extension of Conflict-Based Search (CBS), where the MAPF problem is solved by composing and merging smaller, more easily manageable subproblems. Using the information from these subproblems, the presented algorithms can more efficiently find an optimal solution. Our three presented algorithms demonstrate improved performance for optimally solving MAPF problems consisting of many agents in crowded areas while examining fewer states when compared with CBS and its variant Improved Conflict-Based Search.
Density-aware and background-aware network for crowd counting via multi-task learning

In this paper, we propose a density-aware and background-aware network via multi-task learning (MTL-DB) for crowd counting. It aims to enable the model to capture the high-level semantic information of density and background via multi-task joint training, which may jointly optimize the generation of density maps. Initially, MTL-DB utilizes the first ten layers of VGG-16 with Batch Normalization as the front-end to extract primary features which will be shared by all tasks. Then, a multi-task back-end is constructed by integrating the main task of density map estimation with two auxiliary tasks, i.e., density classification and background segmentation. The density classification auxiliary task captures the density-related information with a fully connected classifier, while the background segmentation auxiliary task applies dilated convolutional network to distinguish the head area of pedestrians and background. With high-level semantic awareness, the main task generates estimated density maps utilizing normal convolutional layers. Furthermore, a multi-task joint loss is proposed to improve the quality of estimated density maps. Extensive experiments on three challenging crowd datasets (ShanghaiTech Part A & B, UCF_CC_50, and UCF_QNRF) verified the effectiveness of this multi-task learning model. MTL-DB outperformed other multi-task learning methods on the ShanghaiTech dataset, both Part A and Part B.
A 5.5mW/Channel 2-to-7 GHz Frequency Synthesizable Qubit-Controlling Cryogenic Pulse Modulator for Scalable Quantum Computers

This work presents a qubit controller IC based on the direct synthesis. The IC consists of six independently-working pulse modulators utilizing the same LO frequency. We propose a sinusoid-shaping nonlinear DAC followed by a linear interpolating DAC to improve both of energy and hardware efficiencies. The implemented IC in 40nm CMOS is verified by superconducting qubit operations with Rabi and Ramsey oscillations while consuming power of < 1/60 compared with the previous state-of-the-art.
BYOD security issues: a systematic literature review

Organizations are exposed to new security risks when they allow employees' personal mobile devices to access the network and the corporate data (a phenomenon called 'Bring Your Own Device' or BYOD). They are confronted with inherent security issues that need to be addressed in order to protect the organization and its information. What are the security issues and considerations associated with BYOD environments? With this in mind, the objective of this paper is to present a systematic literature review of scholarly literature (2010–2019) with respect to BYOD security, and to suggest a classification scheme that depicts a holistic approach to securing BYOD environments. The results of this review include the analysis of 38 scholarly articles, where 22 security issues were identified. Based on the proposed classification scheme, the analysis of the findings shows that 86% of the articles identified security issues and considerations associated with the IT domain, 51% identified security issues related to the Management domain, 45% related to the Users domain, and 19% related to the Mobile Device domain. The results also show that BYOD security issues corresponding to policies are among the most frequently addressed concerns, followed by network security, data protection, user's attitude/behavior and governance.
Hybrid Bionic Cognitive Architecture for Artificial General Intelligence Agents

The article describes the author’s proposal on cognitive architecture for the development of a general-level artificial intelligent agent («strong» artificial intelligence). New principles for the development of such an architecture are proposed — a hybrid approach in artificial intelligence and bionics. The architecture diagram of the proposed solution is given and descriptions of possible areas of application are described. Strong artificial intelligence is a technical solution that can solve arbitrary cognitive tasks available to humans (human-level artificial intelligence) and even surpass the capabilities of human intelligence (artificial superintelligence). The fields of application of strong artificial intelligence are limitless — from solving current problems facing the human to completely new problems that are not yet available to human civilization or are still waiting for their discoverer. The novelty of the work lies in the author’s approach to the construction of cognitive architecture, which has absorbed the results of many years of research in the field of artificial intelligence and the results of the analysis of cognitive architectures of other researchers.
PCA-U-Net based breast cancer nest segmentation from microarray hyperspectral images

The incidence of breast cancer is tending younger globally, and tumor development, clinical treatment, and prognosis are largely influenced by histopathological diagnosis. For diagnosed patients, the distinction between the cancer nests and normal tissue is the basis of breast cancer treatment. Microscopic hyperspectral imaging technology has shown its potential in auxiliary pathological examinations due to the superior imaging modality and data characteristics. This paper presents a method for cancer nest segmentation from hyperspectral images of breast cancer tissue microarray samples. The scheme combines the strengths of the U-Net neural network and unsupervised principal component analysis, which reduces the amount of calculation and improves the recognition accuracy. The experimental accuracy of cancer nest segmentation reaches 87.14%. Furthermore, a set of quantitative pathological characteristic parameters reflects the degree of breast cancer lesions from multiple angles, providing a relatively comprehensive reference for the pathologist's diagnosis. In-depth exploration of the combined development of deep learning and microscopic hyperspectral imaging technology is worthy to promote efficient diagnosis of breast tumors and concern for human health.
BiLabel-Specific Features for Multi-Label Classification

In multi-label classification, the task is to induce predictive models which can assign a set of relevant labels for the unseen instance. The strategy of label-specific features has been widely employed in learning from multi-label examples, where the classification model for predicting the relevancy of each class label is induced based on its tailored features rather than the original features. Existing approaches work by generating a group of tailored features for each class label independently, where label correlations are not fully considered in the label-specific features generation process. In this article, we extend existing strategy by proposing a simple yet effective approach based on BiLabel-specific features. Specifically, a group of tailored features is generated for a pair of class labels with heuristic prototype selection and embedding. Thereafter, predictions of classifiers induced by BiLabel-specific features are ensembled to determine the relevancy of each class label for unseen instance. To thoroughly evaluate the BiLabel-specific features strategy, extensive experiments are conducted over a total of 35 benchmark datasets. Comparative studies against state-of-the-art label-specific features techniques clearly validate the superiority of utilizing BiLabel-specific features to yield stronger generalization performance for multi-label classification.
Parallel exploration via negatively correlated search

Abstract Effective exploration is key to a successful search process. The recently proposed negatively correlated search (NCS) tries to achieve this by coordinated parallel exploration, where a set of search processes are driven to be negatively correlated so that different promising areas of the search space can be visited simultaneously. Despite successful applications of NCS, the negatively correlated search behaviors were mostly devised by intuition, while deeper (e.g., mathematical) understanding is missing. In this paper, a more principled NCS, namely NCNES, is presented, showing that the parallel exploration is equivalent to a process of seeking probabilistic models that both lead to solutions of high quality and are distant from previous obtained probabilistic models. Reinforcement learning, for which exploration is of particular importance, are considered for empirical assessment. The proposed NCNES is applied to directly train a deep convolution network with 1.7 million connection weights for playing Atari games. Empirical results show that the significant advantages of NCNES, especially on games with uncertain and delayed rewards, can be highly owed to the effective parallel exploration ability.
Learned Image Compression with Fixed-point Arithmetic

Learned image compression (LIC) has achieved superior coding performance than traditional image compression standards such as HEVC intra in terms of both PSNR and MS-SSIM. However, most LIC frameworks are based on floating-point arithmetic which has two potential problems. First is that using traditional 32-bit floating-point will consume huge memory and computational cost. Second is that the decoding might fail because of the floating-point error coming from different encoding/decoding platforms. To solve the above two problems. 1) We linearly quantize the weight in the main path to 8-bit fixed-point arithmetic, and propose a fine tuning scheme to reduce the coding loss caused by the quantization. Analysis transform and synthesis transform are fine tuned layer by layer. 2) We exploit look-up-table (LUT) for the cumulative distribution function (CDF) to avoid the floating-point error. When the latent node follows non-zero mean Gaussian distribution, to share the CDF LUT for different mean values, we restrict the range of latent node to be within a certain range around mean. As a result, 8-bit weight quantization can achieve negligible coding gain loss compared with 32-bit floating-point anchor. In addition, proposed CDF LUT can ensure the correct coding at various CPU and GPU hardware platforms.
Improve performance and robustness of knowledge-based FUZZY LOGIC habitat models

Previous criticisms of knowledge-based fuzzy logic modelling have identified some of its limitations and revealed weaknesses regarding the development of fuzzy sets, the integration of expert knowledge, and the outcomes of different defuzzification processes. We show here how expert disagreement and fuzzy logic mechanisms associated with the rule development and combinations can positively or adversely affect model performance and the interpretation of results. We highlight how expert disagreement can induce uncertainty into model outputs when defining fuzzy sets and selecting a defuzzification method. We present a framework to account for sources of error and bias and improve the performance and robustness of knowledge-based fuzzy logic models. We recommend to 1) provide clear/unambiguous instructions on model development, processes and objectives, including the definition of input variables and fuzzy sets, 2) incorporate the disagreement among experts into the analysis, 3) increase the use of short rules and the OR operator to reduce complexity, and 4) improve model performance and robustness by using narrow fuzzy sets for extreme values of input variables to expand the universe of discourse adequately. Our framework is focused on fuzzy logic models but can be applied to all knowledge-based models that require expert judgment, including expert systems, decision trees and (fuzzy) Bayesian inference systems.
Single-shot Semantic Matching Network for Moment Localization in Videos

Moment localization in videos using natural language refers to finding the most relevant segment from videos given a natural language query. Most of the existing methods require video segment candidates for further matching with the query, which leads to extra computational costs, and they may also not locate the relevant moments under any length evaluated. To address these issues, we present a lightweight single-shot semantic matching network (SSMN) to avoid the complex computations required to match the query and the segment candidates, and the proposed SSMN can locate moments of any length theoretically. Using the proposed SSMN, video features are first uniformly sampled to a fixed number, while the query sentence features are generated and enhanced by GloVe, long-term short memory (LSTM), and soft-attention modules. Subsequently, the video features and sentence features are fed to an enhanced cross-modal attention model to mine the semantic relationships between vision and language. Finally, a score predictor and a location predictor are designed to locate the start and stop indexes of the query moment. We evaluate the proposed method on two benchmark datasets and the experimental results demonstrate that SSMN outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both precision and efficiency.