Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
The German NetzDG as Role Model or Cautionary Tale? – Implications for the Debate on Social Media Liability

What can be done against discrimination, bullying, insults, and the spread of dangerous fake news on social media platforms? While platforms in the United States enjoy broad discretion on how to approach that issue, there are both legal and political debates regarding social media regulation. Germany, by contrast, advances the opposite approach: requiring social media providers to block or remove illegal content. The Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz (“NetzDG,” “Network Enforcement Act,” the “Act”) of 2017 outlines a specific procedure for implementing such a claim. The Act is the first of its kind in the western democratic states. Other countries have invoked or discussed whether to follow the German example, which could make NetzDG a pioneer in its strategy of combating hate speech and fake news. This Article is intended to explain the background, mode of operation, and reception of the NetzDG. Furthermore, this Article will attempt to clear up misunderstandings and discuss current developments around this Act. A main purpose of this Article is to examine whether the Act is a suitable prototype for the United States Congress to introduce regarding platform liability and to determine which alternatives are available at hand. To that end, the Article evaluates the constitutional leeway for a regulation of social media. The Article concludes that Congress could establish principles and mechanisms similar to the NetzDG which, despite its room for improvement, is better than its reputation. Data and recent judgments indicate that the debate surrounding this system, however, was based on exaggerated assumptions and misunderstandings. Therefore, it is hopeful that the United States averts the defected discussion surrounding the NetzDG and draws positive and negative lessons from it.
DeepSMOTE: Fusing Deep Learning and SMOTE for Imbalanced Data

Despite over two decades of progress, imbalanced data is still considered a significant challenge for contemporary machine learning models. Modern advances in deep learning have further magnified the importance of the imbalanced data problem, especially when learning from images. Therefore, there is a need for an oversampling method that is specifically tailored to deep learning models, can work on raw images while preserving their properties, and is capable of generating high-quality, artificial images that can enhance minority classes and balance the training set. We propose Deep synthetic minority oversampling technique (SMOTE), a novel oversampling algorithm for deep learning models that leverages the properties of the successful SMOTE algorithm. It is simple, yet effective in its design. It consists of three major components: 1) an encoder/decoder framework; 2) SMOTE-based oversampling; and 3) a dedicated loss function that is enhanced with a penalty term. An important advantage of DeepSMOTE over generative adversarial network (GAN)-based oversampling is that DeepSMOTE does not require a discriminator, and it generates high-quality artificial images that are both information-rich and suitable for visual inspection. DeepSMOTE code is publicly available at https://github.com/dd1github/DeepSMOTE.
Non-Salient Region Object Mining for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation

Semantic segmentation aims to classify every pixel of an input image. Considering the difficulty of acquiring dense labels, researchers have recently been resorting to weak labels to alleviate the annotation burden of segmentation. However, existing works mainly concentrate on expanding the seed of pseudo labels within the image’s salient region. In this work, we propose a non-salient region object mining approach for weakly supervised semantic segmentation. We introduce a graph-based global reasoning unit to strengthen the classification network’s ability to capture global relations among disjoint and distant regions. This helps the network activate the object features outside the salient area. To further mine the non-salient region objects, we propose to exert the segmentation network’s self-correction ability. Specifically, a potential object mining module is proposed to reduce the false-negative rate in pseudo labels. Moreover, we propose a non-salient region masking module for complex images to generate masked pseudo labels. Our non-salient region masking module helps further discover the objects in the non-salient region. Extensive experiments on the PASCAL VOC dataset demonstrate state-of-the-art results compared to current methods. The source codes are available at https://github.com/NUST-Machine-Intelligence-Laboratory/nsrom.
Delving Deep Into Label Smoothing

Label smoothing is an effective regularization tool for deep neural networks (DNNs), which generates soft labels by applying a weighted average between the uniform distribution and the hard label. It is often used to reduce the overfitting problem of training DNNs and further improve classification performance. In this paper, we aim to investigate how to generate more reliable soft labels. We present an Online Label Smoothing (OLS) strategy, which generates soft labels based on the statistics of the model prediction for the target category. The proposed OLS constructs a more reasonable probability distribution between the target categories and non-target categories to supervise DNNs. Experiments demonstrate that based on the same classification models, the proposed approach can effectively improve the classification performance on CIFAR-100, ImageNet, and fine-grained datasets. Additionally, the proposed method can significantly improve the robustness of DNN models to noisy labels compared to current label smoothing approaches.
Mutual Graph Learning for Camouflaged Object Detection

Automatically detecting/segmenting object(s) that blend in with their surroundings is difficult for current models. A major challenge is that the intrinsic similarities between such foreground objects and background surroundings make the features extracted by deep model indistinguishable. To overcome this challenge, an ideal model should be able to seek valuable, extra clues from the given scene and incorporate them into a joint learning framework for representation co-enhancement. With this inspiration, we design a novel Mutual Graph Learning (MGL) model, which generalizes the idea of conventional mutual learning from regular grids to the graph domain. Specifically, MGL decouples an image into two task-specific feature maps — one for roughly locating the target and the other for accurately capturing its boundary details — and fully exploits the mutual benefits by recurrently reasoning their high-order relations through graphs. Importantly, in contrast to most mutual learning approaches that use a shared function to model all between-task interactions, MGL is equipped with typed functions for handling different complementary relations to maximize information interactions. Experiments on challenging datasets, including CHAMELEON, CAMO and COD10K, demonstrate the effectiveness of our MGL with superior performance to existing state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/fanyang587/MGL.
Coverage path planning of heterogeneous unmanned aerial vehicles based on ant colony system

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has been extensively studied and widely adopted in practical systems owing to its effectiveness and flexibility. Although heterogeneous UAVs have an enormous advantage in improving performance and conserving energy with respect to homogeneous ones, they give rise to a complex path planning problem. Especially in large-scale cooperative search systems with multiple separated regions, coverage path planning which seeks optimal paths for UAVs to completely visit and search all of regions of interest, has a NP-hard computation complexity and is difficult to settle. In this work, we focus on the coverage path planning problem of heterogeneous UAVs, and present an ant colony system (ACS)-based algorithm to obtain good enough paths for UAVs and fully cover all regions efficiently. First, models of UAVs and regions are built, and a linear programming-based formulation is presented to exactly provide the best point-to-point flight path for each UAV. Then, inspired by the foraging behaviour of ants that they can obtain the shortest path between their nest and food, an ACS-based heuristic is presented to seek approximately optimal solutions and minimize the time consumption of tasks in the cooperative search system. Experiments on randomly generated regions have been organized to evaluate the performance of the new heuristic in terms of execution time, task completion time and deviation ratio.
Systematic Review of Security Vulnerabilities in Ethereum Blockchain Smart Contract

Blockchain is a revolutionary technology that enables users to communicate in a trust-less manner. It revolutionizes the modes of business between organizations without the need for a trusted third party. It is a distributed ledger technology based on a decentralized peer-to-peer (P2P) network. It enables users to store data globally on thousands of computers in an immutable format and empowers users to deploy small pieces of programs known as smart contracts. The blockchain-based smart contract enables auto enforcement of the agreed terms between two untrusted parties. There are several security vulnerabilities in Ethereum blockchain-based smart contracts, due to which sometimes it does not behave as intended. Because a smart contract can hold millions of dollars as cryptocurrency, so these security vulnerabilities can lead to disastrous losses. In this paper, a systematic review of the security vulnerabilities in the Ethereum blockchain is presented. The main objective is to discuss Ethereum smart contract security vulnerabilities, detection tools, real life attacks and preventive mechanisms. Comparisons are drawn among the Ethereum smart contract analysis tools by considering various features. From the extensive depth review, various issues associated with the Ethereum blockchain-based smart contract are highlighted. Finally, various future directions are also discussed in the field of the Ethereum blockchain-based smart contract that can help the researchers to set the directions for future research in this domain.
A comparison between VGG16, VGG19 and ResNet50 architecture frameworks for Image Classification

Artificial Intelligence advancements have come a long way over the past twenty years. Rapid developments in AI have given birth to a trending topic called machine learning. Machine learning enables us to use algorithms and programming techniques to extract, understand and train data. Machine learning led to the creation of a concept called deep learning which uses algorithms to create an artificial neural network and use it to develop and learn, based on which it makes intuitive decisions by itself. Image classification is a task where we classify the images into sets of different categories, which when performed using deep learning increases business productivity by saving time and manpower. In this paper, we intend to determine which model of the architecture of the Convoluted Neural Network (CNN) can be used to solve a real-life problem of product classification to help optimize pricing comparison. We have compared the VGG16, VGG19, and ResNet50 architectures based on their accuracy while all three of these models solve the same image classification problem. We have concluded that the ResNet50 is the best architecture based on the comparison. These models have provided accuracies of 0.9667, 0.9707, and 0.9733 for VGG16, VGG19, and ResNet50 at epoch 20. The data provided is a real-life data set, sourced from a regional retailer.
TransVG: End-to-End Visual Grounding with Transformers

In this paper, we present a neat yet effective transformer-based framework for visual grounding, namely TransVG, to address the task of grounding a language query to the corresponding region onto an image. The state-of-the-art methods, including two-stage or one-stage ones, rely on a complex module with manually-designed mechanisms to perform the query reasoning and multi-modal fusion. However, the involvement of certain mechanisms in fusion module design, such as query decomposition and image scene graph, makes the models easily overfit to datasets with specific scenarios, and limits the plenitudinous interaction between the visual-linguistic context. To avoid this caveat, we propose to establish the multi-modal correspondence by leveraging transformers, and empirically show that the complex fusion modules (e.g., modular attention network, dynamic graph, and multi-modal tree) can be replaced by a simple stack of transformer encoder layers with higher performance. Moreover, we re-formulate the visual grounding as a direct coordinates regression problem and avoid making predictions out of a set of candidates (i.e., region proposals or anchor boxes). Extensive experiments are conducted on five widely used datasets, and a series of state-of-the-art records are set by our TransVG. We build the benchmark of transformer-based visual grounding framework and make the code available at https://github.com/djiajunustc/TransVG.
Quantum Capacity Bounds of Gaussian Thermal Loss Channels and Achievable Rates With Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill Codes

Gaussian loss channels are of particular importance since they model realistic optical communication channels. Except for special cases, quantum capacity of Gaussian loss channels is not yet known completely. In this paper, we provide improved upper bounds of Gaussian loss channel capacity, both in the energy-constrained and unconstrained scenarios. We briefly review the Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill (GKP) codes and discuss their experimental implementation. We then prove, in the energy-unconstrained case, that the GKP codes achieve the quantum capacity of Gaussian loss channels up to at most a constant gap from the improved upper bound. In the energy-constrained case, we formulate a biconvex encoding and decoding optimization problem to maximize the entanglement fidelity. The biconvex optimization is solved by an alternating semidefinite programming (SDP) method and we report that, starting from random initial codes, our numerical optimization yields GKP codes as the optimal encoding in a practically relevant regime.
A framework for offline signature verification system: Best features selection approach

Biometric verification is a method of identifying the persons by their individualities or traits. Signature verification is the most generally used biometric to maintain human privacy. It is used in many areas as banking, access control, e-business etc. and equally important in financial transactions. Research has progressed greatly in the area of signature verification but still, it is hard to discriminate between genuine signatures and skilled forgeries. Based on the idea of best features selection, a novel technique is introduced in this article foran offline verification system. The presented system consists of four major steps: preprocessing, features extraction, features selection, and feature verification. Global features in the proposed work comprise of aspect ratio, the area of signature, pure width, pure height and normalized actual signature height. Local features consist of signature centroid, slope, angle, and distance. In features selection component, a genetic algorithm is utilized to find appropriate features set which are later on given to support vector machine for verification. For experimental analysis, the selected datasets are CEDAR, MCYT and GPDS synthetic. The performance of proposed algorithm is based on three accuracy measures as FAR, FRR and AER.
A Full RNS Variant of Approximate Homomorphic Encryption

The technology of Homomorphic Encryption (HE) has improved rapidly in a few years. The newest HE libraries are efficient enough to use in practical applications. For example, Cheon et al. (ASIACRYPT’17) proposed an HE scheme with support for arithmetic of approximate numbers. An implementation of this scheme shows the best performance in computation over the real numbers. However, its implementation could not employ a core optimization technique based on the Residue Number System (RNS) decomposition and the Number Theoretic Transformation (NTT). In this paper, we present a variant of approximate homomorphic encryption which is optimal for implementation on standard computer system. We first introduce a new structure of ciphertext modulus which allows us to use both the RNS decomposition of cyclotomic polynomials and the NTT conversion on each of the RNS components. We also suggest new approximate modulus switching procedures without any RNS composition. Compared to previous exact algorithms requiring multi-precision arithmetic, our algorithms can be performed by using only word size (64-bit) operations. Our scheme achieves a significant performance gain from its full RNS implementation. For example, compared to the earlier implementation, our implementation showed speed-ups 17.3, 6.4, and 8.3 times for decryption, constant multiplication, and homomorphic multiplication, respectively, when the dimension of a cyclotomic ring is 32768. We also give experimental result for evaluations of some advanced circuits used in machine learning or statistical analysis. Finally, we demonstrate the practicability of our library by applying to machine learning algorithm. For example, our single core implementation takes 1.8 min to build a logistic regression model from encrypted data when the dataset consists of 575 samples, compared to the previous best result 3.5 min using four cores.
Sentiment analysis through recurrent variants latterly on convolutional neural network of Twitter

Sentiment analysis has been a hot area in the exploration field of language understanding, however, neural networks used in it are even lacking. Presently, the greater part of the work is proceeding on recognizing sentiments by concentrating on syntax and vocabulary. In addition, the task identified with natural language processing and for computing the exceptional and remarkable outcomes Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) and Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been utilized. Keeping in mind the end goal to capture the long-term dependencies CNNs, need to rely on assembling multiple layers. In this Paper for the improvement in understanding the sentiments, we constructed a joint architecture which places of RNN at first for capturing long-term dependencies with CNNs using global average pooling layer while on top a word embedding method using GloVe procured by unsupervised learning in the light of substantial twitter corpora to deal with this problem. Experimentations exhibit better execution when it is compared with the baseline model on the twitter’s corpora which tends to perform dependable results for the analysis of sentiment benchmarks by achieving 90.59% on Stanford Twitter Sentiment Corpus, 89.46% on Sentiment Strength Twitter Data and 88.72% on Health Care Reform Dataset respectively. Empirically, our work turned to be an efficient architecture with slight hyperparameter tuning which capable us to reduce the number of parameters with higher performance and not merely relying on convolutional multiple layers by constructing the RNN layer followed by convolutional layer to seizure long-term dependencies.
Decision support models in climate policy

Climate change is considered among the most critical risks that global society faces in this century. So far, climate policy strategies have been evaluated by means of a variety of climate-economy models, or Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs), in the aim of supporting climate-related decision making. However, their inherent complexity, the number and nature of driving assumptions, and usual exclusion of stakeholders from the modelling process raise the issue of the extent to which they can provide fruitful insights for policy makers. Moreover, as with all modelling frameworks, IAMs inevitably fail to incorporate all relevant types of uncertainty and risk when used as stand-alone tools. This exclusion can have a significant impact on the model outcomes, but can be mitigated if experts’ knowledge is elicited in a structured manner and effectively taken into account, towards identifying such factors or reducing respective knowledge gaps. At the same time, a growing number of research publications have been suggesting decision support frameworks for assessing specific aspects in climate policy, based on “bottom-up” approaches and participatory processes. The objective of this paper is to provide a critical review of such frameworks—namely Portfolio Analysis, Multiple Criteria Decision Making and Fuzzy Cognitive Maps—in order to explore their strengths and weaknesses in this area, and propose a new integrative approach, appropriately exploiting blends of these frameworks, to productively complement IAMs, towards enhancing climate policy support.
Learning Modality-Consistency Feature Templates: A Robust RGB-Infrared Tracking System

With a large number of video surveillance systems installed for the requirement from industrial security, the task of object tracking, which aims to locate objects of interest in videos, is very important. Although numerous tracking algorithms for RGB videos have been developed in the decade, the tracking performance and robustness of these systems may be degraded dramatically when the information from RGB video is unreliable (e.g., poor illumination conditions or very low resolution). To address this issue, this paper presents a new tracking system, which aims to combine the information from RGB and infrared modalities for object tracking. The proposed tracking systems is based on our proposed machine learning model. Particularly, the learning model can alleviate the modality discrepancy issue under the proposed modality consistency constraint from both representation patterns and discriminability, and generate discriminative feature templates for collaborative representations and discrimination in heterogeneous modalities. Experiments on a variety of challenging RGB-infrared videos demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.
Image contrast and color enhancement using adaptive gamma correction and histogram equalization

Image contrast and color preservations are essential needs for color vision and the processing of digital color images. Histogram Equalization (HE) is mostly used for enhancing the digital images. However, HE results in over-enhancement and intensity saturation effect in most cases. In this paper, an effective image contrast enhancement method called an Adaptive Gamma Correction with Weighted Histogram Distribution (AGCWHD) method is proposed to improve contrast while preserving natural color and richer details in images. In the proposed method, the new adaptive gamma correction method is implemented to enhance the contrast, while a weighted histogram distribution is employed for natural color and detail preservation. Experiments are conducted and tested on 500 TID 2008 benchmark images to evaluate the performance of proposed method. Experiment results show that the proposed technique performs well for a wide variety of low-quality images, and achieves better or comparable objective and subjective comparisons with the state-of-the-art methods. Experimental results demonstrated that the proposed technique produced extremely high-quality images compared with the state-of-the-art existing techniques.