Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Attacking Graph-based Classification via Manipulating the Graph Structure

Graph-based classification methods are widely used for security analytics. Roughly speaking, graph-based classification methods include collective classification and graph neural network. Attacking a graph-based classification method enables an attacker to evade detection in security analytics. However, existing adversarial machine learning studies mainly focused on machine learning for non-graph data. Only a few recent studies touched adversarial graph-based classification methods. However, they focused on graph neural network, leaving collective classification largely unexplored. We aim to bridge this gap in this work. We consider an attacker's goal is to evade detection via manipulating the graph structure. We formulate our attack as a graph-based optimization problem, solving which produces the edges that an attacker needs to manipulate to achieve its attack goal. However, it is computationally challenging to solve the optimization problem exactly. To address the challenge, we propose several approximation techniques to solve the optimization problem. We evaluate our attacks and compare them with a recent attack designed for graph neural networks using four graph datasets. Our results show that our attacks can effectively evade graph-based classification methods. Moreover, our attacks outperform the existing attack for evading collective classification methods and some graph neural network methods.
Visualising statistical models using dynamic nomograms

Translational Statistics proposes to promote the use of Statistics within research and improve the communication of statistical findings in an accurate and accessible manner to diverse audiences. When statistical models become more complex, it becomes harder to evaluate the role of explanatory variables on the response. For example, the interpretation and communication of the effect of predictors in regression models where interactions or smoothing splines are included can be challenging. Informative graphical representations of statistical models play a critical translational role; static nomograms are one such useful tool to visualise statistical models. In this paper, we propose the use of dynamic nomogram as a translational tool which can accommodate models of increased complexity. In theory, all models appearing in the literature could be accompanied by the corresponding dynamic nomogram to translate models in an informative manner. The R package presented will facilitate this communication for a variety of linear and non-linear models.
Controlled alternate quantum walks based privacy preserving healthcare images in Internet of Things

The development of quantum computers and quantum algorithms conveys a challenging scenario for several cryptographic protocols due to the mathematical scaffolding upon which those protocols have been built. Quantum walks constitute a universal quantum computational model which is widely used in various fields, including quantum algorithms and cryptography. Quantum walks can be utilized as a powerful tool for the development of modern chaos-based cryptographic applications due to their nonlinear dynamical behavior and high sensitivity to initial conditions. In this paper, we propose new encryption mechanism for privacy preserving Internet of Things-based healthcare systems in order to protect the patients’ privacy. The encryption/decryption processes are based on controlled alternate quantum walks. The proposed cryptosystem approach is composed of two phases: substitution and permutation, both based on independently computed quantum walks. Simulation results and numerical analysis of our data provide enough evidence to reasonably conjecture that our image encryption protocol is robust and efficient for protecting patients’ privacy protection.
Towards Precise End-to-End Weakly Supervised Object Detection Network

It is challenging for weakly supervised object detection network to precisely predict the positions of the objects, since there are no instance-level category annotations. Most existing methods tend to solve this problem by using a two-phase learning procedure, i.e., multiple instance learning detector followed by a fully supervised learning detector with bounding-box regression. Based on our observation, this procedure may lead to local minima for some object categories. In this paper, we propose to jointly train the two phases in an end-to-end manner to tackle this problem. Specifically, we design a single network with both multiple instance learning and bounding-box regression branches that share the same backbone. Meanwhile, a guided attention module using classification loss is added to the backbone for effectively extracting the implicit location information in the features. Experimental results on public datasets show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance.
A Single Model CNN for Hyperspectral Image Denoising

Denoising is a common preprocessing step prior to the analysis and interpretation of hyperspectral images (HSIs). However, the vast majority of methods typically adopted for HSI denoising exploit architectures originally developed for grayscale or RGB images, exhibiting limitations when processing high-dimensional HSI data cubes. In particular, traditional methods do not take into account the high spectral correlation between adjacent bands in HSIs, which leads to unsatisfactory denoising performance as the rich spectral information present in HSIs is not fully exploited. To overcome this limitation, this article considers deep learning models-such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs)-to perform spectral-spatial HSI denoising. The proposed model, called HSI single denoising CNN (HSI-SDeCNN), efficiently takes into consideration both the spatial and spectral information contained in HSIs. Experimental results on both synthetic and real data demonstrate that the proposed HSI-SDeCNN outperforms other state-of-the-art HSI denoising methods. Source code: https://github.com/mhaut/HSI-SDeCNN.
Bayesian Graph Convolution LSTM for Skeleton Based Action Recognition

We propose a framework for recognizing human actions from skeleton data by modeling the underlying dynamic process that generates the motion pattern. We capture three major factors that contribute to the complexity of the motion pattern including spatial dependencies among body joints, temporal dependencies of body poses, and variation among subjects in action execution. We utilize graph convolution to extract structure-aware feature representation from pose data by exploiting the skeleton anatomy. Long short-term memory (LSTM) network is then used to capture the temporal dynamics of the data. Finally, the whole model is extended under the Bayesian framework to a probabilistic model in order to better capture the stochasticity and variation in the data. An adversarial prior is developed to regularize the model parameters to improve the generalization of the model. A Bayesian inference problem is formulated to solve the classification task. We demonstrate the benefit of this framework in several benchmark datasets with recognition under various generalization conditions.
Deep learning based software defect prediction

Software systems have become larger and more complex than ever. Such characteristics make it very challengeable to prevent software defects. Therefore, automatically predicting the number of defects in software modules is necessary and may help developers efficiently to allocate limited resources. Various approaches have been proposed to identify and fix such defects at minimal cost. However, the performance of these approaches require significant improvement. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel approach that leverages deep learning techniques to predict the number of defects in software systems. First, we preprocess a publicly available dataset, including log transformation and data normalization. Second, we perform data modeling to prepare the data input for the deep learning model. Third, we pass the modeled data to a specially designed deep neural network-based model to predict the number of defects. We also evaluate the proposed approach on two well-known datasets. The evaluation results illustrate that the proposed approach is accurate and can improve upon the state-of-the-art approaches. On average, the proposed method significantly reduces the mean square error by more than 14% and increases the squared correlation coefficient by more than 8%.
Few-Shot Knowledge Graph Completion

Knowledge graphs (KGs) serve as useful resources for various natural language processing applications. Previous KG completion approaches require a large number of training instances (i.e., head-tail entity pairs) for every relation. The real case is that for most of the relations, very few entity pairs are available. Existing work of one-shot learning limits method generalizability for few-shot scenarios and does not fully use the supervisory information; however, few-shot KG completion has not been well studied yet. In this work, we propose a novel few-shot relation learning model (FSRL) that aims at discovering facts of new relations with few-shot references. FSRL can effectively capture knowledge from heterogeneous graph structure, aggregate representations of few-shot references, and match similar entity pairs of reference set for every relation. Extensive experiments on two public datasets demonstrate that FSRL outperforms the state-of-the-art.
Distributed Dynamic Resource Management and Pricing in the IoT Systems With Blockchain-as-a-Service and UAV-Enabled Mobile Edge Computing

In this article, we study the pricing and resource management in the Internet of Things (IoT) system with blockchain-as-a-service (BaaS) and mobile-edge computing (MEC). The BaaS model includes the cloud-based server to perform blockchain tasks and the set of peers to collect data from local IoT devices. The MEC model consists of the set of terrestrial and aerial base stations (BSs), i.e., unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), to forward the tasks of peers to the BaaS server. Each BS is also equipped with an MEC server to run some blockchain tasks. As the BSs can be privately owned or controlled by different operators, there is no information exchange among them. We show that the resource management and pricing in the BaaS-MEC system are modeled as a stochastic Stackelberg game with multiple leaders and incomplete information about actions of leaders/BSs and followers/peers. We formulate a novel hierarchical reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm for the decision makings of BSs and peers. We also develop an unsupervised hierarchical deep learning (HDL) algorithm that combines deep $Q$ -learning (DQL) for BSs with the Bayesian deep learning (BDL) for peers. We prove that the proposed algorithms converge to stable states in which the peers' actions are the best responses to optimal actions of BSs.
The Best of Both Worlds: A General Architecture for Data Management in Blockchain-enabled Internet-of-Things

The rapid proliferation of Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices has brought great challenges of data management, i.e., storing, retrieving and manipulating a large volume of IoT data. Conventional IoT systems rely on centralized architectures to manage IoT data, hence suffering from limited scalability, lack of transparency, and single point of failure issues. As such, we employ blockchain as a distributed ledger to support the decentralized approach of data management in IoT systems, where IoT data are stored in the deployed blockchain for further utilization, e.g., retrieve and audit. A general architecture combining blockchain and IoT systems is presented. Nevertheless, as the resource constraints of IoT devices may still exist during the process of data transmissions from IoT devices to the blockchain network, we propose a case study of a learning-assisted resource allocation method to support intelligent data management. The numerical results show that the proposed scheme achieves superior performance compared with baseline solutions.
A modified particle swarm optimization using adaptive strategy

In expert systems, complex optimization problems are usually nonlinear, nonconvex, multimodal and discontinuous. As an efficient and simple optimization algorithm, particle swarm optimization(PSO) has been widely applied to solve various real optimization problems in expert systems. However, avoiding premature convergence and balancing the global exploration and local exploitation capabilities of the PSO remains an open issue. To overcome these drawbacks and strengthen the ability of PSO in solving complex optimization problems, a modified PSO using adaptive strategy called MPSO is proposed. In MPSO, in order to well balance the global exploration and local exploitation capabilities of the PSO, a chaos-based non-linear inertia weight is proposed. Meanwhile, to avoid the premature convergence, stochastic and mainstream learning strategies are adopted. Finally, an adaptive position updating strategy and terminal replacement mechanism are employed to enhance PSO’s ability to solve complex optimization problems in expert systems. 30 complex CEC2017 benchmark functions are utilized to verify the promising performance of MPSO, experimental results and statistical analysis indicate that MPSO has competitive performance compared with 16 state-of-the-art algorithms. The source code of MPSO is provided at https://github.com/lhustl/MPSO .
Progress towards practical qubit computation using approximate Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill codes

Encoding a qubit in the continuous degrees of freedom of an oscillator is a promising path to error-corrected quantum computation. One advantageous way to achieve this is through Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill (GKP) grid states, whose symmetries allow for the correction of any small continuous error on the oscillator. Unfortunately, ideal grid states have infinite energy, so it is important to find finite-energy approximations that are realistic, practical, and useful for applications. In the first half of this work we investigate the impact of imperfect GKP states on computational circuits independently of the physical architecture. To this end, we analyze the behavior of the physical and logical content of normalizable GKP states through several figures of merit, employing a recently developed modular subsystem decomposition. By tracking the errors that enter into the computational circuit due to imperfections in the GKP states, we are able to gauge the utility of these states for noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices. In the second half, we focus on a state preparation approach in the photonic domain wherein photon-number-resolving measurements on some modes of Gaussian states produce non-Gaussian states in others. We produce detailed numerical results for the preparation of GKP states alongside estimating the resource requirements in practical settings and probing the quality of the resulting states with the tools we develop. Our numerical experiments indicate that we can generate any state in the GKP Bloch sphere with nearly equal resources, which has implications for magic state preparation overheads.
AdaEn-Net: An ensemble of adaptive 2D–3D Fully Convolutional Networks for medical image segmentation

Fully Convolutional Networks (FCNs) have emerged as powerful segmentation models but are usually designed manually, which requires extensive time and can result in large and complex architectures. There is a growing interest to automatically design efficient architectures that can accurately segment 3D medical images. However, most approaches either do not fully exploit volumetric information or do not optimize the model's size. To address these problems, we propose a self-adaptive 2D-3D ensemble of FCNs called AdaEn-Net for 3D medical image segmentation that incorporates volumetric data and adapts to a particular dataset by optimizing both the model's performance and size. The AdaEn-Net consists of a 2D FCN that extracts intra-slice information and a 3D FCN that exploits inter-slice information. The architecture and hyperparameters of the 2D and 3D architectures are found through a multiobjective evolutionary based algorithm that maximizes the expected segmentation accuracy and minimizes the number of parameters in the network. The main contribution of this work is a model that fully exploits volumetric information and automatically searches for a high-performing and efficient architecture. The AdaEn-Net was evaluated for prostate segmentation on the PROMISE12 Grand Challenge and for cardiac segmentation on the MICCAI ACDC challenge. In the first challenge, the AdaEn-Net ranks 9 out of 297 submissions and surpasses the performance of an automatically-generated segmentation network while producing an architecture with 13× fewer parameters. In the second challenge, the proposed model is ranked within the top 8 submissions and outperforms an architecture designed with reinforcement learning while having 1.25× fewer parameters.
Comparative study of interval Type-2 and general Type-2 fuzzy systems in medical diagnosis

Nowadays, computer science has the ability of assisting experts in different application areas. Recently there has been increasing attention in the health area, and there exist different approaches based on artificial intelligence that have been proposed in the diagnosis of several kinds of diseases. In particular, fuzzy systems have been successfully used as Diagnosis Systems, in this way helping doctors to realize a faster and more accurate diagnosis. However, with the emergence of Type-2 Fuzzy Systems, there have been important improvements in handling the uncertainty with respect to traditional Fuzzy Systems (now called Type-1 Fuzzy Systems) in different kinds of problems. In the present paper, a new approach to Fuzzy Diagnosis based on Type-2 Fuzzy Systems is proposed and compared with respect to Type-1 Fuzzy Systems on a set of diagnosis problems, in order to evaluate the relevance of the uncertainty handling in this kind of problems. On the other hand, the paper is also aiming at observing the accuracy behavior in Fuzzy Diagnosis Systems by changing the uncertainty level in the models. Finally, a comparison of Interval Type-2 Fuzzy Systems with respect to General Type-2 Fuzzy Systems for a set of diagnosis problems is presented.
Engagement with chatbots versus augmented reality interactive technology in e-commerce

As competition intensifies in the retail industry organizations are increasingly turning to forms of artificial intelligence as a means of differentiation. E-commerce companies are moving towards integrating technologies such as chatbots and augmented reality interactive technology which have proved to be popular solutions to customer service in the practitioner domain. However, little is known about consumers’ attitude and engagement with these emerging technologies when used in a retail environment. A theory-based research model which was designed to uncover the motivational mechanisms needed to provide engagement and effective decision-making processes in this context. Empirical testing conducted with a field study supported the proposed model.
Sustainable B2B E-Commerce and Blockchain-Based Supply Chain Finance

Information technology advancements integrated with the e-commerce supply chain allow participants in the business process to effectively work with large volumes of data and control transactions. To improve the profitability and competitiveness of e-commerce companies, a blockchain solution was incorporated into the global B2B (Business-to-Business) supply chain. This technology simplified the transaction process by providing all participants in the sustainable B2B buying process with the same data about the trade. Overall, the use of blockchain improved the efficiency of logistics and digital documentation which reached 74% and 75%, respectively. The main advantage of using blockchain is that it creates a decentralized database that is secure. In addition, it increases the speed of payment and the reliability and transparency of data transfer. Further research may focus on the use of blockchain in green logistics to improve environmental sustainability in the e-commerce supply chain.
Image Search With Text Feedback by Visiolinguistic Attention Learning

Image search with text feedback has promising impacts in various real-world applications, such as e-commerce and internet search. Given a reference image and text feedback from user, the goal is to retrieve images that not only resemble the input image, but also change certain aspects in accordance with the given text. This is a challenging task as it requires the synergistic understanding of both image and text. In this work, we tackle this task by a novel Visiolin-guistic Attention Learning (VAL) framework. Specifically, we propose a composite transformer that can be seamlessly plugged in a CNN to selectively preserve and transform the visual features conditioned on language semantics. By inserting multiple composite transformers at varying depths, VAL is incentive to encapsulate the multi-granular visiolinguistic information, thus yielding an expressive representation for effective image search. We conduct comprehensive evaluation on three datasets: Fashion200k, Shoes and FashionIQ. Extensive experiments show our model exceeds existing approaches on all datasets, demonstrating consistent superiority in coping with various text feedbacks, including attribute-like and natural language descriptions.
Secure multiparty computation

MPC has moved from theoretical study to real-world usage. How is it doing?
Deep Semantic Clustering by Partition Confidence Maximisation

By simultaneously learning visual features and data grouping, deep clustering has shown impressive ability to deal with unsupervised learning for structure analysis of high-dimensional visual data. Existing deep clustering methods typically rely on local learning constraints based on inter-sample relations and/or self-estimated pseudo labels. This is susceptible to the inevitable errors distributed in the neighbourhoods and suffers from error-propagation during training. In this work, we propose to solve this problem by learning the most confident clustering solution from all the possible separations, based on the observation that assigning samples from the same semantic categories into different clusters will reduce both the intra-cluster compactness and inter-cluster diversity, i.e. lower partition confidence. Specifically, we introduce a novel deep clustering method named PartItion Confidence mAximisation (PICA). It is established on the idea of learning the most semantically plausible data separation, in which all clusters can be mapped to the ground-truth classes one-to-one, by maximising the "global" partition confidence of clustering solution. This is realised by introducing a differentiable partition uncertainty index and its stochastic approximation as well as a principled objective loss function that minimises such index, all of which together enables a direct adoption of the conventional deep networks and mini-batch based model training. Extensive experiments on six widely-adopted clustering benchmarks demonstrate our model's performance superiority over a wide range of the state-of-the-art approaches. The code is available online.