Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
LiBRe: A Practical Bayesian Approach to Adversarial Detection

Despite their appealing flexibility, deep neural networks (DNNs) are vulnerable against adversarial examples. Various adversarial defense strategies have been proposed to resolve this problem, but they typically demonstrate restricted practicability owing to unsurmountable compromise on universality, effectiveness, or efficiency. In this work, we propose a more practical approach, Lightweight Bayesian Refinement (LiBRe), in the spirit of leveraging Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) for adversarial detection. Empowered by the task and attack agnostic modeling under Bayes principle, LiBRe can endow a variety of pre-trained task-dependent DNNs with the ability of defending heterogeneous adversarial attacks at a low cost. We develop and integrate advanced learning techniques to make LiBRe appropriate for adversarial detection. Concretely, we build the few-layer deep ensemble variational and adopt the pre-training & fine-tuning workflow to boost the effectiveness and efficiency of LiBRe. We further provide a novel insight to realise adversarial detection-oriented uncertainty quantification without inefficiently crafting adversarial examples during training. Extensive empirical studies covering a wide range of scenarios verify the practicability of LiBRe. We also conduct thorough ablation studies to evidence the superiority of our modeling and learning strategies. <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sup>
Document-level relation extraction using evidence reasoning on RST-GRAPH

Document-level relation extraction (RE) is a more challenging task providing a new perspective to solve larger and more complex text mining work. Recent document-level RE research following traditional sentence-level methods focus on learning a character representation of one sentence, highlighting the importance of partial words. When applied to a document with a longer text, more entities and more complicated semantics, these traditional methods lacking the ability to select evidence and further reason on them, may not be sufficient to identify all potential relation in the document in an intuitive way. However, some textual semantic associations between entities as well as logical structure of document could provide evidence to the potential relation and explain the reasoning process. Hence, by introducing Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) as an external knowledge, this article attempts to select appropriate evidence and show reasoning process on a new document-graph, RST-GRAPH, which indicators valid semantic associations between multiple text units through RST and incorporates a set of reasoning modules to capture efficient evidence. Our experimental result shows that the RST-GRAPH, as the first work introducing RST, builds associations in an interpretable manner along discourse relation link between any entities compared to previous graph-oriented models, exhibits a clear process of evidence reasoning with competitive performance on DocRED dataset, and outperforms most existing models on the value of Ign F1.
A Novel Just-Noticeable-Difference-Based Saliency-Channel Attention Residual Network for Full-Reference Image Quality Predictions

Recently, due to the strength of deep convolutional neural networks (CNN), many CNN-based image quality assessment (IQA) models have been studied. However, previous CNN-based IQA models likely have yet to utilize the characteristics of the human visual system (HVS) fully for IQA problems when they simply entrust everything to the CNN, expecting it to learn from a training dataset. Therefore, the performance capabilities of such deep-learning-based methods are somewhat saturated. However, in this article, we propose a novel saliency-channel attention residual network based on the just-noticeable-difference (JND) concept for full-reference image quality assessments (FR-IQA). It is referred to as JND-SalCAR and shows significant improvements in large IQA datasets with various types of distortion. The proposed JND-SalCAR effectively learns how to incorporate human psychophysical characteristics, such as visual saliency and JND, into image quality predictions. In the proposed network, a SalCAR block is devised so that perceptually important features can be extracted with the help of saliency-based spatial attention and channel attention schemes. In addition, a saliency map serves as a guideline for predicting a patch weight map in order to afford stable training of end-to-end optimization for the JND-SalCAR. To the best of our knowledge, our work presents the first HVS-inspired trainable FR-IQA network that considers both visual saliency and the JND characteristics of the HVS. When the visual saliency map and the JND probability map are explicitly given as priors, they can be usefully combined to predict IQA scores rated by humans more precisely, eventually leading to performance improvements and faster convergence. The experimental results show that the proposed JND-SalCAR significantly outperforms all recent state-of-the-art FR-IQA methods on large IQA datasets in terms of the Spearman rank order coefficient (SRCC) and the Pearson linear correlation coefficient (PLCC).
Customer satisfaction service match and service quality-based blockchain cloud manufacturing

Blockchain cloud manufacturing is an emerging service-oriented paradigm that takes many advantages to cloud manufacturing. Previous researchers have studied from eradicating third party trust problem among service providers and customers by decentralized data record and involving smart contract. However, the existing paradigm still suffers from third party trust problem among service-related participants and cloud manufacturing provider since service is solely managed by cloud manufacturing provider without supervision and service related participants cannot know whether composed service provision which indeed is NP-hard problem is optimal. In this paper, the architecture of blockchain cloud manufacturing system is proposed with adoption of several cloud manufacturing providers and vote mechanism to vote for optimal composed service provision on candidate composed service scheme firstly calculated by one cloud manufacturing provider. According to customer satisfaction-based service match and quality control, a system framework of composed service performance evaluation is desifned to incorporate the vote mechanism. Firstly, customer satisfaction dimensions as evaluation dimensions are extracted from customer text reviews based on latent dirichlet allocation (LDA) and sub-dimensions under each customer satisfaction dimension are set up based on professional field knowledge. Secondly, overall customer satisfaction rating of reviews and sentiment of reviews towards customer satisfaction dimensions are analysed by three score scheme, bag of words (BOW) and support vector machine (SVM) classification. Thirdly, the sentiment effect and category of customer satisfaction dimension on overall customer satisfaction are identified with the application of neural network and Kano model. Fourthly, in consideration of category characteristic, overall performance of customer satisfaction dimension is measured as distance and using proposed Logit-SVM method. Service selection standard according to value of customer satisfaction is set up. Finally, one empirical study is presented to verify the feasibility of proposed system framework, and proposed model is further discussed.
Fear and loathing in VR: the emotional and physiological effects of immersive games

Abstract Compared to traditional screen-based media, virtual reality (VR) generally leads to stronger feelings of presence. The current study aimed to investigate whether playing games in VR resulted in a stronger sense of presence than playing on a TV, and whether these feelings of presence affected players’ emotional and physiological responses to the games. Two experiments were conducted among 128 students, comparing the effects of playing either a survival horror game ( N = 59) or a first-person shooter ( N = 69) on a TV or in VR on physiological and subjective fear, hostility and enjoyment. Results showed that playing games in VR resulted in a stronger sense of presence, lower heart rate variability and a stronger subjective sense of fear. The feeling of presence thereby mediated the effects of VR on fear. The effects of playing a first-person shooter in VR on hostility were mixed, and gaming in VR was not more enjoyable than on TV. Regardless of the type of game or display medium, hostility increased significantly post-play. This study provides evidence that commercial VR games can affect feelings of presence and the physiological and emotional state of players.
BERT syntactic transfer: A computational experiment on Italian, French and English languages

This paper investigates the ability of multilingual BERT (mBERT) language model to transfer syntactic knowledge cross-lingually, verifying if and to which extent syntactic dependency relationships learnt in a language are maintained in other languages. In detail, the main contributions of this paper are: (i) an analysis of the cross-lingual syntactic transfer capability of mBERT model; (ii) a detailed comparison of cross-language syntactic transfer among languages belonging to different branches of the Indo-European languages, namely English, Italian and French, which present very different syntactic constructions; (iii) a study on the transferability of a syntactic phenomenon peculiar of Italian language, namely the pronoun dropping (pro-drop), also known as omissibility of the subject. To this end, a structural probe devoted to reconstruct the dependency parse tree of a sentence has been exploited, representing the input sentences with the contextual embeddings from mBERT layers. The results of the experimental assessment have shown a transfer of syntactic knowledge of the mBERT model among these languages. Moreover, the behaviour of the probe in the transition from pro-drop to non-pro-drop languages and vice versa has proven to be more effective in case of languages sharing a common linguistic matrix. The possibility of transferring syntactical knowledge, especially in the case of specific phenomena, meets both a theoretical need and can have important practical implications in syntactic tasks, such as dependency parsing.
Improving Weakly Supervised Visual Grounding by Contrastive Knowledge Distillation

Weakly supervised phrase grounding aims at learning region-phrase correspondences using only image-sentence pairs. A major challenge thus lies in the missing links between image regions and sentence phrases during training. To address this challenge, we leverage a generic object detector at training time, and propose a contrastive learning framework that accounts for both region-phrase and image-sentence matching. Our core innovation is the learning of a region-phrase score function, based on which an image-sentence score function is further constructed. Importantly, our region-phrase score function is learned by distilling from soft matching scores between the detected object names and candidate phrases within an image-sentence pair, while the image-sentence score function is supervised by ground-truth image-sentence pairs. The design of such score functions removes the need of object detection at test time, thereby significantly reducing the inference cost. Without bells and whistles, our approach achieves state-of-the-art results on visual phrase grounding, surpassing previous methods that require expensive object detectors at test time.
A Truly Spatial Random Forests Algorithm for Geoscience Data Analysis and Modelling

Abstract Spatial data mining helps to find hidden but potentially informative patterns from large and high-dimensional geoscience data. Non-spatial learners generally look at the observations based on their relationships in the feature space, which means that they cannot consider spatial relationships between regionalised variables. This study introduces a novel spatial random forests technique based on higher-order spatial statistics for analysis and modelling of spatial data. Unlike the classical random forests algorithm that uses pixelwise spectral information as predictors, the proposed spatial random forests algorithm uses the local spatial-spectral information (i.e., vectorised spatial patterns) to learn intrinsic heterogeneity, spatial dependencies, and complex spatial patterns. Algorithms for supervised (i.e., regression and classification) and unsupervised (i.e., dimension reduction and clustering) learning are presented. Approaches to deal with big data, multi-resolution data, and missing values are discussed. The superior performance and usefulness of the proposed algorithm over the classical random forests method are illustrated via synthetic and real cases, where the remotely sensed geophysical covariates in North West Minerals Province of Queensland, Australia, are used as input spatial data for geology mapping, geochemical prediction, and process discovery analysis.
Crowd Counting Via Perspective-Guided Fractional-Dilation Convolution

Crowd counting is critical for numerous video surveillance scenarios. One of the main issues in this task is how to handle the dramatic scale variations of pedestrians caused by the perspective effect. To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel convolution neural network-based crowd counting method, termed Perspective-guided Fractional-Dilation Network (PFDNet). By modeling the continuous scale variations, the proposed PFDNet is able to select the proper fractional dilation kernels for adapting to different spatial locations. It significantly improves the flexibility of the state-of-the-arts that only consider the discrete representative scales. In addition, by avoiding the multi-scale or multi-column architecture that used in other methods, it is computationally more efficient. In practice, the proposed PFDNet is constructed by stacking multiple Perspective-guided Fractional-Dilation Convolutions (PFC) on a VGG16-BN backbone. By introducing a novel generalized dilation convolution operation, the PFC can handle fractional dilation ratios in the spatial domain under the guidance of perspective annotations, achieving continuous scales modeling of pedestrians. To deal with the problem of unavailable perspective information in some cases, we further introduce an effective perspective estimation branch to the proposed PFDNet, which can be trained in either supervised or weakly-supervised setting once the branch has been pre-trained. Extensive experiments show that the proposed PFDNet outperforms state-of-the-art methods on ShanghaiTech A, ShanghaiTech B, WorldExpo'10, UCF-QNRF, UCF_CC_50 and TRANCOS dataset, achieving MAE 53.8, 6.5, 6.8, 84.3, 205.8, and 3.06 respectively.
One Person, One Model, One World

Learning user representations is a vital technique toward effective user modeling and personalized recommender systems. Existing approaches often derive an individual set of model parameters for each task by training on separate data. However, the representation of the same user potentially has some commonalities, such as preference and personality, even in different tasks. As such, these separately trained representations could be suboptimal in performance as well as inefficient in terms of parameter sharing. In this paper, we delve on research to continually learn user representations task by task, whereby new tasks are learned while using partial parameters from old ones. A new problem arises since when new tasks are trained, previously learned parameters are very likely to be modified, and as a result, an artificial neural network (ANN)-based model may lose its capacity to serve for well-trained previous tasks forever, this issue is termed catastrophic forgetting. To address this issue, we present Conure the first continual, or lifelong, user representation learner --- i.e., learning new tasks over time without forgetting old ones. Specifically, we propose iteratively removing less important weights of old tasks in a deep user representation model, motivated by the fact that neural network models are usually over-parameterized. In this way, we could learn many tasks with a single model by reusing the important weights, and modifying the less important weights to adapt to new tasks. We conduct extensive experiments on two real-world datasets with nine tasks and show that Conure largely exceeds the standard model that does not purposely preserve such old "knowledge'', and performs competitively or sometimes better than models which are trained either individually for each task or simultaneously by merging all task data.
Contact Tracing Apps: Lessons Learned on Privacy, Autonomy, and the Need for Detailed and Thoughtful Implementation

The global and national response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been inadequate due to a collective lack of preparation and a shortage of available tools for responding to a large-scale pandemic. By applying lessons learned to create better preventative methods and speedier interventions, the harm of a future pandemic may be dramatically reduced. One potential measure is the widespread use of contact tracing apps. While such apps were designed to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, the time scale in which these apps were deployed proved a significant barrier to efficacy. Many companies and governments sprinted to deploy contact tracing apps that were not properly vetted for performance, privacy, or security issues. The hasty development of incomplete contact tracing apps undermined public trust and negatively influenced perceptions of app efficacy. As a result, many of these apps had poor voluntary public uptake, which greatly decreased the apps’ efficacy. Now, with lessons learned from this pandemic, groups can better design and test apps in preparation for the future. In this viewpoint, we outline common strategies employed for contact tracing apps, detail the successes and shortcomings of several prominent apps, and describe lessons learned that may be used to shape effective contact tracing apps for the present and future. Future app designers can keep these lessons in mind to create a version that is suitable for their local culture, especially with regard to local attitudes toward privacy-utility tradeoffs during public health crises.
Quantum Neuromorphic Computing with Reservoir Computing Networks

Abstract Quantum reservoir networks combine the intelligence of neural networks with the potential of quantum computing in a single platform. This platform operates on the architecture of reservoir computing, which can function even with random connections between neural nodes. This is a major advantage for hardware implementation. Herein is described how reservoir computing is brought into the quantum domain to perform various tasks, including characterization of quantum states, quantum estimation, quantum state preparation, and quantum computing. It shows quantum enhancement in classical data processing, and creates the opportunity for quantum information processing within the robust paradigm of neural networks. It is friendly for implementation in a wide range of physical systems, including quantum dots, superconductors, trapped ions, cold atoms, and exciton‐polaritons.
Learning to Relate Depth and Semantics for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

We present an approach for encoding visual task relationships to improve model performance in an Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) setting. Semantic segmentation and monocular depth estimation are shown to be complementary tasks; in a multi-task learning setting, a proper encoding of their relationships can further improve performance on both tasks. Motivated by this observation, we propose a novel Cross-Task Relation Layer (CTRL), which encodes task dependencies between the semantic and depth predictions. To capture the cross-task relationships, we propose a neural network architecture that contains task-specific and cross-task refinement heads. Furthermore, we propose an Iterative Self-Learning (ISL) training scheme, which exploits semantic pseudo-labels to provide extra supervision on the target domain. We experimentally observe improvements in both tasks’ performance because the complementary information present in these tasks is better captured. Specifically, we show that: (1) our approach improves performance on all tasks when they are complementary and mutually dependent; (2) the CTRL helps to improve both semantic segmentation and depth estimation tasks performance in the challenging UDA setting; (3) the proposed ISL training scheme further improves the semantic segmentation performance. The implementation is available at https://github.com/susaha/ctrl-uda.
Accurate Few-shot Object Detection with Support-Query Mutual Guidance and Hybrid Loss

Most object detection methods require huge amounts of annotated data and can detect only the categories that appear in the training set. However, in reality acquiring massive annotated training data is both expensive and time-consuming. In this paper, we propose a novel two-stage detector for accurate few-shot object detection. In the first stage, we employ a support-query mutual guidance mechanism to generate more support-relevant proposals. Concretely, on the one hand, a query-guided support weighting module is developed for aggregating different supports to generate the support feature. On the other hand, a supportguided query enhancement module is designed by dynamic kernels. In the second stage, we score and filter proposals via multi-level feature comparison between each proposal and the aggregated support feature based on a distance metric learnt by an effective hybrid loss, which makes the embedding space of distance metric more discriminative. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets show that our method substantially outperforms the existing methods and lifts the SOTA of FSOD task to a higher level.
Efficient Source Camera Identification with Diversity-Enhanced Patch Selection and Deep Residual Prediction

Source camera identification has long been a hot topic in the field of image forensics. Besides conventional feature engineering algorithms developed based on studying the traces left upon shooting, several deep-learning-based methods have also emerged recently. However, identification performance is susceptible to image content and is far from satisfactory for small image patches in real demanding applications. In this paper, an efficient patch-level source camera identification method is proposed based on a convolutional neural network. First, in order to obtain improved robustness with reduced training cost, representative patches are selected according to multiple criteria for enhanced diversity in training data. Second, a fine-grained multiscale deep residual prediction module is proposed to reduce the impact of scene content. Finally, a modified VGG network is proposed for source camera identification at brand, model, and instance levels. A more critical patch-level evaluation protocol is also proposed for fair performance comparison. Abundant experimental results show that the proposed method achieves better results as compared with the state-of-the-art algorithms.