Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Viewport-based CNN: A Multi-task Approach for Assessing 360° Video Quality

For 360° video, the existing visual quality assessment (VQA) approaches are designed based on either the whole frames or the cropped patches, ignoring the fact that subjects can only access viewports. When watching 360° video, subjects select viewports through head movement (HM) and then fixate on attractive regions within the viewports through eye movement (EM). Therefore, this paper proposes a two-staged multi-task approach for viewport-based VQA on 360° video. Specifically, we first establish a large-scale VQA dataset of 360° video, called VQA-ODV, which collects the subjective quality scores and the HM and EM data on 600 video sequences. By mining our dataset, we find that the subjective quality of 360° video is related to camera motion, viewport positions and saliency within viewports. Accordingly, we propose a viewport-based convolutional neural network (V-CNN) approach for VQA on 360° video, which has a novel multi-task architecture composed of a viewport proposal network (VP-net) and viewport quality network (VQ-net). The VP-net handles the auxiliary tasks of camera motion detection and viewport proposal, while the VQ-net accomplishes the auxiliary task of viewport saliency prediction and the main task of VQA. The experiments validate that our V-CNN approach significantly advances state-of-the-art VQA performance on 360° video and it is also effective in the three auxiliary tasks.
Remote Sensing Image Registration Based on Deep Learning Regression Model

We propose a novel remote sensing image registration method based on the deep learning regression network. Different from the traditional methods of feature extraction and feature matching, we pair the image blocks from sensed and reference images, and then directly learn the displacement parameters of the four corners of the sensed image block relative to the reference image. In addition, we develop the dual deep learning network with weight sharing to fully extract the registration pair image features. The proposed method is tested on different period Landsat-7 and WorldView-3 images and compared with scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT), fast and rotated brief (ORB), and other deep learning methods. The proposed method outperforms all the comparing methods.
TinyTL: Reduce Memory, Not Parameters for Efficient On-Device Learning

On-device learning enables edge devices to continually adapt the AI models to new data, which requires a small memory footprint to fit the tight memory constraint of edge devices. Existing work solves this problem by reducing the number of trainable parameters. However, this doesn't directly translate to memory saving since the major bottleneck is the activations, not parameters. In this work, we present Tiny-Transfer-Learning (TinyTL) for memory-efficient on-device learning. TinyTL freezes the weights while only learns the bias modules, thus no need to store the intermediate activations. To maintain the adaptation capacity, we introduce a new memory-efficient bias module, the lite residual module, to refine the feature extractor by learning small residual feature maps adding only 3.8% memory overhead. Extensive experiments show that TinyTL significantly saves the memory (up to 6.5x) with little accuracy loss compared to fine-tuning the full network. Compared to fine-tuning the last layer, TinyTL provides significant accuracy improvements (up to 33.8%) with little memory overhead. Furthermore, combined with feature extractor adaptation, TinyTL provides 7.5-12.9x memory saving without sacrificing accuracy compared to fine-tuning the full Inception-V3.
Incorporating BERT into Parallel Sequence Decoding with Adapters

While large scale pre-trained language models such as BERT have achieved great success on various natural language understanding tasks, how to efficiently and effectively incorporate them into sequence-to-sequence models and the corresponding text generation tasks remains a non-trivial problem. In this paper, we propose to address this problem by taking two different BERT models as the encoder and decoder respectively, and fine-tuning them by introducing simple and lightweight adapter modules, which are inserted between BERT layers and tuned on the task-specific dataset. In this way, we obtain a flexible and efficient model which is able to jointly leverage the information contained in the source-side and target-side BERT models, while bypassing the catastrophic forgetting problem. Each component in the framework can be considered as a plug-in unit, making the framework flexible and task agnostic. Our framework is based on a parallel sequence decoding algorithm named Mask-Predict considering the bi-directional and conditional independent nature of BERT, and can be adapted to traditional autoregressive decoding easily. We conduct extensive experiments on neural machine translation tasks where the proposed method consistently outperforms autoregressive baselines while reducing the inference latency by half, and achieves $36.49$/$33.57$ BLEU scores on IWSLT14 German-English/WMT14 German-English translation. When adapted to autoregressive decoding, the proposed method achieves $30.60$/$43.56$ BLEU scores on WMT14 English-German/English-French translation, on par with the state-of-the-art baseline models.
Measurement-device–independent quantum secure direct communication: Direct quantum communication with imperfect measurement device and untrusted operator

Quantum secure direct communication (QSDC) enables direct message transmission over quantum channels. Loopholes involved in practical apparatus, particularly nonideal measurement devices, provide a potential interface for attacking practical quantum communication. Measurement-device–independent (MDI) QSDC protocols deal with all side-channel attacks on practical measurement devices and directly transmit secret messages over classical channels with both integrity and eavesdropper detection and prevention. We review the recent development of MDI QSDC protocols using both single photons and entangled photon pairs. These two types of MDI QSDC protocols are useful for their respective distinct characters and can be generalized to perform more interesting communication networks.
MIMIC-Extract: a data extraction, preprocessing, and representation pipeline for MIMIC-III

Machine learning for healthcare researchers face challenges to progress and reproducibility due to a lack of standardized processing frameworks for public datasets. We present MIMIC-Extract, an open source pipeline for transforming the raw electronic health record (EHR) data of critical care patients from the publicly-available MIMIC-III database into data structures that are directly usable in common time-series prediction pipelines. MIMIC-Extract addresses three challenges in making complex EHR data accessible to the broader machine learning community. First, MIMIC-Extract transforms raw vital sign and laboratory measurements into usable hourly time series, performing essential steps such as unit conversion, outlier handling, and aggregation of semantically similar features to reduce missingness and improve robustness. Second, MIMIC-Extract extracts and makes prediction of clinically-relevant targets possible, including outcomes such as mortality and length-of-stay as well as comprehensive hourly intervention signals for ventilators, vasopressors, and fluid therapies. Finally, the pipeline emphasizes reproducibility and extensibility to future research questions. We demonstrate the pipeline's effectiveness by developing several benchmark tasks for outcome and intervention forecasting and assessing the performance of competitive models.
PC-PG: Policy Cover Directed Exploration for Provable Policy Gradient Learning

Direct policy gradient methods for reinforcement learning are a successful approach for a variety of reasons: they are model free, they directly optimize the performance metric of interest, and they allow for richly parameterized policies. Their primary drawback is that, by being local in nature, they fail to adequately explore the environment. In contrast, while model-based approaches and Q-learning directly handle exploration through the use of optimism, their ability to handle model misspecification and function approximation is far less evident. This work introduces the the Policy Cover-Policy Gradient (PC-PG) algorithm, which provably balances the exploration vs. exploitation tradeoff using an ensemble of learned policies (the policy cover). PC-PG enjoys polynomial sample complexity and run time for both tabular MDPs and, more generally, linear MDPs in an infinite dimensional RKHS. Furthermore, PC-PG also has strong guarantees under model misspecification that go beyond the standard worst case `∞ assumptions; this includes approximation guarantees for state aggregation under an average case error assumption, along with guarantees under a more general assumption where the approximation error under distribution shift is controlled. We complement the theory with empirical evaluation across a variety of domains in both reward-free and reward-driven settings.
DeezyMatch: A Flexible Deep Learning Approach to Fuzzy String Matching

We present DeezyMatch, a free, open-source software library written in Python for fuzzy string matching and candidate ranking.Its pair classifier supports various deep neural network architectures for training new classifiers and for fine-tuning a pretrained model, which paves the way for transfer learning in fuzzy string matching.This approach is especially useful where only limited training examples are available.The learned DeezyMatch models can be used to generate rich vector representations from string inputs.The candidate ranker component in DeezyMatch uses these vector representations to find, for a given query, the best matching candidates in a knowledge base.It uses an adaptive searching algorithm applicable to large knowledge bases and query sets.We describe DeezyMatch's functionality, design and implementation, accompanied by a use case in toponym matching and candidate ranking in realistic noisy datasets.
Differential evolution particle swarm optimization algorithm based on good point set for computing Nash equilibrium of finite noncooperative game

In this paper, a hybrid differential evolution particle swarm optimization (PSO) method based on a good point set (GPDEPSO) is proposed to compute a finite noncooperative game among <i>N</i> people. Stochastic functional analysis is used to prove the convergence of this algorithm. First, an ergodic initial population is generated by using a good point set. Second, PSO is proposed and utilized as the variation operator to perform variation crossover selection with differential evolution (DE). Finally, the experimental results show that the proposed algorithm has a better convergence speed, accuracy, and global optimization ability than other existing algorithms in computing the Nash equilibrium of noncooperative games among N people. In particular, the efficiency of the algorithm is higher for determining the Nash equilibrium of a high-dimensional payoff matrix game.
RDF graph validation using rule-based reasoning

The correct functioning of Semantic Web applications requires that given RDF graphs adhere to an expected shape. This shape depends on the RDF graph and the application’s supported entailments of that graph. During validation, RDF graphs are assessed against sets of constraints, and found violations help refining the RDF graphs. However, existing validation approaches cannot always explain the root causes of violations (inhibiting refinement), and cannot fully match the entailments supported during validation with those supported by the application. These approaches cannot accurately validate RDF graphs, or combine multiple systems, deteriorating the validator’s performance. In this paper, we present an alternative validation approach using rule-based reasoning, capable of fully customizing the used inferencing steps. We compare to existing approaches, and present a formal ground and practical implementation “Validatrr”, based on N3Logic and the EYE reasoner. Our approach – supporting an equivalent number of constraint types compared to the state of the art – better explains the root cause of the violations due to the reasoner’s generated logical proof, and returns an accurate number of violations due to the customizable inferencing rule set. Performance evaluation shows that Validatrr is performant for smaller datasets, and scales linearly w.r.t. the RDF graph size. The detailed root cause explanations can guide future validation report description specifications, and the fine-grained level of configuration can be employed to support different constraint languages. This foundation allows further research into handling recursion, validating RDF graphs based on their generation description, and providing automatic refinement suggestions.
Automatic Call Sign Detection: Matching Air Surveillance Data with Air Traffic Spoken Communications

Voice communication is the main channel to exchange information between pilots and Air-Traffic Controllers (ATCos). Recently, several projects have explored the employment of speech recognition technology to automatically extract spoken key information such as call signs, commands, and values, which can be used to reduce ATCos&rsquo; workload and increase performance and safety in Air-Traffic Control (ATC)-related activities. Nevertheless, the collection of ATC speech data is very demanding, expensive, and limited to the intrinsic speakers&rsquo; characteristics. As a solution, this paper presents ATCO2, a project that aims to develop a unique platform to collect, organize, and pre-process ATC data collected from air space. Initially, the data are gathered directly through publicly accessible radio frequency channels with VHF receivers and LiveATC, which can be considered as an &ldquo;unlimited-source&rdquo; of low-quality data. The ATCO2 project explores employing context information such as radar and air surveillance data (collected with ADS-B and Mode S) from the OpenSky Network (OSN) to correlate call signs automatically extracted from voice communication with those available from ADS-B channels, to eventually increase the overall call sign detection rates. More specifically, the timestamp and location of the spoken command (issued by the ATCo by voice) are extracted, and a query is sent to the OSN server to retrieve the call sign tags in ICAO format for the airplanes corresponding to the given area. Then, a word sequence provided by an automatic speech recognition system is fed into a Natural Language Processing (NLP) based module together with the set of call signs available from the ADS-B channels. The NLP module extracts the call sign, command, and command arguments from the spoken utterance.
AnsibleMetrics: A Python library for measuring Infrastructure-as-Code blueprints in Ansible

Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) has recently received increasing attention in the research community, mainly due to the paradigm shift it brings in software design, development, and operations management. However, while IaC represents an ever-increasing and widely adopted practice, concerns arise about the need for instruments that help DevOps engineers efficiently maintain, speedily evolve, and continuously improve Infrastructure-as-Code. In this paper, we present AnsibleMetrics, a Python-based static source code measurement tool to characterize Infrastructure-as-Code. Although we focus on Ansible, the most used language for IaC, our tool could be easily extended to support additional formats. AnsibleMetrics represents a step forward towards software quality support for DevOps engineers developing and maintaining infrastructure code.
Attention-Based Query Expansion Learning

Query expansion is a technique widely used in image search consisting in combining highly ranked images from an original query into an expanded query that is then reissued, generally leading to increased recall and precision. An important aspect of query expansion is choosing an appropriate way to combine the images into a new query. Interestingly, despite the undeniable empirical success of query expansion, ad-hoc methods with different caveats have dominated the landscape, and not a lot of research has been done on learning how to do query expansion. In this paper we propose a more principled framework to query expansion, where one trains, in a discriminative manner, a model that learns how images should be aggregated to form the expanded query. Within this framework, we propose a model that leverages a self-attention mechanism to effectively learn how to transfer information between the different images before aggregating them. Our approach obtains higher accuracy than existing approaches on standard benchmarks. More importantly, our approach is the only one that consistently shows high accuracy under different regimes, overcoming caveats of existing methods.
Hierarchical simultaneous entanglement swapping for multi-hop quantum communication based on multi-particle entangled states*

Entanglement swapping is a key technology for multi-hop communication based on entanglement in quantum networks. However, the end-to-end delay of the traditional sequential entanglement swapping (SEQES) grows rapidly with the increase of network scale. To solve this problem, we first propose a low-delay multi-particle simultaneous entanglement swapping (SES) scheme to establish the remote four-particle Greenberger–Horne–Zeilinger (GHZ) channel states for the bidirectional teleportation of three-particle GHZ states, in which the intermediate nodes perform Bell state measurements, send the measurement results and the Bell state type to the user node Bob (or Alice) through classical channel simultaneously. Bob (or Alice) only needs to carry out a proper unitary operation according to the information he (or she) has received. Further, we put forward a hierarchical simultaneous entanglement swapping (HSES) scheme to reduce the classical information transmission cost, which is composed of level-1 SES and level-2 SES (schemes). The former is an inner segment SES, and the latter is an inter segments SES. Theoretical analysis and simulation results show the HSES can obtain the optimal performance tradeoff between end-to-end delay and classical cost.
A New Big Data Benchmark for OLAP Cube Design Using Data Pre-Aggregation Techniques

In recent years, several new technologies have enabled OLAP processing over Big Data sources. Among these technologies, we highlight those that allow data pre-aggregation because of their demonstrated performance in data querying. This is the case of Apache Kylin, a Hadoop based technology that supports sub-second queries over fact tables with billions of rows combined with ultra high cardinality dimensions. However, taking advantage of data pre-aggregation techniques to designing analytic models for Big Data OLAP is not a trivial task. It requires very advanced knowledge of the underlying technologies and user querying patterns. A wrong design of the OLAP cube alters significantly several key performance metrics, including: (i) the analytic capabilities of the cube (time and ability to provide an answer to a query), (ii) size of the OLAP cube, and (iii) time required to build the OLAP cube. Therefore, in this paper we (i) propose a benchmark to aid Big Data OLAP designers to choose the most suitable cube design for their goals, (ii) we identify and describe the main requirements and trade-offs for effectively designing a Big Data OLAP cube taking advantage of data pre-aggregation techniques, and (iii) we validate our benchmark in a case study.
Towards Accurate and Consistent Evaluation: A Dataset for Distantly-Supervised Relation Extraction

In recent years, distantly-supervised relation extraction has achieved a certain success by using deep neural networks.Distant Supervision (DS) can automatically generate large-scale annotated data by aligning entity pairs from Knowledge Bases (KB) to sentences.However, these DSgenerated datasets inevitably have wrong labels that result in incorrect evaluation scores during testing, which may mislead the researchers.To solve this problem, we build a new dataset NYT-H, where we use the DS-generated data as training data and hire annotators to label test data.Compared with the previous datasets, NYT-H has a much larger test set and then we can perform more accurate and consistent evaluation.Finally, we present the experimental results of several widely used systems on NYT-H.The experimental results show that the ranking lists of the comparison systems on the DS-labelled test data and human-annotated test data are different.This indicates that our human-annotated data is necessary for evaluation of distantly-supervised relation extraction.
On Using Classification Datasets to Evaluate Graph Outlier Detection: Peculiar Observations and New Insights

It is common practice of the outlier mining community to repurpose classification datasets toward evaluating various detection models. To that end, often a binary classification dataset is used, where samples from one of the classes are designated as the “inlier” samples, and the other class is substantially down-sampled to create the (ground-truth) “outlier” samples. Graph-level outlier detection (GLOD) is rarely studied but has many potentially influential real-world applications. In this study, we identify an intriguing issue with repurposing graph classification datasets for GLOD. We find that ROC-AUC performance of the models changes significantly (“flips” from high to very low, even worse than random) depending on which class is down-sampled. Interestingly, ROC-AUCs on these two variants approximately sum to 1 and their performance gap is amplified with increasing propagations for a certain family of propagation-based outlier detection models. We carefully study the graph embedding space produced by propagation-based models and find two driving factors: (1) disparity between within-class densities, which is amplified by propagation, and (2) overlapping support (mixing of embeddings) across classes. We also study other graph embedding methods and downstream outlier detectors, and we find that the intriguing “performance flip” issue still widely exists but which version of the down-sample achieves higher performance may vary. Thoughtful analysis over comprehensive results further deepens our understanding of the established issue. With this study, we aim at drawing attention to this (to our knowledge) previously unnoticed issue for the rarely studied GLOD problem, and specifically to the following questions: (1) Given the performance flip issue we identified, where one version of the down-sample often yields worse-than-random performance, is it appropriate to evaluate GLOD by average performance across all down-sampled versions when repurposing graph classification datasets? (2) Considering consistently observed performance flip issue across different graph embedding methods we studied, is it possible to design better graph embedding methods to overcome the issue? We conclude the article with our insights to these questions.
Formality Style Transfer with Shared Latent Space

Conventional approaches for formality style transfer borrow models from neural machine translation, which typically requires massive parallel data for training. However, the dataset for formality style transfer is considerably smaller than translation corpora. Moreover, we observe that informal and formal sentences closely resemble each other, which is different from the translation task where two languages have different vocabularies and grammars. In this paper, we present a new approach, Sequence-to-Sequence with Shared Latent Space (S2S-SLS), for formality style transfer, where we propose two auxiliary losses and adopt joint training of bi-directional transfer and auto-encoding. Experimental results show that S2S-SLS (with either RNN or Transformer architectures) consistently outperforms baselines in various settings, especially when we have limited data.