Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Tunable $Λ$-type system made of a superconducting qubit pair

Two transversely coupled and resonant qubits form symmetric and antisymmetric states as their eigenstates. In this paper, we show that parametric modulation of an individual qubit enables direct Rabi swapping between the two states. Its application to setup a $Λ$-type system with a pair of strongly coupled superconducting transmon qubits is discussed. The excited state is made of the symmetric state and the metastable state is the antisymmetric state. The coherence of the metastable state is only limited by the pure dephasing mechanism. Based on this scheme, $Λ$-type electromagnetically induced transparency, Autler-Townes splitting and stimulated Raman adiabatic passage are numerically demonstrated. We highlight the large frequency tunability in such superconducting $Λ$-type systems.
Claim-Dissector: An Interpretable Fact-Checking System with Joint Re-ranking and Veracity Prediction

We present Claim-Dissector: a novel latent variable model for fact-checking and analysis, which given a claim and a set of retrieved evidences jointly learns to identify: (i) the relevant evidences to the given claim, (ii) the veracity of the claim. We propose to disentangle the per-evidence relevance probability and its contribution to the final veracity probability in an interpretable way -- the final veracity probability is proportional to a linear ensemble of per-evidence relevance probabilities. In this way, the individual contributions of evidences towards the final predicted probability can be identified. In per-evidence relevance probability, our model can further distinguish whether each relevant evidence is supporting (S) or refuting (R) the claim. This allows to quantify how much the S/R probability contributes to the final verdict or to detect disagreeing evidence. Despite its interpretable nature, our system achieves results competitive with state-of-the-art on the FEVER dataset, as compared to typical two-stage system pipelines, while using significantly fewer parameters. It also sets new state-of-the-art on FAVIQ and RealFC datasets. Furthermore, our analysis shows that our model can learn fine-grained relevance cues while using coarse-grained supervision, and we demonstrate it in 2 ways. (i) We show that our model can achieve competitive sentence recall while using only paragraph-level relevance supervision. (ii) Traversing towards the finest granularity of relevance, we show that our model is capable of identifying relevance at the token level. To do this, we present a new benchmark TLR-FEVER focusing on token-level interpretability -- humans annotate tokens in relevant evidences they considered essential when making their judgment. Then we measure how similar are these annotations to the tokens our model is focusing on.
CrAM: A Compression-Aware Minimizer

Deep neural networks (DNNs) often have to be compressed, via pruning and/or quantization, before they can be deployed in practical settings. In this work we propose a new compression-aware minimizer dubbed CrAM that modifies the optimization step in a principled way, in order to produce models whose local loss behavior is stable under compression operations such as pruning. Thus, dense models trained via CrAM should be compressible post-training, in a single step, without significant accuracy loss. Experimental results on standard benchmarks, such as residual networks for ImageNet classification and BERT models for language modelling, show that CrAM produces dense models that can be more accurate than the standard SGD/Adam-based baselines, but which are stable under weight pruning: specifically, we can prune models in one-shot to 70-80% sparsity with almost no accuracy loss, and to 90% with reasonable ($\sim 1\%$) accuracy loss, which is competitive with gradual compression methods. Additionally, CrAM can produce sparse models which perform well for transfer learning, and it also works for semi-structured 2:4 pruning patterns supported by GPU hardware. The code for reproducing the results is available at https://github.com/IST-DASLab/CrAM .
Cryptographic Hardness of Learning Halfspaces with Massart Noise

We study the complexity of PAC learning halfspaces in the presence of Massart noise. In this problem, we are given i.i.d. labeled examples $(\mathbf{x}, y) \in \mathbb{R}^N \times \{ \pm 1\}$, where the distribution of $\mathbf{x}$ is arbitrary and the label $y$ is a Massart corruption of $f(\mathbf{x})$, for an unknown halfspace $f: \mathbb{R}^N \to \{ \pm 1\}$, with flipping probability $\eta(\mathbf{x}) \leq \eta < 1/2$. The goal of the learner is to compute a hypothesis with small 0-1 error. Our main result is the first computational hardness result for this learning problem. Specifically, assuming the (widely believed) subexponential-time hardness of the Learning with Errors (LWE) problem, we show that no polynomial-time Massart halfspace learner can achieve error better than $\Omega(\eta)$, even if the optimal 0-1 error is small, namely $\mathrm{OPT} = 2^{-\log^{c} (N)}$ for any universal constant $c \in (0, 1)$. Prior work had provided qualitatively similar evidence of hardness in the Statistical Query model. Our computational hardness result essentially resolves the polynomial PAC learnability of Massart halfspaces, by showing that known efficient learning algorithms for the problem are nearly best possible.
Marvel DC: A Blockchain-Based Decentralized and Incentive-Compatible Distributed Computing Protocol

Decentralized computation outsourcing should allow anyone to access the large amounts of computational power that exists in the Internet of Things. Unfortunately, when trusted third parties are removed to achieve this decentralization, ensuring an outsourced computation is performed correctly remains a significant challenge. In this paper, we provide a solution to this problem. We outline Marvel DC, a fully decentralized blockchain-based distributed-computing protocol which formally guarantees that computers are strictly incentivized to correctly perform requested computations. Furthermore, Marvel DC utilizes a reputation management protocol to ensure that, for any minority of computers not performing calculations correctly, these computers are identified and selected for computations with diminishing probability. We then outline Privacy Marvel DC, a privacy-enhanced version of Marvel DC which decouples results from the computers which computed them, making the protocol suitable for computations such as Federated Learning, where results can reveal sensitive information about that computer that computed them. We provide an implementation of Marvel DC and analyses of both protocols, demonstrating that they are not only the first protocols to provide the aforementioned formal guarantees, but are also practical, competitive with prior attempts in the field, and ready to deploy.
Model based clustering of multinomial count data

We consider the problem of inferring an unknown number of clusters in replicated multinomial data. Under a model based clustering point of view, this task can be treated by estimating finite mixtures of multinomial distributions with or without covariates. Both Maximum Likelihood (ML) as well as Bayesian estimation are taken into account. Under a Maximum Likelihood approach, we provide an Expectation--Maximization (EM) algorithm which exploits a careful initialization procedure combined with a ridge--stabilized implementation of the Newton--Raphson method in the M--step. Under a Bayesian setup, a stochastic gradient Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm embedded within a prior parallel tempering scheme is devised. The number of clusters is selected according to the Integrated Completed Likelihood criterion in the ML approach and estimating the number of non-empty components in overfitting mixture models in the Bayesian case. Our method is illustrated in simulated data and applied to two real datasets. An R package is available at https://github.com/mqbssppe/multinomialLogitMix.
Extending RNN-T-based speech recognition systems with emotion and language classification

Speech transcription, emotion recognition, and language identification are usually considered to be three different tasks. Each one requires a different model with a different architecture and training process. We propose using a recurrent neural network transducer (RNN-T)-based speech-to-text (STT) system as a common component that can be used for emotion recognition and language identification as well as for speech recognition. Our work extends the STT system for emotion classification through minimal changes, and shows successful results on the IEMOCAP and MELD datasets. In addition, we demonstrate that by adding a lightweight component to the RNN-T module, it can also be used for language identification. In our evaluations, this new classifier demonstrates state-of-the-art accuracy for the NIST-LRE-07 dataset.
Will AI Make Cyber Swords or Shields: A few mathematical models of technological progress

We aim to demonstrate the value of mathematical models for policy debates about technological progress in cybersecurity by considering phishing, vulnerability discovery, and the dynamics between patching and exploitation. We then adjust the inputs to those mathematical models to match some possible advances in their underlying technology. We find that AI's impact on phishing may be overestimated but could lead to more attacks going undetected. Advances in vulnerability discovery have the potential to help attackers more than defenders. And automation that writes exploits is more useful to attackers than automation that writes patches, although advances that help deploy patches faster have the potential to be more impactful than either.
CompText: Visualizing, Comparing &amp; Understanding Text Corpus

A common practice in Natural Language Processing (NLP) is to visualize the text corpus without reading through the entire literature, still grasping the central idea and key points described. For a long time, researchers focused on extracting topics from the text and visualizing them based on their relative significance in the corpus. However, recently, researchers started coming up with more complex systems that not only expose the topics of the corpus but also word closely related to the topic to give users a holistic view. These detailed visualizations spawned research on comparing text corpora based on their visualization. Topics are often compared to idealize the difference between corpora. However, to capture greater semantics from different corpora, researchers have started to compare texts based on the sentiment of the topics related to the text. Comparing the words carrying the most weightage, we can get an idea about the important topics for corpus. There are multiple existing texts comparing methods present that compare topics rather than sentiments but we feel that focusing on sentiment-carrying words would better compare the two corpora. Since only sentiments can explain the real feeling of the text and not just the topic, topics without sentiments are just nouns. We aim to differentiate the corpus with a focus on sentiment, as opposed to comparing all the words appearing in the two corpora. The rationale behind this is, that the two corpora do not many have identical words for side-by-side comparison, so comparing the sentiment words gives us an idea of how the corpora are appealing to the emotions of the reader. We can argue that the entropy or the unexpectedness and divergence of topics should also be of importance and help us to identify key pivot points and the importance of certain topics in the corpus alongside relative sentiment.
Diversity Boosted Learning for Domain Generalization with Large Number of Domains

Machine learning algorithms minimizing the average training loss usually suffer from poor generalization performance due to the greedy exploitation of correlations among the training data, which are not stable under distributional shifts. It inspires various works for domain generalization (DG), where a series of methods, such as Causal Matching and FISH, work by pairwise domain operations. They would need $O(n^2)$ pairwise domain operations with $n$ domains, where each one is often highly expensive. Moreover, while a common objective in the DG literature is to learn invariant representations against domain-induced spurious correlations, we highlight the importance of mitigating spurious correlations caused by objects. Based on the observation that diversity helps mitigate spurious correlations, we propose a Diversity boosted twO-level saMplIng framework (DOMI) utilizing Determinantal Point Processes (DPPs) to efficiently sample the most informative ones among large number of domains. We show that DOMI helps train robust models against spurious correlations from both domain-side and object-side, substantially enhancing the performance of the backbone DG algorithms on rotated MNIST, rotated Fashion MNIST, and iwildcam datasets.
Cross-Attention of Disentangled Modalities for 3D Human Mesh Recovery with Transformers

Transformer encoder architectures have recently achieved state-of-the-art results on monocular 3D human mesh reconstruction, but they require a substantial number of parameters and expensive computations. Due to the large memory overhead and slow inference speed, it is difficult to deploy such models for practical use. In this paper, we propose a novel transformer encoder-decoder architecture for 3D human mesh reconstruction from a single image, called FastMETRO. We identify the performance bottleneck in the encoder-based transformers is caused by the token design which introduces high complexity interactions among input tokens. We disentangle the interactions via an encoder-decoder architecture, which allows our model to demand much fewer parameters and shorter inference time. In addition, we impose the prior knowledge of human body's morphological relationship via attention masking and mesh upsampling operations, which leads to faster convergence with higher accuracy. Our FastMETRO improves the Pareto-front of accuracy and efficiency, and clearly outperforms image-based methods on Human3.6M and 3DPW. Furthermore, we validate its generalizability on FreiHAND.
Structural Similarity for Improved Transfer in Reinforcement Learning

Transfer learning is an increasingly common approach for developing performant RL agents. However, it is not well understood how to define the relationship between the source and target tasks, and how this relationship contributes to successful transfer. We present an algorithm called Structural Similarity for Two MDPS, or SS2, that calculates a state similarity measure for states in two finite MDPs based on previously developed bisimulation metrics, and show that the measure satisfies properties of a distance metric. Then, through empirical results with GridWorld navigation tasks, we provide evidence that the distance measure can be used to improve transfer performance for Q-Learning agents over previous implementations.
Declarative Smart Contracts

This paper presents DeCon, a declarative programming language for implementing smart contracts and specifying contract-level properties. Driven by the observation that smart contract operations and contract-level properties can be naturally expressed as relational constraints, DeCon models each smart contract as a set of relational tables that store transaction records. This relational representation of smart contracts enables convenient specification of contract properties, facilitates run-time monitoring of potential property violations, and brings clarity to contract debugging via data provenance. Specifically, a DeCon program consists of a set of declarative rules and violation query rules over the relational representation, describing the smart contract implementation and contract-level properties, respectively. We have developed a tool that can compile DeCon programs into executable Solidity programs, with instrumentation for run-time property monitoring. Our case studies demonstrate that DeCon can implement realistic smart contracts such as ERC20 and ERC721 digital tokens. Our evaluation results reveal the marginal overhead of DeCon compared to the open-source reference implementation, incurring 14% median gas overhead for execution, and another 16% median gas overhead for run-time verification.
Look at Adjacent Frames: Video Anomaly Detection without Offline Training

We propose a solution to detect anomalous events in videos without the need to train a model offline. Specifically, our solution is based on a randomly-initialized multilayer perceptron that is optimized online to reconstruct video frames, pixel-by-pixel, from their frequency information. Based on the information shifts between adjacent frames, an incremental learner is used to update parameters of the multilayer perceptron after observing each frame, thus allowing to detect anomalous events along the video stream. Traditional solutions that require no offline training are limited to operating on videos with only a few abnormal frames. Our solution breaks this limit and achieves strong performance on benchmark datasets.
Quantum supremacy regime for compressed fermionic models

Compressible models extend the domain of simulable systems in quantum computers, but little is known about their precise limits of applicability. Using the theory of compressible matchgate circuits, we identify a class of quadratic fermionic Hamiltonians that can be simulated in compressed space. In particular, for systems of $n$ orbitals encoded to 2-local qubit models with nearest neighbour interactions, the ground state energy can be evaluated with $O\left(\log n\right)$ sets of measurements, independently of the number of dimensions in which the $n$ sites are arranged. We also provide an expressible circuit ansatz in a logarithmic number of qubits for finding the compressed ground state with a variational quantum eigensolver. From the complexity analysis of the compressed circuits, we find a regime of quantum supremacy for sampling compressed Gaussian fermionic models.
Brand Dilution: An Analysis of The IKEA Versus IKEMA Dispute

This study is aimed to provide a different analysis related to dispute of trademark or brand of IKEA against Ikema. IKEA in the Judicial Review Verdict of Indonesia Supreme Court of (Peninjauan Kembali Mahkamah Agung), was asserted not having similarity with Ikema. On the other hand, the author views this case is potentially presumed as as a dilution case. Regarding this, the analysis employs theory that proposed by Shuy (2002) to uncover the identical similarity between the two trademarks. Graphemic and Phonetic analysis are used to establish the feature similarity, for analysis of public perception upon the both trademarks, psycholinguistic has been practiced. The result is the both trademarks are similar in terms of dilution. Keywords: dispute, dilution, linguistic analysis
An Assessment of Research Data Services Through Client Interaction Records

Research data services have become a key feature of academic libraries. In this paper, we provide an internal assessment of consulting reach and effectiveness for our Data Services provided by the University Libraries at Virginia Tech and using client records from 2016 to 2020. Through this assessment, we explore how service growth and reach across Virginia Tech has evolved with time. We also look more closely at these aspects for one college and discuss how we will use this data to assess the impact of our services. Finally, through the lens of client outcomes, we examine the trends of client interactions over the term of the study. Initially, we envisioned a successful service as one useful to the largest number of entities (primarily colleges and institutes) across Virginia Tech. However, analysis of the data we have gathered over the past 4 years leads us to consider target ing our service growth where it might be most useful. Rather than prioritizing services that are useful to the largest number of researchers, we instead could (and perhaps should) prioritize engagement with researchers and research communities for whom our assistance can make the largest positive impact on their research projects. This assessment of our client data demonstrates the utility of detailed client management records for periodic formative and summative assessment of research data services.
Computer Vision Radar for Autonomous Driving using Histogram Method

Mobility is a fundamental human desire.All societies aspire to safe and efficient mobility at low ecological and economic costs.ADAS systems (Advanced Driver Assistance Systems) are safety systems designed to eliminate human error in driving vehicles of all types.ADAS systems such as Radars use advanced technologies to assist the driver while driving and thus improve their performance.Radar uses a combination of sensor technologies to perceive the world around the vehicle and then provide information to the driver or take safety action when necessary.Conventional radars based on the emission of electromagnetic and ultrasonic waves have been consumed in the face of the challenges of the constraints of modern autonomous driving, and have not been generalized on all roads.For this reason, we studied the design and construction of a computer vision radar to reproduce human behavior, with a road line lane detection approach based on the histogram of the grayscale image that gives good estimates in real-time, and make a comparison of this method with other computer vision methods performed in the literature: Hough, RANSAC, and Radon.
IMPROVING STUDENTS’ SPEAKING ABILITY USING THREE-STEP INTERVIEW FOR BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION TO THE STUDENTS AT BALITAR ISLAMIC UNIVERSITY

This present research aims to enhance students’ speaking skills three-step interview For Business Administration to The Students at Balitar Islamic University. The study used Classroom Action that is promoted by Latief (2012) and this methodology is used by the researcher in order to answer the student problems which are found in his preliminary study. The subject is the second semester of business administration study program or ESP class. After doing two cycles in his study, the findings show that implementing strategy could give a good contribution to the student speaking skills. It means that this strategy can help them performing a good speaking session by reducing tension in speaking in public, reduce afraid, and shy feeling based on speaking rubric which is used by the researcher in this study.