Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
A Fusion-Based Defogging Algorithm

To solve the problem that traditional dark channel is not suitable for a large sky area and can easyily distort defogged images, we propose a novel fusion-based defogging algorithm. Firstly, an improved remote sensing image segmentation algorithm is introduced to mix the dark channel. Secondly, we establish a dark-light channel fusion model to calculate the atmospheric light map. Furthermore, in order to refine the transmittance image without reducing restoration quality, the grayscale image corresponding to the original image is selected as a guide image. Meanwhile, we optimize the set value of the defogging intensity parameter ω in the transmission estimation formula as the value of atmospheric light. Finally, a brightness/color compensation model based on visual perception is generated for image correction. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm achieves superior performance on UAV foggy images in both subjective and objective evaluation, which verifies the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.
Identifying Balls Feature in a Large-Scale Laser Point Cloud of a Coal Mining Environment by a Multiscale Dynamic Graph Convolution Neural Network

In the process of coal mining, a certain amount of gas will be produced. Environmental perception is very important to realize intelligent and unmanned coal mine production and operation and to reduce the accident rate of gas explosion and other disasters. The identification of geometric features of the coal mine working face is the main part of the environmental perception of the working face. In this study, we identify geometric features in a large-scale coal mine working face point cloud (we take the ball as an example) so as to provide a method for the environmental perception of the coal mine working face. On the basis of previous research, we upgrade the dynamic graph convolution neural network (DGCNN) for directly processing point clouds from two aspects: extracting local features and global features of point clouds. First, a multiscale dynamic graph convolution neural network (MS-DGCNN) is proposed, and the combination of max-pooling and average-pooling is used as the symmetry function. Second, we use MS-DGCNN to learn the features of a variety of geometric point clouds in the point cloud data set we make and then look for the ball in the large-scale point cloud of the coal mining working face. Finally, we compare the performance of MS-DGCNN with that of other deep neural networks directly processing point clouds. This study enables MS-DGCNN to obtain more powerful feature expression ability and enhance the generalization of the model. In addition, this study provides a solid foundation for the geometric feature identification of MS-DGCNN in the environmental perception of the coal mine working face and creates a precedent for the application of MS-DGCNN in the field of energy. At the same time, this study makes a beneficial exploration for the development of a transparent coal mine working face.
A mini review on UAV mission planning

With the increasing complexity of modern air warfare, an efficient and robust mission planning, which mainly includes task assignment and path planning, becomes the key issue to improve the combat efficiency. This paper reviews recent progress in UAV mission planning. First, basic concepts of UAVs and their mission planning problem are given. And several representative existing mission planning systems are briefly introduced. The constraints and objectives in the task assignment model are reviewed, and the pros and cons of algorithms commonly used are then summarized. After that, the algorithms for path planning are reviewed. Finally, we point out current problems and future research directions. The paper provides a comprehensive review of the field and enables a quick start for those who aim to do related research.
The 1/5-th rule with rollbacks

Self-adjustment of parameters can significantly improve the performance of evolutionary algorithms. A notable example is the $(1+(\lambda,\lambda))$ genetic algorithm, where the adaptation of the population size helps to achieve the linear runtime on the OneMax problem. However, on problems which interfere with the assumptions behind the self-adjustment procedure, its usage can lead to performance degradation compared to static parameter choices. In particular, the one fifth rule, which guides the adaptation in the example above, is able to raise the population size too fast on problems which are too far away from the perfect fitness-distance correlation. We propose a modification of the one fifth rule in order to have less negative impact on the performance in scenarios when the original rule reduces the performance. Our modification, while still having a good performance on OneMax, both theoretically and in practice, also shows better results on linear functions with random weights and on random satisfiable MAX-SAT instances.
Spatial-Angular Versatile Convolution for Light Field Reconstruction

Spatial-angular separable convolution (SAS-conv) has been widely used for efficient and effective 4D light field (LF) feature embedding in different tasks, which mimics a 4D convolution by alternatively operating on 2D spatial slices and 2D angular slices. In this paper, we argue that, despite its global intensity modeling capabilities, SAS-conv can only embed local geometry information into the features, resulting in inferior performances in the regions with textures and occlusions. Because the epipolar lines are highly related to the scene depth, we introduce the concept of spatial-angular correlated convolution (SAC-conv). By alternating 2D convolutions on the vertical and horizontal epipolar slices, SAC-conv can embed global and robust geometry information into the features. We verify that SAS-conv and SAC-conv are skilled at different aspects of 4D LF feature embedding through a detailed feature and error analysis. Based on their complementarity, we further combine SAS-conv and SAC-conv by a parallel residual connection, forming a new spatial-angular versatile convolution (SAV-conv) module. We conduct comprehensive experiments on two representative LF reconstruction tasks, i.e., LF angular super-resolution and LF spatial super-resolution. Both the quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate that, without any extra parameters, networks upgraded with our proposed SAV-conv notably outperform those upgraded with SAS-conv and achieve a new state-of-the-art performance. Codes are available at <uri xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://github.com/Joechann0831/SAV_conv</uri> .
Secure Industrial IoT Systems via RF Fingerprinting Under Impaired Channels With Interference and Noise

Industrial IoT-enabled critical infrastructures are susceptible to cyber attacks due to their mission-critical deployment. To ensure security by design, radio frequency (RF)-based security is considered an effective way for wirelessly monitored or actuated critical infrastructures. For this purpose, this paper presents a novel augmentation-driven deep learning approach to analyze unique transmitter fingerprints and determine the legitimacy of a user device or transmitter. An RF fingerprinting model is susceptible to various channel and environmental conditions that impact the learning performance of a machine/deep learning model. As data gathering cannot always be considered a feasible alternative, efficient solutions that can tackle the impact of varying propagation channels on learning performance are emergent. This work aims to shed light on the RF fingerprinting problem from a different angle when 4G, 5G, and WiFi data samples are collected from different transmitters by proposing a fine-grained augmentation approach to improve the learning performance of a deep learning model. This work also proposes an enhanced classifier structure following the fine-grained augmentation approach. Results of experiments, conducted on the POWDER dataset, demonstrate promising RF fingerprinting performance when training data are augmented in a waveform-specific fine-grained manner. Thus, the RF identification accuracy can be boosted to 97.84% on unseen RF data instances from our previously published work where we had achieved an accuracy of 87.94% using tapped delay line (TDL)/clustered delay line (CDL)-based augmentation approach. The paper also presents a sensitivity analysis of the fine-grained approach concerning different signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR), signal-to-interference-ratio (SIR) levels (20 dB and 30 dB), and signal-to-interference-plus-noise-ratio (SINR) levels (15 dB, 25 dB). The sensitivity analysis exhibits that it achieves 85.78% accuracy at 20 dB SIR on both Day 1 (train) and Day 2 (test) data. In addition, it achieves 92.37% accuracy even at 20 dB SNR on Day 2 data from POWDER dataset. Furthermore, it achieves 84.95% accuracy at 15 dB SINR on Day 2 data. Hence, these results exhibit the resiliency of the fine-grained augmentation approach against interference and noise.
Features of Immersive Virtual Reality to Support Meaningful Chemistry Education

One way of triggering students’ interest in chemistry is making chemistry education more meaningful. Four characteristics of meaningful chemistry education (MCE) were identified in projects that involved a redesign of curriculum materials: daily life context, the need-to-know principle, students’ input, and the macro–micro connection. Chemistry education has struggled with the implementation of meaningful learning. A possible solution might be the use of immersive virtual reality (IVR) in chemistry classrooms, a promising tool to support students’ meaningful learning. IVR can be described as a computer simulation that provides an interactive simulated virtual environment, while the user wears a head mounted display and can experience immersion and presence in a virtual environment. The aim of this study was to explore features of IVR to support MCE at a secondary school level. A systematic literature search was done, experts were consulted, and animation- and 360°-IVR lessons were designed and tested in classrooms. Features that could support MCE found in both animation-IVR and 360°-IVR were: the application of the characteristics of MCE, the necessity of a storyboard, difficulties in realizing interactive visualization, and positive student experiences. These features can be used to design future IVR lessons to support MCE. Features needing careful consideration since they are different for 360°-IVR and animation-IVR are the need for a professional designer, the degree of interactivity, and classroom use with all students at the same time.
LLM-Adapters: An Adapter Family for Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models

The success of large language models (LLMs), like GPT-4 and ChatGPT, has led to the development of numerous cost-effective and accessible alternatives that are created by finetuning open-access LLMs with task-specific data (e.g., ChatDoctor) or instruction data (e.g., Alpaca). Among the various fine-tuning methods, adapter-based parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) is undoubtedly one of the most attractive topics, as it only requires fine-tuning a few external parameters instead of the entire LLMs while achieving comparable or even better performance. To enable further research on PEFT methods of LLMs, this paper presents LLM-Adapters, an easy-to-use framework that integrates various adapters into LLMs and can execute these adapter-based PEFT methods of LLMs for different tasks. The framework includes state-of-the-art open-access LLMs such as LLaMA, BLOOM, and GPT-J, as well as widely used adapters such as Series adapters, Parallel adapter, Prompt-based learning and Reparametrization-based methods. Moreover, we conduct extensive empirical studies on the impact of adapter types, placement locations, and hyper-parameters to the best design for each adapter-based methods. We evaluate the effectiveness of the adapters on fourteen datasets from two different reasoning tasks, Arithmetic Reasoning and Commonsense Reasoning. The results demonstrate that using adapter-based PEFT in smaller-scale LLMs (7B) with few extra trainable parameters yields comparable, and in some cases superior, performance to powerful LLMs (175B) in zero-shot inference on simple math reasoning datasets.
STATE-OF-THE-ART AND TRENDS IN THE SYSTEMATIC DEVELOPMENT OF RICH INTERNET APPLICATIONS

Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) are widely adopted Web applications that add the richer interaction, presentation, and client-side computation capabilities of desktop applications to the Web. However, the evolution from Web applications towards RIAs comes at the cost of increased complexity in their development. For this reason, a wide variety of tools and technologies have been proposed in order to streamline their development effort. This paper investigates the current state of the art of the RIA development approaches. The review shows that the current industrial development practice lacks a comprehensive approach to RIA development, supporting all the development steps from the design to implementation, test and maintenance, and helping identifying correct design choices. This is in part due to the severe fragmentation of current RIA technologies that prevents the adoption of a commonly recognized set of best practices resulting in ad-hoc development processes. These aspects are in part treated by research methodologies and some innovative industrial solutions, but also these approaches present some limitations. The paper identifies future research directions for RIAs to fully support their development process and to support their design in a more comprehensive and systematic way, from both industrial and research perspectives.
Intuitionistic Center-Free FCM Clustering for MR Brain Image Segmentation

In this paper, an intuitionistic center-free fuzzy c-means clustering method (ICFFCM) is proposed for magnetic resonance (MR) brain image segmentation. First, in order to suppress the effect of noise in MR brain images, a pixel-to-pixel similarity with spatial information is defined. Then, for the purpose of handling the vagueness in MR brain images as well as the uncertainty in clustering process, a pixel-to-cluster similarity measure is defined by employing the intuitionistic fuzzy membership function. These two similarities are used to modify the center-free FCM so that the ability of the method for MR brain image segmentation could be improved. Second, on the basis of the improved center-free FCM method, a local information term, which is also intuitionistic and center-free, is appended to the objective function. This generates the final proposed ICFFCM. The consideration of local information further enhances the robustness of ICFFCM to the noise in MR brain images. Experimental results on the simulated and real MR brain image datasets show that ICFFCM is effective and robust. Moreover, ICFFCM could outperform several fuzzy-clustering-based methods and could achieve comparable results to the standard published methods like statistical parametric mapping and FMRIB automated segmentation tool.
Aegis

Our everyday lives are expanding fast with the introduction of new Smart Home Systems (SHSs). Today, a myriad of SHS devices and applications are widely available to users and have already started to re-define our modern lives. Smart home users utilize the apps to control and automate such devices. Users can develop their own apps or easily download and install them from vendor-specific app markets. App-based SHSs offer many tangible benefits to our lives, but also unfold diverse security risks. Several attacks have already been reported for SHSs. However, current security solutions consider smart home devices and apps individually to detect malicious actions rather than the context of the SHS as a whole. The existing mechanisms cannot capture user activities and sensor-device-user interactions in a holistic fashion. To address these issues, in this paper, we introduce Aegis, a novel context-aware security framework to detect malicious behavior in a SHS. Specifically, Aegis observes the states of the connected smart home entities (sensors and devices) for different user activities and usage patterns in a SHS and builds a contextual model to differentiate between malicious and benign behavior. We evaluated the efficacy and performance of Aegis in multiple smart home settings (i.e., single bedroom, double bedroom, duplex) with real-life users performing day-to-day activities and real SHS devices. We also measured the performance of Aegis against five different malicious behaviors. Our detailed evaluation shows that Aegis can detect malicious behavior in SHS with high accuracy (over 95%) and secure the SHS regardless of the smart home layout, device configuration, installed apps, and enforced user policies. Finally, Aegis achieves minimum overhead in detecting malicious behavior in SHS, ensuring easy deployability in real-life smart environments.
The Walrus: a library for the calculation of hafnians, Hermite polynomials and Gaussian boson sampling

Gupt et al., (2019). The Walrus: a library for the calculation of hafnians, Hermite polynomials and Gaussian boson sampling. Journal of Open Source Software, 4(44), 1705, https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.01705
Bridges Between Islands: Cross-Chain Technology for Distributed Ledger Technology

Since the emergence of blockchain in 2008, we see a kaleidoscopic variety of applications built on distributed ledger technology (DLT), including applications for financial services, healthcare, or the Internet of Things.Each application comes with specific requirements for DLT characteristics (e.g., high throughput, scalability).However, trade-offs between DLT characteristics restrict the development of a DLT design (e.g., Ethereum, IOTA) that fits all use cases' requirements.Separated DLT designs emerged, each specialized to suite dedicated application requirements.To enable the development of more powerful applications on DLT, such DLT islands must be bridged.However, knowledge of cross-chain technology (CCT) is scattered across scientific and practical sources.Therefore, we examine this diverse body of knowledge and provide comprehensive insights into CCT by synthesizing its underlying characteristics, evolving patterns, and use cases.Our findings resolve contradictions in the literature and provide avenues for future research in an emerging scientific field.
RETRIEVAL OF COMPLEX IMAGES USING VISUAL SALIENCY GUIDED COGNITIVE CLASSIFICATION

Data storage via multimedia technology is more preferred as the information in multimedia contain rich meanings and are concise when compared to the traditional textual information. However, efficient information retrieval is a crucial factor in such storage. This paper presents a cognitive classification based visual saliency guided model for the efficient retrieval of information from multimedia data storage. The Itti visual saliency model is described here for generation of an overall saliency map with the integration of color saliency, intensity and direction maps. Multi-feature fusion paradigms are used for providing clear description of the image pattern. The definition is based on two stages namely complexity based on cognitive load and classification of complexity at a cognitive level. The image retrieval system is finalized by integrating a group sparse logistic regression model. In complex scenarios, the baselines are overcome by the proposed system when tested on multiple databased as compared to other state-of-the-art models.
Source-Relaxed Domain Adaptation for Image Segmentation

Domain adaptation (DA) has drawn high interests for its capacity to adapt a model trained on labeled source data to perform well on unlabeled or weakly labeled target data from a different domain. Most common DA techniques require the concurrent access to the input images of both the source and target domains. However, in practice, it is common that the source images are not available in the adaptation phase. This is a very frequent DA scenario in medical imaging, for instance, when the source and target images come from different clinical sites. We propose a novel formulation for adapting segmentation networks, which relaxes such a constraint. Our formulation is based on minimizing a label-free entropy loss defined over target-domain data, which we further guide with a domain invariant prior on the segmentation regions. Many priors can be used, derived from anatomical information. Here, a class-ratio prior is learned via an auxiliary network and integrated in the form of a Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence in our overall loss function. We show the effectiveness of our prior-aware entropy minimization in adapting spine segmentation across different MRI modalities. Our method yields comparable results to several state-of-the-art adaptation techniques, even though is has access to less information, the source images being absent in the adaptation phase. Our straight-forward adaptation strategy only uses one network, contrary to popular adversarial techniques, which cannot perform without the presence of the source images. Our framework can be readily used with various priors and segmentation problems.
Reinforced Multi-Teacher Selection for Knowledge Distillation

In natural language processing (NLP) tasks, slow inference speed and huge footprints in GPU usage remain the bottleneck of applying pre-trained deep models in production. As a popular method for model compression, knowledge distillation transfers knowledge from one or multiple large (teacher) models to a small (student) model. When multiple teacher models are available in distillation, the state-of-the-art methods assign a fixed weight to a teacher model in the whole distillation. Furthermore, most of the existing methods allocate an equal weight to every teacher model. In this paper, we observe that, due to the complexity of training examples and the differences in student model capability, learning differentially from teacher models can lead to better performance of student models distilled. We systematically develop a reinforced method to dynamically assign weights to teacher models for different training instances and optimize the performance of student model. Our extensive experimental results on several NLP tasks clearly verify the feasibility and effectiveness of our approach.
Vector-Decomposed Disentanglement for Domain-Invariant Object Detection

To improve the generalization of detectors, for domain adaptive object detection (DAOD), recent advances mainly explore aligning feature-level distributions between the source and single-target domain, which may neglect the impact of domain-specific information existing in the aligned features. Towards DAOD, it is important to extract domain-invariant object representations. To this end, in this paper, we try to disentangle domain-invariant representations from domain-specific representations. And we propose a novel disentangled method based on vector decomposition. Firstly, an extractor is devised to separate domain-invariant representations from the input, which are used for extracting object proposals. Secondly, domain-specific representations are introduced as the differences between the input and domain-invariant representations. Through the difference operation, the gap between the domain-specific and domain-invariant representations is enlarged, which promotes domain-invariant representations to contain more domain-irrelevant information. In the experiment, we separately evaluate our method on the single- and compound-target case. For the single-target case, experimental results of four domain-shift scenes show our method obtains a significant performance gain over baseline methods. Moreover, for the compound-target case (i.e., the target is a compound of two different domains without domain labels), our method outperforms baseline methods by around 4%, which demonstrates the effectiveness of our method.