Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Improving Robustness using Generated Data

Recent work argues that robust training requires substantially larger datasets than those required for standard classification. On CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100, this translates into a sizable robust-accuracy gap between models trained solely on data from the original training set and those trained with additional data extracted from the "80 Million Tiny Images" dataset (TI-80M). In this paper, we explore how generative models trained solely on the original training set can be leveraged to artificially increase the size of the original training set and improve adversarial robustness to $\ell_p$ norm-bounded perturbations. We identify the sufficient conditions under which incorporating additional generated data can improve robustness, and demonstrate that it is possible to significantly reduce the robust-accuracy gap to models trained with additional real data. Surprisingly, we even show that even the addition of non-realistic random data (generated by Gaussian sampling) can improve robustness. We evaluate our approach on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, SVHN and TinyImageNet against $\ell_\infty$ and $\ell_2$ norm-bounded perturbations of size $\epsilon = 8/255$ and $\epsilon = 128/255$, respectively. We show large absolute improvements in robust accuracy compared to previous state-of-the-art methods. Against $\ell_\infty$ norm-bounded perturbations of size $\epsilon = 8/255$, our models achieve 66.10% and 33.49% robust accuracy on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100, respectively (improving upon the state-of-the-art by +8.96% and +3.29%). Against $\ell_2$ norm-bounded perturbations of size $\epsilon = 128/255$, our model achieves 78.31% on CIFAR-10 (+3.81%). These results beat most prior works that use external data.
DBSegment: Fast and robust segmentation of deep brain structures -- Evaluation of transportability across acquisition domains

Segmenting deep brain structures from magnetic resonance images is important for patient diagnosis, surgical planning, and research. Most current state-of-the-art solutions follow a segmentation-by-registration approach, where subject MRIs are mapped to a template with well-defined segmentations. However, registration-based pipelines are time-consuming, thus, limiting their clinical use. This paper uses deep learning to provide a robust and efficient deep brain segmentation solution. The method consists of a pre-processing step to conform all MRI images to the same orientation, followed by a convolutional neural network using the nnU-Net framework. We use a total of 14 datasets from both research and clinical collections. Of these, seven were used for training and validation and seven were retained for independent testing. We trained the network to segment 30 deep brain structures, as well as a brain mask, using labels generated from a registration-based approach. We evaluated the generalizability of the network by performing a leave-one-dataset-out cross-validation, and extensive testing on external datasets. Furthermore, we assessed cross-domain transportability by evaluating the results separately on different domains. We achieved an average DSC of 0.89 $\pm$ 0.04 on the independent testing datasets when compared to the registration-based gold standard. On our test system, the computation time decreased from 42 minutes for a reference registration-based pipeline to 1 minute. Our proposed method is fast, robust, and generalizes with high reliability. It can be extended to the segmentation of other brain structures. The method is publicly available on GitHub, as well as a pip package for convenient usage.
The Game of Arrows on 3-Legged Spider Graphs

The Game of Cycles is a combinatorial game introduced by Francis Su in 2020 in which players take turns marking arrows on the edges of a simple plane graph, avoiding the creation of sinks and sources and seeking to complete a "cycle cell." Su and his collaborators (2021) found winning strategies on graphs with certain types of symmetry using reverse mirroring. In this paper, we for the first time determine the winning player in the Game of Cycles on an infinite family of graphs lacking symmetry. In particular, we use the Sprague-Grundy Theorem to show that player two has a winning strategy for the Game of Cycles on any 3-legged spider graph with legs of odd length. Because the cycle cell victory condition is extraneous for tree graphs (including spiders), we drop it from the rules and call the result the Game of Arrows. Our proof leans heavily on a notion of state isomorphism that allows us to decompose a game state into states of smaller pieces of a graph, leading to nim-sum calculations with Grundy values.
On the Effect of Selfie Beautification Filters on Face Detection and Recognition

Beautification and augmented reality filters are very popular in applications that use selfie images captured with smartphones or personal devices. However, they can distort or modify biometric features, severely affecting the capability of recognizing individuals' identity or even detecting the face. Accordingly, we address the effect of such filters on the accuracy of automated face detection and recognition. The social media image filters studied either modify the image contrast or illumination or occlude parts of the face with for example artificial glasses or animal noses. We observe that the effect of some of these filters is harmful both to face detection and identity recognition, specially if they obfuscate the eye or (to a lesser extent) the nose. To counteract such effect, we develop a method to reconstruct the applied manipulation with a modified version of the U-NET segmentation network. This is observed to contribute to a better face detection and recognition accuracy. From a recognition perspective, we employ distance measures and trained machine learning algorithms applied to features extracted using a ResNet-34 network trained to recognize faces. We also evaluate if incorporating filtered images to the training set of machine learning approaches are beneficial for identity recognition. Our results show good recognition when filters do not occlude important landmarks, specially the eyes (identification accuracy &gt;99%, EER&lt;2%). The combined effect of the proposed approaches also allow to mitigate the effect produced by filters that occlude parts of the face, achieving an identification accuracy of &gt;92% with the majority of perturbations evaluated, and an EER &lt;8%. Although there is room for improvement, when neither U-NET reconstruction nor training with filtered images is applied, the accuracy with filters that severely occlude the eye is &lt;72% (identification) and &gt;12% (EER)
Hand Gesture Recognition Using Temporal Convolutions and Attention Mechanism

Advances in biosignal signal processing and machine learning, in particular Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), have paved the way for the development of innovative Human-Machine Interfaces for decoding the human intent and controlling artificial limbs. DNN models have shown promising results with respect to other algorithms for decoding muscle electrical activity, especially for recognition of hand gestures. Such data-driven models, however, have been challenged by their need for a large number of trainable parameters and their structural complexity. Here we propose the novel Temporal Convolutions-based Hand Gesture Recognition architecture (TC-HGR) to reduce this computational burden. With this approach, we classified 17 hand gestures via surface Electromyogram (sEMG) signals by the adoption of attention mechanisms and temporal convolutions. The proposed method led to 81.65% and 80.72% classification accuracy for window sizes of 300ms and 200ms, respectively. The number of parameters to train the proposed TC-HGR architecture is 11.9 times less than that of its state-of-the-art counterpart.
Contrastive Learning of Visual-Semantic Embeddings

Contrastive learning is a powerful technique to learn representations that are semantically distinctive and geometrically invariant. While most of the earlier approaches have demonstrated its effectiveness on single-modality learning tasks such as image classification, recently there have been a few attempts towards extending this idea to multi-modal data. In this paper, we propose two loss functions based on normalized cross-entropy to perform the task of learning joint visual-semantic embedding using batch contrastive training. In a batch, for a given anchor point from one modality, we consider its negatives only from another modality, and define our first contrastive loss based on expected violations incurred by all the negatives. Next, we update this loss and define the second contrastive loss based on the violation incurred only by the hardest negative. We compare our results with existing visual-semantic embedding methods on cross-modal image-to-text and text-to-image retrieval tasks using the MS-COCO and Flickr30K datasets, where we outperform the state-of-the-art on the MS-COCO dataset and achieve comparable results on the Flickr30K dataset.
An Evolutionary Correlation-aware Feature Selection Method for Classification Problems

The population-based optimization algorithms have provided promising results in feature selection problems. However, the main challenges are high time complexity. Moreover, the interaction between features is another big challenge in FS problems that directly affects the classification performance. In this paper, an estimation of distribution algorithm is proposed to meet three goals. Firstly, as an extension of EDA, the proposed method generates only two individuals in each iteration that compete based on a fitness function and evolve during the algorithm, based on our proposed update procedure. Secondly, we provide a guiding technique for determining the number of features for individuals in each iteration. As a result, the number of selected features of the final solution will be optimized during the evolution process. The two mentioned advantages can increase the convergence speed of the algorithm. Thirdly, as the main contribution of the paper, in addition to considering the importance of each feature alone, the proposed method can consider the interaction between features. Thus, it can deal with complementary features and consequently increase classification performance. To do this, we provide a conditional probability scheme that considers the joint probability distribution of selecting two features. The introduced probabilities successfully detect correlated features. Experimental results on a synthetic dataset with correlated features prove the performance of our proposed approach facing these types of features. Furthermore, the results on 13 real-world datasets obtained from the UCI repository show the superiority of the proposed method in comparison with some state-of-the-art approaches.
Crossmark - Asian Research Association

Asian Research Association CrossMark policy page DOI: 10.54392/CrossmarkPolicy What is Crossmark? CrossMark, a multi-publisher initiative from CrossRef, provides a standard way for readers to locate the authoritative version of a document. Asian Research Association recognizes the importance of the integrity and completeness of the scholarly record to researchers and librarians and attaches the highest importance to maintaining trust […]
A Good Prompt Is Worth Millions of Parameters: Low-resource Prompt-based Learning for Vision-Language Models

Large pre-trained vision-language (VL) models can learn a new task with a handful of examples and generalize to a new task without fine-tuning. However, these VL models are hard to deploy for real-world applications due to their impractically huge sizes and slow inference speed. To solve this limitation, we study prompt-based low-resource learning of VL tasks with our proposed method, FewVLM, relatively smaller than recent few-shot learners. For FewVLM, we pre-train a sequence-to-sequence transformer model with prefix language modeling (PrefixLM) and masked language modeling (MaskedLM). Furthermore, we analyze the effect of diverse prompts for few-shot tasks. Experimental results on VQA show that FewVLM with prompt-based learning outperforms Frozen which is 31x larger than FewVLM by 18.2% point and achieves comparable results to a 246x larger model, PICa. In our analysis, we observe that (1) prompts significantly affect zero-shot performance but marginally affect few-shot performance, (2) models with noisy prompts learn as quickly as hand-crafted prompts given larger training data, and (3) MaskedLM helps VQA tasks while PrefixLM boosts captioning performance. Our code is publicly available at \url{https://github.com/woojeongjin/FewVLM}
A Survey on Awesome Korean NLP Datasets

English based datasets are commonly available from Kaggle, GitHub, or recently published papers. Although benchmark tests with English datasets are sufficient to show off the performances of new models and methods, still a researcher need to train and validate the models on Korean based datasets to produce a technology or product, suitable for Korean processing. This paper introduces 15 popular Korean based NLP datasets with summarized details such as volume, license, repositories, and other research results inspired by the datasets. Also, I provide high-resolution instructions with sample or statistics of datasets. The main characteristics of datasets are presented on a single table to provide a rapid summarization of datasets for researchers.
Equivariant Discrete Normalizing Flows

At its core, generative modeling seeks to uncover the underlying factors that give rise to observed data that can often be modelled as the natural symmetries that manifest themselves through invariances and equivariances to certain transformations laws. However, current approaches are couched in the formalism of continuous normalizing flows that require the construction of equivariant vector fields -- inhibiting their simple application to conventional higher dimensional generative modelling domains like natural images. In this paper we focus on building equivariant normalizing flows using discrete layers. We first theoretically prove the existence of an equivariant map for compact groups whose actions are on compact spaces. We further introduce two new equivariant flows: $G$-coupling Flows and $G$-Residual Flows that elevate classical Coupling and Residual Flows with equivariant maps to a prescribed group $G$. Our construction of $G$-Residual Flows are also universal, in the sense that we prove an $G$-equivariant diffeomorphism can be exactly mapped by a $G$-residual flow. Finally, we complement our theoretical insights with experiments -- for the first time -- on image datasets like CIFAR-10 and show $G$-Equivariant Discrete Normalizing flows lead to increased data efficiency, faster convergence, and improved likelihood estimates.
A Review of Evolutionary Multi-objective Clustering Approaches

Evolutionary multi-objective clustering (EMOC), a modern clustering technique, has been widely applied to extract patterns, allowing us to analyze different aspects of complex data by considering multiple criteria. In this article, we present an analysis of the advances in EMOC studies and provide a profile of this study field by considering an extensive mapping of the literature to identify the main methods and concepts that have been adopted to design the EMOC approaches. This review provides a comprehensive view of the EMOC studies that supports newcomers or busy researchers in understanding the general features of the existing algorithms and guides the generation of new approaches. For that, we introduce a general architecture of EMOC to describe the main elements applied in designing EMOC algorithms and we correlate them with the main features found in the literature. Also, we categorized the EMOC algorithms based on shared characteristics that highlight the main features or application fields. The paper ends by addressing some potential subjects for future research.
Why don't people use character-level machine translation?

We present a literature and empirical survey that critically assesses the state of the art in character-level modeling for machine translation (MT). Despite evidence in the literature that character-level systems are comparable with subword systems, they are virtually never used in competitive setups in WMT competitions. We empirically show that even with recent modeling innovations in character-level natural language processing, character-level MT systems still struggle to match their subword-based counterparts. Character-level MT systems show neither better domain robustness, nor better morphological generalization, despite being often so motivated. However, we are able to show robustness towards source side noise and that translation quality does not degrade with increasing beam size at decoding time.
Chunked-Cache: On-Demand and Scalable Cache Isolation for Security Architectures

Shared cache resources in multi-core processors are vulnerable to cache side-channel attacks. Recently proposed defenses have their own caveats: Randomization-based defenses are vulnerable to the evolving attack algorithms besides relying on weak cryptographic primitives, because they do not fundamentally address the root cause for cache side-channel attacks. Cache partitioning defenses, on the other hand, provide the strict resource partitioning and effectively block all side-channel threats. However, they usually rely on way-based partitioning which is not fine-grained and cannot scale to support a larger number of protection domains, e.g., in trusted execution environment (TEE) security architectures, besides degrading performance and often resulting in cache underutilization. To overcome the shortcomings of both approaches, we present a novel and flexible set-associative cache partitioning design for TEE architectures, called Chunked-Cache. Chunked-Cache enables an execution context to "carve" out an exclusive configurable chunk of the cache if the execution requires side-channel resilience. If side-channel resilience is not required, mainstream cache resources are freely utilized. Hence, our solution addresses the security-performance trade-off practically by enabling selective and on-demand utilization of side-channel-resilient caches, while providing well-grounded future-proof security guarantees. We show that Chunked-Cache provides side-channel-resilient cache utilization for sensitive code execution, with small hardware overhead, while incurring no performance overhead on the OS. We also show that it outperforms conventional way-based cache partitioning by 43%, while scaling significantly better to support a larger number of protection domains.
Simultaneous Missing Value Imputation and Structure Learning with Groups

Learning structures between groups of variables from data with missing values is an important task in the real world, yet difficult to solve. One typical scenario is discovering the structure among topics in the education domain to identify learning pathways. Here, the observations are student performances for questions under each topic which contain missing values. However, most existing methods focus on learning structures between a few individual variables from the complete data. In this work, we propose VISL, a novel scalable structure learning approach that can simultaneously infer structures between groups of variables under missing data and perform missing value imputations with deep learning. Particularly, we propose a generative model with a structured latent space and a graph neural network-based architecture, scaling to a large number of variables. Empirically, we conduct extensive experiments on synthetic, semi-synthetic, and real-world education data sets. We show improved performances on both imputation and structure learning accuracy compared to popular and recent approaches.
Causal Identification with Additive Noise Models: Quantifying the Effect of Noise

In recent years, a lot of research has been conducted within the area of causal inference and causal learning. Many methods have been developed to identify the cause-effect pairs in models and have been successfully applied to observational real-world data to determine the direction of causal relationships. Yet in bivariate situations, causal discovery problems remain challenging. One class of such methods, that also allows tackling the bivariate case, is based on Additive Noise Models (ANMs). Unfortunately, one aspect of these methods has not received much attention until now: what is the impact of different noise levels on the ability of these methods to identify the direction of the causal relationship. This work aims to bridge this gap with the help of an empirical study. We test Regression with Subsequent Independence Test (RESIT) using an exhaustive range of models where the level of additive noise gradually changes from 1\% to 10000\% of the causes' noise level (the latter remains fixed). Additionally, the experiments in this work consider several different types of distributions as well as linear and non-linear models. The results of the experiments show that ANMs methods can fail to capture the true causal direction for some levels of noise.
Fast and Reliable Formal Verification of Smart Contracts with the Move Prover

The Move Prover (MVP) is a formal verifier for smart contracts written in the Move programming language. MVP has an expressive specification language, and is fast and reliable enough that it can be run routinely by developers and in integration testing in a few minutes. Besides the simplicity of smart contracts and the Move language, three transformations are responsible for the practicality of MVP: (1) an alias-free memory model, (2) fine-grained invariant checking, and (3) monomorphization. The entirety of the Move code for the Diem blockchain has been extensively specified and can be completely verified by MVP in a few minutes. Changes in the Diem framework must be successfully verified before being integrated into the open source repository on GitHub.
Comparing Human and Machine Bias in Face Recognition

Much recent research has uncovered and discussed serious concerns of bias in facial analysis technologies, finding performance disparities between groups of people based on perceived gender, skin type, lighting condition, etc. These audits are immensely important and successful at measuring algorithmic bias but have two major challenges: the audits (1) use facial recognition datasets which lack quality metadata, like LFW and CelebA, and (2) do not compare their observed algorithmic bias to the biases of their human alternatives. In this paper, we release improvements to the LFW and CelebA datasets which will enable future researchers to obtain measurements of algorithmic bias that are not tainted by major flaws in the dataset (e.g. identical images appearing in both the gallery and test set). We also use these new data to develop a series of challenging facial identification and verification questions that we administered to various algorithms and a large, balanced sample of human reviewers. We find that both computer models and human survey participants perform significantly better at the verification task, generally obtain lower accuracy rates on dark-skinned or female subjects for both tasks, and obtain higher accuracy rates when their demographics match that of the question. Computer models are observed to achieve a higher level of accuracy than the survey participants on both tasks and exhibit bias to similar degrees as the human survey participants.