Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
EINNs: Epidemiologically-Informed Neural Networks

We introduce EINNs, a framework crafted for epidemic forecasting that builds upon the theoretical grounds provided by mechanistic models as well as the data-driven expressibility afforded by AI models, and their capabilities to ingest heterogeneous information. Although neural forecasting models have been successful in multiple tasks, predictions well-correlated with epidemic trends and long-term predictions remain open challenges. Epidemiological ODE models contain mechanisms that can guide us in these two tasks; however, they have limited capability of ingesting data sources and modeling composite signals. Thus, we propose to leverage work in physics-informed neural networks to learn latent epidemic dynamics and transfer relevant knowledge to another neural network which ingests multiple data sources and has more appropriate inductive bias. In contrast with previous work, we do not assume the observability of complete dynamics and do not need to numerically solve the ODE equations during training. Our thorough experiments on all US states and HHS regions for COVID-19 and influenza forecasting showcase the clear benefits of our approach in both short-term and long-term forecasting as well as in learning the mechanistic dynamics over other non-trivial alternatives.
An Active Service Recommendation Model for Multi-Source Remote Sensing Information Using Fusion of Attention and Multi-Perspective

With the development and popularization of remote sensing earth observation technology and the remote sensing satellite system, the problems of insufficient proactiveness, relevance and timeliness of large-scale remote sensing supporting services are increasingly prominent, which seriously restricts the application of remote sensing resources in multi-domain and cross-disciplinary. It is urgent to help terminal users make appropriate decisions according to real-time network environment and domain requirements, and obtain the optimal resources efficiently from the massive remote sensing resources. In this paper, we propose a recommendation algorithm using fusion of attention and multi-perspective (MRS_AMRA). Based on MRS_AMRA, we further implement an active service recommendation model (MRS_ASRM) for massive multi-source remote sensing resources by combining streaming pushing technology. Firstly, we construct value evaluation functions from multi-perspective in terms of remote sensing users, data and services to enable the adaptive provision of remote sensing resources. Then, we define multi-perspective heuristic policies to support resource discovery, and fusion these policies through the attention network, to achieve the accurate pushing of remote sensing resources. Finally, we implement comparative experiments to simulate accurate recommendation scenarios, compared with state-of-the-art algorithms, such as DIN and Geoportal. Furthermore, MRS_AMRA achieves an average improvement of 10.5% in the recommendation accuracy NDCG@K, and in addition, we developed a prototype system to verify the effectiveness and timeliness of MRS_ASRM.
LWSIS: LiDAR-Guided Weakly Supervised Instance Segmentation for Autonomous Driving

Image instance segmentation is a fundamental research topic in autonomous driving, which is crucial for scene understanding and road safety. Advanced learning-based approaches often rely on the costly 2D mask annotations for training. In this paper, we present a more artful framework, LiDAR-guided Weakly Supervised Instance Segmentation (LWSIS), which leverages the off-the-shelf 3D data, i.e., Point Cloud, together with the 3D boxes, as natural weak supervisions for training the 2D image instance segmentation models. Our LWSIS not only exploits the complementary information in multimodal data during training but also significantly reduces the annotation cost of the dense 2D masks. In detail, LWSIS consists of two crucial modules, Point Label Assignment (PLA) and Graph-based Consistency Regularization (GCR). The former module aims to automatically assign the 3D point cloud as 2D point-wise labels, while the atter further refines the predictions by enforcing geometry and appearance consistency of the multimodal data. Moreover, we conduct a secondary instance segmentation annotation on the nuScenes, named nuInsSeg, to encourage further research on multimodal perception tasks. Extensive experiments on the nuInsSeg, as well as the large-scale Waymo, show that LWSIS can substantially improve existing weakly supervised segmentation models by only involving 3D data during training. Additionally, LWSIS can also be incorporated into 3D object detectors like PointPainting to boost the 3D detection performance for free. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/Serenos/LWSIS.
OMPQ: Orthogonal Mixed Precision Quantization

To bridge the ever-increasing gap between deep neural networks' complexity and hardware capability, network quantization has attracted more and more research attention. The latest trend of mixed precision quantization takes advantage of hardware's multiple bit-width arithmetic operations to unleash the full potential of network quantization. However, existing approaches rely heavily on an extremely time-consuming search process and various relaxations when seeking the optimal bit configuration. To address this issue, we propose to optimize a proxy metric of network orthogonality that can be efficiently solved with linear programming, which proves to be highly correlated with quantized model accuracy and bit-width. Our approach significantly reduces the search time and the required data amount by orders of magnitude, but without a compromise on quantization accuracy. Specifically, we achieve 72.08% Top-1 accuracy on ResNet-18 with 6.7Mb parameters, which does not require any searching iterations. Given the high efficiency and low data dependency of our algorithm, we use it for the post-training quantization, which achieves 71.27% Top-1 accuracy on MobileNetV2 with only 1.5Mb parameters.
Rethinking Data Augmentation for Single-Source Domain Generalization in Medical Image Segmentation

Single-source domain generalization (SDG) in medical image segmentation is a challenging yet essential task as domain shifts are quite common among clinical image datasets. Previous attempts most conduct global-only/random augmentation. Their augmented samples are usually insufficient in diversity and informativeness, thus failing to cover the possible target domain distribution. In this paper, we rethink the data augmentation strategy for SDG in medical image segmentation. Motivated by the class-level representation invariance and style mutability of medical images, we hypothesize that unseen target data can be sampled from a linear combination of C (the class number) random variables, where each variable follows a location-scale distribution at the class level. Accordingly, data augmented can be readily made by sampling the random variables through a general form. On the empirical front, we implement such strategy with constrained Bezier transformation on both global and local (i.e. class-level) regions, which can largely increase the augmentation diversity. A Saliency-balancing Fusion mechanism is further proposed to enrich the informativeness by engaging the gradient information, guiding augmentation with proper orientation and magnitude. As an important contribution, we prove theoretically that our proposed augmentation can lead to an upper bound of the generalization risk on the unseen target domain, thus confirming our hypothesis. Combining the two strategies, our Saliency-balancing Location-scale Augmentation (SLAug) exceeds the state-of-the-art works by a large margin in two challenging SDG tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/Kaiseem/SLAug.
Contrastive Open Set Recognition

In conventional recognition tasks, models are only trained to recognize learned targets, but it is usually difficult to collect training examples of all potential categories. In the testing phase, when models receive test samples from unknown classes, they mistakenly classify the samples into known classes. Open set recognition (OSR) is a more realistic recognition task, which requires the classifier to detect unknown test samples while keeping a high classification accuracy of known classes. In this paper, we study how to improve the OSR performance of deep neural networks from the perspective of representation learning. We employ supervised contrastive learning to improve the quality of feature representations, propose a new supervised contrastive learning method that enables the model to learn from soft training targets, and design an OSR framework on its basis. With the proposed method, we are able to make use of label smoothing and mixup when training deep neural networks contrastively, so as to improve both the robustness of outlier detection in OSR tasks and the accuracy in conventional classification tasks. We validate our method on multiple benchmark datasets and testing scenarios, achieving experimental results that verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Data science for next-generation recommender systems

Data science has been the foundation of recommender systems for a long time. Over the past few decades, various recommender systems have been developed using different data science and machine learning methodologies and techniques. However, no existing work systematically discusses the significant relationships between data science and recommender systems. To bridge this gap, this paper aims to systematically investigate recommender systems from the perspective of data science. Firstly, we introduce the various types of data used for recommendations and the corresponding machine learning models and methods that effectively represent each type. Next, we provide a brief outline of the representative data science and machine learning models utilized in building recommender systems. Subsequently, we share some preliminary thoughts on next-generation recommender systems. Finally, we summarize this special issue on data science for next-generation recommender systems.
Specifying the Virtual Reality Approach in Mobile Gaming Using Unity Game Engine

Mobile based gaming application development is an innovative recent trend in the area of mobile computing. The paper explores Hypercasual Infinity Virtual Reality (VR) mobile gaming application designed and developed using Unity Game Engine (UGE) as a mobile application. Mobile gaming applications are becoming successful in the media and entertainment industries and are easily available in Google play store. The research paper highlights the various activities like analysis of various domain requirements, user requirements and system requirements, design and development activities. Hypercasual Infinity captures the features for players with coins information, selection of different players, use of coins, display player list etc. Hypercasual Infinity is an effective learning game-based tool useful for increasing computational logic.
Construction of Intelligent Manufacturing Training Practice Teaching System for the Cultivation of Big Engineering Perspective

摘要: 新工科背景下智能制造创新人才教育对实践教学提出了新的要求,按照实践驱动创新的人才培养理念,将大工程观融入智能制造实践教学整体设计和变革过程。首先,提出基于"实践驱动创新"的智能制造创新人才实践教学理念,构建以能力为导向、科学与工程素养并重的多学科交叉融合创新人才实践教学体系。同时,搭建"科教融合、产教贯通"工程创新实践平台,保证"大学四年不断线"的工程感性认识、素质教育和能力教育实践教学实施,持续激发创新思维。此外,从实践创新教育新内涵、新模式、评价新方法进一步保障智能制造创新人才应具备的知识、能力、素养的培养需要,促进智能制造实践教育的全面提升。最终,引导智能制造实践教学向"自主学习、主动实践、追求创新"转变,实现"价值引领、知识探究、能力发展和素质提高"的实践教学创新人才培养。
A Vehicle Detection Method Based on an Improved U-YOLO Network for High-Resolution Remote-Sensing Images

The lack of vehicle feature information and the limited number of pixels in high-definition remote-sensing images causes difficulties in vehicle detection. This paper proposes U-YOLO, a vehicle detection method that integrates multi-scale features, attention mechanisms, and sub-pixel convolution. The adaptive fusion module (AF) is added to the backbone of the YOLO detection model to increase the underlying structural information of the feature map. Cross-scale channel attention (CSCA) is introduced to the feature fusion part to obtain the vehicle’s explicit semantic information and further refine the feature map. The sub-pixel convolution module (SC) is used to replace the linear interpolation up-sampling of the original model, and the vehicle target feature map is enlarged to further improve the vehicle detection accuracy. The detection accuracies on the open-source datasets NWPU VHR-10 and DOTA were 91.35% and 71.38%. Compared with the original network model, the detection accuracy on these two datasets was increased by 6.89% and 4.94%, respectively. Compared with the classic target detection networks commonly used in RFBnet, M2det, and SSD300, the average accuracy rate values increased by 6.84%, 6.38%, and 12.41%, respectively. The proposed method effectively solves the problem of low vehicle detection accuracy. It provides an effective basis for promoting the application of high-definition remote-sensing images in traffic target detection and traffic flow parameter detection.
Benchmarking Reinforcement Learning Techniques for Autonomous Navigation

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) has brought many successes for autonomous robot navigation. However, there still exists important limitations that prevent real-world use of RL-based navigation systems. For example, most learning approaches lack safety guarantees; and learned navigation systems may not generalize well to unseen environments. Despite a variety of recent learning techniques to tackle these challenges in general, a lack of an open-source benchmark and reproducible learning methods specifically for autonomous navigation makes it difficult for roboticists to choose what learning methods to use for their mobile robots and for learning researchers to identify current shortcomings of general learning methods for autonomous navigation. In this paper, we identify four major desiderata of applying deep RL approaches for autonomous navigation: (D1) reasoning under uncertainty, (D2) safety, (D3) learning from limited trial-and-error data, and (D4) generalization to diverse and novel environments. Then, we explore four major classes of learning techniques with the purpose of achieving one or more of the four desiderata: memory-based neural network architectures (D1), safe RL (D2), model-based RL (D2, D3), and domain randomization (D4). By deploying these learning techniques in a new open-source large-scale navigation benchmark and real-world environments, we perform a comprehensive study aimed at establishing to what extent can these techniques achieve these desiderata for RL-based navigation systems.
Verifiable Outsourced Attribute-Based Encryption Scheme for Cloud-Assisted Mobile E-health System

The cloud-assisted mobile electronic health (e-health) system facilitates e-health data sharing between healthcare providers and patients, but also raises the security and privacy concerns of e-health data. Although Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (CP-ABE) has been a promising technique to achieve fine-grained access control over encrypted e-health data, it still incurs high encryption and decryption burdens on mobile users such as smartphones and sensors. In addition, malicious cloud servers may conduct incorrect operations due to various interest incentives (e.g., leaking sensitive information to illegal users, saving computation and storage costs). To solve the above issues, in this paper we first propose an Outsourced CP-ABE (OABE) with verifiable encryption scheme by splitting secret keys corresponding to an attribute set and using the short signature, which not only reduces the encryption and decryption complexities of mobile users but also guarantees that cloud servers correctly perform encryption operations. Then, we extend OABE to construct outsourced CP-ABE with verifiable decryption (OABE+) by utilizing the verifiable tag mechanism, which guarantees that cloud servers correctly conduct the ciphertext transformation. Formal security analysis proves that our schemes are selectively secure against unauthorized accesses and malicious operations. Extensive experiments using various real-world datasets demonstrate that our schemes are efficient and feasible in real applications.
Prioritized Task-Scheduling Algorithm in Cloud Computing Using Cat Swarm Optimization

Effective scheduling algorithms are needed in the cloud paradigm to leverage services to customers seamlessly while minimizing the makespan, energy consumption and SLA violations. The ineffective scheduling of resources while not considering the suitability of tasks will affect the quality of service of the cloud provider, and much more energy will be consumed in the running of tasks by the inefficient provisioning of resources, thereby taking an enormous amount of time to process tasks, which affects the makespan. Minimizing SLA violations is an important aspect that needs to be addressed as it impacts the makespans, energy consumption, and also the quality of service in a cloud environment. Many existing studies have solved task-scheduling problems, and those algorithms gave near-optimal solutions from their perspective. In this manuscript, we developed a novel task-scheduling algorithm that considers the task priorities coming onto the cloud platform, calculates their task VM priorities, and feeds them to the scheduler. Then, the scheduler will choose appropriate tasks for the VMs based on the calculated priorities. To model this scheduling algorithm, we used the cat swarm optimization algorithm, which was inspired by the behavior of cats. It was implemented on the Cloudsim tool and OpenStack cloud platform. Extensive experimentation was carried out using real-time workloads. When compared to the baseline PSO, ACO and RATS-HM approaches and from the results, it is evident that our proposed approach outperforms all of the baseline algorithms in view of the above-mentioned parameters.
Performance Analysis of Segmentation and Classification of CT-Scanned Ovarian Tumours Using U-Net and Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

Difficulty in detecting tumours in early stages is the major cause of mortalities in patients, despite the advancements in treatment and research regarding ovarian cancer. Deep learning algorithms were applied to serve the purpose as a diagnostic tool and applied to CT scan images of the ovarian region. The images went through a series of pre-processing techniques and, further, the tumour was segmented using the UNet model. The instances were then classified into two categories—benign and malignant tumours. Classification was performed using deep learning models like CNN, ResNet, DenseNet, Inception-ResNet, VGG16 and Xception, along with machine learning models such as Random Forest, Gradient Boosting, AdaBoosting and XGBoosting. DenseNet 121 emerges as the best model on this dataset after applying optimization on the machine learning models by obtaining an accuracy of 95.7%. The current work demonstrates the comparison of multiple CNN architectures with common machine learning algorithms, with and without optimization techniques applied.
MC-ABAC: An ABAC-based Model for Collaboration in Multi-Cloud Environment

Collaborative systems allow a group of organizations to collaborate and complete shared tasks through distributed platforms.Organizations who collaborate often leverage cloud-based solutions to outsource their data and to benefit from the cloud capabilities.During such collaborations, tenants require access to and utilize resources held by other collaborating tenants, which are hosted across multiple cloud providers.Ensuring access control in a cloud-based collaborative application is a crucial problem that needs to be addressed, particularly in a multi-cloud environment.This paper presents the Multi-Cloud ABAC: MC-ABAC model, an extension of the ABAC: Attribute Based Access Control model, suitable for ensuring secure collaboration and cross-tenant access in a multi-cloud environment.The MC-ABAC introduces the notions of tenant, cloud customer and cloud service provider as fundamental entities within the model.Additionally, it incorporates multiple trust relations to enable collaboration and resource sharing among tenants in the multi-cloud environment.To demonstrate its feasibility, we have implemented the MC-ABAC model using Python technology.
A Brief Review of the Most Recent Activation Functions for Neural Networks

Even though the majority of the current functions have shortcomings, this study looks at a few activation function capabilities that might lead to performance enhancement. The research on neural networks still shows a lot of interest in the activation function since it can enhance performance. With or without trainable parameters, other adaptive activation functions have been put forth that have demonstrated to lead to better results than the benchmark. These studies outline the characteristics, benefits, constraints, and directions of such types of applications. Due to their shortcomings, several of those functions are now regarded as deprecated. The primary emphasis of such functions is on fundamental elements that are thought to be necessary for learning, such as monocity, derivatives, and finite of their range. The goal of this research article is to present and assess the most popular and recent activation functions. This will go through their characteristics, advantages and disadvantages, formulation, and usage.
The rank of contextuality

Abstract Quantum contextuality is one of the most recognized resources in quantum communication and computing scenarios. We provide a new quantifier of this resource, the rank of contextuality (RC). We define RC as the minimum number of non-contextual behaviors that are needed to simulate a contextual behavior. We show that the logarithm of RC is a natural contextuality measure satisfying several properties considered in the spirit of the resource-theoretic approach. The properties include faithfulness, monotonicity, and additivity under tensor product. We also give examples of how to construct contextual behaviors with an arbitrary value of RC exhibiting a natural connection between this quantifier and the arboricity of an underlying hypergraph. We also discuss exemplary areas of research in which the new measure appears as a natural quantifier.
Distillation-Based Hashing Transformer for Cross-Modal Vessel Image Retrieval

Cross-modal image retrieval has attracted much attention in remote sensing(RS) data analysis these years, however, the retrieval of target images such as surface vessels receives little interest. Considering the complex geometric features of vessel images and the modality gap, the widely used joint feature learning based on CNNs tends to have low precision. In this letter, a distillation-based hashing transformer(DBHT) is proposed to solve the above problems. Specifically, we adopt vision transformer(ViT) as the feature extractor for target images and a hash token is designed and attended to ViT for hashing generation. To avoid the precision attenuation caused by the uncontrollability in common feature space construction, we design a two-step feature learning strategy and build a well-performed unimodal hashing retrieval framework firstly, and then transfer the hashing knowledge to another modality. Two distillation strategies, as well as cross-modal weighted triplet loss, are designed to supervise the above process and ensure complete knowledge transfer. Cross-modal weight transfer is also adopted to bridge the modality gap. Extensive experiments on two bimodal vessel image datasets show that the proposed DBHT is superior to several cross-modal hashing baselines in cross-modal vessel image retrieval tasks.