Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Deep Learning-Based Approach for Sign Language Gesture Recognition With Efficient Hand Gesture Representation

Hand gesture recognition is an attractive research field with a wide range of applications, including video games and telesurgery techniques.Another important application of hand gesture recognition is the translation of sign language, which is a complicated structured form of hand gestures.In sign language, the fingers' configuration, the hand's orientation, and the hand's relative position to the body are the primitives of structured expressions.The importance of hand gesture recognition has increased due to the prevalence of touchless applications and the rapid growth of the hearing-impaired population.However, developing an efficient recognition system needs to overcome the challenges of hand segmentation, local hand shape representation, global body configuration representation, and gesture sequence modeling.In this paper, a novel system is proposed for dynamic hand gesture recognition using multiple deep learning architectures for hand segmentation, local and global feature representations, and sequence feature globalization and recognition.The proposed system is evaluated on a very challenging dataset, which consists of 40 dynamic hand gestures performed by 40 subjects in an uncontrolled environment.The results show that the proposed system outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, demonstrating its effectiveness.
Shape-Aware Meta-learning for Generalizing Prostate MRI Segmentation to Unseen Domains

Model generalization capacity at domain shift (e.g., various imaging protocols and scanners) is crucial for deep learning methods in real-world clinical deployment. This paper tackles the challenging problem of domain generalization, i.e., learning a model from multi-domain source data such that it can directly generalize to an unseen target domain. We present a novel shape-aware meta-learning scheme to improve the model generalization in prostate MRI segmentation. Our learning scheme roots in the gradient-based meta-learning, by explicitly simulating domain shift with virtual meta-train and meta-test during training. Importantly, considering the deficiencies encountered when applying a segmentation model to unseen domains (i.e., incomplete shape and ambiguous boundary of the prediction masks), we further introduce two complementary loss objectives to enhance the meta-optimization, by particularly encouraging the shape compactness and shape smoothness of the segmentations under simulated domain shift. We evaluate our method on prostate MRI data from six different institutions with distribution shifts acquired from public datasets. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms many state-of-the-art generalization methods consistently across all six settings of unseen domains (Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/liuquande/SAML).
Extensions of the External Validation for Checking Learned Model Interpretability and Generalizability

We discuss the validation of machine learning models, which is standard practice in determining model efficacy and generalizability. We argue that internal validation approaches, such as cross-validation and bootstrap, cannot guarantee the quality of a machine learning model due to potentially biased training data and the complexity of the validation procedure itself. For better evaluating the generalization ability of a learned model, we suggest leveraging on external data sources from elsewhere as validation datasets, namely external validation. Due to the lack of research attractions on external validation, especially a well-structured and comprehensive study, we discuss the necessity for external validation and propose two extensions of the external validation approach that may help reveal the true domain-relevant model from a candidate set. Moreover, we also suggest a procedure to check whether a set of validation datasets is valid and introduce statistical reference points for detecting external data problems.
Guided Collaborative Training for Pixel-Wise Semi-Supervised Learning

We investigate the generalization of semi-supervised learning (SSL) to diverse pixel-wise tasks. Although SSL methods have achieved impressive results in image classification, the performances of applying them to pixel-wise tasks are unsatisfactory due to their need for dense outputs. In addition, existing pixel-wise SSL approaches are only suitable for certain tasks as they usually require to use task-specific properties. In this paper, we present a new SSL framework, named Guided Collaborative Training (GCT), for pixel-wise tasks, with two main technical contributions. First, GCT addresses the issues caused by the dense outputs through a novel flaw detector. Second, the modules in GCT learn from unlabeled data collaboratively through two newly proposed constraints that are independent of task-specific properties. As a result, GCT can be applied to a wide range of pixel-wise tasks without structural adaptation. Our extensive experiments on four challenging vision tasks, including semantic segmentation, real image denoising, portrait image matting, and night image enhancement, show that GCT outperforms state-of-the-art SSL methods by a large margin.
Deep attributed network representation learning of complex coupling and interaction

Networks that can describe complex systems in nature are increasingly coupled and interacted, and effective modeling on complex coupling and interaction information is an important research direction of artificial intelligence. Representation learning provides us with a paradigm to solve such issues, but the current network representation learning methods are difficult to capture the coupling and interaction information in complex networks. In this paper, we propose a novel deep attributed network representation learning model framework (RolEANE), which can effectively preserve the highly nonlinear coupling and interactive network topological structure and attribute information. We design two different structural role proximity enhancement strategies for the deep autoencoder in the model framework, so that it can efficiently capture network topological structure and attribute information. In addition, the neighbor-modified Skip-Gram model in our model framework can efficiently and seamlessly integrate network topological structure and attribute information, and the selection of an appropriate representation learning output strategy can significantly improve the final performance of the algorithm. The experiments on four real datasets show that our method consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art network representation learning methods. On the node classification task, the average performance is improved by 4.52%–10.28% than the optimal baseline method; on the link prediction task, the average performance is 4.63% higher than the optimal baseline method.
Intelligent contract adoption in the construction industry: Concept development

The digitalisation of the construction industry through revolutionary innovations, such as blockchain and intelligent contracts (iContracts), is becoming increasingly researched. However, a gap in current literature exists on the identification of contributing factors that will influence successful iContract development and adoption. This study aims to identify key considerations for iContracts in order to develop a novel theoretical adoption model and offer an agenda of six research directions for future iContract development. Through systematic analysis, forty-six key papers were identified with further thematic analysis highlighting the iContract technology's taxonomy. Content analysis then identified nine key themes of relevant considerations, barriers and contributing factors informing the development of the Tri-Dimensional iContract model. This study contributes to the iContract body of knowledge by identifying key considerations for the development and successful adoption of the iContract concept while offering a practical lens to direct future industry adoption and inform the development of iContract technologies.
Learning from Extrinsic and Intrinsic Supervisions for Domain Generalization

The generalization capability of neural networks across domains is crucial for real-world applications. We argue that a generalized object recognition system should well understand the relationships among different images and also the images themselves at the same time. To this end, we present a new domain generalization framework (called EISNet) that learns how to generalize across domains simultaneously from extrinsic relationship supervision and intrinsic self-supervision for images from multi-source domains. To be specific, we formulate our framework with feature embedding using a multi-task learning paradigm. Besides conducting the common supervised recognition task, we seamlessly integrate a momentum metric learning task and a self-supervised auxiliary task to collectively integrate the extrinsic and intrinsic supervisions. Also, we develop an effective momentum metric learning scheme with the K-hard negative mining to boost the network generalization ability. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on two standard object recognition benchmarks VLCS and PACS, and show that our EISNet achieves state-of-the-art performance.
Learning to Optimize Domain Specific Normalization for Domain Generalization

We propose a simple but effective multi-source domain generalization technique based on deep neural networks by incorporating optimized normalization layers that are specific to individual domains. Our approach employs multiple normalization methods while learning separate affine parameters per domain. For each domain, the activations are normalized by a weighted average of multiple normalization statistics. The normalization statistics are kept track of separately for each normalization type if necessary. Specifically, we employ batch and instance normalizations in our implementation to identify the best combination of these two normalization methods in each domain. The optimized normalization layers are effective to enhance the generalizability of the learned model. We demonstrate the state-of-the-art accuracy of our algorithm in the standard domain generalization benchmarks, as well as viability to further tasks such as multi-source domain adaptation and domain generalization in the presence of label noise.
Spatial-Angular Interaction for Light Field Image Super-Resolution

Light field (LF) cameras record both intensity and directions of light rays, and capture scenes from a number of viewpoints. Both information within each perspective (i.e., spatial information) and among different perspectives (i.e., angular information) is beneficial to image super-resolution (SR). In this paper, we propose a spatial-angular interactive network (namely, LF-InterNet) for LF image SR. Specifically, spatial and angular features are first separately extracted from input LFs, and then repetitively interacted to progressively incorporate spatial and angular information. Finally, the interacted features are fused to super-resolve each sub-aperture image. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of LF-InterNet over the state-of-the-art methods, i.e., our method can achieve high PSNR and SSIM scores with low computational cost, and recover faithful details in the reconstructed images.
Distributed Grey Wolf Optimizer for scheduling of workflow applications in cloud environments

Optimal scheduling of workflows in cloud computing environments is an essential element to maximize the utilization of Virtual Machines (VMs). In practice, scheduling of dependent tasks in a workflow requires distributing the tasks to the available VMs on the cloud. This paper introduces a discrete variation of the Distributed Grey Wolf Optimizer (DGWO) for scheduling dependent tasks to VMs. The scheduling process in DGWO is modeled as a minimization problem for two objectives: computation and data transmission costs. DGWO uses the largest order value (LOV) method to convert the continuous candidate solutions produced by DGWO to discrete candidate solutions. DGWO was experimentally tested and compared to well-known optimization-based scheduling algorithms (Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), Grey Wolf Optimizer). The experimental results suggest that DGWO distributes tasks to VMs faster than the other tested algorithms. Besides, DGWO was compared to PSO and Binary PSO (BPSO) using WorkflowSim and scientific workflows of different sizes. The obtained simulation results suggest that DGWO provides the best makespan compared to the other algorithms.
RangeDet: In Defense of Range View for LiDAR-based 3D Object Detection

In this paper, we propose an anchor-free single-stage LiDAR-based 3D object detector – RangeDet. The most notable difference with previous works is that our method is purely based on the range view representation. Compared with the commonly used voxelized or Bird’s Eye View (BEV) representations, the range view representation is more compact and without quantization error. Although there are works adopting it for semantic segmentation, its performance in object detection is largely behind voxelized or BEV counterparts. We first analyze the existing range-view-based methods and find two issues overlooked by previous works: 1) the scale variation between nearby and far away objects; 2) the inconsistency between the 2D range image coordinates used in feature extraction and the 3D Cartesian coordinates used in output. Then we deliberately design three components to address these issues in our RangeDet. We test our RangeDet in the large-scale Waymo Open Dataset (WOD). Our best model achieves 72.9/75.9/65.8 3D AP on vehicle/pedestrian/cyclist. These results outperform other range-view-based methods by a large margin, and are overall comparable with the state-of-the-art multi-view-based methods. Codes will be released at https://github.com/TuSimple/RangeDet.
Learning Generalisable Omni-Scale Representations for Person Re-Identification

An effective person re-identification (re-ID) model should learn feature representations that are both discriminative, for distinguishing similar-looking people, and generalisable, for deployment across datasets without any adaptation. In this paper, we develop novel CNN architectures to address both challenges. First, we present a re-ID CNN termed omni-scale network (OSNet) to learn features that not only capture different spatial scales but also encapsulate a synergistic combination of multiple scales, namely omni-scale features. The basic building block consists of multiple convolutional streams, each detecting features at a certain scale. For omni-scale feature learning, a unified aggregation gate is introduced to dynamically fuse multi-scale features with channel-wise weights. OSNet is lightweight as its building blocks comprise factorised convolutions. Second, to improve generalisable feature learning, we introduce instance normalisation (IN) layers into OSNet to cope with cross-dataset discrepancies. Further, to determine the optimal placements of these IN layers in the architecture, we formulate an efficient differentiable architecture search algorithm. Extensive experiments show that, in the conventional same-dataset setting, OSNet achieves state-of-the-art performance, despite being much smaller than existing re-ID models. In the more challenging yet practical cross-dataset setting, OSNet beats most recent unsupervised domain adaptation methods without using any target data. Our code and models are released at <monospace xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><uri>https://github.com/KaiyangZhou/deep-person-reid</uri></monospace> .
Siamese Network for RGB-D Salient Object Detection and Beyond

Existing RGB-D salient object detection (SOD) models usually treat RGB and depth as independent information and design separate networks for feature extraction from each. Such schemes can easily be constrained by a limited amount of training data or over-reliance on an elaborately designed training process. Inspired by the observation that RGB and depth modalities actually present certain commonality in distinguishing salient objects, a novel joint learning and densely cooperative fusion (JL-DCF) architecture is designed to learn from both RGB and depth inputs through a shared network backbone, known as the Siamese architecture. In this paper, we propose two effective components: joint learning (JL), and densely cooperative fusion (DCF). The JL module provides robust saliency feature learning by exploiting cross-modal commonality via a Siamese network, while the DCF module is introduced for complementary feature discovery. Comprehensive experiments using 5 popular metrics show that the designed framework yields a robust RGB-D saliency detector with good generalization. As a result, JL-DCF significantly advances the SOTAs by an average of ~2.0% (F-measure) across 7 challenging datasets. In addition, we show that JL-DCF is readily applicable to other related multi-modal detection tasks, including RGB-T SOD and video SOD, achieving comparable or better performance.
Optimizing Dense Retrieval Model Training with Hard Negatives

Ranking has always been one of the top concerns in information retrieval researches. For decades, the lexical matching signal has dominated the ad-hoc retrieval process, but solely using this signal in retrieval may cause the vocabulary mismatch problem. In recent years, with the development of representation learning techniques, many researchers turn to Dense Retrieval (DR) models for better ranking performance. Although several existing DR models have already obtained promising results, their performance improvement heavily relies on the sampling of training examples. Many effective sampling strategies are not efficient enough for practical usage, and for most of them, there still lacks theoretical analysis in how and why performance improvement happens. To shed light on these research questions, we theoretically investigate different training strategies for DR models and try to explain why hard negative sampling performs better than random sampling. Through the analysis, we also find that there are many potential risks in static hard negative sampling, which is employed by many existing training methods. Therefore, we propose two training strategies named a Stable Training Algorithm for dense Retrieval (STAR) and a query-side training Algorithm for Directly Optimizing Ranking pErformance (ADORE), respectively. STAR improves the stability of DR training process by introducing random negatives. ADORE replaces the widely-adopted static hard negative sampling method with a dynamic one to directly optimize the ranking performance. Experimental results on two publicly available retrieval benchmark datasets show that either strategy gains significant improvements over existing competitive baselines and a combination of them leads to the best performance.
The impact of blockchain on e-commerce: A framework for salient research topics

Blockchain-based technologies are predicted as major disruptors for numerous business applications and processes, which bears huge implications for e-commerce. Given the ability of blockchain and related technologies to create so-called “trustless systems” with idiosyncratic properties, various business models and established processes that have emerged over the years to ensure trust, reliability and enforceability in business-to-consumer (B2C), business-to-business (B2B), business-to-government (B2G) and consumer-to-consumer (C2C) relations need to be questioned and potentially adjusted. Blockchain has the potential to shake the foundation of e-commerce by enabling exchange relations that are trustless and operate without dedicated intermediaries or even central authorities in the case of permissionless blockchains. Furthermore, the exchange of information and value between companies and consumers might change considerably by enabling unified access to immutable data along the entire supply chain. In this paper, a framework and 19 high-level research questions are developed to inspire researchers to closely investigate the potential impact of blockchain on e-commerce. The main categories include (a) technological, (b) legal and (c) organizational and quality issues as well as (d) consumer issues. This paper illustrates how blockchain potentially impacts different elements of e-commerce in these respective areas.
Nested cross-validation when selecting classifiers is overzealous for most practical applications

When selecting a classification algorithm to be applied to a particular problem, one has to simultaneously select the best algorithm for that dataset and the best set of hyperparameters for the chosen model. The usual approach is to apply a nested cross-validation procedure: hyperparameter selection is performed in the inner cross-validation, while the outer cross-validation computes an unbiased estimate of the expected accuracy of the algorithm with cross-validation based hyperparameter tuning. The alternative approach, which we shall call “flat cross-validation”, uses a single cross-validation step both to select the optimal hyperparameter values and to provide an estimate of the expected accuracy of the algorithm that, while biased, may nevertheless still be used to select the best learning algorithm. We tested both procedures using 12 different algorithms on 115 real-life binary datasets and conclude that using the less computationally costly flat cross-validation procedure will generally result in the selection of an algorithm that is, for all practical purposes, of similar quality to that selected via nested cross-validation, provided the learning algorithms have relatively few hyperparameters to be optimised.
Recent Developments on Espnet Toolkit Boosted By Conformer

In this study, we present recent developments on ESPnet: End-to- End Speech Processing toolkit, which mainly involves a recently proposed architecture called Conformer, Convolution-augmented Transformer. This paper shows the results for a wide range of end- to-end speech processing applications, such as automatic speech recognition (ASR), speech translations (ST), speech separation (SS) and text-to-speech (TTS). Our experiments reveal various training tips and significant performance benefits obtained with the Conformer on different tasks. These results are competitive or even outperform the current state-of-art Transformer models. We are preparing to release all-in-one recipes using open source and publicly available corpora for all the above tasks with pre-trained models. Our aim for this work is to contribute to our research community by reducing the burden of preparing state-of-the-art research environments usually requiring high resources.