Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
A Machine Learning Driven Threat Intelligence System for Malicious URL Detection

Malicious websites predominantly promote the growth of criminal activities over the Internet restraining the development of web services. Furthermore, we see different types of devices being equipped with WiFi capabilities, that allow web traffic to pass through the device’s data systems with ease. The proposed framework in the present study analyzes the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) through which malicious users can gain access to the content of the websites. It thus eliminates issues of run-time latency and possibilities of users being subjected to browser oriented vulnerabilities. The primary objective of this paper is to detect malicious links on the web using a machine learning classification technique that would help users defend against cyber-crime attacks and related threats of the real world. This may be helpful in the newly expanding Intelligent Infrastructures, where we see more data availability almost daily. The embedding of malicious URLs is a predominant web threat faced by the Internet community in the present day and age. Attackers falsely claim of being a trustworthy entity and lure users to click on compromised links to extract confidential information, victimizing them towards identity theft. The present work explores the various ways of detecting malicious links from the host-based and lexical features of the URL in order to protect users from being subjected to identity theft attacks.
Age and gender in language, emoji, and emoticon usage in instant messages

Text is one of the most prevalent types of digital data that people create as they go about their lives. Digital footprints of people's language usage in social media posts were found to allow for inferences of their age and gender. However, the even more prevalent and potentially more sensitive text from instant messaging services has remained largely uninvestigated. We analyze language variations in instant messages with regard to individual differences in age and gender by replicating and extending the methods used in prior research on social media posts. Using a dataset of 309,229 WhatsApp messages from 226 volunteers, we identify unique age- and gender-linked language variations. We use cross-validated machine learning algorithms to predict volunteers' age (MAEMd = 3.95, rMd = 0.81, R2Md = 0.49) and gender (AccuracyMd = 85.7%, F1Md = 0.67, AUCMd = .82) significantly above baseline-levels and identify the most predictive language features. We discuss implications for psycholinguistic theory, present opportunities for application in author profiling, and suggest methodological approaches for making predictions from small text data sets. Given the recent trend towards the dominant use of private messaging and increasingly weaker user data protection, we highlight rising threats to individual privacy rights in instant messaging.
Discrepant multiple instance learning for weakly supervised object detection

Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) is a fundamental method for weakly supervised object detection (WSOD), but experiences difficulty in excluding local optimal solutions and may miss objects or falsely localize object parts. In this paper, we introduce discrepantly collaborative modules into MIL and thereby create discrepant multiple instance learning (D-MIL), pursuing optimal solutions in a simple-yet-effective way. D-MIL adopts multiple MIL learners to pursue discrepant yet complementary solutions indicating object parts, which are fused with a collaboration module for precise object localization. D-MIL implements a new “teachers-students” model, where MIL learners act as “teachers” and object detectors as “students”. Multiple teachers provide rich yet complementary information, which are absorbed by students and transferred back to reinforce the performance of teachers. Experiments show that D-MIL significantly improves the baseline while achieves state-of-the-art performance on the challenging MS-COCO object detection benchmark.
A large-scale empirical study on Java library migrations: prevalence, trends, and rationales

With the rise of open-source software and package hosting platforms, reusing 3rd-party libraries has become a common practice. Due to various failures during software evolution, a project may remove a used library and replace it with another library, which we call library migration. Despite substantial research on dependency management, the understanding of how and why library migrations occur is still lacking. Achieving this understanding may help practitioners optimize their library selection criteria, develop automated approaches to monitor dependencies, and provide migration suggestions for their libraries or software projects. In this paper, through a fine-grained commit-level analysis of 19,652 Java GitHub projects, we extract the largest migration dataset to-date (1,194 migration rules, 3,163 migration commits). We show that 8,065 (41.04%) projects having at least one library removal, 1,564 (7.96%, lower-bound) to 5,004 (25.46%, upper-bound) projects have at least one migration, and a median project with migrations has 2 to 4 migrations in total. We discover that library migrations are dominated by several domains (logging, JSON, testing and web service) presenting a long tail distribution. Also, migrations are highly unidirectional in that libraries are either mostly abandoned or mostly chosen in our project corpus. A thematic analysis on related commit messages, issues, and pull requests identifies 14 frequently mentioned migration reasons (e.g., lack of maintenance, usability, integration, etc), 7 of which are not discussed in previous work. Our findings can be operationalized into actionable insights for package hosting platforms, project maintainers, and library developers. We provide a replication package at <a>https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4816752</a>.
Style Normalization and Restitution for Domain Generalization and Adaptation

For many computer vision applications, the learned models usually have high performance on the training datasets but suffer from significant performance degradation when deployed in new environments, where there are usually style differences between the training images and the testing images. For high-level vision tasks, an effective domain generalizable model is expected to be able to learn feature representations that are both generalizable and discriminative. In this paper, we design a novel Style Normalization and Restitution module (SNR) to simultaneously ensure high generalization and discrimination capability of the networks. In SNR, particularly, we filter out the style variations (<i>e.g</i>., illumination, color contrast) by performing Instance Normalization (IN) to obtain style normalized features, where the discrepancy among different samples/domains is reduced. However, such a process is task-ignorant and inevitably removes some task-relevant discriminative information, which may hurt the performance. To remedy this, we propose to distill task-relevant discriminative features from the residual (<i>i</i>.<i>e</i>., the difference between the original feature and the style normalized feature) and add them back to the network to ensure high discrimination. Moreover, for better disentanglement, we enforce a dual restitution loss constraint to encourage the better separation of task-relevant and task-irrelevant features. We validate the effectiveness of our SNR on different vision tasks, including classification, semantic segmentation, and object detection. Experiments demonstrate that our SNR is capable of improving the performance of networks for domain generalization (DG) and unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA).
Finite element-based virtual fields method with pseudo-real deformation fields for identifying constitutive parameters

In this study, a novel virtual fields method (VFM) based on the finite element (FE) scheme, namely FE-VFM, is proposed as an inverse method for identifying the parameters of constitutive models. In the FE-VFM, experimentally measured full-field displacements are mapped onto FE meshes using global and local shape functions, and the internal virtual work is integrated using the Gauss quadrature rule. To validate the new method, a well-designed sensitivity study is conducted using the ideal deformation obtained from FE simulations for anisotropic linear elastic and isotropic plastic materials. In the case of anisotropic elasticity, the residuals of the internal and external virtual work are not significantly affected by the order and size of FE meshes, but the order of the numerical integration has a marginal effect on the quality of the results. Conversely, substantial impacts are obtained for the plastic case, in which the size and order of the FE meshes and the order of the numerical integration are all critical to the accuracy of identification owing to large, localized deformation. Furthermore, the concept of a pseudo-real deformation field is newly proposed as a virtual field, which improves the accuracy of the FE-VFM for optimizing the constitutive parameters of the plastic material. Finally, the inverse identification of the plastic hardening law for press-hardened steel is conducted using the FE-VFM with real experimental data. The results show that the FE-VFM can successfully reproduce the full-field displacements even with relatively low-quality full-field data if an optimum FE mesh is adopted. In addition, the simulated load–displacement curve of notch tension with FE-VFM identified hardening is in good agreement with the experimental results.
Breaking the psychological distance: the effect of immersive virtual reality on perceived novelty and user satisfaction

The integration of digital and physical worlds, known as ‘phygital’, has led to the emergence of hybrid consumption experiences (e.g. virtual reality, augmented reality, digital concierge services)...
Robust Kalman Filtering Under Model Uncertainty: The Case of Degenerate Densities

In this article, we consider a robust state-space filtering problem in the case that the transition probability density is unknown and possibly degenerate. The resulting robust filter has a Kalman-like structure and solves a minimax game: the nature selects the least favorable model in a prescribed ambiguity set, which also contains non-Gaussian probability densities, while the other player designs the optimum filter for the least favorable model. It turns out that the resulting robust filter is characterized by a Riccati-like iteration evolving on the cone of the positive-semidefinite matrices. Moreover, we study the convergence of such iteration in the case that the nominal model is with constant parameters on the basis of the contraction analysis in the same spirit of Bougerol. Finally, some numerical examples show that the proposed filter outperforms the standard Kalman filter.
Reconcile Prediction Consistency for Balanced Object Detection

Classification and regression are two pillars of object detectors. In most CNN-based detectors, these two pillars are optimized independently. Without direct interactions be-tween them, the classification loss and the regression loss can not be optimized synchronously toward the optimal direction in the training phase. This clearly leads to lots of inconsistent predictions with high classification score but low localization accuracy or low classification score but high localization accuracy in the inference phase, especially for the objects of irregular shape and occlusion, which severely hurts the detection performance of existing detectors after N-MS. To reconcile prediction consistency for balanced object detection, we propose a Harmonic loss to harmonize the optimization of classification branch and localization branch. The Harmonic loss enables these two branches to supervise and promote each other during training, thereby producing consistent predictions with high co-occurrence of top classification and localization in the inference phase. Furthermore, in order to prevent the localization loss from being dominated by outliers during training phase, a Harmonic IoU loss is proposed to harmonize the weight of the localization loss of different IoU-level samples. Comprehensive experiments on benchmarks PASCAL VOC and MS COCO demonstrate the generality and effectiveness of our model for facilitating existing object detectors to state-of-the-art accuracy.
CX-ToM: Counterfactual explanations with theory-of-mind for enhancing human trust in image recognition models

We propose CX-ToM, short for counterfactual explanations with theory-of-mind, a new explainable AI (XAI) framework for explaining decisions made by a deep convolutional neural network (CNN). In contrast to the current methods in XAI that generate explanations as a single shot response, we pose explanation as an iterative communication process, i.e., dialogue between the machine and human user. More concretely, our CX-ToM framework generates a sequence of explanations in a dialogue by mediating the differences between the minds of the machine and human user. To do this, we use Theory of Mind (ToM) which helps us in explicitly modeling the human's intention, the machine's mind as inferred by the human, as well as human's mind as inferred by the machine. Moreover, most state-of-the-art XAI frameworks provide attention (or heat map) based explanations. In our work, we show that these attention-based explanations are not sufficient for increasing human trust in the underlying CNN model. In CX-ToM, we instead use counterfactual explanations called fault-lines which we define as follows: given an input image I for which a CNN classification model M predicts class cpred , a fault-line identifies the minimal semantic-level features (e.g., stripes on zebra), referred to as explainable concepts, that need to be added to or deleted from I to alter the classification category of I by M to another specified class calt . Extensive experiments verify our hypotheses, demonstrating that our CX-ToM significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art XAI models.
An advanced YOLOv3 method for small-scale road object detection

Road target detection is a very challenging task in the field of computer vision because it is easily affected by complex backgrounds and sparse features of small targets. YOLOv3 (You Only Look Once v3) is currently one of the state-of-the-art object detection methods of deep learning. However, because the k-means clustering algorithm is sensitive to the initial clustering center, the local fragile visual field features related to small objects in the prediction map are severely lost and the final decision-making theory (The grid located in the center of the foreground object is responsible for predicting this object) of the network ignores the detailed information of the neighboring grid, there are still many problems in object detection. In this paper, we propose an improved algorithm based on YOLOv3 for small-scale object detection. We use the improved k-medians clustering method instead of the previous k-means to improve the model instability caused by the singularity; We propose a local enhancement method to strengthen weak features for small-scale object detection by paralleling a branch on the backbone. Besides, a flexible offset sampling structure added in parallel for information compensation is also designed. A series of experiments showing that our system has achieved good detection results on the KITTI and UA-DETRAC public datasets, and the distinguishing performance for small-scale objects is significantly improved. Therefore, our method is effective in road target detection tasks.
Representation learning with collaborative autoencoder for personalized recommendation

In the past decades, recommendation systems have provided lots of valuable personalized suggestions for the users to address the problem of information over-loaded. Collaborative Filtering (CF) is one of the most commonly applied and successful recommendation approaches, which refers to using the preferences of groups with similar interests to recommend information to other users. Recently, in addition to the traditional matrix factorization techniques, deep learning methods have been proposed to learn more abstract and higher-level representations for recommendation. However, most previous deep recommendation methods learn the higher-level feature representations of users and items through an identical model structure, which ignores the different characteristics of the user-based and item-based data. In addition, the rating matrix is usually sparse which may result in a significant degradation of recommendation performance. To address these problems, we propose a representation learning method with Collaborative Autoencoder for Personalized Recommendation (CAPR for short). In this method, user-based and item-based feature representations are learned by two different autoencoders for capturing different features of the data. Meanwhile, items’ attributions are combined into the feature representations with semi-autoencoder for alleviating the sparsity problem. Extensive experimental results confirm the effectiveness of our proposed method compared to other state-of-the-art matrix factorization methods and deep recommendation methods.
Fine-grained action recognition using dynamic kernels

Fine-grained action recognition involves comparison of similar actions of variable-length size consisting of subtle interactions between human and specific objects. Hence, we propose a dynamic kernel-based approach to handle the variable-length patterns for effective recognition of fine-grained actions. Initially, we extract local spatio-temporal features for each video to capture appearance and motion information effectively. An action-independent Gaussian mixture model (AIGMM) is trained on the extracted features of all fine-grained actions to analyze spatio-temporal information and preserve the local similarities among fine-grained actions. Then, the statistics of AIGMM, namely, mean, covariance, and posteriors are used to build the kernels for finding the similarity between any two fine-grained actions by mapping statistics to kernel feature space. We demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed approach using three dynamic kernels i.e., GMM mean interval kernel, supervector kernel, intermediate matching kernel on four varieties of fine-grained action datasets, namely, MERL, JIGSAWS, KSCGR, and MPII cooking2
Glomerular disease classification and lesion identification by machine learning

Classification of glomerular diseases and identification of glomerular lesions require careful morphological examination by experienced nephropathologists, which is labor-intensive, time-consuming, and prone to interobserver variability. In this regard, recent advance in machine learning-based image analysis is promising.We combined Mask Region-based Convolutional Neural Networks (Mask R-CNN) with an additional classification step to build a glomerulus detection model using human kidney biopsy samples. A Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) recurrent neural network was applied for glomerular disease classification, and another two-stage model using ResNeXt-101 was constructed for glomerular lesion identification in cases of lupus nephritis.The detection model showed state-of-the-art performance on variedly stained slides with F1 scores up to 0.944. The disease classification model showed good accuracies up to 0.940 on recognizing different glomerular diseases based on H&E whole slide images. The lesion identification model demonstrated high discriminating power with area under the receiver operating characteristic curve up to 0.947 for various glomerular lesions. Models showed good generalization on external testing datasets.This study is the first-of-its-kind showing how each step of kidney biopsy interpretation carried out by nephropathologists can be captured and simulated by machine learning models. The models were integrated into a whole slide image viewing and annotating platform to enable nephropathologists to review, correct, and confirm the inference results. Further improvement on model performances and incorporating inputs from immunofluorescence, electron microscopy, and clinical data might realize actual clinical use.
Hybrid Parallel Image Processing Algorithm for Binary Images with Image Thinning Technique

Image thinning is the most essential pre-processing technique that plays major role in image processing applications such as image analysis and pattern recognition. It is a process that reduces a thick binary image into thin skeleton. In the present paper we have used hybrid parallel thinning algorithm to obtain the skeleton of the binary image. The result skeleton contains one pixel width which preserves the topological properties and retains the connectivity.
Design and analysis of an efficient machine learning based hybrid recommendation system with enhanced density-based spatial clustering for digital e-learning applications

Abstract A decision-making system is one of the most important tools in data mining. The data mining field has become a forum where it is necessary to utilize users' interactions, decision-making processes and overall experience. Nowadays, e-learning is indeed a progressive method to provide online education in long-lasting terms, contrasting to the customary head-to-head process of educating with culture. Through e-learning, an ever-increasing number of learners have profited from different programs. Notwithstanding, the highly assorted variety of the students on the internet presents new difficulties to the conservative one-estimate fit-all learning systems, in which a solitary arrangement of learning assets is specified to the learners. The problems and limitations in well-known recommender systems are much variations in the expected absolute error, consuming more query processing time, and providing less accuracy in the final recommendation. The main objectives of this research are the design and analysis of a new transductive support vector machine-based hybrid personalized hybrid recommender for the machine learning public data sets. The learning experience has been achieved through the habits of the learners. This research designs some of the new strategies that are experimented with to improve the performance of a hybrid recommender. The modified one-source denoising approach is designed to preprocess the learner dataset. The modified anarchic society optimization strategy is designed to improve the performance measurements. The enhanced and generalized sequential pattern strategy is proposed to mine the sequential pattern of learners. The enhanced transductive support vector machine is developed to evaluate the extracted habits and interests. These new strategies analyze the confidential rate of learners and provide the best recommendation to the learners. The proposed generalized model is simulated on public datasets for machine learning such as movies, music, books, food, merchandise, healthcare, dating, scholarly paper, and open university learning recommendation. The experimental analysis concludes that the enhanced clustering strategy discovers clusters that are based on random size. The proposed recommendation strategies achieve better significant performance over the methods in terms of expected absolute error, accuracy, ranking score, recall, and precision measurements. The accuracy of the proposed datasets lies between 82 and 98%. The MAE metric lies between 5 and 19.2% for the simulated public datasets. The simulation results prove the proposed generalized recommender has a great strength to improve the quality and performance.