Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
SADnet: Semi-supervised Single Image Dehazing Method Based on an Attention Mechanism

Many real-life tasks such as military reconnaissance and traffic monitoring require high-quality images. However, images acquired in foggy or hazy weather pose obstacles to the implementation of these real-life tasks; consequently, image dehazing is an important research problem. To meet the requirements of practical applications, a single image dehazing algorithm has to be able to effectively process real-world hazy images with high computational efficiency. In this article, we present a fast and robust semi-supervised dehazing algorithm named SADnet for practical applications. SADnet utilizes both synthetic datasets and natural hazy images for training, so it has good generalizability for real-world hazy images. Furthermore, considering the uneven distribution of haze in the atmospheric environment, a Channel-Spatial Self-Attention (CSSA) mechanism is presented to enhance the representational power of the proposed SADnet. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the presented approach achieves good dehazing performances and competitive running times compared with other state-of-the-art image dehazing algorithms.
The Possibility of Combining and Implementing Deep Neural Network Compression Methods

In the paper, the possibility of combining deep neural network (DNN) model compression methods to achieve better compression results was considered. To compare the advantages and disadvantages of each method, all methods were applied to the ResNet18 model for pretraining to the NCT-CRC-HE-100K dataset while using CRC-VAL-HE-7K as the validation dataset. In the proposed method, quantization, pruning, weight clustering, QAT (quantization-aware training), preserve cluster QAT (hereinafter PCQAT), and distillation were performed for the compression of ResNet18. The final evaluation of the obtained models was carried out on a Raspberry Pi 4 device using the validation dataset. The greatest model compression result on the disk was achieved by applying the PCQAT method, whose application led to a reduction in size of the initial model by as much as 45 times, whereas the greatest model acceleration result was achieved via distillation on the MobileNetV2 model. All methods led to the compression of the initial size of the model, with a slight loss in the model accuracy or an increase in the model accuracy in the case of QAT and weight clustering. INT8 quantization and knowledge distillation also led to a significant decrease in the model execution time.
CLIP4Hashing: Unsupervised Deep Hashing for Cross-Modal Video-Text Retrieval

With the ever-increasing multimedia data on the Web, cross-modal video-text retrieval has received a lot of attention in recent years. Deep cross-modal hashing approaches utilize the Hamming space for achieving fast retrieval. However, most existing algorithms have difficulties in seeking or constructing a well-defined joint semantic space. In this paper, an unsupervised deep cross-modal video-text hashing approach (CLIP4Hashing) is proposed, which mitigates the difficulties in bridging between different modalities in the Hamming space through building a single hashing net by employing the pre-trained CLIP model. The approach is enhanced by two novel techniques, the dynamic weighting strategy and the design of the min-max hashing layer, which are found to be the main sources of the performance gain. Compared with conventional deep cross-modal hashing algorithms, CLIP4Hashing does not require data-specific hyper-parameters. With evaluation using three challenging video-text benchmark datasets, we demonstrate that CLIP4Hashing is able to significantly outperform existing state-of-the-art hashing algorithms. Additionally, with larger bit sizes (e.g., 2048 bits), CLIP4Hashing can even deliver competitive performance compared with the results based on non-hashing features.
SoK: Cryptanalysis of Encrypted Search with LEAKER – A framework for LEakage AttacK Evaluation on Real-world data

An encrypted search algorithm (ESA) allows a user to encrypt its data while preserving the ability to search over it. As all practical solutions leak some information, cryptanalysis plays an important role in the area of encrypted search. Starting with the work of Islam et al. (NDSS'12), many attacks have been proposed that exploit different leakage profiles under various assumptions. While these attacks improve our understanding of leakage, it can sometimes be difficult to draw definite conclusions about their practical performance. This is due to several reasons, including a lack of open-source implementations (which are needed to reproduce results), empirical evaluations that are conducted on restricted datasets, and in some cases reliance on relatively strong assumptions that can significantly affect accuracy. In this work, we address these limitations. First, we design and implement LEAKER, an open-source framework that evaluates the major leakage attacks against any dataset and that we hope will serve the community as a common way to evaluate leakage attacks. We identify new real-world datasets that capture different use cases for ESAs and, for the first time, include real-world user queries. Finally, we use LEAKER to systematically evaluate known attacks on our datasets, uncovering sometimes unexpected properties that increase or diminish accuracy. Our evaluation shows that some attacks work better on real-world data than previously thought and that others perform worse.
Mask R-CNN based automated identification and extraction of oil well sites

Fine-scale land disturbances due to mining development modify the land surface cover and have cumulative detrimental impacts on the environment. Understanding the distribution of fine-scale land disturbances related to mining activities, such as oil well sites, in mining regions is of vital importance to sustainable mining development. For efficient mapping, automated identification and extraction of the oil well sites using high-resolution satellite images are required. In this work, we proposed the Oil Well Site extraction (OWS) Mask R-CNN based on the original Mask R-CNN (Region-based Convolutional Neural Networks), to accurately extract well sites using multi-sensor remote sensing images. For improvement of mapping efficiency, two modifications were made to Mask R-CNN: (1) replacing the backbone of Mask R-CNN with D-LinkNet, and (2) adding a semantic segmentation branch to Mask R-CNN to force the whole network to focus on the relationship between line objects and oil well sites. As imagery data were from multiple sensors (RapidEye 2/3 and WorldView 3), a pre-trained Residual Channel Attention Network (RCAN) was applied to super-resolve the images with different resolutions. Several key spatial features, such as nearby roads and area size, have also been used in the oil well site mapping process. The experimental results indicate that our OWS Mask R-CNN considerably improves the average precision (AP) and the F1 score of Mask R-CNN from 51.26% and 25.7% to 60.93% and 61.59%, respectively.
Metrics, Explainability and the European AI Act Proposal

On 21 April 2021, the European Commission proposed the first legal framework on Artificial Intelligence (AI) to address the risks posed by this emerging method of computation. The Commission proposed a Regulation known as the AI Act. The proposed AI Act considers not only machine learning, but expert systems and statistical models long in place. Under the proposed AI Act, new obligations are set to ensure transparency, lawfulness, and fairness. Their goal is to establish mechanisms to ensure quality at launch and throughout the whole life cycle of AI-based systems, thus ensuring legal certainty that encourages innovation and investments on AI systems while preserving fundamental rights and values. A standardisation process is ongoing: several entities (e.g., ISO) and scholars are discussing how to design systems that are compliant with the forthcoming Act, and explainability metrics play a significant role. Specifically, the AI Act sets some new minimum requirements of explicability (transparency and explainability) for a list of AI systems labelled as “high-risk” listed in Annex III. These requirements include a plethora of technical explanations capable of covering the right amount of information, in a meaningful way. This paper aims to investigate how such technical explanations can be deemed to meet the minimum requirements set by the law and expected by society. To answer this question, with this paper we propose an analysis of the AI Act, aiming to understand (1) what specific explicability obligations are set and who shall comply with them and (2) whether any metric for measuring the degree of compliance of such explanatory documentation could be designed. Moreover, by envisaging the legal (or ethical) requirements that such a metric should possess, we discuss how to implement them in a practical way. More precisely, drawing inspiration from recent advancements in the theory of explanations, our analysis proposes that metrics to measure the kind of explainability endorsed by the proposed AI Act shall be risk-focused, model-agnostic, goal-aware, intelligible, and accessible. Therefore, we discuss the extent to which these requirements are met by the metrics currently under discussion.
Deep Semantic and Attentive Network for Unsupervised Video Summarization

With the rapid growth of video data, video summarization is a promising approach to shorten a lengthy video into a compact version. Although supervised summarization approaches have achieved state-of-the-art performance, they require frame-level annotated labels. Such an annotation process is time-consuming and tedious. In this article, we propose a novel deep summarization framework named Deep Semantic and Attentive Network for Video Summarization (DSAVS) that can select the most semantically representative summary by minimizing the distance between video representation and text representation without any frame-level labels. Another challenge associated with video summarization tasks mainly originates from the difficulty of considering temporal information over a long time. Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) performs well for temporal dependencies modeling but does not work well with long video clips. Therefore, we introduce a self-attention mechanism into our summarization framework to capture the long-range temporal dependencies among the frames. Extensive experiments on two popular benchmark datasets, i.e., SumMe and TVSum, show that our proposed framework outperforms other state-of-the-art unsupervised approaches and even most supervised methods.
Making AI Explainable in the Global South: A Systematic Review

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are quickly becoming pervasive in ways that impact the lives of all humans across the globe. In an effort to make otherwise ”black box” AI/ML systems more understandable, the field of Explainable AI (XAI) has arisen with the goal of developing algorithms, toolkits, frameworks, and other techniques that enable people to comprehend, trust, and manage AI systems. However, although XAI is a rapidly growing area of research, most of the work has focused on contexts in the Global North, and little is known about if or how XAI techniques have been designed, deployed, or tested with communities in the Global South. This gap is concerning, especially in light of rapidly growing enthusiasm from governments, companies, and academics to use AI/ML to “solve” problems in the Global South. Our paper contributes the first systematic review of XAI research in the Global South, providing an early look at emerging work in the space. We identified 16 papers from 15 different venues that targeted a wide range of application domains. All of the papers were published in the last three years. Of the 16 papers, 13 focused on applying a technical XAI method, all of which involved the use of (at least some) data that was local to the context. However, only three papers engaged with or involved humans in the work, and only one attempted to deploy their XAI system with target users. We close by reflecting on the current state of XAI research in the Global South, discussing data and model considerations for building and deploying XAI systems in these regions, and highlighting the need for human-centered approaches to XAI in the Global South.
The Intraday Bitcoin Response to Tether Minting and Burning Events: Asymmetry, Investor Sentiment, and “Whale Alerts” on Twitter

Tether Limited has the sole authority to create (mint) and destroy (burn) Tether stablecoins (USD₮). This paper investigates Bitcoin's response to USD₮ supply change events between 2014 and 2021 and identifies an interesting asymmetry between Bitcoin's responses to USD₮ minting and burning events. Bitcoin responds positively to USD₮ minting events over 5- to 30-minute event windows, but this response begins declining after 60 minutes. State-dependence is also demonstrated, with Bitcoin prices exhibiting a greater increase when the corresponding USD₮ minting event coincides with positive investor sentiment and is announced to the public by data service provider, Whale Alert, on Twitter.
Multi-task learning approach for modulation and wireless signal classification for 5G and beyond: Edge deployment via model compression

Future communication networks must address the scarce spectrum to accommodate extensive growth of heterogeneous wireless devices. Efforts are underway to address spectrum coexistence, enhance spectrum awareness, and bolster authentication schemes. Wireless signal recognition is becoming increasingly more significant for spectrum monitoring, spectrum management, secure communications, among others. Consequently, comprehensive spectrum awareness on the edge has the potential to serve as a key enabler for the emerging beyond 5G (fifth generation) networks. State-of-the-art studies in this domain have (i) only focused on a single task – modulation or signal (protocol) classification – which in many cases is insufficient information for a system to act on, (ii) consider either radar or communication waveforms (homogeneous waveform category), and (iii) does not address edge deployment during neural network design phase. In this work, for the first time in the wireless communication domain, we exploit the potential of deep neural networks based multi-task learning (MTL) framework to simultaneously learn modulation and signal classification tasks while considering heterogeneous wireless signals such as radar and communication waveforms in the electromagnetic spectrum. The proposed MTL architecture benefits from the mutual relation between the two tasks in improving the classification accuracy as well as the learning efficiency with a lightweight neural network model. We additionally include experimental evaluations of the model with over-the-air collected samples and demonstrate first-hand insight on model compression along with deep learning pipeline for deployment on resource-constrained edge devices. We demonstrate significant computational, memory, and accuracy improvement of the proposed model over two reference architectures. In addition to modeling a lightweight MTL model suitable for resource-constrained embedded radio platforms, we provide a comprehensive heterogeneous wireless signals dataset for public use.
Digital Skills, ICTs and Students’ Needs: A Case Study in Social Work Degree, University of Zaragoza (Aragón-Spain)

Technological innovations are related to information and communication technologies (ICTs), which in turn have become a fundamental pillar in the field of education. Social work professionals require new approaches to take on the new type of work demanded by the digital society, specializing in research into the innovation of these new forms of action through technology. This article analyses whether university training is in tune with the new skills and abilities required for professional interventions in the twenty-first century. A total of 288 surveys were carried out on 309 students. Each survey consisted of 25 questions on the five digital skills areas. The results indicate that training in digital skills must gain space in university training plans, just as the pandemic became a starting point for the massive use of ICTs. The conclusions point to the importance of improving training in digital competences and skills for future generations of social workers, who, although they are digital natives, will need to know how to use ICTs in their social work.
Indian traffic sign detection and recognition using deep learning

Traffic signs play a crucial role in managing traffic on the road, disciplining the drivers, thereby preventing injury, property damage, and fatalities. Traffic sign management with automatic detection and recognition is very much part of any Intelligent Transportation System (ITS). In this era of self-driving vehicles, calls for automatic detection and recognition of traffic signs cannot be overstated. This paper presents a deep-learning-based autonomous scheme for cognizance of traffic signs in India. The automatic traffic sign detection and recognition was conceived on a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)- Refined Mask R-CNN (RM R-CNN)-based end-to-end learning. The proffered concept was appraised via an innovative dataset comprised of 6480 images that constituted 7056 instances of Indian traffic signs grouped into 87 categories. We present several refinements to the Mask R-CNN model both in architecture and data augmentation. We have considered highly challenging Indian traffic sign categories which are not yet reported in previous works. The dataset for training and testing of the proposed model is obtained by capturing images in real-time on Indian roads. The evaluation results indicate lower than 3% error. Furthermore, RM R-CNN’s performance was compared with the conventional deep neural network architectures such as Fast R-CNN and Mask R-CNN. Our proposed model achieved precision of 97.08% which is higher than precision obtained by Mask R-CNN and Faster R-CNN models.
Consumer Fraud in Online Shopping: Detecting Risk Indicators through Data Mining

Consumer fraud in online shopping has become a major problem and severe challenge for online retailers. However, detection lags behind — for academia and practice — and data-driven knowledge about risk indicators in transaction data is still very limited. Thus, this study focuses on the empirical data-based identification of consumer fraud risk indicators and combinations in online shopping transaction data. We demonstrate the use of a decision tree as a data mining technique for analysis of data from one of the world's largest online retailers. Thereby, several patterns of fraud that improve separation of online shopping transactions into fraudulent and legitimate cases are identified. Thus, results can guide the choice of variables and design of fraud prevention actions and systems in future practical and theoretical work.
Secret Message Protection using Fuzzy Logic and Difference Expansion in Digital Images

Secrete message protection has become a focal point of the network security domain due to the problems of violating the network use policies and unauthorized access of the public network. These problems have led to data protection techniques such as cryptography, and steganography. Cryptography consists of encrypting secrete message to a ciphertext format and steganography consists of concealing the secrete message in codes that make up a digital file, such as an image, audio, and video. Steganography, which is different from cryptography, ensures hiding a secret message for secure transmission over the public network. This paper presents a steganographic approach using digital images for data hiding that aims to providing higher performance by combining fuzzy logic type I to pre-process the cover image and difference expansion techniques. The previous methods have used the original cover image to embed the secrete message. This paper provides a new method that first identifies the edges of a cover image and then proceeds with a difference expansion to embed the secrete message. The experimental results of this work identified an improvement of 10% of the existing method based on increased payload capacity and the visibility of the stego image.
Task-Adaptive Few-shot Node Classification

Node classification is of great importance among various graph mining tasks. In practice, real-world graphs generally follow the long-tail distribution, where a large number of classes only consist of limited labeled nodes. Although Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved significant improvements in node classification, their performance decreases substantially in such a few-shot scenario. The main reason can be attributed to the vast generalization gap between meta-training and meta-test due to the task variance caused by different node/class distributions in meta-tasks (i.e., node-level and class-level variance). Therefore, to effectively alleviate the impact of task variance, we propose a task-adaptive node classification framework under the few-shot learning setting. Specifically, we first accumulate meta-knowledge across classes with abundant labeled nodes. Then we transfer such knowledge to the classes with limited labeled nodes via our proposed task-adaptive modules. In particular, to accommodate the different node/class distributions among meta-tasks, we propose three essential modules to perform node-level, class-level, and task-level adaptations in each meta-task, respectively. In this way, our framework can conduct adaptations to different meta-tasks and thus advance the model generalization performance on meta-test tasks. Extensive experiments on four prevalent node classification datasets demonstrate the superiority of our framework over the state-of-the-art baselines. Our code is provided at https://github.com/SongW-SW/TENT https://github.com/SongW-SW/TENT.
Deep learning, stochastic gradient descent and diffusion maps

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is widely used in deep learning due to its computational efficiency, but a complete understanding of why SGD performs so well remains a major challenge. It has been observed empirically that most eigenvalues of the Hessian of the loss functions on the loss landscape of over-parametrized deep neural networks are close to zero, while only a small number of eigenvalues are large. Zero eigenvalues indicate zero diffusion along the corresponding directions. This indicates that the process of minima selection mainly happens in the relatively low-dimensional subspace corresponding to the top eigenvalues of the Hessian. Although the parameter space is very high-dimensional, these findings seems to indicate that the SGD dynamics may mainly live on a low-dimensional manifold. In this paper, we pursue a truly data driven approach to the problem of getting a potentially deeper understanding of the high-dimensional parameter surface, and in particular, of the landscape traced out by SGD by analyzing the data generated through SGD, or any other optimizer for that matter, in order to possibly discover (local) low-dimensional representations of the optimization landscape. As our vehicle for the exploration, we use diffusion maps introduced by R. Coifman and coauthors.