Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
The DAO Controversy: The Case for a New Species of Corporate Governance?

This paper reviews the recent case of The DAO “hack” in June 2016 and analyzes The DAO's response in its time of crisis, and its implications for corporate and IT governance. There was no human-led governance in The DAO. Instead, The DAO placed its trust in the smart contract they had built together on the blockchain, which became its governance mechanism. The events that follow allow us to see hitherto unobservable organizational behaviors that are unique to trustless organizations, and hence The DAO gives us a glimpse at a new species of corporate governance. This paper explores the implications of these ideas: we propose the emergence of a spectrum of organizations based on the alienation of trust, we consider the economic impact and legality of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), smart contracts, work and job design, and what happens when corporate governance is managed solely by IT governance.
IMoJIE: Iterative Memory-Based Joint Open Information Extraction

While traditional systems for Open Information Extraction were statistical and rule-based, recently neural models have been introduced for the task.Our work builds upon CopyAttention, a sequence generation OpenIE model (Cui et al., 2018).Our analysis reveals that CopyAttention produces a constant number of extractions per sentence, and its extracted tuples often express redundant information.We present IMOJIE, an extension to Copy-Attention, which produces the next extraction conditioned on all previously extracted tuples.This approach overcomes both shortcomings of CopyAttention, resulting in a variable number of diverse extractions per sentence.We train IMOJIE on training data bootstrapped from extractions of several non-neural systems, which have been automatically filtered to reduce redundancy and noise.IMOJIE outperforms CopyAttention by about 18 F1 pts, and a BERT-based strong baseline by 2 F1 pts, establishing a new state of the art for the task.
Leveraging Procedural Generation to Benchmark Reinforcement Learning

We introduce Procgen Benchmark, a suite of 16 procedurally generated game-like environments designed to benchmark both sample efficiency and generalization in reinforcement learning. We believe that the community will benefit from increased access to high quality training environments, and we provide detailed experimental protocols for using this benchmark. We empirically demonstrate that diverse environment distributions are essential to adequately train and evaluate RL agents, thereby motivating the extensive use of procedural content generation. We then use this benchmark to investigate the effects of scaling model size, finding that larger models significantly improve both sample efficiency and generalization.
SIGUA: Forgetting May Make Learning with Noisy Labels More Robust

Given data with noisy labels, over-parameterized deep networks can gradually memorize the data, and fit everything in the end. Although equipped with corrections for noisy labels, many learning methods in this area still suffer overfitting due to undesired memorization. In this paper, to relieve this issue, we propose stochastic integrated gradient underweighted ascent (SIGUA): in a mini-batch, we adopt gradient descent on good data as usual, and learning-rate-reduced gradient ascent on bad data; the proposal is a versatile approach where data goodness or badness is w.r.t. desired or undesired memorization given a base learning method. Technically, SIGUA pulls optimization back for generalization when their goals conflict with each other; philosophically, SIGUA shows forgetting undesired memorization can reinforce desired memorization. Experiments demonstrate that SIGUA successfully robustifies two typical base learning methods, so that their performance is often significantly improved.
Pattern Recognition Techniques for Boson Sampling Validation

The difficulty of validating large-scale quantum devices, such as Boson Samplers, poses a major challenge for any research program that aims to show quantum advantages over classical hardware. To address this problem, we propose a novel data-driven approach wherein models are trained to identify common pathologies using unsupervised machine learning methods. We illustrate this idea by training a classifier that exploits K-means clustering to distinguish between Boson Samplers that use indistinguishable photons from those that do not. We train the model on numerical simulations of small-scale Boson Samplers and then validate the pattern recognition technique on larger numerical simulations as well as on photonic chips in both traditional Boson Sampling and scattershot experiments. The effectiveness of such method relies on particle-type-dependent internal correlations present in the output distributions. This approach performs substantially better on the test data than previous methods and underscores the ability to further generalize its operation beyond the scope of the examples that it was trained on.
A Blockchain Solution for Securing Real Property Transactions: A Case Study for Serbia

The origins of digital money and blockchain technology goes back to the 1980s, but in the last decade, the blockchain technology gained large popularity in the financial sector with the appearance of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. However, recently, many other fields of application have been recognized, particularly with the development of smart contracts. Among them is the possible application of blockchain technology in the domain of land administration, mostly as a tool for transparency in the developing countries and means to fight corruption. However, developed countries also find interest in launching pilot projects to test their applicability in land administration domain for reasons such as to increase the speed and reduce costs of the real property transactions through a more secure environment. In this paper, we analyse how transactions are handled in Serbian land administration and how this process may be supported by modern ledger technologies such as blockchain. In order to analyse how blockchain could be implemented to support transactions in land information systems (LIS), it is necessary to understand cadastral processes and transactions in LIS, as well as legislative and organizational aspects of LIS. Transactions in cadastre comprise many actors and utilize both alphanumeric (descriptive or legal) data and geospatial data about property boundaries on the cadastral map. Based on the determined requirements for the blockchain-based LIS, we propose a system architecture for its implementation. Such a system keeps track of transactions in LIS in an immutable and tamper-proof manner to increase the security of the system and consequently increase the speed of transactions, efficiency, and data integrity without a significant impact on the existing laws and regulations. The system is anticipated as a permissioned public blockchain implemented on top of the Ethereum network.
Computational Advantage from the Quantum Superposition of Multiple Temporal Orders of Photonic Gates

Models for quantum computation with circuit connections subject to the quantum superposition principle have been recently proposed. There, a control quantum system can coherently determine the order in which a target quantum system undergoes $N$ gate operations. This process, known as the quantum $N$-switch, is a resource for several information-processing tasks. In particular, it provides a computational advantage -- over fixed-gate-order quantum circuits -- for phase-estimation problems involving $N$ unknown unitary gates. However, the corresponding algorithm requires an experimentally unfeasible target-system dimension (super)exponential in $N$. Here, we introduce a promise problem for which the quantum $N$-switch gives an equivalent computational speed-up with target-system dimension as small as 2 regardless of $N$. We use state-of-the-art multi-core optical-fiber technology to experimentally demonstrate the quantum $N$-switch with $N=4$ gates acting on a photonic-polarization qubit. This is the first observation of a quantum superposition of more than $N=2$ temporal orders, demonstrating its usefulness for efficient phase-estimation.
Resource-Efficient and Convergence-Preserving Online Participant Selection in Federated Learning

Federated learning achieves the privacy-preserving training of models on mobile devices by iteratively aggregating model updates instead of raw training data to the server. Since excessive training iterations and model transferences incur heavy usage of computation and communication resources, selecting appropriate devices and excluding unnecessary model updates can help save the resource usage. We formulate an online time-varying non-linear integer program to minimize the cumulative resource usage over time while achieving the desired long-term convergence of the model being trained. We design an online learning algorithm to make fractional control decisions based on both previous system dynamics and previous training results, and also design an online randomized rounding algorithm to convert the fractional decisions into integers without violating any constraints. We rigorously prove that our online approach only incurs sub-linear dynamic regret for the optimality loss and sub-linear dynamic fit for the long-term convergence violation. We conduct extensive trace-driven evaluations and confirm the empirical superiority of our approach over alternative algorithms in terms of up to 27% reduction on the resource usage while sacrificing only 4% reduction on accuracy.
Image Encryption and Authentication With Elliptic Curve Cryptography and Multidimensional Chaotic Maps

Many researchers have used the properties of the popular Elliptic Curve Cryptography(ECC) to devise a stronger and faster image encryption algorithm to assure the secrecy of images during online transmission. In this paper, a robust Elliptic curve based image encryption and authentication model for both grayscale and color images has been proposed. The model uses the secure Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman(ECDH) key exchange to compute a shared session key along with the improved ElGamal encoding scheme. 3D and 4D Arnold Cat maps are used to effectively scramble and transform the values of plain image pixels. A well-structured digital signature is used to verify the authenticity of the encrypted image prior to decryption. The model produces good-quality cipher images with an average entropy of 7.9993 for grayscale and 7.99925 for the individual components of color images. The model has high average NPCR of 99.6%, average UACI of 33.3% and low correlation for both grayscale and color images. The model has low computational costs with minimized point multiplication operations. The proposed model is robust with high resilience against statistical, differential, chosen-plaintext(CPA), known-plaintext(KPA) and occlusion attacks.
Adversarial and Contrastive Variational Autoencoder for Sequential Recommendation

Sequential recommendation as an emerging topic has attracted increasing attention due to its important practical significance. Models based on deep learning and attention mechanism have achieved good performance in sequential recommendation. Recently, the generative models based on Variational Autoencoder (VAE) have shown the unique advantage in collaborative filtering. In particular, the sequential VAE model as a recurrent version of VAE can effectively capture temporal dependencies among items in user sequence and perform sequential recommendation. However, VAE-based models suffer from a common limitation that the representational ability of the obtained approximate posterior distribution is limited, resulting in lower quality of generated samples. This is especially true for generating sequences. To solve the above problem, in this work, we propose a novel method called Adversarial and Contrastive Variational Autoencoder (ACVAE) for sequential recommendation. Specifically, we first introduce the adversarial training for sequence generation under the Adversarial Variational Bayes (AVB) framework, which enables our model to generate high-quality latent variables. Then, we employ the contrastive loss. The latent variables will be able to learn more personalized and salient characteristics by minimizing the contrastive loss. Besides, when encoding the sequence, we apply a recurrent and convolutional structure to capture global and local relationships in the sequence. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on four real-world datasets. The experimental results show that our proposed ACVAE model outperforms other state-of-the-art methods.
RCD: Relation Map Driven Cognitive Diagnosis for Intelligent Education Systems

Cognitive diagnosis (CD) is a fundamental issue in intelligent educational settings, which aims to discover the mastery levels of students on different knowledge concepts. In general, most previous works consider it as an inter-layer interaction modeling problem, e.g., student-exercise interactions in IRT or student-concept interactions in DINA, while the inner-layer structural relations, such as educational interdependencies among concepts, are still underexplored. Furthermore, there is a lack of comprehensive modeling for the student-exercise-concept hierarchical relations in CD systems. To this end, in this paper, we present a novel Relation map driven Cognitive Diagnosis (RCD) framework, uniformly modeling the interactive and structural relations via a multi-layer student-exercise-concept relation map. Specifically, we first represent students, exercises and concepts as individual nodes in a hierarchical layout, and construct three well-defined local relation maps to incorporate inter- and inner-layer relations, including a student-exercise interaction map, a concept-exercise correlation map and a concept dependency map. Then, we leverage a multi-level attention network to integrate node-level relation aggregation inside each local map and balance map-level aggregation across different maps. Finally, we design an extendable diagnosis function to predict students' performance and jointly train the networks. Extensive experimental results on real-world datasets clearly show the effectiveness and extendibility of our RCD in both diagnosis accuracy improvement and relation-aware representation learning.
A Spam Transformer Model for SMS Spam Detection

In this paper, we aim to explore the possibility of the Transformer model in detecting the spam Short Message Service (SMS) messages by proposing a modified Transformer model that is designed for detecting SMS spam messages. The evaluation of our proposed spam Transformer is performed on SMS Spam Collection v.1 dataset and UtkMl's Twitter Spam Detection Competition dataset, with the benchmark of multiple established machine learning classifiers and state-of-the-art SMS spam detection approaches. In comparison to all other candidates, our experiments on SMS spam detection show that the proposed modified spam Transformer has the optimal results on the accuracy, recall, and F1-Score with the values of 98.92%, 0.9451, and 0.9613, respectively. Besides, the proposed model also achieves good performance on the UtkMl's Twitter dataset, which indicates a promising possibility of adapting the model to other similar problems.
PLATO-2: Towards Building an Open-Domain Chatbot via Curriculum Learning

To build a high-quality open-domain chatbot, we introduce the effective training process of PLATO-2 via curriculum learning.There are two stages involved in the learning process.In the first stage, a coarse-grained generation model is trained to learn response generation under the simplified framework of oneto-one mapping.In the second stage, a finegrained generative model augmented with latent variables and an evaluation model are further trained to generate diverse responses and to select the best response, respectively.PLATO-2 was trained on both Chinese and English data, whose effectiveness and superiority are verified through comprehensive evaluations, achieving new state-of-the-art results.
Wasserstein Contrastive Representation Distillation

The primary goal of knowledge distillation (KD) is to encapsulate the information of a model learned from a teacher network into a student network, with the latter being more compact than the former. Existing work, e.g., using Kullback-Leibler divergence for distillation, may fail to capture important structural knowledge in the teacher network and often lacks the ability for feature generalization, particularly in situations when teacher and student are built to address different classification tasks. We propose Wasserstein Contrastive Representation Distillation (WCoRD), which leverages both primal and dual forms of Wasserstein distance for KD. The dual form is used for global knowledge transfer, yielding a contrastive learning objective that maximizes the lower bound of mutual information between the teacher and the student networks. The primal form is used for local contrastive knowledge transfer within a mini-batch, effectively matching the distributions of features between the teacher and the student networks. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed WCoRD method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on privileged information distillation, model compression and cross-modal transfer.
Is the Reign of Interactive Search Eternal? Findings from the Video Browser Showdown 2020

Comprehensive and fair performance evaluation of information retrieval systems represents an essential task for the current information age. Whereas Cranfield-based evaluations with benchmark datasets support development of retrieval models, significant evaluation efforts are required also for user-oriented systems that try to boost performance with an interactive search approach. This article presents findings from the 9th Video Browser Showdown, a competition that focuses on a legitimate comparison of interactive search systems designed for challenging known-item search tasks over a large video collection. During previous installments of the competition, the interactive nature of participating systems was a key feature to satisfy known-item search needs, and this article continues to support this hypothesis. Despite the fact that top-performing systems integrate the most recent deep learning models into their retrieval process, interactive searching remains a necessary component of successful strategies for known-item search tasks. Alongside the description of competition settings, evaluated tasks, participating teams, and overall results, this article presents a detailed analysis of query logs collected by the top three performing systems, SOMHunter, VIRET, and vitrivr. The analysis provides a quantitative insight to the observed performance of the systems and constitutes a new baseline methodology for future events. The results reveal that the top two systems mostly relied on temporal queries before a correct frame was identified. An interaction log analysis complements the result log findings and points to the importance of result set and video browsing approaches. Finally, various outlooks are discussed in order to improve the Video Browser Showdown challenge in the future.
Multipopulation Ant Colony System With Knowledge-Based Local Searches for Multiobjective Supply Chain Configuration

Supply chain management (SCM) is a significant and complex system in a smart city that requires advanced artificial intelligence (AI) and optimization techniques. The multiobjective supply chain configuration (MOSCC) in SCM is to set the optimal configurations for supply chain members to minimize both the cost of goods sold ( <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$CoGS$ </tex-math></inline-formula> ) and the lead time ( <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$LT$ </tex-math></inline-formula> ). Although some algorithms have been proposed for the MOSCC, they do not make the best use of the problem-related knowledge and cannot perform well on the large-scale instances with many members and configuration options. Therefore, this article proposes a multipopulation ant colony system with knowledge-based local searches (MPACS-KLSs). First, the multiobjective algorithm is based on the multiple populations for multiple objectives framework. Two ant colonies are used to separately minimize <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$CoGS$ </tex-math></inline-formula> and <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$LT$ </tex-math></inline-formula> , which helps to search in the biobjective space sufficiently. Second, with the considerations of the problem-related knowledge, a priority-based solution construction method, a rank-based heuristic strategy, and an objective-oriented global pheromone updating strategy are proposed. Third, to speed up the convergence, especially for large-scale MOSCC instances, two knowledge-based local searches are designed to minimize <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$CoGS$ </tex-math></inline-formula> and <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$LT$ </tex-math></inline-formula> of solutions, respectively. Exhaustive experiments are conducted on both the instances from the real life and the randomly generated instances with different problem scales. The results show that MPACS-KLS is superior to the contestant algorithms, especially on the large-scale MOSCC instances, which significantly extends the AI and optimization techniques in practical applications of the smart city.
Learning Motion Priors for 4D Human Body Capture in 3D Scenes

Recovering high-quality 3D human motion in complex scenes from monocular videos is important for many applications, ranging from AR/VR to robotics. However, capturing realistic human-scene interactions, while dealing with occlusions and partial views, is challenging; current approaches are still far from achieving compelling results. We address this problem by proposing LEMO: LEarning human MOtion priors for 4D human body capture. By leveraging the large-scale motion capture dataset AMASS [38], we introduce a novel motion smoothness prior, which strongly reduces the jitters exhibited by poses recovered over a sequence. Furthermore, to handle contacts and occlusions occurring frequently in body-scene interactions, we design a contact friction term and a contact-aware motion infiller obtained via per-instance self-supervised training. To prove the effectiveness of the proposed motion priors, we combine them into a novel pipeline for 4D human body capture in 3D scenes. With our pipeline, we demonstrate high-quality 4D human body capture, reconstructing smooth motions and physically plausible body-scene interactions. The code and data are available at https://sanweiliti.github.io/LEMO/LEMO.html.