Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Breast ultrasound image segmentation: A coarse‐to‐fine fusion convolutional neural network

Purpose Breast ultrasound (BUS) image segmentation plays a crucial role in computer‐aided diagnosis systems for BUS examination, which are useful for improved accuracy of breast cancer diagnosis. However, such performance remains a challenging task owing to the poor image quality and large variations in the sizes, shapes, and locations of breast lesions. In this paper, we propose a new convolutional neural network with coarse‐to‐fine feature fusion to address the aforementioned challenges. Methods The proposed fusion network consists of an encoder path, a decoder path, and a core fusion stream path (FSP). The encoder path is used to capture the context information, and the decoder path is used for localization prediction. The FSP is designed to generate beneficial aggregate feature representations (i.e., various‐sized lesion features, aggregated coarse‐to‐fine information, and high‐resolution edge characteristics) from the encoder and decoder paths, which are eventually used for accurate breast lesion segmentation. To better retain the boundary information and alleviate the effect of image noise, we input the superpixel image along with the original image to the fusion network. Furthermore, a weighted‐balanced loss function was designed to address the problem of lesion regions having different sizes. We then conducted exhaustive experiments on three public BUS datasets to evaluate the proposed network. Results The proposed method outperformed state‐of‐the‐art (SOTA) segmentation methods on the three public BUS datasets, with average dice similarity coefficients of 84.71(±1.07), 83.76(±0.83), and 86.52(±1.52), average intersection‐over‐union values of 76.34(±1.50), 75.70(±0.98), and 77.86(±2.07), average sensitivities of 86.66(±1.82), 85.21(±1.98), and 87.21(±2.51), average specificities of 97.92(±0.46), 98.57(±0.19), and 99.42(±0.21), and average accuracies of 95.89(±0.57), 97.17(±0.3), and 98.51(±0.3). Conclusions The proposed fusion network could effectively segment lesions from BUS images, thereby presenting a new feature fusion strategy to handle challenging task of segmentation, while outperforming the SOTA segmentation methods. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/mniwk/CF2‐NET .
IMG‐forensics: Multimedia‐enabled information hiding investigation using convolutional neural network

Information hiding aims to embed a crucial amount of confidential data records into the multimedia, such as text, audio, static and dynamic image, and video. Image-based information hiding has been a significantly important topic for digital forensics. Here, active image deep steganographic approaches have come forward for hiding data. The least significant bit (LSB) steganography approach is proposed to conceal a secret message into the original image. First, the lightweight stream encryption cryptography encrypts secret information in the cover image to protect embedded information from source to destination. Whereas the encrypted embedded cover information into the carrier of stego-image with the help of the LSB and then transmit. In the proposed investigational scheme, a convolutional neural net is used. A model is trained to detect and extract patterns of image hidden features, encrypted stego-image optimization, and classify original and cover images of steganography. Through the experiment result on the forensic image database for mobile steganography of the Center for Statistics and Application in Forensic Evidence, the overall embedded and extracting that the proposed scheme can achieve information hiding as well as revealing with an accuracy rate of 95.1%. The experimental result shows the robustness of the model in terms of efficiency as compared to other state-of-the-art schemes.
Accelerated Stochastic Algorithms for Convex-Concave Saddle-Point Problems

We develop stochastic first-order primal-dual algorithms to solve a class of convex-concave saddle-point problems. When the saddle function is strongly convex in the primal variable, we develop the first stochastic restart scheme for this problem. When the gradient noises obey sub-Gaussian distributions, the oracle complexity of our restart scheme is strictly better than any of the existing methods, even in the deterministic case. Furthermore, for each problem parameter of interest, whenever the lower bound exists, the oracle complexity of our restart scheme is either optimal or nearly optimal (up to a log factor). The subroutine used in this scheme is itself a new stochastic algorithm developed for the problem where the saddle function is nonstrongly convex in the primal variable. This new algorithm, which is based on the primal-dual hybrid gradient framework, achieves the state-of-the-art oracle complexity and may be of independent interest.
Dimension Reduction in Quantum Key Distribution for Continuous- and Discrete-Variable Protocols

We develop a method to connect the infinite-dimensional description of optical continuous-variable quantum key distribution (QKD) protocols to a finite-dimensional formulation. The secure key rates of the optical QKD protocols can then be evaluated using recently-developed reliable numerical methods for key rate calculations. We apply this method to obtain asymptotic key rates for discrete-modulated continuous-variable QKD protocols, which are of practical significance due to their experimental simplicity and potential for large-scale deployment in quantum-secured networks. Importantly, our security proof does not require the photon-number cutoff assumption relied upon in previous works. We also demonstrate that our method can provide practical advantages over the flag-state squasher when applied to discrete-variable protocols.
LightIoT: Lightweight and Secure Communication for Energy-Efficient IoT in Health Informatics

Internet of Things (IoT) is considered as a key enabler of health informatics. IoT-enabled devices are used for in-hospital and in-home patient monitoring to collect and transfer biomedical data pertaining to blood pressure, electrocardiography (ECG), blood sugar levels, body temperature, etc. Among these devices, wearables have found their presence in a wide range of healthcare applications. These devices generate data in real-time and transmit them to nearby gateways and remote servers for processing and visualization. The data transmitted by these devices are vulnerable to a range of adversarial threats, and as such, privacy and integrity need to be preserved. In this paper, we present LightIoT, a lightweight and secure communication approach for data exchanged among the devices of a healthcare infrastructure. LightIoT operates in three phases: initialization, pairing, and authentication. These phases ensure the reliable transmission of data by establishing secure sessions among the communicating entities (wearables, gateways and a remote server). Statistical results exhibit that our scheme is lightweight, robust, and resilient against a wide range of adversarial attacks and incurs much lower computational and communication overhead for the transmitted data in the presence of existing approaches.
Stylizing 3D Scene via Implicit Representation and HyperNetwork

In this work, we aim to address the 3D scene stylization problem - generating stylized images of the scene at arbitrary novel view angles. A straightforward solution is to combine existing novel view synthesis and image/video style transfer approaches, which often leads to blurry results or inconsistent appearance. Inspired by the high-quality results of the neural radiance fields (NeRF) method, we propose a joint framework to directly render novel views with the desired style. Our framework consists of two components: an implicit representation of the 3D scene with the neural radiance fields model, and a hypernetwork to transfer the style information into the scene representation. To alleviate the training difficulties and memory burden, we propose a two-stage training procedure and a patch sub-sampling approach to optimize the style and content losses with the neural radiance fields model. After optimization, our model is able to render consistent novel views at arbitrary view angles with arbitrary style. Both quantitative evaluation and human subject study have demonstrated that the proposed method generates faithful stylization results with consistent appearance across different views.
Modeling label-wise syntax for fine-grained sentiment analysis of reviews via memory-based neural model

Fine-grained sentiment analysis has shown great benefits to real-word applications, such as for social media texts and product reviews. While the current state-of-the-art methods employ external syntactic dependency knowledge and enhance the task performances, most of them make use of merely the dependency edges, leaving the dependency labels unexploited, which the work presented here shows to be also of great helpfulness to the task. In this study we leverage these syntactic features for improving fine-grained sentiment analysis. Compared to previous studies, our method advances following aspects. First, we are the first to propose a novel label-wise syntax memory (LSM) network for simultaneously encoding both the syntactic dependency edges and labels information in a unified manner. Additionally, we take the advantage of the current state-of-the-art contextualized BERT language models to provide rich contexts towards the targeted aspects. We conduct experiments on five benchmark datasets, and the results demonstrate that our model outperforms current best-performing baselines, and achieves new state-of-the-art performances. Further analysis is conducted, proving the necessity to encode sufficient syntactic dependency knowledge for the task, also illustrating the effectiveness of our LSM encoder on modeling these syntax attributes. By exploiting rich syntactic information, our framework outperforms baselines in identifying multiple aspects of sentiment analysis as well as the long-range dependency issues.
Computer Aided Breast Cancer Detection Using Ensembling of Texture and Statistical Image Features

Breast cancer, like most forms of cancer, is a fatal disease that claims more than half a million lives every year. In 2020, breast cancer overtook lung cancer as the most commonly diagnosed form of cancer. Though extremely deadly, the survival rate and longevity increase substantially with early detection and diagnosis. The treatment protocol also varies with the stage of breast cancer. Diagnosis is typically done using histopathological slides from which it is possible to determine whether the tissue is in the Ductal Carcinoma In Situ (DCIS) stage, in which the cancerous cells have not spread into the encompassing breast tissue, or in the Invasive Ductal Carcinoma (IDC) stage, wherein the cells have penetrated into the neighboring tissues. IDC detection is extremely time-consuming and challenging for physicians. Hence, this can be modeled as an image classification task where pattern recognition and machine learning can be used to aid doctors and medical practitioners in making such crucial decisions. In the present paper, we use an IDC Breast Cancer dataset that contains 277,524 images (with 78,786 IDC positive images and 198,738 IDC negative images) to classify the images into IDC(+) and IDC(-). To that end, we use feature extractors, including textural features, such as SIFT, SURF and ORB, and statistical features, such as Haralick texture features. These features are then combined to yield a dataset of 782 features. These features are ensembled by stacking using various Machine Learning classifiers, such as Random Forest, Extra Trees, XGBoost, AdaBoost, CatBoost and Multi Layer Perceptron followed by feature selection using Pearson Correlation Coefficient to yield a dataset with four features that are then used for classification. From our experimental results, we found that CatBoost yielded the highest accuracy (92.55%), which is at par with other state-of-the-art results—most of which employ Deep Learning architectures. The source code is available in the GitHub repository.
PointINS: Point-Based Instance Segmentation

In this paper, we explore the mask representation in instance segmentation with Point-of-Interest (PoI) features. Differentiating multiple potential instances within a single PoI feature is challenging, because learning a high-dimensional mask feature for each instance using vanilla convolution demands a heavy computing burden. To address this challenge, we propose an instance-aware convolution. It decomposes this mask representation learning task into two tractable modules as instance-aware weights and instance-agnostic features. The former is to parametrize convolution for producing mask features corresponding to different instances, improving mask learning efficiency by avoiding employing several independent convolutions. Meanwhile, the latter serves as mask templates in a single point. Together, instance-aware mask features are computed by convolving the template with dynamic weights, used for the mask prediction. Along with instance-aware convolution, we propose PointINS, a simple and practical instance segmentation approach, building upon dense one-stage detectors. Through extensive experiments, we evaluated the effectiveness of our framework built upon RetinaNet and FCOS. PointINS in ResNet101 backbone achieves a 38.3 mask mean average precision (mAP) on COCO dataset, outperforming existing point-based methods by a large margin. It gives a comparable performance to the region-based Mask R-CNN K. He, G. Gkioxari, P. Dollár, and R. Girshick, "Mask R-CNN," in Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. Comput. Vis., 2017, pp. 2980-2988 with faster inference.
Exploiting Adapters for Cross-Lingual Low-Resource Speech Recognition

Cross-lingual speech adaptation aims to solve the problem of leveraging multiple rich-resource languages to build models for a low-resource target language. Since the low-resource language has limited training data, speech recognition models can easily overfit. Adapter is a versatile module that can be plugged into Transformer for parameter-efficient learning. In this paper, we propose to use adapters for parameter-efficient cross-lingual speech adaptation. Based on our previous MetaAdapter that implicitly leverages adapters, we propose a novel algorithm called SimAdapter for explicitly learning knowledge from adapters. Our algorithms can be easily integrated into the Transformer structure. MetaAdapter leverages meta-learning to transfer the general knowledge from training data to the test language. SimAdapter aims to learn the similarities between the source and target languages during fine-tuning using the adapters. We conduct extensive experiments on five-low-resource languages in the Common Voice dataset. Results demonstrate that MetaAdapter and SimAdapter can reduce WER by 2.98% and 2.55% with only 2.5% and 15.5% of trainable parameters compared to the strong full-model fine-tuning baseline. Moreover, we show that these two novel algorithms can be integrated for better performance with up to 3.55% relative WER reduction.
Word-level emotion distribution with two schemas for short text emotion classification

Understanding word-level emotion in terms of both category and intensity has always been considered an essential step in addressing text emotion classification tasks. Existing studies have mainly adopted the categorical lexicons that are tagged by predefined emotion taxonomies to link affective words with discrete emotions. However, in these lexicons, emotion tags are restricted to a specific set of basic emotions . Moreover, the emotional intensity is ignored, making these methods less flexible and less informative. This paper proposes a novel method to generate a word-level emotion distribution (WED) vector by incorporating domain knowledge and dimensional lexicon. The proposed method can link a word with more generic and fine-grained emotion taxonomies with quantitatively computed intensities. We propose two schemas to utilize the WED vector implicitly and explicitly to facilitate classification. The implicit approach implements a rule-based conversion strategy to augment the information in the label space. The explicit approach exploits WED as an emotional word embedding to enhance the sentiment feature. We conduct extensive experiments on seven multiclass datasets. The results indicate that both proposed schemas produce competitive results compared with the state-of-the-art baselines.
Embracing New Techniques in Deep Learning for Estimating Image Memorability

Various works have suggested that the memorability of an image is consistent across people, and thus can be treated as an intrinsic property of an image. Using computer vision models, we can make specific predictions about what people will remember or forget. While older work has used now-outdated deep learning architectures rooted in shallow visual processing to predict image memorability, innovations in the field have given us new techniques to apply to this problem. Here, we propose and evaluate five alternative deep learning models which exploit developments in the field from the last 5 years, largely the introduction of residual neural networks, which are intended to allow the model to use semantic information in the memorability estimation process. These new models were tested against the prior state of the art with a combined dataset built to optimize both within-category and across-category predictions. Our findings suggest that the key prior memorability network had overstated its generalizability and was overfit on its training set. Our new models outperform this prior model, leading us to conclude that residual networks outperform simpler convolutional neural networks in memorability regression. We make our new state-of-the-art model readily available to the research community, allowing memory researchers to make predictions about memorability on a wider range of images.
Unifying the Global and Local Approaches: An Efficient Power Iteration with Forward Push

Personalized PageRank (PPR) is a critical measure of the importance of a node t to a source node s in a graph. The Single-Source PPR (SSPPR) query computes the PPR's of all the nodes with respect to s on a directed graph G with n nodes and m edges; and it is an essential operation widely used in graph applications. In this paper, we propose novel algorithms for answering two variants of SSPPR queries: (i) high-precision queries and (ii) approximate queries.
Embedding-based Product Retrieval in Taobao Search

Nowadays, the product search service of e-commerce platforms has become a vital shopping channel in people's life. The retrieval phase of products determines the search system's quality and gradually attracts researchers' attention. Retrieving the most relevant products from a large-scale corpus while preserving personalized user characteristics remains an open question. Recent approaches in this domain have mainly focused on embedding-based retrieval (EBR) systems. However, after a long period of practice on Taobao, we find that the performance of the EBR system is dramatically degraded due to its: (1) low relevance with a given query and (2) discrepancy between the training and inference phases. Therefore, we propose a novel and practical embedding-based product retrieval model, named Multi-Grained Deep Semantic Product Retrieval (MGDSPR). Specifically, we first identify the inconsistency between the training and inference stages, and then use the softmax cross-entropy loss as the training objective, which achieves better performance and faster convergence. Two efficient methods are further proposed to improve retrieval relevance, including smoothing noisy training data and generating relevance-improving hard negative samples without requiring extra knowledge and training procedures. We evaluate MGDSPR on Taobao Product Search with significant metrics gains observed in offline experiments and online A/B tests. MGDSPR has been successfully deployed to the existing multi-channel retrieval system in Taobao Search. We also introduce the online deployment scheme and share practical lessons of our retrieval system to contribute to the community.
DRANet: Disentangling Representation and Adaptation Networks for Unsupervised Cross-Domain Adaptation

In this paper, we present DRANet, a network architecture that disentangles image representations and transfers the visual attributes in a latent space for unsupervised cross-domain adaptation. Unlike the existing domain adaptation methods that learn associated features sharing a domain, DRANet preserves the distinctiveness of each domain’s characteristics. Our model encodes individual representations of content (scene structure) and style (artistic appearance) from both source and target images. Then, it adapts the domain by incorporating the transferred style factor into the content factor along with learnable weights specified for each domain. This learning framework allows bi/multi-directional domain adaptation with a single encoder-decoder network and aligns their domain shift. Additionally, we propose a content-adaptive domain transfer module that helps retain scene structure while transferring style. Extensive experiments show our model successfully separates content-style factors and synthesizes visually pleasing domain-transferred images. The proposed method demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on standard digit classification tasks as well as semantic segmentation tasks.
Multi-view Subword Regularization

Multilingual pretrained representations generally rely on subword segmentation algorithms to create a shared multilingual vocabulary.However, standard heuristic algorithms often lead to sub-optimal segmentation, especially for languages with limited amounts of data.In this paper, we take two major steps towards alleviating this problem.First, we demonstrate empirically that applying existing subword regularization methods (Kudo, 2018;Provilkov et al., 2020) during fine-tuning of pre-trained multilingual representations improves the effectiveness of cross-lingual transfer.Second, to take full advantage of different possible input segmentations, we propose Multi-view Subword Regularization (MVR), a method that enforces the consistency between predictions of using inputs tokenized by the standard and probabilistic segmentations.Results on the XTREME multilingual benchmark (Hu et al., 2020) show that MVR brings consistent improvements of up to 2.5 points over using standard segmentation algorithms. 1
Methodological orientations, academic citations, and scientific collaboration in applied linguistics: What do research synthesis and bibliometrics indicate?

Addressing meta-research is contemporaneous with a nascent call in the field of applied linguistics and L2 studies for methodological awareness. Adhering to synthetic techniques and bibliometric analysis, we manually examined and coded the methodological orientations and scientific collaboration of 3992 applied linguistics articles published in 18 leading journals from 2009 to 2018 and analyzed their citation impact. The results showed that 178 (4.5%) of articles were non-empirical and the rest were empirical. Among empirical articles, the most prevalent research approach was quantitative (42.6%), followed by mixed-methods research studies (25.9%) and qualitative studies (24.9%). Systematic reviews (2.2%) were the smallest groups. Systematic reviews had a bigger citation impact than the other three research approaches. However, there was no statistically significant difference between the number of citations of the other three approaches (i.e., quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods). The rates of collaboration in general and international collaboration and interdisciplinary collaboration in particular were significantly higher in quantitative articles than the articles of other research approaches. Education and psychology were two disciplines that had the highest rate of collaboration with applied linguistics researchers.