Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Exploring Digital Competence of Pakistani ELT Teachers during Pandemic

Covid-19 was a tumultuous and unpredictable event that forcibly relocated all educators from the conventional face-to-face phenomenon to a virtual setting. This mode of teaching necessitated a level of digital competence that goes beyond online-based knowledge and encompasses media literacy, information seeking, and critical thinking skills. It also deals with the capacity to communicate with others via digital tools and applications around the globe. The study is aimed at exploring the effect of online teaching on ELT teachers' digital competence in the Covid-19 perspective using (DigCompEdu 2017). Following pragmatism, the researcher used a mixed-method approach to collect data via questionnaires and semi-structured interviews as data collection tools. ELT Teachers at the elementary and secondary levels in Multan's FGEIS(C/G) schools were selected through purposive sampling. For statistical analysis cross-tabulation, chi-square tests, frequency tables, and bar charts whereas IPA for qualitative analysis were used. The study revealed that during the online mode of education, teachers' digital competence increased remarkably. It is suggested that all stakeholders should make substantial efforts to organize regular training and workshops, particularly to enhance ELT teachers' digital competence to meet the challenges during any emergency in future. At the official level, digital competence research should be developed, encouraged, and supported, as it will help to promote digital competence and optimize the use of technology in the classroom.
Multi-task Learning Based Spoofing-Robust Automatic Speaker Verification System

Spoofing attacks posed by generating artificial speech can severely degrade the performance of a speaker verification system. Recently, many anti-spoofing countermeasures have been proposed for detecting varying types of attacks from synthetic speech to replay presentations. While there are numerous effective defenses reported on standalone anti-spoofing solutions, the integration for speaker verification and spoofing detection systems has obvious benefits. In this paper, we propose a spoofing-robust automatic speaker verification (SR-ASV) system for diverse attacks based on a multi-task learning architecture. This deep learning based model is jointly trained with time-frequency representations from utterances to provide recognition decisions for both tasks simultaneously. Compared with other state-of-the-art systems on the ASVspoof 2017 and 2019 corpora, a substantial improvement of the combined system under different spoofing conditions can be obtained.
Empirical evaluation of full-reference image quality metrics on MDID database

In this study, our goal is to give a comprehensive evaluation of 32 state-of-the-art FR-IQA metrics using the recently published MDID. This database contains distorted images derived from a set of reference, pristine images using random types and levels of distortions. Specifically, Gaussian noise, Gaussian blur, contrast change, JPEG noise, and JPEG2000 noise were considered.
Robust and Lossless Fingerprinting of Deep Neural Networks via Pooled Membership Inference

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have already achieved great success in a lot of application areas and brought profound changes to our society. However, it also raises new security problems, among which how to protect the intellectual property (IP) of DNNs against infringement is one of the most important yet very challenging topics. To deal with this problem, recent studies focus on the IP protection of DNNs by applying digital watermarking, which embeds source information and/or authentication data into DNN models by tuning network parameters directly or indirectly. However, tuning network parameters inevitably distorts the DNN and therefore surely impairs the performance of the DNN model on its original task regardless of the degree of the performance degradation. It has motivated the authors in this paper to propose a novel technique called pooled membership inference (PMI) so as to protect the IP of the DNN models. The proposed PMI neither alters the network parameters of the given DNN model nor fine-tunes the DNN model with a sequence of carefully crafted trigger samples. Instead, it leaves the original DNN model unchanged, but can determine the ownership of the DNN model by inferring which mini-dataset among multiple mini-datasets was once used to train the target DNN model, which differs from previous arts and has remarkable potential in practice. Experiments also have demonstrated the superiority and applicability of this work.
In-situ animal behavior classification using knowledge distillation and fixed-point quantization

We explore the use of knowledge distillation (KD) for learning compact and accurate models that enable classification of animal behavior from accelerometry data on wearable devices. To this end, we take a deep and complex convolutional neural network, known as residual neural network (ResNet), as the teacher model. ResNet is specifically designed for multivariate time-series classification. We use ResNet to distill the knowledge of animal behavior classification datasets into soft labels, which consist of the predicted pseudo-probabilities of every class for each datapoint. We then use the soft labels to train our significantly less complex student models, which are based on the gated recurrent unit (GRU) and multilayer perceptron (MLP). The evaluation results using two real-world animal behavior classification datasets show that the classification accuracy of the student GRU-MLP models improves appreciably through KD, approaching that of the teacher ResNet model. To further reduce the computational and memory requirements of performing inference using the student models trained via KD, we utilize dynamic fixed-point quantization (DQ) through an appropriate modification of the computational graph of the considered models. We implement both unquantized and quantized versions of the developed KD-based models on the embedded systems of our purpose-built collar and ear tag devices to classify animal behavior in situ and in real time. Our evaluations corroborate the effectiveness of KD and DQ in improving the accuracy and efficiency of in-situ animal behavior classification.
Adapting to Non-Centered Languages for Zero-shot Multilingual Translation

Multilingual neural machine translation can translate unseen language pairs during training, i.e. zero-shot translation. However, the zero-shot translation is always unstable. Although prior works attributed the instability to the domination of central language, e.g. English, we supplement this viewpoint with the strict dependence of non-centered languages. In this work, we propose a simple, lightweight yet effective language-specific modeling method by adapting to non-centered languages and combining the shared information and the language-specific information to counteract the instability of zero-shot translation. Experiments with Transformer on IWSLT17, Europarl, TED talks, and OPUS-100 datasets show that our method not only performs better than strong baselines in centered data conditions but also can easily fit non-centered data conditions. By further investigating the layer attribution, we show that our proposed method can disentangle the coupled representation in the correct direction.
Machine Learning-based Selection of Graph Partitioning Strategy Using the Characteristics of Graph Data and Algorithm

Analyzing large graph data is an essential part of many modern applications, such as social networks. Due to its large computational complexity, distributed processing is frequently employed. This requires graph data to be divided across nodes, and the choice of partitioning strategy has a great impact on the execution time of the task. Yet, there is no one-size-fits-all partitioning strategy that performs well on arbitrary graph data and algorithms. The performance of a strategy depends on the characteristics of the graph data and algorithms. Moreover, due to the complexity of graph data and algorithms, manually identifying the best partitioning strategy is also infeasible. In this work, we propose a machine learning-based approach to select the most appropriate partitioning strategy for a given graph and processing algorithm. Our approach enumerates viable partitioning strategies, predicts the execution time of the target algorithm for each, and selects the partitioning strategy with the fastest estimated execution time. Our machine learning model is trained on features extracted from graph data and algorithm pseudo-code. We also propose a method that augments real execution logs of graph tasks to create a large synthetic dataset. Evaluation results show that the strategies selected by our approach lead to 1.46X faster execution time on average compared with the mean execution time of the partitioning strategies and about 0.95X the performance compared to the best partitioning strategy.
Post-Quantum Oblivious Transfer from Smooth Projective Hash Functions with Grey Zone

Oblivious Transfer (OT) is a major primitive for secure multiparty computation. Indeed, combined with symmetric primitives along with garbled circuits, it allows any secure function evaluation between two parties. In this paper, we propose a new approach to build OT protocols. Interestingly, our new paradigm features a security analysis in the Universal Composability (UC) framework and may be instantiated from post-quantum primitives. In order to do so, we define a new primitive named Smooth Projective Hash Function with Grey Zone (SPHFwGZ) which can be seen as a relaxation of the classical Smooth Projective Hash Functions, with a subset of the words for which one cannot claim correctness nor smoothness: the grey zone. As a concrete application, we provide two instantiations of SPHFwGZ respectively based on the Diffie-Hellman and the Learning With Errors (LWE) problems. Hence, we propose a quantum-resistant OT protocol with UC-security in the random oracle model.
Enhancing Pre-trained Models with Text Structure Knowledge for Question Generation

Today the pre-trained language models achieve great success for question generation (QG) task and significantly outperform traditional sequence-to-sequence approaches. However, the pre-trained models treat the input passage as a flat sequence and are thus not aware of the text structure of input passage. For QG task, we model text structure as answer position and syntactic dependency, and propose answer localness modeling and syntactic mask attention to address these limitations. Specially, we present localness modeling with a Gaussian bias to enable the model to focus on answer-surrounded context, and propose a mask attention mechanism to make the syntactic structure of input passage accessible in question generation process. Experiments on SQuAD dataset show that our proposed two modules improve performance over the strong pre-trained model ProphetNet, and combing them together achieves very competitive results with the state-of-the-art pre-trained model.
Deriving dynamical systems for language based on the Tolerance Principle

In this research note, I derive explicit dynamical systems for language within an acquisition-driven framework (Niyogi \& Berwick, 1997; Niyogi, 2006) assuming that children/learners follow the Tolerance Principle (Yang, 2016) to determine whether a rule is productive during the process of language acquisition. I consider different theoretical parameters such as population size (finite vs. infinite) and the number of previous generations that provide learners with data. Multiple simulations of the dynamics obtained here and applications to diacrhonic language data are in preparation, so they are not included in this first note.
SUPER-Rec: SUrrounding Position-Enhanced Representation for Recommendation

Collaborative filtering problems are commonly solved based on matrix completion techniques which recover the missing values of user-item interaction matrices. In a matrix, the rating position specifically represents the user given and the item rated. Previous matrix completion techniques tend to neglect the position of each element (user, item and ratings) in the matrix but mainly focus on semantic similarity between users and items to predict the missing value in a matrix. This paper proposes a novel position-enhanced user/item representation training model for recommendation, SUPER-Rec. We first capture the rating position in the matrix using the relative positional rating encoding and store the position-enhanced rating information and its user-item relationship to the fixed dimension of embedding that is not affected by the matrix size. Then, we apply the trained position-enhanced user and item representations to the simplest traditional machine learning models to highlight the pure novelty of our representation learning model. We contribute the first formal introduction and quantitative analysis of position-enhanced item representation in the recommendation domain and produce a principled discussion about our SUPER-Rec to the outperformed performance of typical collaborative filtering recommendation tasks with both explicit and implicit feedback.
Self-supervised Learning for Heterogeneous Graph via Structure Information based on Metapath

graph neural networks (GNNs) are the dominant paradigm for modeling and handling graph structure data by learning universal node representation. The traditional way of training GNNs depends on a great many labeled data, which results in high requirements on cost and time. In some special scene, it is even unavailable and impracticable. Self-supervised representation learning, which can generate labels by graph structure data itself, is a potential approach to tackle this problem. And turning to research on self-supervised learning problem for heterogeneous graphs is more challenging than dealing with homogeneous graphs, also there are fewer studies about it. In this paper, we propose a SElfsupervised learning method for heterogeneous graph via Structure Information based on Metapath (SESIM). The proposed model can construct pretext tasks by predicting jump number between nodes in each metapath to improve the representation ability of primary task. In order to predict jump number, SESIM uses data itself to generate labels, avoiding time-consuming manual labeling. Moreover, predicting jump number in each metapath can effectively utilize graph structure information, which is the essential property between nodes. Therefore, SESIM deepens the understanding of models for graph structure. At last, we train primary task and pretext tasks jointly, and use meta-learning to balance the contribution of pretext tasks for primary task. Empirical results validate the performance of SESIM method and demonstrate that this method can improve the representation ability of traditional neural networks on link prediction task and node classification task.
Pathology Synthesis of 3D-Consistent Cardiac MR Images using 2D VAEs and GANs

We propose a method for synthesizing cardiac magnetic resonance (MR) images with plausible heart pathologies and realistic appearances for the purpose of generating labeled data for the application of supervised deep-learning (DL) training. The image synthesis consists of label deformation and label-to-image translation tasks. The former is achieved via latent space interpolation in a VAE model, while the latter is accomplished via a label-conditional GAN model. We devise three approaches for label manipulation in the latent space of the trained VAE model; i) \textbf{intra-subject synthesis} aiming to interpolate the intermediate slices of a subject to increase the through-plane resolution, ii) \textbf{inter-subject synthesis} aiming to interpolate the geometry and appearance of intermediate images between two dissimilar subjects acquired with different scanner vendors, and iii) \textbf{pathology synthesis} aiming to synthesize a series of pseudo-pathological synthetic subjects with characteristics of a desired heart disease. Furthermore, we propose to model the relationship between 2D slices in the latent space of the VAE prior to reconstruction for generating 3D-consistent subjects from stacking up 2D slice-by-slice generations. We demonstrate that such an approach could provide a solution to diversify and enrich an available database of cardiac MR images and to pave the way for the development of generalizable DL-based image analysis algorithms. We quantitatively evaluate the quality of the synthesized data in an augmentation scenario to achieve generalization and robustness to multi-vendor and multi-disease data for image segmentation. Our code is available at https://github.com/sinaamirrajab/CardiacPathologySynthesis.
100 Gbps Integrated Quantum Random Number Generator Based on Vacuum Fluctuations

Emerging communication and cryptography applications call for reliable, fast, unpredictable random number generators. Quantum random number generation (QRNG) allows for the creation of truly unpredictable numbers thanks to the inherent randomness available in quantum mechanics. A popular approach is using the quantum vacuum state to generate random numbers. While convenient, this approach was generally limited in speed compared to other schemes. Here, through custom co-design of opto-electronic integrated circuits and side-information reduction by digital filtering, we experimentally demonstrated an ultrafast generation rate of 100 Gbps, setting a new record for vacuum-based quantum random number generation by one order of magnitude. Furthermore, our experimental demonstrations are well supported by an upgraded device-dependent framework that is secure against both classical and quantum side-information and that also properly considers the non-linearity in the digitization process. This ultrafast secure random number generator in the chip-scale platform holds promise for next generation communication and cryptography applications.
Pre-training image-language transformers for open-vocabulary tasks

We present a pre-training approach for vision and language transformer models, which is based on a mixture of diverse tasks. We explore both the use of image-text captioning data in pre-training, which does not need additional supervision, as well as object-aware strategies to pre-train the model. We evaluate the method on a number of textgenerative vision+language tasks, such as Visual Question Answering, visual entailment and captioning, and demonstrate large gains over standard pre-training methods.
SC-Square: Overview to 2021

This extended abstract was written to accompany an invited talk at the 2021 SC-Square Workshop, where the author was asked to give an overview of SC-Square progress to date. The author first reminds the reader of the definition of SC-Square, then briefly outlines some of the history, before picking out some (personal) scientific highlights.
Longitudinal Acoustic Speech Tracking Following Pediatric Traumatic Brain Injury

Recommendations for common outcome measures following pediatric traumatic brain injury (TBI) support the integration of instrumental measurements alongside perceptual assessment in recovery and treatment plans. A comprehensive set of sensitive, robust and non-invasive measurements is therefore essential in assessing variations in speech characteristics over time following pediatric TBI. In this article, we study the changes in the acoustic speech patterns of a pediatric cohort of ten subjects diagnosed with severe TBI. We extract a diverse set of both well-known and novel acoustic features from child speech recorded throughout the year after the child produced intelligible words. These features are analyzed individually and by speech subsystem, within-subject and across the cohort. As a group, older children exhibit highly significant (p<0.01) increases in pitch variation and phoneme diversity, shortened pause length, and steadying articulation rate variability. Younger children exhibit similar steadied rate variability alongside an increase in formant-based articulation complexity. Correlation analysis of the feature set with age and comparisons to normative developmental data confirm that age at injury plays a significant role in framing the recovery trajectory. Nearly all speech features significantly change (p<0.05) for the cohort as a whole, confirming that acoustic measures supplementing perceptual assessment are needed to identify efficacious treatment targets for speech therapy following TBI.
Covid-19 Vaccination Classification of Opinion Mining with Semantic Knowledge-based Decision Making

The Covid-19 ontology is to classify the data using a supervised learning approach in machine learning, which has been preprocessed. Afterthe classification is done, with thehelp of opinion mining with decisionmaking, the classified data is stored in the database using semantic webontology using the protégé tool. The data will be retrieved through SPARQL which helps to retrieve complex queries, followed by the output based on the given query. This Covid-19 ontology helps in analyzing the risk factors and treatment plans for the respective individuals i.e., students based on their given details which include diagnosis, symptoms, and vaccination history. The information given by the students can be automatically processed and with the help of SWRL (Semantic Web Rule Language), the risk factor and treatment plans for the students are inferred from the given knowledge.
Similarity Search for Efficient Active Learning and Search of Rare Concepts

Many active learning and search approaches are intractable for large-scale industrial settings with billions of unlabeled examples. Existing approaches search globally for the optimal examples to label, scaling linearly or even quadratically with the unlabeled data. In this paper, we improve the computational efficiency of active learning and search methods by restricting the candidate pool for labeling to the nearest neighbors of the currently labeled set instead of scanning over all of the unlabeled data. We evaluate several selection strategies in this setting on three large-scale computer vision datasets: ImageNet, OpenImages, and a de-identified and aggregated dataset of 10 billion images provided by a large internet company. Our approach achieved similar mean average precision and recall as the traditional global approach while reducing the computational cost of selection by up to three orders of magnitude, thus enabling web-scale active learning.
Visual Grounding Strategies for Text-Only Natural Language Processing

Visual grounding is a promising path toward more robust and accurate Natural Language Processing (NLP) models. Many multimodal extensions of BERT (e.g., VideoBERT, LXMERT, VL-BERT) allow a joint modeling of texts and images that lead to state-of-the-art results on multimodal tasks such as Visual Question Answering. Here, we leverage multimodal modeling for purely textual tasks (language modeling and classification) with the expectation that the multimodal pretraining provides a grounding that can improve text processing accuracy. We propose possible strategies in this respect. A first type of strategy, referred to as {\it transferred grounding} consists in applying multimodal models to text-only tasks using a placeholder to replace image input. The second one, which we call {\it associative grounding}, harnesses image retrieval to match texts with related images during both pretraining and text-only downstream tasks. We draw further distinctions into both strategies and then compare them according to their impact on language modeling and commonsense-related downstream tasks, showing improvement over text-only baselines.