Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Category-Aware Spatial Constraint for Weakly Supervised Detection

Weakly supervised object detection has attracted increasing research attention recently. To this end, most existing schemes rely on scoring category-independent region proposals, which is formulated as a multiple instance learning problem. During this process, the proposal scores are aggregated and supervised by only image-level labels, which often fails to locate object boundaries precisely. In this paper, we break through such a restriction by taking a deeper look into the score aggregation stage and propose a Category-aware Spatial Constraint (CSC) scheme for proposals, which is integrated into weakly supervised object detection in an end-to-end learning manner. In particular, we incorporate the global shape information of objects as an unsupervised constraint, which is inferred from build-in foreground-and-background cues, termed Category-specific Pixel Gradient (CPG) maps. Specifically, each region proposal is weighted according to how well it covers the estimated shape of objects. For each category, a multi-center regularization is further introduced to penalize the violations between centers cluster and high-score proposals in a given image. Extensive experiments are done on the most widely-used benchmark Pascal VOC and COCO, which shows that our approach significantly improves weakly supervised object detection without adding new learnable parameters to the existing models nor changing the structures of CNNs.
Modular network for high-rate quantum conferencing

Abstract One of the main open problems in quantum communication is the design of efficient quantum-secured networks. This is a challenging goal, because it requires protocols that guarantee both unconditional security and high communication rates, while increasing the number of users. In this scenario, continuous-variable systems provide an ideal platform where high rates can be achieved by using off-the-shelf optical components. At the same time, the measurement-device independent architecture is also appealing for its feature of removing a substantial portion of practical weaknesses. Driven by these ideas, here we introduce a modular design of continuous-variable network where each individual module is a measurement-device-independent star network. In each module, the users send modulated coherent states to an untrusted relay, creating multipartite secret correlations via a generalized Bell detection. Using one-time pad between different modules, the network users may share a quantum-secure conference key over arbitrary distances at constant rate.
Reduction of qubits in a quantum algorithm for Monte Carlo simulation by a pseudo-random-number generator

It is known that quantum computers can speed up Monte Carlo simulation compared to classical counterparts. There are already some proposals of application of the quantum algorithm to practical problems, including quantitative finance. In many problems in finance to which Monte Carlo simulation is applied, many random numbers are required to obtain one sample value of the integrand, since those problems are extremely high-dimensional integrations, for example, risk measurement of credit portfolio. This leads to the situation that the required qubit number is too large in the naive implementation where a quantum register is allocated per random number. In this paper, we point out that we can reduce qubits keeping quantum speed up if we perform calculation similar to classical one, that is, estimate the average of integrand values sampled by a pseudo-random number generator (PRNG) implemented on a quantum circuit. We present not only the overview of the idea but also concrete implementation of PRNG and application to credit risk measurement. Actually, reduction of qubits is a trade-off against increase of circuit depth. Therefore full reduction might be impractical, but such a trade-off between speed and memory space will be important in adjustment of calculation setting considering machine specs, if large-scale Monte Carlo simulation by quantum computer is in operation in the future.
A Unified Framework for Generalizable Style Transfer: Style and Content Separation

Image style transfer has drawn broad attention recently. However, most existing methods aim to explicitly model the transformation between different styles, and the learned model is often not generalizable to new styles. Based on the idea of style and content separation, we here propose a unified style transfer framework that consists of style encoder, content encoder, mixer and decoder. The style encoder and the content encoder are used to extract the style and content representations from the corresponding reference images. The two representations are integrated by the mixer and fed to the decoder, which generates images with the target style and content. Assuming the same encoder could be shared among different styles/contents, the style/content encoder explores a generalizable way to represent style/content information, i.e. the encoders are expected to capture the underlying representation for different styles/contents and generalize to new styles/contents. Training simultaneously with a number of styles and contents, the framework enables building one single transfer network for multiple styles and further leads to a key merit of the framework, i.e. its generalizability to new styles and contents. To evaluate the proposed framework, we apply it to both supervised and unsupervised style transfer, using character typeface transfer and neural style transfer as respective examples. For character typeface transfer, to separate the style features and content features, we leverage the conditional dependence of styles and contents given an image. For neural style transfer, we leverage the statistical information of feature maps in certain layers to represent style. Extensive experimental results have demonstrated the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed methods. Furthermore, models learned under the proposed framework are shown to be better generalizable to new styles and contents.
Developing a photonic hardware platform for brain-inspired computing based on 5 × 5 VCSEL arrays

Brain-inspired computing concepts like artificial neural networks have become promising alternatives to classical von Neumann computer architectures. Photonic neural networks target the realizations of neurons, network connections and potentially learning in photonic substrates. Here, we report the development of a nanophotonic hardware platform of fast and energy-efficient photonic neurons via arrays of high-quality vertical cavity surface emitting lasers (VCSELs). The developed $5\times5$ VCSEL arrays provide high optical injection locking efficiency through homogeneous fabrication combined with individual control over the laser wavelengths. Injection locking is crucial for the reliable processing of information in VCSEL-based photonic neurons, and we demonstrate the suitability of the VCSEL arrays by injection locking measurements and current-induced spectral fine-tuning. We find that our investigated array can readily be tuned to the required spectral homogeneity, and as such show that VCSEL arrays based on our technology can act as highly energy efficient and ultra-fast photonic neurons for next generation photonic neural networks. Combined with fully parallel photonic networks our substrates are promising for ultra-fast operation reaching 10s of GHz bandwidths, and we show that a nonlinear transformation based on our lasers will consume only about 100 fJ per VCSEL, which is highly competitive, compared to other platforms.
Some SonarQube issues have a significant but small effect on faults and changes. A large-scale empirical study

Context. Companies commonly invest effort to remove technical issues believed to impact software qualities, such as removing anti-patterns or coding styles violations. Objective. Our aim is to analyze the diffuseness of Technical Debt (TD) items in software systems and to assess their impact on code changes and fault-proneness, considering also the type of TD items and their severity. Method. We conducted a case study among 33 Java projects from the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) repository. We analyzed 726 commits containing 27K faults and 12M changes. The projects violated 173 SonarQube rules generating more than 95K TD items in more than 200K classes. Results. Clean classes (classes not affected by TD items) are less change-prone than dirty ones, but the difference between the groups is small. Clean classes are slightly more change-prone than classes affected by TD items of type Code Smell or Security Vulnerability. As for fault-proneness, there is no difference between clean and dirty classes. Moreover, we found a lot of incongruities in the type and severity level assigned by SonarQube. Conclusions. Our result can be useful for practitioners to understand which TD items they should refactor and for researchers to bridge the missing gaps. They can also support companies and tool vendors in identifying TD items as accurately as possible.
On the feasibility of automated prediction of bug and non-bug issues

Abstract Context Issue tracking systems are used to track and describe tasks in the development process, e.g., requested feature improvements or reported bugs. However, past research has shown that the reported issue types often do not match the description of the issue. Objective We want to understand the overall maturity of the state of the art of issue type prediction with the goal to predict if issues are bugs and evaluate if we can improve existing models by incorporating manually specified knowledge about issues. Method We train different models for the title and description of the issue to account for the difference in structure between these fields, e.g., the length. Moreover, we manually detect issues whose description contains a null pointer exception, as these are strong indicators that issues are bugs. Results Our approach performs best overall, but not significantly different from an approach from the literature based on the fastText classifier from Facebook AI Research. The small improvements in prediction performance are due to structural information about the issues we used. We found that using information about the content of issues in form of null pointer exceptions is not useful. We demonstrate the usefulness of issue type prediction through the example of labelling bugfixing commits. Conclusions Issue type prediction can be a useful tool if the use case allows either for a certain amount of missed bug reports or the prediction of too many issues as bug is acceptable.
Incremental Unsupervised Domain-Adversarial Training of Neural Networks

In the context of supervised statistical learning, it is typically assumed that the training set comes from the same distribution that draws the test samples. When this is not the case, the behavior of the learned model is unpredictable and becomes dependent upon the degree of similarity between the distribution of the training set and the distribution of the test set. One of the research topics that investigates this scenario is referred to as domain adaptation (DA). Deep neural networks brought dramatic advances in pattern recognition and that is why there have been many attempts to provide good DA algorithms for these models. Herein we take a different avenue and approach the problem from an incremental point of view, where the model is adapted to the new domain iteratively. We make use of an existing unsupervised domain-adaptation algorithm to identify the target samples on which there is greater confidence about their true label. The output of the model is analyzed in different ways to determine the candidate samples. The selected samples are then added to the source training set by self-labeling, and the process is repeated until all target samples are labeled. This approach implements a form of adversarial training in which, by moving the self-labeled samples from the target to the source set, the DA algorithm is forced to look for new features after each iteration. Our results report a clear improvement with respect to the non-incremental case in several data sets, also outperforming other state-of-the-art DA algorithms.
Self-Supervised Contrastive Video-Speech Representation Learning for Ultrasound

In medical imaging, manual annotations can be expensive to acquire and sometimes infeasible to access, making conventional deep learning-based models difficult to scale. As a result, it would be beneficial if useful representations could be derived from raw data without the need for manual annotations. In this paper, we propose to address the problem of self-supervised representation learning with multi-modal ultrasound video-speech raw data. For this case, we assume that there is a high correlation between the ultrasound video and the corresponding narrative speech audio of the sonographer. In order to learn meaningful representations, the model needs to identify such correlation and at the same time understand the underlying anatomical features. We designed a framework to model the correspondence between video and audio without any kind of human annotations. Within this framework, we introduce cross-modal contrastive learning and an affinity-aware self-paced learning scheme to enhance correlation modelling. Experimental evaluations on multi-modal fetal ultrasound video and audio show that the proposed approach is able to learn strong representations and transfers well to downstream tasks of standard plane detection and eye-gaze prediction.
Lexicase selection in learning classifier systems

The lexicase parent selection method selects parents by considering performance on individual data points in random order instead of using a fitness function based on an aggregated data accuracy. While the method has demonstrated promise in genetic programming and more recently in genetic algorithms, its applications in other forms of evolutionary machine learning have not been explored. In this paper, we investigate the use of lexicase parent selection in Learning Classifier Systems (LCS) and study its effect on classification problems in a supervised setting. We further introduce a new variant of lexicase selection, called batch-lexicase selection, which allows for the tuning of selection pressure. We compare the two lexicase selection methods with tournament and fitness proportionate selection methods on binary classification problems. We show that batch-lexicase selection results in the creation of more generic rules which is favorable for generalization on future data. We further show that batch-lexicase selection results in better generalization in situations of partial or missing data.
Entangled coherent states created by mixing squeezed vacuum and coherent light

Entangled coherent states are shown to emerge, with high fidelity, when mixing coherent and squeezed vacuum states of light on a beam-splitter.These maximally entangled states, where photons bunch at the exit of a beam-splitter, are measured experimentally by Fock-state projections.Entanglement is examined theoretically using a Bell-type nonlocality test and compared with ideal entangled coherent states.We experimentally show nearly perfect similarity with entangled coherent states for an optimal ratio of coherent and squeezed vacuum light.In our scheme, entangled coherent states are generated deterministically with small amplitudes, which could be beneficial, for example, in deterministic distribution of entanglement over long distances.
Scalable Importance Tempering and Bayesian Variable Selection

Summary We propose a Monte Carlo algorithm to sample from high dimensional probability distributions that combines Markov chain Monte Carlo and importance sampling. We provide a careful theoretical analysis, including guarantees on robustness to high dimensionality, explicit comparison with standard Markov chain Monte Carlo methods and illustrations of the potential improvements in efficiency. Simple and concrete intuition is provided for when the novel scheme is expected to outperform standard schemes. When applied to Bayesian variable-selection problems, the novel algorithm is orders of magnitude more efficient than available alternative sampling schemes and enables fast and reliable fully Bayesian inferences with tens of thousand regressors.
Multi-Pooled Inception Features for No-Reference Image Quality Assessment

Image quality assessment (IQA) is an important element of a broad spectrum of applications ranging from automatic video streaming to display technology. Furthermore, the measurement of image quality requires a balanced investigation of image content and features. Our proposed approach extracts visual features by attaching global average pooling (GAP) layers to multiple Inception modules of on an ImageNet database pretrained convolutional neural network (CNN). In contrast to previous methods, we do not take patches from the input image. Instead, the input image is treated as a whole and is run through a pretrained CNN body to extract resolution-independent, multi-level deep features. As a consequence, our method can be easily generalized to any input image size and pretrained CNNs. Thus, we present a detailed parameter study with respect to the CNN base architectures and the effectiveness of different deep features. We demonstrate that our best proposal—called MultiGAP-NRIQA—is able to outperform the state-of-the-art on three benchmark IQA databases. Furthermore, these results were also confirmed in a cross database test using the LIVE In the Wild Image Quality Challenge database.
DDet: Dual-Path Dynamic Enhancement Network for Real-World Image Super-Resolution

Different from traditional image super-resolution task, real image super-resolution(Real-SR) focus on the relationship between real-world high-resolution(HR) and low-resolution(LR) image. Most of the traditional image SR obtains the LR sample by applying a fixed down-sampling operator. Real-SR obtains the LR and HR image pair by incorporating different quality optical sensors. Generally, Real-SR has more challenges as well as broader application scenarios. Previous image SR methods fail to exhibit similar performance on Real-SR as the image data is not aligned inherently. In this article, we propose a Dual-path Dynamic Enhancement Network(DDet) for Real-SR, which addresses the cross-camera image mapping by realizing a dual-way dynamic sub-pixel weighted aggregation and refinement. Unlike conventional methods which stack up massive convolutional blocks for feature representation, we introduce a content-aware framework to study non-inherently aligned image pair in image SR issue. First, we use a content-adaptive component to exhibit the Multi-scale Dynamic Attention(MDA). Second, we incorporate a long-term skip connection with a Coupled Detail Manipulation(CDM) to perform collaborative compensation and manipulation. The above dual-path model is joint into a unified model and works collaboratively. Extensive experiments on the challenging benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our model.
Online Ensemble Model Compression Using Knowledge Distillation

This paper presents a novel knowledge distillation based model compression framework consisting of a student ensemble. It enables distillation of simultaneously learnt ensemble knowledge onto each of the compressed student models. Each model learns unique representations from the data distribution due to its distinct architecture. This helps the ensemble generalize better by combining every model's knowledge. The distilled students and ensemble teacher are trained simultaneously without requiring any pretrained weights. Moreover, our proposed method can deliver multi-compressed students with single training, which is efficient and flexible for different scenarios. We provide comprehensive experiments using state-of-the-art classification models to validate our framework's effectiveness. Notably, using our framework a 97% compressed ResNet110 student model managed to produce a 10.64% relative accuracy gain over its individual baseline training on CIFAR100 dataset. Similarly a 95% compressed DenseNet-BC(k=12) model managed a 8.17% relative accuracy gain.
Automatic Deep Learning Semantic Segmentation of Ultrasound Thyroid Cineclips Using Recurrent Fully Convolutional Networks

Medical segmentation is an important but challenging task with applications in standardized report generation, remote medicine and reducing medical exam costs by assisting experts. In this paper, we exploit time sequence information using a novel spatio-temporal recurrent deep learning network to automatically segment the thyroid gland in ultrasound cineclips. We train a DeepLabv3+ based convolutional LSTM model in four stages to perform semantic segmentation by exploiting spatial context from ultrasound cineclips. The backbone DeepLabv3+ model is replicated six times and the output layers are replaced with convolutional LSTM layers in an atrous spatial pyramid pooling configuration. Our proposed model achieves mean intersection over union scores of 0.427 for cysts, 0.533 for nodules and 0.739 for thyroid. We demonstrate the potential application of convolutional LSTM models for thyroid ultrasound segmentation.
Creating and concentrating quantum resource states in noisy environments using a quantum neural network

Quantum information processing tasks require exotic quantum states as a prerequisite. They are usually prepared with many different methods tailored to the specific resource state. Here we provide a versatile unified state preparation scheme based on a driven quantum network composed of randomly-coupled fermionic nodes. The output of such a system is then superposed with the help of linear mixing where weights and phases are trained in order to obtain desired output quantum states. We explicitly show that our method is robust and can be utilized to create almost perfect maximally entangled, NOON, W, cluster, and discorded states. Furthermore, the treatment includes energy decay in the system as well as dephasing and depolarization. Under these noisy conditions we show that the target states are achieved with high fidelity by tuning controllable parameters and providing sufficient strength to the driving of the quantum network. Finally, in very noisy systems, where noise is comparable to the driving strength, we show how to concentrate entanglement by mixing more states in a larger network.
A new image encryption algorithm based on the OF-LSTMS and chaotic sequences

Abstract In this paper, a novel image encryption algorithm based on the Once Forward Long Short Term Memory Structure (OF-LSTMS) and the Two-Dimensional Coupled Map Lattice (2DCML) fractional-order chaotic system is proposed. The original image is divided into several image blocks, each of which is input into the OF-LSTMS as a pixel sub-sequence. According to the chaotic sequences generated by the 2DCML fractional-order chaotic system, the parameters of the input gate, output gate and memory unit of the OF-LSTMS are initialized, and the pixel positions are changed at the same time of changing the pixel values, achieving the synchronization of permutation and diffusion operations, which greatly improves the efficiency of image encryption and reduces the time consumption. In addition the 2DCML fractional-order chaotic system has better chaotic ergodicity and the values of chaotic sequences are larger than the traditional chaotic system. Therefore, it is very suitable to image encryption. Many simulation results show that the proposed scheme has higher security and efficiency comparing with previous schemes.