Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
An Improved Chaos Sparrow Search Optimization Algorithm Using Adaptive Weight Modification and Hybrid Strategies

Sparrow Search Algorithm (SSA) is a kind of novel swarm intelligence algorithm, which has been applied in-to various domains because of its unique characteristics, such as strong global search capability, few adjustable parameters, and a clear structure.However, the SSA still has some inherent weaknesses that hinder its further development, such as poor population diversity, weak local searchability, and falling into local optimal easily.This manuscript proposes an improved chaos sparrow search optimization algorithm (ICSSOA) to overcome the mentioned shortcomings of the standard SSA.Firstly, the Cubic chaos mapping is introduced to increase the population diversity in the initialization stage.Then, an adaptive weight is employed to automatically adjust the search step for balancing the global search performance and the local search capability in different phases.Finally, a hybrid strategy of Levy flight and reverse learning is presented to perturb the position of individuals in the population according to the random strategy, and a greedy strategy is utilized to select individuals with higher fitness values to decrease the possibility of falling into the local optimum.The experiments are divided into two modules.The former investigates the performance of the proposed approach through 20 benchmark functions optimization using the ICSSOA, standard SSA, and other four SSA variants.In the latter experiment, the selected 20 functions are also optimized by the ICSSOA and other classic swarm intelligence algorithms, namely ACO, PSO, GWO, and WOA.Experimental results and corresponding statistical analysis revealed that only one function optimization test using the ICSSOA was slightly lower than the CSSOA and the WOA among the 20-function optimization.In most cases, both the solution accuracy and convergence speed are higher than other algorithms.It further indicates that the ICSSOA has an outstanding ability to jump out of the local optimum.
Acceptance of augmented reality in video conference based learning during COVID-19 pandemic in higher education

Three years after the COVID-19 pandemic emerged, we have adapted to the new normal, especially in the education field. Learning with video conferences has become our daily activity, and learning tools have gotten more prominent attention to gain student engagement, especially in emergency remote teaching (ERT). Since the trends of metaverse campaigns by meta, augmented reality (AR) has increased recognition in education contexts. However, very little research about the acceptance of augmented reality in video conferences, especially among university students. This paper aims to measure acceptance of AR in video conferences to motivate and inspire students to gain benefits and get impactful technology in the learning process. The research gathered data from a survey of 170 university students (from 5 majors in the study program and 17 different demographic areas) using unified theory of acceptance of technology 2 (UTAUT2). The result reveals that variables significantly impact acceptance: performance expectancy, hedonic motivation, and habit. The least significant but still positive effects are effort expectancy, social influence, and facilitating conditions. The study will provide helpful information on AR technology in video conferences and help top-level management in the university that provides online/distance learning in the early diffusion stage for metaverse in education.
PFEMed: Few-shot medical image classification using prior guided feature enhancement

• A novel dual-encoder architecture is introduced to extract feature representation. • To our knowledge, we are the first to investigate the proposed VAE model. • We present a novel method to initialize the priors estimated in the VAE module. • Proposed approach will help medical industry utilize knowledge from public datasets. Deep learning-based methods have recently demonstrated outstanding performance on general image classification tasks. As optimization of these methods is dependent on a large amount of labeled data, their application in medical image classification is limited. To address this issue, we propose PFEMed, a novel few-shot classification method for medical images. To extract general and specific features from medical images, this method employs a dual-encoder structure, that is, one encoder with fixed weights pre-trained on public image classification datasets and another encoder trained on the target medical dataset. In addition, we introduce a novel prior-guided Variational Autoencoder (VAE) module to enhance the robustness of the target feature, which is the concatenation of the general and specific features. Then, we match the target features extracted from both the support and query medical image samples and predict the category attribution of the query examples. Extensive experiments on several publicly available medical image datasets show that our method outperforms current state-of-the-art few-shot methods by a wide margin, particularly outperforming MetaMed on the Pap smear dataset by over 2.63%.
PToPI: A Comprehensive Review, Analysis, and Knowledge Representation of Binary Classification Performance Measures/Metrics

Although few performance evaluation instruments have been used conventionally in different machine learning-based classification problem domains, there are numerous ones defined in the literature. This study reviews and describes performance instruments via formally defined novel concepts and clarifies the terminology. The study first highlights the issues in performance evaluation via a survey of 78 mobile-malware classification studies and reviews terminology. Based on three research questions, it proposes novel concepts to identify characteristics, similarities, and differences of instruments that are categorized into 'performance measures' and 'performance metrics' in the classification context for the first time. The concepts reflecting the intrinsic properties of instruments such as canonical form, geometry, duality, complementation, dependency, and leveling, aim to reveal similarities and differences of numerous instruments, such as redundancy and ground-truth versus prediction focuses. As an application of knowledge representation, we introduced a new exploratory table called PToPI (Periodic Table of Performance Instruments) for 29 measures and 28 metrics (69 instruments including variant and parametric ones). Visualizing proposed concepts, PToPI provides a new relational structure for the instruments including graphical, probabilistic, and entropic ones to see their properties and dependencies all in one place. Applications of the exploratory table in six examples from different domains in the literature have shown that PToPI aids overall instrument analysis and selection of the proper performance metrics according to the specific requirements of a classification problem. We expect that the proposed concepts and PToPI will help researchers comprehend and use the instruments and follow a systematic approach to classification performance evaluation and publication.
Learning user sentiment orientation in social networks for sentiment analysis

Sentiment analysis on social networks mines users' opinions, emotions, and attitudes to derive useful insights into community opinions and can improve the sales strategies of e-commerce platforms. Existing sentiment analysis methods are primarily based on complex user social relations and text data. However, they only use social relations among users and ignore the interactions of user sentiment orientation. In this paper, we designed a novel USON model to learn user sentiment orientation in social networks that fuses the interaction of users and their opinions. We define the score of the user sentiment orientation according to the sentiment polarity distribution of the opinion datasets. Then, we rebuilt a user social network, which is an attribute network with scores of user sentiment orientation as node attributes and social relations as edges. Finally, we integrated user representations with opinion representations for sentiment analysis. Experimental results on Amazon and Yelp show that the performance of our proposed model is significantly higher than that of state-of-the-art methods.
Information and Communication Technologies Combined with Mixed Reality as Supporting Tools in Medical Education

The dynamic COVID-19 pandemic has destabilized education and forced academic centers to explore non-traditional teaching modalities. A key challenge this creates is in reconciling the fact that hands-on time in lab settings has been shown to increase student understanding and peak their interests. Traditional visualization methods are already limited and topics such as 3D molecular structures remain difficult to understand. This is where advances in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), including remote meetings, Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), Mixed Reality (MR), and Extended Reality (XR, so-called Metaverse) offer vast potential to revolutionize the education landscape. Specifically, how MR merges real and virtual life in a uniquely promising way and offers opportunities for entirely new educational applications. In this paper, we briefly overview and report our initial experience using MR to teach medical and pharmacy students. We also explore the future usefulness of MR in pharmacy education. MR mimics real-world experiences both in distance education and traditional laboratory classes. We also propose ICT-based systems designed to run on the Microsoft HoloLens2 MR goggles and can be successfully applied in medical and pharmacy coursework. The models were developed and implemented in Autodesk Maya and exported to Unity. Our findings demonstrate that MR-based solutions can be an excellent alternative to traditional classes, notably in medicine, anatomy, organic chemistry, and biochemistry (especially 3D molecular structures), in both remote and traditional in-person teaching modalities. MR therefore has the potential to become an integral part of medical education in both remote learning and in-person study.
Learning Where to Learn in Cross-View Self-Supervised Learning

Self-supervised learning (SSL) has made enormous progress and largely narrowed the gap with the supervised ones, where the representation learning is mainly guided by a projection into an embedding space. During the projection, current methods simply adopt uniform aggregation of pixels for embedding; however, this risks involving object-irrelevant nuisances and spatial misalignment for different augmentations. In this paper, we present a new approach, Learning Where to Learn (LEWEL), to adaptively aggregate spatial information of features, so that the projected embeddings could be exactly aligned and thus guide the feature learning better. Concretely, we reinterpret the projection head in SSL as a per-pixel projection and predict a set of spatial alignment maps from the original features by this weight-sharing projection head. A spectrum of aligned embeddings is thus obtained by aggregating the features with spatial weighting according to these alignment maps. As a result of this adaptive alignment, we observe substantial improvements on both image-level prediction and dense prediction at the same time: LEWEL improves MoCov2 [15] by 1.6%/1.3%/0.5%/0.4% points, improves BYOL [14] by 1.3%/1.3%/0.7%/0.6% points, on ImageNet linear/semi-supervised classification, Pascal VOC semantic segmentation, and object detection, respectively. <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">†</sup> <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">†</sup> Code: https://t.1y/ZI0A.
Active Learning for Open-set Annotation

Existing active learning studies typically work in the closed-set setting by assuming that all data examples to be labeled are drawn from known classes. However, in real annotation tasks, the unlabeled data usually contains a large amount of examples from unknown classes, resulting in the failure of most active learning methods. To tackle this open-set annotation (OSA) problem, we propose a new active learning framework called LfOSA, which boosts the classification performance with an effective sampling strategy to precisely detect examples from known classes for annotation. The LfOSA framework introduces an auxiliary network to model the perexample max activation value (MAV) distribution with a Gaussian Mixture Model, which can dynamically select the examples with highest probability from known classes in the unlabeled set. Moreover, by reducing the temperature T of the loss function, the detection model will be further optimized by exploiting both known and unknown supervision. The experimental results show that the proposed method can significantly improve the selection quality of known classes, and achieve higher classification accuracy with lower annotation cost than state-of-the-art active learning methods. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work of active learning for open-set annotation.
ISDNet: Integrating Shallow and Deep Networks for Efficient Ultra-high Resolution Segmentation

The huge burden of computation and memory are two obstacles in ultra-high resolution image segmentation. To tackle these issues, most of the previous works follow the global-local refinement pipeline, which pays more attention to the memory consumption but neglects the inference speed. In comparison to the pipeline that partitions the large image into small local regions, we focus on inferring the whole image directly. In this paper, we propose ISDNet, a novel ultra-high resolution segmentation framework that integrates the shallow and deep networks in a new manner, which significantly accelerates the inference speed while achieving accurate segmentation. To further exploit the relationship between the shallow and deep features, we propose a novel Relational-Aware feature Fusion module, which ensures high performance and robustness of our framework. Extensive experiments on Deepglobe, Inria Aerial, and Cityscapes datasets demonstrate our performance is consistently superior to state-of-the-arts. Specifically, it achieves 73.30 mIoU with a speed of 27.70 FPS on Deepglobe, which is more accurate and 172 × faster than the recent competitor. Code available at https://github.com/cedricgsh/ISDNet.
Design of two dimensional hyperchaotic system through optimization benchmark function

The hyperchaotic systems are essentially needed for various applications, especially multimedia encryption, watermarking and communications. However, existing chaotic systems have limited chaotic performance in terms of precise chaos measuring tools like bifurcation and attractor diagrams, Lyapunov exponent (LE), 0-1 test, correlation dimension (CD) and Kolmogorov entropy (KE). In this paper, a new hyperchaotic system so-called 2D Rosenbrock map is designed by exploiting the Rosenbrock function, which has perfect swinging characteristics in modular form. In order to manage the map, two control parameters are inserted to the Rosenbrock function. The proposed 2D Rosenbrock map is self-verified and also validated over a comparison with the recently reported results. The 2D Rosenbrock map has excellent ergodicity and diversity properties. Moreover, the 2D Rosenbrock map is implemented to multimedia encryption. The findings manifest that the designed 2D Rosenbrock map owns superior chaotic capability due to its reproduction and oscillation features.
Data-driven color augmentation for H&amp;E stained images in computational pathology

Computational pathology targets the automatic analysis of Whole Slide Images (WSI). WSIs are high-resolution digitized histopathology images, stained with chemical reagents to highlight specific tissue structures and scanned via whole slide scanners. The application of different parameters during WSI acquisition may lead to stain color heterogeneity, especially considering samples collected from several medical centers. Dealing with stain color heterogeneity often limits the robustness of methods developed to analyze WSIs, in particular Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), the state-of-the-art algorithm for most computational pathology tasks. Stain color heterogeneity is still an unsolved problem, although several methods have been developed to alleviate it, such as Hue-Saturation-Contrast (HSC) color augmentation and stain augmentation methods. The goal of this paper is to present Data-Driven Color Augmentation (DDCA), a method to improve the efficiency of color augmentation methods by increasing the reliability of the samples used for training computational pathology models. During CNN training, a database including over 2 million H&E color variations collected from private and public datasets is used as a reference to discard augmented data with color distributions that do not correspond to realistic data. DDCA is applied to HSC color augmentation, stain augmentation and H&E-adversarial networks in colon and prostate cancer classification tasks. DDCA is then compared with 11 state-of-the-art baseline methods to handle color heterogeneity, showing that it can substantially improve classification performance on unseen data including heterogeneous color variations.
A systematic review of machine learning techniques for stance detection and its applications

Stance detection is an evolving opinion mining research area motivated by the vast increase in the variety and volume of user-generated content. In this regard, considerable research has been recently carried out in the area of stance detection. In this study, we review the different techniques proposed in the literature for stance detection as well as other applications such as rumor veracity detection. Particularly, we conducted a systematic literature review of empirical research on the machine learning (ML) models for stance detection that were published from January 2015 to October 2022. We analyzed 96 primary studies, which spanned eight categories of ML techniques. In this paper, we categorize the analyzed studies according to a taxonomy of six dimensions: approaches, target dependency, applications, modeling, language, and resources. We further classify and analyze the corresponding techniques from each dimension's perspective and highlight their strengths and weaknesses. The analysis reveals that deep learning models that adopt a mechanism of self-attention have been used more frequently than the other approaches. It is worth noting that emerging ML techniques such as few-shot learning and multitask learning have been used extensively for stance detection. A major conclusion of our analysis is that despite that ML models have shown to be promising in this field, the application of these models in the real world is still limited. Our analysis lists challenges and gaps to be addressed in future research. Furthermore, the taxonomy presented can assist researchers in developing and positioning new techniques for stance detection-related applications.
Optimal gap-affine alignment in <i>O</i>(<i>s</i>) space

Pairwise sequence alignment remains a fundamental problem in computational biology and bioinformatics. Recent advances in genomics and sequencing technologies demand faster and scalable algorithms that can cope with the ever-increasing sequence lengths. Classical pairwise alignment algorithms based on dynamic programming are strongly limited by quadratic requirements in time and memory. The recently proposed wavefront alignment algorithm (WFA) introduced an efficient algorithm to perform exact gap-affine alignment in O(ns) time, where s is the optimal score and n is the sequence length. Notwithstanding these bounds, WFA's O(s2) memory requirements become computationally impractical for genome-scale alignments, leading to a need for further improvement.In this article, we present the bidirectional WFA algorithm, the first gap-affine algorithm capable of computing optimal alignments in O(s) memory while retaining WFA's time complexity of O(ns). As a result, this work improves the lowest known memory bound O(n) to compute gap-affine alignments. In practice, our implementation never requires more than a few hundred MBs aligning noisy Oxford Nanopore Technologies reads up to 1 Mbp long while maintaining competitive execution times.All code is publicly available at https://github.com/smarco/BiWFA-paper.Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
MFCNet: A multi-modal fusion and calibration networks for 3D pancreas tumor segmentation on PET-CT images

In clinical diagnosis, positron emission tomography and computed tomography (PET-CT) images containing complementary information are fused. Tumor segmentation based on multi-modal PET-CT images is an important part of clinical diagnosis and treatment. However, the existing current PET-CT tumor segmentation methods mainly focus on positron emission tomography (PET) and computed tomography (CT) feature fusion, which weakens the specificity of the modality. In addition, the information interaction between different modal images is usually completed by simple addition or concatenation operations, but this has the disadvantage of introducing irrelevant information during the multi-modal semantic feature fusion, so effective features cannot be highlighted. To overcome this problem, this paper propose a novel Multi-modal Fusion and Calibration Networks (MFCNet) for tumor segmentation based on three-dimensional PET-CT images. First, a Multi-modal Fusion Down-sampling Block (MFDB) with a residual structure is developed. The proposed MFDB can fuse complementary features of multi-modal images while retaining the unique features of different modal images. Second, a Multi-modal Mutual Calibration Block (MMCB) based on the inception structure is designed. The MMCB can guide the network to focus on a tumor region by combining different branch decoding features using the attention mechanism and extracting multi-scale pathological features using a convolution kernel of different sizes. The proposed MFCNet is verified on both the public dataset (Head and Neck cancer) and the in-house dataset (pancreas cancer). The experimental results indicate that on the public and in-house datasets, the average Dice values of the proposed multi-modal segmentation network are 74.14% and 76.20%, while the average Hausdorff distances are 6.41 and 6.84, respectively. In addition, the experimental results show that the proposed MFCNet outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on the two datasets.
Fast Computational Approach to the Levenberg-Marquardt Algorithm for Training Feedforward Neural Networks

Abstract This paper presents a parallel approach to the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm (LM). The use of the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm to train neural networks is associated with significant computational complexity, and thus computation time. As a result, when the neural network has a big number of weights, the algorithm becomes practically ineffective. This article presents a new parallel approach to the computations in Levenberg-Marquardt neural network learning algorithm. The proposed solution is based on vector instructions to effectively reduce the high computational time of this algorithm. The new approach was tested on several examples involving the problems of classification and function approximation, and next it was compared with a classical computational method. The article presents in detail the idea of parallel neural network computations and shows the obtained acceleration for different problems.