Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Self-Supervised Equivariant Attention Mechanism for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation

Image-level weakly supervised semantic segmentation is a challenging problem that has been deeply studied in recent years. Most of advanced solutions exploit class activation map (CAM). However, CAMs can hardly serve as the object mask due to the gap between full and weak supervisions. In this paper, we propose a self-supervised equivariant attention mechanism (SEAM) to discover additional supervision and narrow the gap. Our method is based on the observation that equivariance is an implicit constraint in fully supervised semantic segmentation, whose pixel-level labels take the same spatial transformation as the input images during data augmentation. However, this constraint is lost on the CAMs trained by image-level supervision. Therefore, we propose consistency regularization on predicted CAMs from various transformed images to provide self-supervision for network learning. Moreover, we propose a pixel correlation module (PCM), which exploits context appearance information and refines the prediction of current pixel by its similar neighbors, leading to further improvement on CAMs consistency. Extensive experiments on PASCAL VOC 2012 dataset demonstrate our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods using the same level of supervision. The code is released online.
Superhuman AI for multiplayer poker

AI now masters six-player poker Computer programs have shown superiority over humans in two-player games such as chess, Go, and heads-up, no-limit Texas hold'em poker. However, poker games usually include six players—a much trickier challenge for artificial intelligence than the two-player variant. Brown and Sandholm developed a program, dubbed Pluribus, that learned how to play six-player no-limit Texas hold'em by playing against five copies of itself (see the Perspective by Blair and Saffidine). When pitted against five elite professional poker players, or with five copies of Pluribus playing against one professional, the computer performed significantly better than humans over the course of 10,000 hands of poker. Science , this issue p. 885 ; see also p. 864
DialogueRNN: An Attentive RNN for Emotion Detection in Conversations

Emotion detection in conversations is a necessary step for a number of applications, including opinion mining over chat history, social media threads, debates, argumentation mining, understanding consumer feedback in live conversations, and so on. Currently systems do not treat the parties in the conversation individually by adapting to the speaker of each utterance. In this paper, we describe a new method based on recurrent neural networks that keeps track of the individual party states throughout the conversation and uses this information for emotion classification. Our model outperforms the state-of-the-art by a significant margin on two different datasets.
Binary Multi-View Clustering

Clustering is a long-standing important research problem, however, remains challenging when handling large-scale image data from diverse sources. In this paper, we present a novel Binary Multi-View Clustering (BMVC) framework, which can dexterously manipulate multi-view image data and easily scale to large data. To achieve this goal, we formulate BMVC by two key components: compact collaborative discrete representation learning and binary clustering structure learning, in a joint learning framework. Specifically, BMVC collaboratively encodes the multi-view image descriptors into a compact common binary code space by considering their complementary information; the collaborative binary representations are meanwhile clustered by a binary matrix factorization model, such that the cluster structures are optimized in the Hamming space by pure, extremely fast bit-operations. For efficiency, the code balance constraints are imposed on both binary data representations and cluster centroids. Finally, the resulting optimization problem is solved by an alternating optimization scheme with guaranteed fast convergence. Extensive experiments on four large-scale multi-view image datasets demonstrate that the proposed method enjoys the significant reduction in both computation and memory footprint, while observing superior (in most cases) or very competitive performance, in comparison with state-of-the-art clustering methods.
BlendMask: Top-Down Meets Bottom-Up for Instance Segmentation

Instance segmentation is one of the fundamental vision tasks. Recently, fully convolutional instance segmentation methods have drawn much attention as they are often simpler and more efficient than two-stage approaches like Mask R-CNN. To date, almost all such approaches fall behind the two-stage Mask R-CNN method in mask precision when models have similar computation complexity, leaving great room for improvement. In this work, we achieve improved mask prediction by effectively combining instance-level information with semantic information with lower-level fine-granularity. Our main contribution is a blender module which draws inspiration from both top-down and bottom-up instance segmentation approaches. The proposed BlendMask can effectively predict dense per-pixel position-sensitive instance features with very few channels, and learn attention maps for each instance with merely one convolution layer, thus being fast in inference. BlendMask can be easily incorporate with the state-of-the-art one-stage detection frameworks and outperforms Mask R-CNN under the same training schedule while being faster. A light-weight version of BlendMask achieves 36.0 mAP at 27 FPS evaluated on a single 1080Ti. Because of its simplicity and efficacy, we hope that our BlendMask could serve as a simple yet strong baseline for a wide range of instance-wise prediction tasks.
Machine Learning Testing: Survey, Landscapes and Horizons

This paper provides a comprehensive survey of techniques for testing machine learning systems; Machine Learning Testing (ML testing) research. It covers 144 papers on testing properties (e.g., correctness, robustness, and fairness), testing components (e.g., the data, learning program, and framework), testing workflow (e.g., test generation and test evaluation), and application scenarios (e.g., autonomous driving, machine translation). The paper also analyses trends concerning datasets, research trends, and research focus, concluding with research challenges and promising research directions in ML testing.
StyleCLIP: Text-Driven Manipulation of StyleGAN Imagery

Inspired by the ability of StyleGAN to generate highly realistic images in a variety of domains, much recent work has focused on understanding how to use the latent spaces of StyleGAN to manipulate generated and real images. However, discovering semantically meaningful latent manipulations typically involves painstaking human examination of the many degrees of freedom, or an annotated collection of images for each desired manipulation. In this work, we explore leveraging the power of recently introduced Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) models in order to develop a text-based interface for StyleGAN image manipulation that does not require such manual effort. We first introduce an optimization scheme that utilizes a CLIP-based loss to modify an input latent vector in response to a user-provided text prompt. Next, we describe a latent mapper that infers a text-guided latent manipulation step for a given input image, allowing faster and more stable text-based manipulation. Finally, we present a method for mapping text prompts to input-agnostic directions in StyleGAN’s style space, enabling interactive text-driven image manipulation. Extensive results and comparisons demonstrate the effectiveness of our approaches.
Time to seize the digital evolution: Adoption of blockchain in operations and supply chain management among Malaysian SMEs

This study aims to investigate the effects of relative advantage, complexity, upper management support, cost, market dynamics, competitive pressure and regulatory support on blockchain adoption for operations and supply chain management among Small-Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in Malaysia. Unlike existing studies that employed linear models with Technology Acceptance Model or United Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology that ignores the organisational and environmental factors, we adopted the Technology, Organisation and Environment Framework that covers the technological dimensions of relative advantage and complexity, organisational dimensions of upper management support and cost and environmental dimensions of market dynamics, competitive pressure and regulatory support. Empirical data from 194 SMEs were investigated and ranked using a nonlinear non-compensatory PLS-ANN approach. Competitive pressure, complexity, cost and relative have significant effects on behavioural intention. Market dynamics, regulatory support and upper management support were insignificant predictors. SMEs often lack resources for technological investments but faces same requirements for streamlining business processes to optimise returns and blockchain presents a viable option for SMEs’ sustainability due to its features of immutability, transparency and security that have the potential to revolutionise businesses. This study contributes new knowledge to the literature on factors that affect blockchain adoption and justifications were discussed accordingly.
R3Det: Refined Single-Stage Detector with Feature Refinement for Rotating Object

Rotation detection is a challenging task due to the difficulties of locating the multi-angle objects and separating them effectively from the background. Though considerable progress has been made, for practical settings, there still exist challenges for rotating objects with large aspect ratio, dense distribution and category extremely imbalance. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end refined single-stage rotation detector for fast and accurate object detection by using a progressive regression approach from coarse to fine granularity. Considering the shortcoming of feature misalignment in existing refined single-stage detector, we design a feature refinement module to improve detection performance by getting more accurate features. The key idea of feature refinement module is to re-encode the position information of the current refined bounding box to the corresponding feature points through pixel-wise feature interpolation to realize feature reconstruction and alignment. For more accurate rotation estimation, an approximate SkewIoU loss is proposed to solve the problem that the calculation of SkewIoU is not derivable. Experiments on three popular remote sensing public datasets DOTA, HRSC2016, UCAS-AOD as well as one scene text dataset ICDAR2015 show the effectiveness of our approach. The source code is available at https://github.com/Thinklab-SJTU/R3Det_Tensorflow and is also integrated in our open source rotation detection benchmark: https://github.com/yangxue0827/RotationDetection.
DeepChain: Auditable and Privacy-Preserving Deep Learning with Blockchain-based Incentive

Deep learning can achieve higher accuracy than traditional machine learning algorithms in a variety of machine learning tasks. Recently, privacy-preserving deep learning has drawn tremendous attention from information security community, in which neither training data nor the training model is expected to be exposed. Federated learning is a popular learning mechanism, where multiple parties upload local gradients to a server and the server updates model parameters with the collected gradients. However, there are many security problems neglected in federated learning, for example, the participants may behave incorrectly in gradient collecting or parameter updating, and the server may be malicious as well. In this article, we present a distributed, secure, and fair deep learning framework named DeepChain to solve these problems. DeepChain provides a value-driven incentive mechanism based on Blockchain to force the participants to behave correctly. Meanwhile, DeepChain guarantees data privacy for each participant and provides auditability for the whole training process. We implement a prototype of DeepChain and conduct experiments on a real dataset for different settings, and the results show that our DeepChain is promising.
ABD-Net: Attentive but Diverse Person Re-Identification

Attention mechanisms have been found effective for person re-identification (Re-ID). However, the learned "attentive'' features are often not naturally uncorrelated or "diverse'', which compromises the retrieval performance based on the Euclidean distance. We advocate the complementary powers of attention and diversity for Re-ID, by proposing an Attentive but Diverse Network (ABD-Net). ABD-Net seamlessly integrates attention modules and diversity regularizations throughout the entire network to learn features that are representative, robust, and more discriminative. Specifically, we introduce a pair of complementary attention modules, focusing on channel aggregation and position awareness, respectively. Then, we plug in a novel orthogonality constraint that efficiently enforces diversity on both hidden activations and weights. Through an extensive set of ablation study, we verify that the attentive and diverse terms each contributes to the performance boosts of ABD-Net. It consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on there popular person Re-ID benchmarks.
A Survey of Multi-View Representation Learning

Recently, multi-view representation learning has become a rapidly growing direction in machine learning and data mining areas. This paper introduces two categories for multi-view representation learning: multi-view representation alignment and multi-view representation fusion. Consequently, we first review the representative methods and theories of multi-view representation learning based on the perspective of alignment, such as correlation-based alignment. Representative examples are canonical correlation analysis (CCA) and its several extensions. Then, from the perspective of representation fusion, we investigate the advancement of multi-view representation learning that ranges from generative methods including multi-modal topic learning, multi-view sparse coding, and multi-view latent space Markov networks, to neural network-based methods including multi-modal autoencoders, multi-view convolutional neural networks, and multi-modal recurrent neural networks. Further, we also investigate several important applications of multi-view representation learning. Overall, this survey aims to provide an insightful overview of theoretical foundation and state-of-the-art developments in the field of multi-view representation learning and to help researchers find the most appropriate tools for particular applications.
YAKE! Keyword extraction from single documents using multiple local features

As the amount of generated information grows, reading and summarizing texts of large collections turns into a challenging task. Many documents do not come with descriptive terms, thus requiring humans to generate keywords on-the-fly. The need to automate this kind of task demands the development of keyword extraction systems with the ability to automatically identify keywords within the text. One approach is to resort to machine-learning algorithms. These, however, depend on large annotated text corpora, which are not always available. An alternative solution is to consider an unsupervised approach. In this article, we describe YAKE!, a light-weight unsupervised automatic keyword extraction method which rests on statistical text features extracted from single documents to select the most relevant keywords of a text. Our system does not need to be trained on a particular set of documents, nor does it depend on dictionaries, external corpora, text size, language, or domain. To demonstrate the merits and significance of YAKE!, we compare it against ten state-of-the-art unsupervised approaches and one supervised method. Experimental results carried out on top of twenty datasets show that YAKE! significantly outperforms other unsupervised methods on texts of different sizes, languages, and domains.
Fine-Grained Entity Recognition

Entity Recognition (ER) is a key component of relation extraction systems and many other natural-language processing applications. Unfortunately, most ER systems are restricted to produce labels from to a small set of entity classes, e.g., person, organization, location or miscellaneous. In order to intelligently understand text and extract a wide range of information, it is useful to more precisely determine the semantic classes of entities mentioned in unstructured text. This paper defines a fine-grained set of 112 tags, formulates the tagging problem as multi-class, multi-label classification, describes an unsupervised method for collecting training data, and presents the FIGER implementation. Experiments show that the system accurately predicts the tags for entities. Moreover, it provides useful information for a relation extraction system, increasing the F1 score by 93%. We make FIGER and its data available as a resource for future work.
Human-level performance in 3D multiplayer games with population-based reinforcement learning

Artificial teamwork Artificially intelligent agents are getting better and better at two-player games, but most real-world endeavors require teamwork. Jaderberg et al. designed a computer program that excels at playing the video game Quake III Arena in Capture the Flag mode, where two multiplayer teams compete in capturing the flags of the opposing team. The agents were trained by playing thousands of games, gradually learning successful strategies not unlike those favored by their human counterparts. Computer agents competed successfully against humans even when their reaction times were slowed to match those of humans. Science , this issue p. 859
Knowledge Graph Embedding Based Question Answering

Question answering over knowledge graph (QA-KG) aims to use facts in the knowledge graph (KG) to answer natural language questions. It helps end users more efficiently and more easily access the substantial and valuable knowledge in the KG, without knowing its data structures. QA-KG is a nontrivial problem since capturing the semantic meaning of natural language is difficult for a machine. Meanwhile, many knowledge graph embedding methods have been proposed. The key idea is to represent each predicate/entity as a low-dimensional vector, such that the relation information in the KG could be preserved. The learned vectors could benefit various applications such as KG completion and recommender systems. In this paper, we explore to use them to handle the QA-KG problem. However, this remains a challenging task since a predicate could be expressed in different ways in natural language questions. Also, the ambiguity of entity names and partial names makes the number of possible answers large. To bridge the gap, we propose an effective Knowledge Embedding based Question Answering (KEQA) framework. We focus on answering the most common types of questions, i.e., simple questions, in which each question could be answered by the machine straightforwardly if its single head entity and single predicate are correctly identified. To answer a simple question, instead of inferring its head entity and predicate directly, KEQA targets at jointly recovering the question's head entity, predicate, and tail entity representations in the KG embedding spaces. Based on a carefully-designed joint distance metric, the three learned vectors' closest fact in the KG is returned as the answer. Experiments on a widely-adopted benchmark demonstrate that the proposed KEQA outperforms the state-of-the-art QA-KG methods.
Fast Poisson estimation with high-dimensional fixed effects

In this paper we present ppmlhdfe, a new Stata command for estimation of (pseudo) Poisson regression models with multiple high-dimensional fixed effects (HDFE). Estimation is implemented using a modified version of the iteratively reweighted least-squares (IRLS) algorithm that allows for fast estimation in the presence of HDFE. Because the code is built around the reghdfe package, it has similar syntax, supports many of the same functionalities, and benefits from reghdfe's fast convergence properties for computing high-dimensional least squares problems. Performance is further enhanced by some new techniques we introduce for accelerating HDFE-IRLS estimation specifically. ppmlhdfe also implements a novel and more robust approach to check for the existence of (pseudo) maximum likelihood estimates.
Pseudo-Labeling and Confirmation Bias in Deep Semi-Supervised Learning

Semi-supervised learning, i.e. jointly learning from labeled and unlabeled samples, is an active research topic due to its key role on relaxing human supervision. In the context of image classification, recent advances to learn from unlabeled samples are mainly focused on consistency regularization methods that encourage invariant predictions for different perturbations of unlabeled samples. We, conversely, propose to learn from unlabeled data by generating soft pseudo-labels using the network predictions. We show that a naive pseudo-labeling overfits to incorrect pseudo-labels due to the so-called confirmation bias and demonstrate that mixup augmentation and setting a minimum number of labeled samples per mini-batch are effective regularization techniques for reducing it. The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art results in CIFAR-10/100, SVHN, and Mini-ImageNet despite being much simpler than other methods. These results demonstrate that pseudo-labeling alone can outperform consistency regularization methods, while the opposite was supposed in previous work. Source code is available at https://git.io/fjQsC.
Personalized Recommendation System Based on Collaborative Filtering for IoT Scenarios

Recommendation technology is an important part of the Internet of Things (IoT) services, which can provide better service for users and help users get information anytime, anywhere. However, the traditional recommendation algorithms cannot meet user's fast and accurate recommended requirements in the IoT environment. In the face of a large-volume data, the method of finding neighborhood by comparing whole user information will result in a low recommendation efficiency. In addition, the traditional recommendation system ignores the inherent connection between user's preference and time. In reality, the interest of the user varies over time. Recommendation system should provide users accurate and fast with the change of time. To address this, we propose a novel recommendation model based on time correlation coefficient and an improved K-means with cuckoo search (CSK-means), called TCCF. The clustering method can cluster similar users together for further quick and accurate recommendation. Moreover, an effective and personalized recommendation model based on preference pattern (PTCCF) is designed to improve the quality of TCCF. It can provide a higher quality recommendation by analyzing the user's behaviors. The extensive experiments are conducted on two real datasets of MovieLens and Douban, and the precision of our model have improved about 5.2 percent compared with the MCoC model. Systematic experimental results have demonstrated our models TCCF and PTCCF are effective for IoT scenarios.