Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Credit score classification using spiking extreme learning machine

Abstract Credit score classification is a prominent research problem in the banking or financial industry, and its predictive performance is responsible for the profitability of financial industry. This paper addresses how Spiking Extreme Learning Machine (SELM) can be effectively used for credit score classification. A novel spike‐generating function is proposed in Leaky Nonlinear Integrate and Fire Model (LNIF). Its interspike period is computed and utilized in the extreme learning machine (ELM) for credit score classification. The proposed model is named as SELM and is validated on five real‐world credit scoring datasets namely: Australian, German‐categorical, German‐numerical, Japanese, and Bankruptcy. Further, results obtained by SELM are compared with back propagation, probabilistic neural network, ELM, voting‐based Q ‐generalized extreme learning machine, Radial basis neural network and ELM with some existing spiking neuron models in terms of classification accuracy, Area under curve (AUC), H ‐measure and computational time. From the experimental results, it has been noticed that improvement in accuracy and execution time for the proposed SELM is highly statistically important for all aforementioned credit scoring datasets. Thus, integrating a biological spiking function with ELM makes it more efficient for categorization.
Compressing the CNN architecture for in-air handwritten Chinese character recognition

Since the convolutional neural network (CNN) has brought great breakthroughs in the field of computer vision, it recently has been introduced to the in-air handwritten Chinese character recognition (IAHCCR) to achieve better recognition performance. However, the CNN is typically over-parameterized and contains lots of redundant filters or parameters. This leads the CNN to suffer from huge computation cost and considerable storage usage, limiting its deployments to resource-constrained devices like mobile phones and intelligent TVs. In this paper, we propose a unified algorithm to effectively compress the CNN for IAHCCR with little accuracy loss. Specifically, we first utilize the channel pruning strategy to simplify the network structure, and then adopt the network quantization technique to represent parameters with lower precision. We conduct experiments on the in-air handwriting dataset IAHCC-UCAS2016, where the baseline CNN achieves the state-of-the-art accuracy of 95.33% with 15.5 MB of storage. After the compression, we achieve 12.4 × storage saving and 1.7 × theoretical acceleration with only 0.17% accuracy loss. Moreover, evaluations on other benchmark datasets including ICDAR-2013 and MNIST further demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Content-gnostic Bitrate Ladder Prediction for Adaptive Video Streaming

A challenge that many video providers face is the heterogeneity of networks and display devices for streaming, as well as dealing with a wide variety of content with different encoding performance. In the past, a fixed bit rate ladder solution based on a "fitting all" approach has been employed. However, such a content-tailored solution is highly demanding; the computational and financial cost of constructing the convex hull per video by encoding at all resolutions and quantization levels is huge. In this paper, we propose a content-gnostic approach that exploits machine learning to predict the bit rate ranges for different resolutions. This has the advantage of significantly reducing the number of encodes required. The first results, based on over 100 HEVC-encoded sequences demonstrate the potential, showing an average Bjøntegaard Delta Rate (BDRate) loss of 0.51% and an average BDPSNR loss of 0.01 dB compared to the ground truth, while significantly reducing the number of pre-encodes required when compared to two other methods (by 81%-94%).
Making rose diagrams fit-for-purpose

Rose diagrams are powerful tools for visually representing two-dimensional orientation (and other cyclic) data. The conventional practice of scaling the wedge radius to frequency leads to exaggeration of modal orientations and should be replaced by using wedges whose area is proportional to frequency (the equal-area wedge diagram). We outline a workflow in which the type of data (vectorial or axial), sample size and the degree of preferred orientation are used to control the type of plot (discrete or binned) and the parameters used for binning the data. This allows visual comparison of data using rose diagrams that are fit-for-purpose.
Design of Momentum Fractional Stochastic Gradient Descent for Recommender Systems

The demand for recommender systems in E-commerce industry has increased tremendously. Efficient recommender systems are being proposed by different E-business companies with the intention to give users accurate and most relevant recommendation of products from huge amount of information. To improve the performance of recommender systems, various stochastic variants of gradient descent based algorithms have been reported. The scalability requirement of recommender systems needs algorithms with fast convergence to generate recommendations of specific items. Using the concepts of fractional calculus, an efficient variant of the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) was developed for fast convergence. Such fractional SGD (F-SGD) is further accelerated by adding a momentum term, thus termed as momentum fractional stochastic gradient descent (mF-SGD). The proposed mF-SGD method is shown to offer improved estimation accuracy and convergence rate, as compared to F-SGD and standard momentum SGD for different proportions of previous gradients, fractional orders, learning rates and number of features.
Methodologies of Learning Served by Virtual Reality: A Case Study in Urban Interventions

A computer-simulated reality and the human-machine interactions facilitated by computer technology and wearable computers may be used as an educational methodology that transforms the way students deal with information. This turns the learning process into a more participative and active process, which fits both the practical part of subjects and the learner’s profile, as students nowadays are more technology-savvy and familiar with current technological advances. This methodology is being used in architectural and urbanism degrees to support the design process and to help students visualize design alternatives in the context of existing environments. This paper proposes the use of virtual reality (VR) as a resource in the teaching of courses that focus on the design of urban spaces. A group of users—composed of architecture students and professionals related to the architecture field—participated in an immersing VR experience and had the opportunity to interact with the space that was being redesigned. Later, a quantitative tool was used in order to evaluate the effectiveness of virtual systems in the design of urban environments. The survey was designed using as a reference the competences required in the urbanism courses; this allowed the authors to identify positive and negative aspects in an objective way. The results prove that VR helps to expand digital abilities in complex representation and helps users in the evaluation and decision-making processes involved in the design of urban spaces.
Interpretable mammographic mass classification with fuzzy interpolative reasoning

Breast mass cancer remains a great challenge for developing advanced computer-aided diagnosis (CADx) systems, to assist medical professionals for the determination of benignancy or malignancy of masses. This paper presents a novel approach to building fuzzy rule-based CADx systems for mass classification of mammographic images, via the use of weighted fuzzy rule interpolation. It describes an integrated implementation of such a classification system that ensures interpretable classification of masses through firing the rules that match given observations, while having the capability of classifying unmatched observations through fuzzy rule interpolation (FRI). In particular, a feature weight-guided FRI scheme is exploited to enable such inference. The work is implemented through integrating feature weights with a popular scale and move transformation-based FRI, with the individual feature weights derived from feature selection as a preprocessing process. The efficacy of the proposed CADx system is systematically evaluated using two real-world mammographic image datasets, demonstrating its explicit interpretability and potential classification performance.
Intelligent Fault Classification and Location Identification Method for Microgrids Using Discrete Orthonormal Stockwell Transform-Based Optimized Multi-Kernel Extreme Learning Machine

This paper proposes an intelligent fault classification and location identification method for microgrids using discrete orthonormal Stockwell transform (DOST)-based optimized multi-kernel extreme learning machine (MKELM). The proposed method first extracts useful statistical features from one cycle of post-fault current signals retrieved from sending-end relays of microgrids using DOST. Then, the extracted features are normalized and fed to the MKELM as an input. The MKELM, which consists of multiple kernels in the hidden nodes of an extreme learning machine, is used for the classification and location of faults in microgrids. A genetic algorithm is employed to determine the optimum parameters of the MKELM. The performance of the proposed method is tested on the standard IEC microgrid test system for various operating conditions and fault cases, including different fault locations, fault resistance, and fault inception angles using the MATLAB/Simulink software. The test results confirm the efficacy of the proposed method for classifying and locating any type of fault in a microgrid with high performance. Furthermore, the proposed method has higher performance and is more robust to measurement noise than existing intelligent methods.
On the robustness of Lightning Network in Bitcoin

An off-chain transaction protocol called Lightning Network was recently introduced to enable low-fee and micropayment transactions on the top of the Bitcoin network. This technology has the potential to solve the inherent scalability issue of the Bitcoin system, but is still questionable whether the proposed system is highly secure and robust against various cyberattacks. In this paper, we analyzed the network characteristics of the Lightning Network mainnet which was launched on March 15, 2018 and found that the Lightning Network topology shows strong scale-free network characteristics. This implies that Lightning Network can be vulnerable to DDoS attacks targeting some specific nodes in the network because there are a few highly connected “hub” nodes in a scale-free network. We experimentally analyze the robustness of Lightning Network via the simulation of network attack model. Our simulation results demonstrate that the connectivity of the existing Lightning Network cannot be maintained sufficiently against target attacks that repeatedly destroy a few nodes with high centrality.
Visualizing the Invisible: Occluded Vehicle Segmentation and Recovery

In this paper, we propose a novel iterative multi-task framework to complete the segmentation mask of an occluded vehicle and recover the appearance of its invisible parts. In particular, firstly, to improve the quality of the segmentation completion, we present two coupled discriminators that introduce an auxiliary 3D model pool for sampling authentic silhouettes as adversarial samples. In addition, we propose a two-path structure with a shared network to enhance the appearance recovery capability. By iteratively performing the segmentation completion and the appearance recovery, the results will be progressively refined. To evaluate our method, we present a dataset, Occluded Vehicle dataset, containing synthetic and real-world occluded vehicle images. Based on this dataset, we conduct comparison experiments and demonstrate that our model outperforms the state-of-the-arts in both tasks of recovering segmentation mask and appearance for occluded vehicles. Moreover, we also demonstrate that our appearance recovery approach can benefit the occluded vehicle tracking in real-world videos.
A paired sparse representation model for robust face recognition from a single sample

Sparse representation-based classification (SRC) has been shown to achieve a high level of accuracy in face recognition (FR). However, matching faces captured in unconstrained video against a gallery with a single reference facial still per individual typically yields low accuracy. For improved robustness to intra-class variations, SRC techniques for FR have recently been extended to incorporate variational information from an external generic set into an auxiliary dictionary. Despite their success in handling linear variations, non-linear variations (e.g., pose and expressions) between probe and reference facial images cannot be accurately reconstructed with a linear combination of images in the gallery and auxiliary dictionaries because they do not share the same type of variations. In order to account for non-linear variations due to pose, a paired sparse representation model is introduced allowing for joint use of variational information and synthetic face images. The proposed model, called synthetic plus variational model, reconstructs a probe image by jointly using (1) a variational dictionary and (2) a gallery dictionary augmented with a set of synthetic images generated over a wide diversity of pose angles. The augmented gallery dictionary is then encouraged to pair the same sparsity pattern with the variational dictionary for similar pose angles by solving a newly formulated simultaneous sparsity-based optimization problem. Experimental results obtained on Chokepoint and COX-S2V datasets, using different face representations, indicate that the proposed approach can outperform state-of-the-art SRC-based methods for still-to-video FR with a single sample per person.
Robust and Lightweight Ensemble Extreme Learning Machine Engine Based on Eigenspace Domain for Compressed Learning

Compressive sensing (CS) is applied to electrocardiography (ECG) telemonitoring system to address the energy constraint of signal acquisition in sensors. In addition, on-sensor-analysis transmitting only abnormal data further reduces the energy consumption. To combine both advantages, “On-CS-sensor-analysis” can be achieved by compressed learning (CL), which analyzes signals directly in compressed domain. Extreme learning machine (ELM) provides an effective solution to achieve the goal of low-complexity CL. However, single ELM model has limited accuracy and is sensitive to the quality of data. Furthermore, hardware non-idealities in CS sensors result in learning performance degradation. In this work, we propose the ensemble of sub-eigenspace-ELM (SE-ELM), including two novel approaches: 1) We develop the eigenspace transformation for compressed noisy data, and further utilize a subspace-based dictionary to remove the interferences, and 2) Hardware-friendly design for ensemble of ELM provides high accuracy while maintaining low complexity. The simulation results on ECG-based atrial fibrillation show the SE-ELM can achieve the highest accuracy with 61.9% savings of the required multiplications compared with conventional methods. Finally, we implement this engine in TSMC 90 nm technology. The postlayout results show the proposed CL engine can provide competitive area- and energy-efficiency compared to existing machine learning engines.
Relational labeling unlocks inert knowledge

Insightful solutions often come about by recalling a relevant prior situation—one that shares the same essential relational pattern as the current problem. Unfortunately, our memory retrievals often depend primarily on surface matches, rather than relational matches. For example, a person who is familiar with the idea of positive feedback in sound systems may fail to think of it in the context of global warming. We suggest that one reason for the failure of cross-domain relational retrieval is that relational information is typically encoded variably, in a context-dependent way. In contrast, the surface features of that context—such as objects, animals and characters—are encoded in a relatively stable way, and are therefore easier to retrieve across contexts. We propose that the use of relational language can serve to make situations' relational representations more uniform, thereby facilitating relational retrieval. In two studies, we find that providing relational labels for situations at encoding or at retrieval increased the likelihood of relational retrieval. In contrast, domain labels—labels that highlight situations' contextual features—did not reliably improve domain retrieval. We suggest that relational language allows people to retrieve knowledge that would otherwise remain inert and contributes to domain experts' insight.
Survey of Attacks and Defenses on Edge-Deployed Neural Networks

Deep Neural Network (DNN) workloads are quickly moving from datacenters onto edge devices, for latency, privacy, or energy reasons. While datacenter networks can be protected using conventional cybersecurity measures, edge neural networks bring a host of new security challenges. Unlike classic IoT applications, edge neural networks are typically very compute and memory intensive, their execution is data-independent, and they are robust to noise and faults. Neural network models may be very expensive to develop, and can potentially reveal information about the private data they were trained on, requiring special care in distribution. The hidden states and outputs of the network can also be used in reconstructing user inputs, potentially violating users' privacy. Furthermore, neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, which may cause misclassifications and violate the integrity of the output. These properties add challenges when securing edge-deployed DNNs, requiring new considerations, threat models, priorities, and approaches in securely and privately deploying DNNs to the edge. In this work, we cover the landscape of attacks on, and defenses, of neural networks deployed in edge devices and provide a taxonomy of attacks and defenses targeting edge DNNs.
Convolutional Reconstruction-to-Sequence for Video Captioning

Recent advances towards video captioning mainly follow an encoder-decoder (sequence-to-sequence) framework and generate captions via a recurrent neural network (RNN). However, employing RNN as the decoder (generator) is prone to diluting long-term information, which weakens its ability to capture long-term dependencies. Recently, some work has demonstrated that the convolutional neural network (CNN) could be used to model sequential information. Though strengths in representation ability and computation efficiency, CNN has not been well exploited in video captioning. The reason partially comes from the difficulty of modeling multi-modal sequence with CNN. In this paper, we devise a novel CNN-based encoder-decoder framework for video captioning. Particularly, we first append inter-frame differences to each CNN-extracted frame feature to get a more discriminative representation; then with that as the input, we encode each frame to be a more compact feature by a one-layer convolutional mapping, which could be taken as a reconstruction network. In the decoding stage, we first fuse visual and lexical feature; then we stack multiple dilated convolutional layers to form a hierarchical decoder. As long-term dependencies could be captured by a shorter path along the hierarchical structure, the decoder could alleviate the loss of long-term information. Experiments on two benchmark datasets show that our method could obtain state-of-the-art performance.
Memory-Based Explainable Reinforcement Learning

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a learning approach based on behavioral psychology used by artificial agents to learn autonomously by interacting with their environment. An open issue in RL is the lack of visibility and understanding for end-users in terms of decisions taken by an agent during the learning process. One way to overcome this issue is to endow the agent with the ability to explain in simple terms why a particular action is taken in a particular situation. In this work, we propose a memory-based explainable reinforcement learning (MXRL) approach. Using an episodic memory, the RL agent is able to explain its decisions by using the probability of success and the number of transactions to reach the goal state. We have performed experiments considering two variations of a simulated scenario, namely, an unbounded grid world with aversive regions and a bounded grid world. The obtained results show that the agent, using information extracted from the memory, is able to explain its behavior in an understandable manner for non-expert end-users at any moment during its operation.
Reversible data hiding based on RSBEMD coding and adaptive multi-segment left and right histogram shifting

By leveraging the secret data coding using the remainder storage based exploiting modification direction (RSBEMD), and the pixel change operation recording based on multi-segment left and right histogram shifting, a novel reversible data hiding (RHD) scheme is proposed in this paper. The secret data are first encoded by some specific pixel change operations to the pixels in groups. After that, multi-segment left and right histogram shifting based on threshold manipulation is implemented for recording the pixel change operations. Furthermore, a multiple embedding policy based on chess board prediction (CBP) and threshold manipulation is put forward, and the threshold can be adjusted to achieve adaptive data hiding. Experimental results and analysis show that it is reversible and can achieve good performance in capacity and imperceptibility compared with the existing methods.
Challenges in Task Incremental Learning for Assistive Robotics

Recent breakthroughs in computer vision areas, ranging from detection, segmentation, to classification, rely on the availability of large-scale representative training datasets. Yet, robotic vision poses new challenges towards applying visual algorithms developed from these datasets because the latter implicitly assume a fixed set of categories and time-invariant distribution of tasks. In practice, assistive robots should be able to operate in dynamic environments with everyday changes. The variations of four commonly observed factors, including illumination, occlusion, camera-object distance/angles and clutter, could make lifelong/continual learning in computer vision more challenging. Large-scale datasets previously made publicly available were relatively simple, and rarely include such real-world challenges in data collection. Benefited from the recent released OpenLORIS-Object dataset, which explicitly includes these real-world challenges in the lifelong object recognition task, we evaluate three most adopted regularization methods in lifelong/continual learning (Learning without Forgetting, Elastic Weights Consolidation, and Synaptic Intelligence). Their performances were compared with the naive and cumulative training modes as the lower bound and upper bound of performances, respectively. The experiments conducted on the dataset focused on task incremental learning, i.e., incremental difficulty based on the four environment of factors. However, all the three most reported lifelong/continual learning algorithms have failed with the increase in encountered batches across various metrics with indistinguishable performance comparing to the naive training mode. Our results highlight the current challenges in lifelong object recognition for assistive robots to operate in real-world dynamic scene.