Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Libraries in the State Cultural Policy of the Russian Federation

The article analyzes changes in state cultural policy over the last three decades and the role of libraries in its implementation. The basic constitutional norms that enshrine the powers of state authorities at different levels in the sphere of culture have been identified. Libraries are seen as both an object of cultural policy and a subject that plays a significant role in its implementation. Two main stages of the state cultural policy are distinguished: 1) from 1992 (adoption of the “Fundamentals of Legislation of the Russian Federation on Culture”) to 2014; 2) from 2014 (Presidential Decree “On Approval of the Fundamentals of State Cultural Policy”) to the present. The relationship between legislation in the sphere of culture and legislation in the sphere of librarianship is presented. The refusal of value-oriented functions of libraries and understanding of the library as a service provider is highlighted as a characteristic feature of libraries in the time of the first stage. The limitations of this approach are demonstrated. An analysis has been made of the tasks of libraries in an environment where culture is defined as one of the national development priorities, contributing to consolidation and cultural continuity. It shows how the Strategy for Development of Librarianship in the Russian Federation until 2030 relates to the tasks of cultural policy. The relevance of librariesʼ educational work in the formation of a fully developed and socially responsible personality is emphasized. It justifies the need to develop a state programme for acquiring literature for public libraries, which will help consolidate the peoples of the Russian Federation on the basis of a unified system of values and continuity of cultural development. This direction is historically characteristic for the development of public libraries in Russia. Russia’s national libraries bear special responsibility for the development and implementation of the state cultural policy.
Quantum Computing Techniques for Multi-knapsack Problems

Optimization problems are ubiquitous in various industrial settings, and multi-knapsack optimization is one recurrent task faced daily by several industries. The advent of quantum computing has opened a new paradigm for computationally intensive tasks, with promises of delivering better and faster solutions for specific classes of problems. This work presents a comprehensive study of quantum computing approaches for multi-knapsack problems, by investigating some of the most prominent and state-of-the-art quantum algorithms using different quantum software and hardware tools. The performance of the quantum approaches is compared for varying hyperparameters. We consider several gate-based quantum algorithms, such as QAOA and VQE, as well as quantum annealing, and present an exhaustive study of the solutions and the estimation of runtimes. Additionally, we analyze the impact of warm-starting QAOA to understand the reasons for the better performance of this approach. We discuss the implications of our results in view of utilizing quantum optimization for industrial applications in the future. In addition to the high demand for better quantum hardware, our results also emphasize the necessity of more and better quantum optimization algorithms, especially for multi-knapsack problems.
RingSFL: An Adaptive Split Federated Learning Towards Taming Client Heterogeneity

Federated learning (FL) has gained increasing attention due to its ability to collaboratively train while protecting client data privacy. However, vanilla FL cannot adapt to client heterogeneity, leading to a degradation in training efficiency due to stragglers, and is still vulnerable to privacy leakage. To address these issues, this paper proposes RingSFL, a novel distributed learning scheme that integrates FL with a model split mechanism to adapt to client heterogeneity while maintaining data privacy. In RingSFL, all clients form a ring topology. For each client, instead of training the model locally, the model is split and trained among all clients along the ring through a pre-defined direction. By properly setting the propagation lengths of heterogeneous clients, the straggler effect is mitigated, and the training efficiency of the system is significantly enhanced. Additionally, since the local models are blended, it is less likely for an eavesdropper to obtain the complete model and recover the raw data, thus improving data privacy. The experimental results on both simulation and prototype systems show that RingSFL can achieve better convergence performance than benchmark methods on independently identically distributed (IID) and non-IID datasets, while effectively preventing eavesdroppers from recovering training data.
Protecting Dilithium against Leakage

CRYSTALS-Dilithium has been selected by the NIST as the new standard for post-quantum digital signatures. In this work, we revisit the side-channel countermeasures of Dilithium in three directions. First, we improve its sensitivity analysis by classifying intermediate computations according to their physical security requirements. Second, we provide improved gadgets dedicated to Dilithium, taking advantage of recent advances in masking conversion algorithms. Third, we combine these contributions and report performance for side-channel protected Dilithium implementations. Our benchmarking results additionally put forward that the randomized version of Dilithium can lead to significantly more efficient implementations (than its deterministic version) when side-channel attacks are a concern.
Classification of Malicious URLs Using Machine Learning

Amid the rapid proliferation of thousands of new websites daily, distinguishing safe ones from potentially harmful ones has become an increasingly complex task. These websites often collect user data, and, without adequate cybersecurity measures such as the efficient detection and classification of malicious URLs, users’ sensitive information could be compromised. This study aims to develop models based on machine learning algorithms for the efficient identification and classification of malicious URLs, contributing to enhanced cybersecurity. Within this context, this study leverages support vector machines (SVMs), random forests (RFs), decision trees (DTs), and k-nearest neighbors (KNNs) in combination with Bayesian optimization to accurately classify URLs. To improve computational efficiency, instance selection methods are employed, including data reduction based on locality-sensitive hashing (DRLSH), border point extraction based on locality-sensitive hashing (BPLSH), and random selection. The results show the effectiveness of RFs in delivering high precision, recall, and F1 scores, with SVMs also providing competitive performance at the expense of increased training time. The results also emphasize the substantial impact of the instance selection method on the performance of these models, indicating its significance in the machine learning pipeline for malicious URL classification.
POTA: Privacy-Preserving Online Multi-Task Assignment with Path Planning

Privacy-preserving online multi-task assignment is a crucial aspect of spatial crowdsensing on untrusted platforms, where multiple real-time tasks are allocated to appropriate workers in a privacy-preserving manner. While existing schemes ensure the privacy of tasks and users, they seldom focus on minimizing the total moving distances for crowdsensing workers when assigning multiple tasks in real time, which adversely impacts the efficiency of online multi-task assignments. To address this issue, we propose POTA, the first privacy-preserving online multi-task assignment scheme with path planning that minimizes the total moving distances for crowdsensing workers without additional noise. POTA cryptographically implements the extended minimum-cost flow model, which models the encrypted data of workers and tasks in a graph and later produces optimized routing. With such a secure path-planning component, POTA reduces the total moving distances by 25.19% - 52.78% in the tested dataset compared with the state-of-the-art schemes with obfuscated path planning. Security analysis proves that POTA guarantees the confidentiality of sensitive data, a stronger security property than introducing obfuscation to sensitive data. Experimental evaluations on real-world datasets demonstrate the feasibility of POTA in terms of running time and its ability to achieve minimized total moving distances.
Improved Breast Cancer Classification through Combining Transfer Learning and Attention Mechanism

Breast cancer, a leading cause of female mortality worldwide, poses a significant health challenge. Recent advancements in deep learning techniques have revolutionized breast cancer pathology by enabling accurate image classification. Various imaging methods, such as mammography, CT, MRI, ultrasound, and biopsies, aid in breast cancer detection. Computer-assisted pathological image classification is of paramount importance for breast cancer diagnosis. This study introduces a novel approach to breast cancer histopathological image classification. It leverages modified pre-trained CNN models and attention mechanisms to enhance model interpretability and robustness, emphasizing localized features and enabling accurate discrimination of complex cases. Our method involves transfer learning with deep CNN models—Xception, VGG16, ResNet50, MobileNet, and DenseNet121—augmented with the convolutional block attention module (CBAM). The pre-trained models are finetuned, and the two CBAM models are incorporated at the end of the pre-trained models. The models are compared to state-of-the-art breast cancer diagnosis approaches and tested for accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score. The confusion matrices are used to evaluate and visualize the results of the compared models. They help in assessing the models’ performance. The test accuracy rates for the attention mechanism (AM) using the Xception model on the “BreakHis” breast cancer dataset are encouraging at 99.2% and 99.5%. The test accuracy for DenseNet121 with AMs is 99.6%. The proposed approaches also performed better than previous approaches examined in the related studies.
MW-MADDPG: a meta-learning based decision-making method for collaborative UAV swarm

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have gained popularity due to their low lifecycle cost and minimal human risk, resulting in their widespread use in recent years. In the UAV swarm cooperative decision domain, multi-agent deep reinforcement learning has significant potential. However, current approaches are challenged by the multivariate mission environment and mission time constraints. In light of this, the present study proposes a meta-learning based multi-agent deep reinforcement learning approach that provides a viable solution to this problem. This paper presents an improved MAML-based multi-agent deep deterministic policy gradient (MADDPG) algorithm that achieves an unbiased initialization network by automatically assigning weights to meta-learning trajectories. In addition, a Reward-TD prioritized experience replay technique is introduced, which takes into account immediate reward and TD-error to improve the resilience and sample utilization of the algorithm. Experiment results show that the proposed approach effectively accomplishes the task in the new scenario, with significantly improved task success rate, average reward, and robustness compared to existing methods.
MC-Blur: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Image Deblurring

Blur artifacts can seriously degrade the visual quality of images, and numerous deblurring methods have been proposed for specific scenarios. However, in most real-world images, blur is caused by different factors, <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">e.g</i> ., motion, and defocus. In this paper, we address how other deblurring methods perform in the case of multiple types of blur. For in-depth performance evaluation, we construct a new large-scale multi-cause image deblurring dataset (MC-Blur), including real-world and synthesized blurry images with different blur factors. The images in the proposed MC-Blur dataset are collected using other techniques: averaging sharp images captured by a 1000-fps high-speed camera, convolving Ultra-High-Definition (UHD) sharp images with large-size kernels, adding defocus to images, and real-world blurry images captured by various camera models. Based on the MC-Blur dataset, we conduct extensive bench-marking studies to compare SOTA methods in different scenarios, analyze their efficiency, and investigate the buildataset’s capacity. These benchmarking results provide a comprehensive overview of the advantages and limitations of current deblurring methods, revealing our dataset’s advances. The dataset is available to the public at https://github.com/HDCVLab/MC-Blur-Dataset.
An in-depth examination of requirements for disclosure risk assessment

The use of formal privacy to protect the confidentiality of responses in the 2020 Decennial Census of Population and Housing has triggered renewed interest and debate over how to measure the disclosure risks and societal benefits of the published data products. We argue that any proposal for quantifying disclosure risk should be based on prespecified, objective criteria. We illustrate this approach to evaluate the absolute disclosure risk framework, the counterfactual framework underlying differential privacy, and prior-to-posterior comparisons. We conclude that satisfying all the desiderata is impossible, but counterfactual comparisons satisfy the most while absolute disclosure risk satisfies the fewest. Furthermore, we explain that many of the criticisms levied against differential privacy would be levied against any technology that is not equivalent to direct, unrestricted access to confidential data. More research is needed, but in the near term, the counterfactual approach appears best-suited for privacy versus utility analysis.
3DFaceShop: Explicitly Controllable 3D-Aware Portrait Generation

In contrast to the traditional avatar creation pipeline which is a costly process, contemporary generative approaches directly learn the data distribution from photographs. While plenty of works extend unconditional generative models and achieve some levels of controllability, it is still challenging to ensure multi-view consistency, especially in large poses. In this work, we propose a network that generates 3D-aware portraits while being controllable according to semantic parameters regarding pose, identity, expression and illumination. Our network uses neural scene representation to model 3D-aware portraits, whose generation is guided by a parametric face model that supports explicit control. While the latent disentanglement can be further enhanced by contrasting images with partially different attributes, there still exists noticeable inconsistency in non-face areas when animating expressions. We solve this by proposing a volume blending strategy in which we form a composite output by blending dynamic and static areas, with two parts segmented from the jointly learned semantic field. Our method outperforms prior arts in extensive experiments, producing realistic portraits with vivid expression in natural lighting when viewed from free viewpoints. It also demonstrates generalization ability to real images as well as out-of-domain data, showing great promise in real applications.
Higher-dimensional processing using a photonic tensor core with continuous-time data

Abstract New developments in hardware-based ‘accelerators’ range from electronic tensor cores and memristor-based arrays to photonic implementations. The goal of these approaches is to handle the exponentially growing computational load of machine learning, which currently requires the doubling of hardware capability approximately every 3.5 months. One solution is increasing the data dimensionality that is processable by such hardware. Although two-dimensional data processing by multiplexing space and wavelength has been previously reported, the use of three-dimensional processing has not yet been implemented in hardware. In this paper, we introduce the radio-frequency modulation of photonic signals to increase parallelization, adding an additional dimension to the data alongside spatially distributed non-volatile memories and wavelength multiplexing. We leverage higher-dimensional processing to configure such a system to an architecture compatible with edge computing frameworks. Our system achieves a parallelism of 100, two orders higher than implementations using only the spatial and wavelength degrees of freedom. We demonstrate this by performing a synchronous convolution of 100 clinical electrocardiogram signals from patients with cardiovascular diseases, and constructing a convolutional neural network capable of identifying patients at sudden death risk with 93.5% accuracy.
Scalable Surface-Code Decoders with Parallelization in Time

Leveraging parallelization in time, a scalable decoding paradigm for topological quantum error-correction codes effectively resolves the exponential backlog problem without compromising decoding accuracy.
Synergistic pretraining of parametrized quantum circuits via tensor networks

Parametrized quantum circuits (PQCs) represent a promising framework for using present-day quantum hardware to solve diverse problems in materials science, quantum chemistry, and machine learning. We introduce a "synergistic" approach that addresses two prominent issues with these models: the prevalence of barren plateaus in PQC optimization landscapes, and the difficulty to outperform state-of-the-art classical algorithms. This framework first uses classical resources to compute a tensor network encoding a high-quality solution, and then converts this classical output into a PQC which can be further improved using quantum resources. We provide numerical evidence that this framework effectively mitigates barren plateaus in systems of up to 100 qubits using only moderate classical resources, with overall performance improving as more classical or quantum resources are employed. We believe our results highlight that classical simulation methods are not an obstacle to overcome in demonstrating practically useful quantum advantage, but rather can help quantum methods find their way.
ChatClimate: Grounding conversational AI in climate science

Abstract Large Language Models have made remarkable progress in question-answering tasks, but challenges like hallucination and outdated information persist. These issues are especially critical in domains like climate change, where timely access to reliable information is vital. One solution is granting these models access to external, scientifically accurate sources to enhance their knowledge and reliability. Here, we enhance GPT-4 by providing access to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC AR6), the most comprehensive, up-to-date, and reliable source in this domain (refer to the ’Data Availability’ section). We present our conversational AI prototype, available at www.chatclimate.ai , and demonstrate its ability to answer challenging questions in three different setups: (1) GPT-4, (2) ChatClimate, which relies exclusively on IPCC AR6 reports, and (3) Hybrid ChatClimate, which utilizes IPCC AR6 reports with in-house GPT-4 knowledge. The evaluation of answers by experts show that the hybrid ChatClimate AI assistant provide more accurate responses, highlighting the effectiveness of our solution.
Graph Matching with Bi-level Noisy Correspondence

In this paper, we study a novel and widely existing problem in graph matching (GM), namely, Bi-level Noisy Correspondence (BNC), which refers to node-level noisy correspondence (NNC) and edge-level noisy correspondence (ENC). In brief, on the one hand, due to the poor recognizability and viewpoint differences between images, it is inevitable to inaccurately annotate some keypoints with offset and confusion, leading to the mismatch between two associated nodes, i.e., NNC. On the other hand, the noisy node-to-node correspondence will further contaminate the edge-to-edge correspondence, thus leading to ENC. For the BNC challenge, we propose a novel method termed Contrastive Matching with Momentum Distillation. Specifically, the proposed method is with a robust quadratic contrastive loss which enjoys the following merits: i) better exploring the node-to-node and edge-to-edge correlations through a GM customized quadratic contrastive learning paradigm; ii) adaptively penalizing the noisy assignments based on the confidence estimated by the momentum teacher. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets show the robustness of our model compared with 12 competitive baselines. The code is available at https://github.com/XLearning-SCU/2023-ICCV-COMMON.
MOSE: A New Dataset for Video Object Segmentation in Complex Scenes

Video object segmentation (VOS) aims at segmenting a particular object throughout the entire video clip sequence. The state-of-the-art VOS methods have achieved excellent performance (e.g., 90+% $\mathcal{J}$ & $\mathcal{F}$) on existing datasets. However, since the target objects in these existing datasets are usually relatively salient, dominant, and isolated, VOS under complex scenes has rarely been studied. To revisit VOS and make it more applicable in the real world, we collect a new VOS dataset called coMplex video Object SEgmentation (MOSE) to study the tracking and segmenting objects in complex scenarios. MOSE contains 2,149 video clips and 5,200 objects from 36 categories, with 431,725 high-quality object segmentation masks. The most notable feature of MOSE dataset is complex scenes with crowded and occluded objects. The target objects in the videos are commonly occluded by others and disappear in some frames. To analyze the proposed MOSE dataset, we benchmark 18 existing VOS methods under 4 different settings on the proposed MOSE dataset and conduct comprehensive comparisons. The experiments show that current VOS algorithms cannot well perceive objects in complex scenes. For example, under the semi-supervised VOS setting, the highest $\mathcal{J}$ & $\mathcal{F}$ by existing state-of-the-art VOS methods is only 59.4% on MOSE, much lower than their ∼90% $\mathcal{J}$ & $\mathcal{F}$ performance on DAVIS. The results reveal that although excellent performance has been achieved on existing benchmarks, there are unresolved challenges under complex scenes and more efforts are desired to explore these challenges in the future.
LLM-Planner: Few-Shot Grounded Planning for Embodied Agents with Large Language Models

This study focuses on using large language models (LLMs) as a planner for embodied agents that can follow natural language instructions to complete complex tasks in a visually-perceived environment. The high data cost and poor sample efficiency of existing methods hinders the development of versatile agents that are capable of many tasks and can learn new tasks quickly. In this work, we propose a novel method, LLM-Planner, that harnesses the power of large language models to do few-shot planning for embodied agents. We further propose a simple but effective way to enhance LLMs with physical grounding to generate and update plans that are grounded in the current environment. Experiments on the ALFRED dataset show that our method can achieve very competitive few-shot performance: Despite using less than 0.5% of paired training data, LLM-Planner achieves competitive performance with recent baselines that are trained using the full training data. Existing methods can barely complete any task successfully under the same few-shot setting. Our work opens the door for developing versatile and sample-efficient embodied agents that can quickly learn many tasks. <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sup>