Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Efficient Attribute Based Server-Aided Verification Signature

Attribute based signature (ABS) is a novel cryptographic primitive, which permits users to sign a message over attributes without revealing other information. A signature only reveals that it is signed by a signer whose some attributes meet an access policy. However, some ABS schemes only support the threshold access policy, where the signing algorithms are limited by the threshold. The threshold access policy can not express precise access control well. In addition, the computation cost of the verification algorithm is heavy since pairing operations are required. Pairing is costly operation comparing to exponentiation. Therefore, existing ABS schemes are not suitable to resource-limited devices, such as RFID tags and smart cards. In order to solve the issues above, we present a novel ABS scheme by using the attribute tree as access policy that expresses flexible access control. We utilize server-aid technique to help the verifier to verify signatures and reduce the computation burden. Our scheme is proved secure against unforgeable and anonymous under chosen-policy selective-message attack in the standard model. Compared with existing schemes, our scheme is more efficient in terms of private key generation and verification. The proposed scheme reduces users’ calculation burden and expresses more flexible access policy.
Learnable Companding Quantization for Accurate Low-bit Neural Networks

Quantizing deep neural networks is an effective method for reducing memory consumption and improving inference speed, and is thus useful for implementation in resource-constrained devices. However, it is still hard for extremely low-bit models to achieve accuracy comparable with that of full-precision models. To address this issue, we propose learnable companding quantization (LCQ) as a novel non-uniform quantization method for 2-, 3-, and 4-bit models. LCQ jointly optimizes model weights and learnable companding functions that can flexibly and non-uniformly control the quantization levels of weights and activations. We also present a new weight normalization technique that allows more stable training for quantization. Experimental results show that LCQ outperforms conventional state-of-the-art methods and narrows the gap between quantized and full-precision models for image classification and object detection tasks. Notably, the 2-bit ResNet-50 model on ImageNet achieves top-1 accuracy of 75.1% and reduces the gap to 1.7%, allowing LCQ to further exploit the potential of non-uniform quantization.
Multimodal Technologies in Precision Education: Providing New Opportunities or Adding More Challenges?

Personalized or precision education (PE) considers the integration of multimodal technologies to tailor individuals’ learning experiences based on their preferences and needs. To identify the impact that emerging multimodal technologies have on personalized education, we reviewed recent implementations and applications of systems (e.g., MOOCs, serious games, artificial intelligence, learning management systems, mobile applications, augmented/virtual reality, classroom technologies) that integrate such features. Our findings revealed that PE techniques could leverage the instructional potential of educational platforms and tools by facilitating students’ knowledge acquisition and skill development. The added value of PE is also extended beyond the online digital learning context, as positive outcomes were also identified in blended/face-to-face learning scenarios, with multiple connections being discussed between the impact of PE on student efficacy, achievement, and well-being. In line with the recommendations and suggestions that supporters of PE make, we provide implications for research and practice as well as ground for policy formulation and reformation on how multimodal technologies can be integrated into the educational context.
The Effect of Augmented Reality based applications on achievement and attitude towards science course in distance education process

This study aims to enrich a theme in the science course in the distance education process with augmented reality-based applications and to examine the effects of these applications on students' achievement and attitudes in science courses. A single group pretest and posttest experimental design was used in this research. The research group consisted of 15 third grade students attending at a school in Siirt during the 2020-2021 academic year. In the research, AR-based applications were designed for some gains aimed at the "Electric Vehicles" theme in the science course and these applications were shown to the students through the Zoom program. This applications consist of 15 h, including pre and post test. Research data were collected through data sets obtained from success and attitude scales given before and after the application. The findings obtained from the research show that the students' achievement and attitudes towards the science course increased significantly with Augmented Reality (AR) based applications.
Adaptive Client Selection in Resource Constrained Federated Learning Systems: A Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach

With data increasingly collected by end devices and the number of devices is growing rapidly in which data source mainly located outside the cloud today. To guarantee data privacy and remain data on client devices, federated learning (FL) has been proposed. In FL, end devices train a local model with their data and send the model parameters rather than raw data to server for aggregating a new global model. However, due to the limited wireless bandwidth and energy of mobile devices, it is not practical for FL to perform model updating and aggregation on all participating devices in parallel. And it is difficulty for FL server to select apposite clients to take part in model training which is important to save energy and reduce latency. In this paper, we establish a novel mobile edge computing (MEC) system for FL and propose an experience-driven control algorithm that adaptively chooses client devices to participate in each round of FL. Adaptive client selection mechanism in MEC can be modeled as a Markov Decision Process in which we do not need any prior knowledge of the environment. We then propose a client selection scheme based on reinforcement learning that learns to select a subset of devices in each communication round to minimize energy consumption and training delay that encourages the increase number of client devices to participate in model updating. The experimental results show that the unit of energy required in FL can be reduced by up to 50% and training delay required can be reduced by up to 20.70% compared to the other static algorithms. Finally, we demonstrate the scalability of MEC system with different tasks and the influence of different non independent and identically distributed (non-IID) settings.
CBCapsNet: A novel writer-independent offline signature verification model using a CNN-based architecture and capsule neural networks

Offline Signature verification is a biometric method with important applications in financial, legal and administrative procedures. The verification process includes comparing the extracted features of a questioned signature with those of genuine signatures of a certain individual. There are many challenges in designing offline signature verification as dynamic temporal features of signatures are not available. Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs) have the great capability of extracting features from signature images. Despite the important advantages of these networks, they are unable to recognize the spatial properties of each feature in a signature. In addition, max-pooling layers usually eliminate some features that are crucial for forgery detection. In this paper, we propose a novel signature verification model with a combination of a CNN and Capsule Neural Networks (CapsNet) in order to capture spatial properties of signature features, improve the feature extraction phase, and reduce the complexity of the network. Moreover, we designed a new training mechanism in which a single network is trained simultaneously by two images at the same level so that the training parameters are reduced by half. Such mechanism does not require two separate networks for learning the features. Finally, a composite backbone architecture is presented with the hybrid of the proposed CNN-CapsNet models which we name CBCapsNet. The evaluation results demonstrate that our proposed model can improve accuracy and outperform prevalent signature verification methods in the community.
NTIRE 2022 Challenge on Perceptual Image Quality Assessment

This paper reports on the NTIRE 2022 challenge on perceptual image quality assessment (IQA), held in conjunction with the New Trends in Image Restoration and Enhancement workshop (NTIRE) workshop at CVPR 2022. This challenge is held to address the emerging challenge of IQA by perceptual image processing algorithms. The output images of these algorithms have completely different characteristics from traditional distortions and are included in the PIPAL dataset used in this challenge. This challenge is divided into two tracks, a full-reference IQA track similar to the previous NTIRE IQA challenge and a new track that focuses on the no-reference IQA methods. The challenge has 192 and 179 registered participants for two tracks. In the final testing stage, 7 and 8 participating teams submitted their models and fact sheets. Almost all of them have achieved better results than existing IQA methods, and the winning method can demonstrate state-of-the-art performance.
Adaptive Batch Size for Federated Learning in Resource-Constrained Edge Computing

The emerging Federated Learning (FL) enables IoT devices to collaboratively learn a shared model based on their local datasets. However, due to end devices’ heterogeneity, it will magnify the inherent synchronization barrier issue of FL and result in non-negligible waiting time when local models are trained with the identical batch size. Moreover, the useless waiting time will further lead to a great strain on devices’ limited battery life. Herein, we aim to alleviate the negative impact of synchronization barrier through adaptive batch size during model training. When using different batch sizes, stability and convergence of the global model should be enforced by assigning appropriate learning rates on different devices. Therefore, we first study the relationship between batch size and learning rate, and formulate a scaling rule to guide the setting of learning rate in terms of batch size. Then we theoretically analyze the convergence rate of global model and obtain a convergence upper bound. On these bases, we propose an efficient algorithm that adaptively adjusts batch size with scaled learning rate for heterogeneous devices to reduce the waiting time and save battery life. We conduct extensive simulations and testbed experiments, and the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
Linguistic Structures as Weak Supervision for Visual Scene Graph Generation

Prior work in scene graph generation requires categorical supervision at the level of triplets—subjects and objects, and predicates that relate them, either with or without bounding box information. However, scene graph generation is a holistic task: thus holistic, contextual supervision should intuitively improve performance. In this work, we explore how linguistic structures in captions can benefit scene graph generation. Our method captures the information provided in captions about relations between individual triplets, and context for subjects and objects (e.g. visual properties are mentioned). Captions are a weaker type of supervision than triplets since the alignment between the exhaustive list of human-annotated subjects and objects in triplets, and the nouns in captions, is weak. However, given the large and diverse sources of multimodal data on the web (e.g. blog posts with images and captions), linguistic supervision is more scalable than crowdsourced triplets. We show extensive experimental comparisons against prior methods which leverage instance- and image-level supervision, and ablate our method to show the impact of leveraging phrasal and sequential context, and techniques to improve localization of subjects and objects.
E-Voting System Based on Blockchain Technology: A Survey

Democracy in any country must have a transparent voting system that meets the people's needs to give the power to the right person. Furthermore, the existing traditional voting systems suffer from major drawbacks and missing the lack of security and transparency. This survey paper discusses the possible opportunity for applying BC technology in e-voting systems to improve the process of voting by tackling the issues of trustless, privacy, and security. This paper aims to evaluate different applications of blockchain as a service to implement distributed electronic voting systems. Some of them have been only a draft paper; others are implemented in the real world. A blockchain-based e-voting application improves security, privacy, and decreases the cost, even more, which can be achieved.
Context-aware Retrieval-based Deep Commit Message Generation

Commit messages recorded in version control systems contain valuable information for software development, maintenance, and comprehension. Unfortunately, developers often commit code with empty or poor quality commit messages. To address this issue, several studies have proposed approaches to generate commit messages from commit diffs . Recent studies make use of neural machine translation algorithms to try and translate git diffs into commit messages and have achieved some promising results. However, these learning-based methods tend to generate high-frequency words but ignore low-frequency ones. In addition, they suffer from exposure bias issues, which leads to a gap between training phase and testing phase. In this article, we propose CoRec to address the above two limitations. Specifically, we first train a context-aware encoder-decoder model that randomly selects the previous output of the decoder or the embedding vector of a ground truth word as context to make the model gradually aware of previous alignment choices. Given a diff for testing, the trained model is reused to retrieve the most similar diff from the training set. Finally, we use the retrieval diff to guide the probability distribution for the final generated vocabulary. Our method combines the advantages of both information retrieval and neural machine translation. We evaluate CoRec on a dataset from Liu et al. and a large-scale dataset crawled from 10K popular Java repositories in Github. Our experimental results show that CoRec significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art method NNGen by 19% on average in terms of BLEU.
A hybrid feature selection model based on butterfly optimization algorithm: <scp>COVID</scp>‐19 as a case study

The need to evolve a novel feature selection (FS) approach was motivated by the persistence necessary for a robust FS system, the time-consuming exhaustive search in traditional methods, and the favourable swarming manner in various optimization techniques. Most of the datasets have a high dimension in many issues since all features are not crucial to the problem, which reduces the algorithm's accuracy and efficiency. This article presents a hybrid feature selection approach to solve the low precision and tardy convergence of the butterfly optimization algorithm (BOA). The proposed method is dependent on combining the algorithm of BOA and the particle swarm optimization (PSO) as a search methodology using a wrapper framework. BOA is started with a one-dimensional cubic map in the proposed approach, and a non-linear parameter control technique is also implemented. To boost the basic BOA for global optimization, PSO algorithm is mixed with the butterfly optimization algorithm (BOAPSO). A 25 dataset evaluates the proposed BOAPSO to determine its efficiency with three metrics: classification precision, the selected features, and the computational time. A COVID-19 dataset has been used to evaluate the proposed approach. Compared to the previous approaches, the findings show the supremacy of BOAPSO for enhancing performance precision and minimizing the number of chosen features. Concerning the accuracy, the experimental outcomes demonstrate that the proposed model converges rapidly and performs better than with the PSO, BOA, and GWO with improvement percentages: 91.07%, 87.2%, 87.8%, 87.3%, respectively. Moreover, the proposed model's average selected features are 5.7 compared to the PSO, BOA, and GWO, with average features 22.5, 18.05, and 23.1, respectively.
RGB-IR cross-modality person ReID based on teacher-student GAN model

RGB-Infrared (RGB-IR) person re-identification (ReID) is a technology where the system can automatically identify the same person appearing at different parts of a video when light is unavailable. The critical challenge of this task is the cross-modality gap of features under different modalities. To solve this challenge, we proposed a Teacher-Student GAN model (TS-GAN) to adopt different domains and guide the ReID backbone. (1) In order to get corresponding RGB-IR image pairs, the RGB-IR Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) was used to generate IR images. (2) To kick-start the training of identities, a ReID Teacher module was trained under IR modality person images, which is then used to guide its Student counterpart in training. (3) Likewise, to better adapt different domain features and enhance model ReID performance, three Teacher-Student loss functions were used. Unlike other GAN based models, the proposed model only needs the backbone module at the test stage, making it more efficient and resource-saving. To showcase our model’s capability, we did extensive experiments on the newly-released SYSU-MM01 and RegDB RGB-IR Re-ID benchmark and achieved superior performance to the state-of-the-art with 47.4% mAP and 69.4% mAP respectively.
IoMT and DNN-Enabled Drone-Assisted Covid-19 Screening and Detection Framework for Rural Areas

Providing rapid testing and proper treatment has become highly challenging due to the rapid and highly unpredictable spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19). In most developing countries, rural areas lack adequate medical facilities and medical staff for effective diagnosis and treatment. Recently, there have been several technological advancements across various engineering disciplines such as the Internet of Things, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drones, deep neural networks (DNNs), and intelligent robots. This work proposes a prototype that integrates these technologies to develop a payload deployable in a drone to help in providing rapid testing and healthcare. The proposed UAV prototype combines secure patient authentication, an automated disinfection system, and medical sensors as part of the UAV payload. It uses a DNN model for real-time COVID-19 detection. It uses intelligent flight path planning, operational management, battery recharge planning, disinfectant refilling, and strategic location planning to quickly disseminate testing kits and essential medical services to remote locations without direct human involvement.
Context-aware Adversarial Training for Name Regularity Bias in Named Entity Recognition

In this work, we examine the ability of NER models to use contextual information when predicting the type of an ambiguous entity. We introduce NRB, a new testbed carefully designed to diagnose Name Regularity Bias of NER models. Our results indicate that all state-of-the-art models we tested show such a bias; BERT fine-tuned models significantly outperforming feature-based (LSTM-CRF) ones on NRB, despite having comparable (sometimes lower) performance on standard benchmarks. To mitigate this bias, we propose a novel model-agnostic training method that adds learnable adversarial noise to some entity mentions, thus enforcing models to focus more strongly on the contextual signal, leading to significant gains on NRB. Combining it with two other training strategies, data augmentation and parameter freezing, leads to further gains.
An Improved Attention for Visual Question Answering

We consider the problem of Visual Question Answering (VQA). Given an image and a free-form, open-ended, question, expressed in natural language, the goal of VQA system is to provide accurate answer to this question with respect to the image. The task is challenging because it requires simultaneous and intricate understanding of both visual and textual information. Attention, which captures intra- and inter-modal dependencies, has emerged as perhaps the most widely used mechanism for addressing these challenges. In this paper, we propose an improved attention-based architecture to solve VQA. We incorporate an Attention on Attention (AoA) module within encoder-decoder framework, which is able to determine the relation between attention results and queries. Attention module generates weighted average for each query. On the other hand, AoA module first generates an information vector and an attention gate using attention results and current context; and then adds another attention to generate final attended information by multiplying the two. We also propose multimodal fusion module to combine both visual and textual information. The goal of this fusion module is to dynamically decide how much information should be considered from each modality. Extensive experiments on VQA-v2 benchmark dataset show that our method achieves better performance than the baseline method.
An Algorithm for Solving Robot Inverse Kinematics Based on FOA Optimized BP Neural Network

The solution of robot inverse kinematics has a direct impact on the control accuracy of the robot. Conventional inverse kinematics solution methods, such as numerical solution, algebraic solution, and geometric solution, have insufficient solution speed and solution accuracy, and the solution process is complicated. Due to the mapping ability of the neural network, the use of neural networks to solve robot inverse kinematics problems has attracted widespread attention. However, it has slow convergence speed and low accuracy. This paper proposes the FOA optimized BP neural network algorithm to solve inverse kinematics. It overcomes the shortcomings of low convergence accuracy, slow convergence speed, and easy to fall into local minima when using BP neural network to solve inverse kinematics. The experimental results show that using the trained FOA optimized BP neural network to solve the inverse kinematics, the maximum error range of the output joint angle is [−0.04686, 0.1271]. The output error of the FOA optimized BP neural network algorithm is smaller than that of the ordinary BP neural network algorithm and the PSO optimized BP neural network algorithm. Using the FOA optimized BP neural network algorithm to solve the robot kinematics can improve the control accuracy of the robot.
Real-Time Text Steganalysis Based on Multi-Stage Transfer Learning

With the extensive use of texts on social network, text steganography, which protects several sensitive messages by embedding secret data into normal texts, has attracted widespread attention. As an adversary, text steganalysis which reveals the existence of hidden messages is also important. Recently, Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have led to significant improvements in text steganalysis. However, the deeper and wider DNNs cause the increase of inference time, which restricts the practicality of text steganalysis. In this paper, we propose an effective and real-time text steganalysis method based on multi-stage transfer learning to enhance inference efficiency and detection performance simultaneously. The experimental results show that the proposed text steganalysis method can outperform previously reported methods in terms of detection accuracy and inference efficiency.