Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
An Explainable Machine Learning Model for Early Detection of Parkinson's Disease using LIME on DaTSCAN Imagery

Parkinson's Disease (PD) is a degenerative and progressive neurological condition. Early diagnosis can improve treatment for patients and is performed through dopaminergic imaging techniques like the SPECT DaTSCAN. In this study, we propose a machine learning model that accurately classifies any given DaTSCAN as having Parkinson's disease or not, in addition to providing a plausible reason for the prediction. This kind of reasoning is done through the use of visual indicators generated using Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explainer (LIME) methods. DaTSCANs were drawn from the Parkinson's Progression Markers Initiative database and trained on a CNN (VGG16) using transfer learning, yielding an accuracy of 95.2%, a sensitivity of 97.5%, and a specificity of 90.9%. Keeping model interpretability of paramount importance, especially in the healthcare field, this study utilises LIME explanations to distinguish PD from non-PD, using visual superpixels on the DaTSCANs. It could be concluded that the proposed system, in union with its measured interpretability and accuracy may effectively aid medical workers in the early diagnosis of Parkinson's Disease.
Ant colony optimization with horizontal and vertical crossover search: Fundamental visions for multi-threshold image segmentation

The ant colony optimization (ACO) is the most exceptionally fundamental swarm-based solver for realizing discrete problems. In order to make it also suitable for solving continuous problems, a variant of ACO (ACOR) has been proposed already. The deep-rooted ACO always stands out in the eyes of well-educated researchers as one of the best-designed metaheuristic ways for realizing the solutions to real-world problems. However, ACOR has some stochastic components that need to be further improved in terms of solution quality and convergence speed. Therefore, to effectively improve these aspects, this in-depth research introduced horizontal crossover search (HCS) and vertical crossover search (VCS) into the ACOR and improved the selection mechanism of the original ACOR to form an improved algorithm (CCACO) for the first time. In CCACO, the HCS is mainly intended to increase the convergence rate. Meanwhile, the VCS and the developed selection mechanism are mainly aimed at effectively improving the ability to avoid dwindling into local optimal (LO) and the convergence accuracy. To reach next-level strong results for image segmentation and better illustrate its effectiveness, we conducted a series of comparative experiments with 30 benchmark functions from IEEE CEC 2014. In the experiment, we compared the developed CCACO with well-known conventional algorithms and advanced ones. All experimental results also show that its convergence speed and solution quality are superior to other algorithms, and its ability to avoid dropping into local optimum (LO) is more reliable than that of its peers. Furthermore, to further illustrate its enhanced performance, we applied it to image segmentation based on multi-threshold image segmentation (MTIS) method with a non-local means 2D histogram and Kapur's entropy. In the experiment, it was compared with existing competitive algorithms at low and high threshold levels. The experimental results show that the proposed CCACO achieves excellent segmentation results at both low and high threshold levels. For any help and guidance regarding this research, readers, and industry activists can refer to the background info at http://aliasgharheidari.com/.
Making conversations with chatbots more personalized

Many of the world's leading brands and increasingly government agencies are using intelligent agent technologies, also known as chatbots to interact with consumers. However, consumer satisfaction with chatbots is mixed. Consumers report frustration with chatbots arising from misunderstood questions, irrelevant responses, and poor integration with human service agents. This study examines whether human-computer interactions can be more personalized by matching consumer personality with congruent machine personality using language. Although the idea that personality is manifested through language, and that people are more likely to be responsive to others with the same personality is well known, there is a dearth of research that examines whether this is consistent for human-computer interactions. Based on a sample of over 57,000 chatbot interactions, this study demonstrates that consumer personality can be predicted during contextual interactions, and that chatbots can be manipulated to ‘assume a personality’ using response language. Matching consumer personality with congruent chatbot personality had a positive impact on consumer engagement with chatbots and purchasing outcomes for interactions involving social gain.
An improved method for soft tissue modeling

The technique of force and haptic reappearance is an effective method to solve the shortage of haptic presence and improve the medical robots' practicability. Soft tissue models, the core of force-haptic reappearance systems, play a decisive role in its performance. The establishment of realistic soft tissue models can improve the system's authenticity and efficiency and better realize the representation of force and touch in the interaction process. At present, there exists a contradiction between timeliness and accuracy in soft tissue modeling. This paper combined the finite element method with the mass-spring model. We estimated the mass-spring model's parameters with the finite element method by neglecting the damping coefficient and obtained the relationship between the elastic coefficients. Then, according to the real measurement data of soft tissue in literature and the stress-strain curve obtained from real measurement, the values of a, A, ε, ks σ were determined. Through those methods above, an improved soft tissue model was obtained. Through our comparison experiments, the improved spring particle model has a high degree of data fitting, and the force value under the same displacement is smaller. Moreover, the improved model's force-displacement curve in the large deformation stage is still very close to the measurement curve of the volume, which cannot be achieved by the empirical spring particle model. These comparative experiments show that the improved finite element-based particle spring model can better consider the timeliness and accuracy and simulate the soft tissue more accurately.
FedHome: Cloud-Edge Based Personalized Federated Learning for In-Home Health Monitoring

In-home health monitoring has attracted great attention for the ageing population worldwide. With the abundant user health data accessed by Internet of Things (IoT) devices and recent development in machine learning, smart healthcare has seen many successful stories. However, existing approaches for in-home health monitoring do not pay sufficient attention to user data privacy and thus are far from being ready for large-scale practical deployment. In this paper, we propose FedHome, a novel cloud-edge based federated learning framework for in-home health monitoring, which learns a shared global model in the cloud from multiple homes at the network edges and achieves data privacy protection by keeping user data locally. To cope with the imbalanced and non-IID distribution inherent in user’s monitoring data, we design a generative convolutional autoencoder (GCAE), which aims to achieve accurate and personalized health monitoring by refining the model with a generated class-balanced dataset from user’s personal data. Besides, GCAE is lightweight to transfer between the cloud and edges, which is useful to reduce the communication cost of federated learning in FedHome. Extensive experiments based on realistic human activity recognition data traces corroborate that FedHome significantly outperforms existing widely-adopted methods.
Hyperspectral Image Denoising Using a 3-D Attention Denoising Network

Hyperspectral image (HSI) denoising plays an important role in image quality improvement and related applications. Convolutional neural network (CNN)-based image denoising methods have been predominant due to advances made in the field of deep learning in recent years. Spatial and spectral information are crucial to HIS denoising, along with their correlations. However, existing methods fail to consider the global dependence and correlation between spatial and spectral information. Accordingly, in this article, we propose a novel dual-attention denoising network to overcome these limitations. We design two parallel branches to process the spatial and spectral information separately. The position attention module is applied to the spatial branch to formulate the interdependencies on the feature map, while the channel attention module is applied to the spectral branch to simulate the spectral correlation before the two branches are combined. A multiscale structure is also employed to extract and fuse the multiscale features following the fusion of spatial and spectral information. Experimental results on simulated and real data substantiate the superiority of our method both visually and quantitatively when compared with state-of-the-art methods.
Evolutionary Transfer Optimization - A New Frontier in Evolutionary Computation Research

The evolutionary algorithm (EA) is a nature-inspired population-based search method that works on Darwinian principles of natural selection. Due to its strong search capability and simplicity of implementation, EA has been successfully applied to solve many complex optimization problems, which cannot be easily solved by traditional exact mathematical approaches, such as linear programming, quadratic programming, and convex optimization. Despite its great success, it is worth noting that traditional EA solvers start the search from scratch by assuming zero prior knowledge about the task at hand. However, as problems seldom exist in isolation, solving one problem may yield useful information for solving other related problems. There has been growing interest in conducting research on evolutionary transfer optimization (ETO) in recent years: a paradigm that integrates EA solvers with knowledge learning and transfer across related domains to achieve better optimization efficiency and performance. This paper provides an overview of existing works of ETO based on the type of problems being solved by these methods, which are ETO for Optimization in Uncertain Environment, ETO for Multitask Optimization, ETO for Complex Optimization, ETO for Multi/Many-Objective Optimization, and ETO for Machine Learning Applications. The paper also highlights some of the challenges faced in this emerging research field of computational intelligence and discusses some promising future research directions in ETO. It is hoped that the study presented in this paper can help to inspire the development of more advanced ETO methods and applications.
Boundary IoU: Improving Object-Centric Image Segmentation Evaluation

We present Boundary IoU (Intersection-over-Union), a new segmentation evaluation measure focused on boundary quality. We perform an extensive analysis across different error types and object sizes and show that Boundary IoU is significantly more sensitive than the standard Mask IoU measure to boundary errors for large objects and does not over-penalize errors on smaller objects. The new quality measure displays several desirable characteristics like symmetry w.r.t. prediction/ground truth pairs and balanced responsiveness across scales, which makes it more suitable for segmentation evaluation than other boundary-focused measures like Trimap IoU and F-measure. Based on Boundary IoU, we update the standard evaluation protocols for instance and panoptic segmentation tasks by proposing the Boundary AP (Average Precision) and Boundary PQ (Panoptic Quality) metrics, respectively. Our experiments show that the new evaluation metrics track boundary quality improvements that are generally overlooked by current Mask IoU-based evaluation metrics. We hope that the adoption of the new boundary-sensitive evaluation metrics will lead to rapid progress in segmentation methods that improve boundary quality. <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sup>
Learning Graph Structures With Transformer for Multivariate Time-Series Anomaly Detection in IoT

Many real-world IoT systems, which include a variety of internet-connected sensory devices, produce substantial amounts of multivariate time series data. Meanwhile, vital IoT infrastructures like smart power grids and water distribution networks are frequently targeted by cyber-attacks, making anomaly detection an important study topic. Modeling such relatedness is, nevertheless, unavoidable for any efficient and effective anomaly detection system, given the intricate topological and nonlinear connections that are originally unknown among sensors. Furthermore, detecting anomalies in multivariate time series is difficult due to their temporal dependency and stochasticity. This paper presented GTA, a new framework for multivariate time series anomaly detection that involves automatically learning a graph structure, graph convolution, and modeling temporal dependency using a Transformer-based architecture. The connection learning policy, which is based on the Gumbel-softmax sampling approach to learn bi-directed links among sensors directly, is at the heart of learning graph structure. To describe the anomaly information flow between network nodes, we introduced a new graph convolution called Influence Propagation convolution. In addition, to tackle the quadratic complexity barrier, we suggested a multi-branch attention mechanism to replace the original multi-head self-attention method. Extensive experiments on four publicly available anomaly detection benchmarks further demonstrate the superiority of our approach over alternative state-of-the-arts. Codes are available at https://github.com/ZEKAICHEN/GTA.
A Survey of Path Planning Algorithms for Mobile Robots

Path planning algorithms are used by mobile robots, unmanned aerial vehicles, and autonomous cars in order to identify safe, efficient, collision-free, and least-cost travel paths from an origin to a destination. Choosing an appropriate path planning algorithm helps to ensure safe and effective point-to-point navigation, and the optimal algorithm depends on the robot geometry as well as the computing constraints, including static/holonomic and dynamic/non-holonomically-constrained systems, and requires a comprehensive understanding of contemporary solutions. The goal of this paper is to help novice practitioners gain an awareness of the classes of path planning algorithms used today and to understand their potential use cases—particularly within automated or unmanned systems. To that end, we provide broad, rather than deep, coverage of key and foundational algorithms, with popular algorithms and variants considered in the context of different robotic systems. The definitions, summaries, and comparisons are relevant to novice robotics engineers and embedded system developers seeking a primer of available algorithms.
A 15-user quantum secure direct communication network

Abstract Quantum secure direct communication (QSDC) based on entanglement can directly transmit confidential information. However, the inability to simultaneously distinguish the four sets of encoded entangled states limits its practical application. Here, we explore a QSDC network based on time–energy entanglement and sum-frequency generation. In total,15 users are in a fully connected QSDC network, and the fidelity of the entangled state shared by any two users is &gt;97%. The results show that when any two users are performing QSDC over 40 km of optical fiber, the fidelity of the entangled state shared by them is still &gt;95%, and the rate of information transmission can be maintained above 1 Kbp/s. Our result demonstrates the feasibility of a proposed QSDC network and hence lays the foundation for the realization of satellite-based long-distance and global QSDC in the future.
Domain Adaptive Ensemble Learning

The problem of generalizing deep neural networks from multiple source domains to a target one is studied under two settings: When unlabeled target data is available, it is a multi-source unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) problem, otherwise a domain generalization (DG) problem. We propose a unified framework termed domain adaptive ensemble learning (DAEL) to address both problems. A DAEL model is composed of a CNN feature extractor shared across domains and multiple classifier heads each trained to specialize in a particular source domain. Each such classifier is an expert to its own domain but a non-expert to others. DAEL aims to learn these experts collaboratively so that when forming an ensemble, they can leverage complementary information from each other to be more effective for an unseen target domain. To this end, each source domain is used in turn as a pseudo-target-domain with its own expert providing supervisory signal to the ensemble of non-experts learned from the other sources. To deal with unlabeled target data under the UDA setting where real expert does not exist, DAEL uses pseudo labels to supervise the ensemble learning. Extensive experiments on three multi-source UDA datasets and two DG datasets show that DAEL improves the state of the art on both problems, often by significant margins.
Fast Convergence of DETR with Spatially Modulated Co-Attention

The recently proposed Detection Transformer (DETR) model successfully applies Transformer to objects detection and achieves comparable performance with two-stage object detection frameworks, such as Faster-RCNN. However, DETR suffers from its slow convergence. Training DETR [4] from scratch needs 500 epochs to achieve a high accuracy. To accelerate its convergence, we propose a simple yet effective scheme for improving the DETR framework, namely Spatially Modulated Co-Attention (SMCA) mechanism. The core idea of SMCA is to conduct location-aware co-attention in DETR by constraining co-attention responses to be high near initially estimated bounding box locations. Our proposed SMCA increases DETR’s convergence speed by replacing the original co-attention mechanism in the decoder while keeping other operations in DETR unchanged. Furthermore, by integrating multi-head and scale-selection attention designs into SMCA, our fully-fledged SMCA can achieve better performance compared to DETR with a dilated convolution-based backbone (45.6 mAP at 108 epochs vs. 43.3 mAP at 500 epochs). We perform extensive ablation studies on COCO dataset to validate SMCA. Code is released at https://github.com/gaopengcuhk/SMCA-DETR.
Deep double descent: where bigger models and more data hurt*

Abstract We show that a variety of modern deep learning tasks exhibit a ‘double-descent’ phenomenon where, as we increase model size, performance first gets worse and then gets better. Moreover, we show that double descent occurs not just as a function of model size, but also as a function of the number of training epochs. We unify the above phenomena by defining a new complexity measure we call the effective model complexity and conjecture a generalized double descent with respect to this measure. Furthermore, our notion of model complexity allows us to identify certain regimes where increasing (even quadrupling) the number of train samples actually hurts test performance.
Full Verifiability for Outsourced Decryption in Attribute Based Encryption

Attribute based encryption (ABE) is a popular cryptographic technology to protect the security of users' data. However, the decryption cost and ciphertext size restrict the application of ABE in practice. For most existing ABE schemes, the decryption cost and ciphertext size grow linearly with the complexity of access structure. This is undesirable to the devices with limited computing capability and storage space. Outsourced decryption is considered as a feasible method to reduce the user's decryption overhead, which enables a user to outsource a large number of decryption operations to the cloud service provider (CSP). However, outsourced decryption cannot guarantee the correctness of transformation done by the cloud, so it is necessary to check the correctness of outsourced decryption to ensure security for users' data. Current research mainly focuses on verifiability of outsourced decryption for the authorized users. It still remains a challenging issue that how to guarantee the correctness of outsourced decryption for unauthorized users. In this paper, we propose an ABE scheme with verifiable outsourced decryption (called full verifiability for outsourced decryption), which can simultaneously check the correctness for transformed ciphertext for the authorized users and unauthorized users. The proposed ABE scheme with verifiable outsourced decryption is proved to be selective CPA-secure in the standard model.
Hyper-Laplacian Regularized Multilinear Multiview Self-Representations for Clustering and Semisupervised Learning

In this paper, we address the multiview nonlinear subspace representation problem. Traditional multiview subspace learning methods assume that the heterogeneous features of the data usually lie within the union of multiple linear subspaces. However, instead of linear subspaces, the data feature actually resides in multiple nonlinear subspaces in many real-world applications, resulting in unsatisfactory clustering performance. To overcome this, we propose a hyper-Laplacian regularized multilinear multiview self-representation model, which is referred to as HLR-M2VS, to jointly learn multiple views correlation and a local geometrical structure in a unified tensor space and view-specific self-representation feature spaces, respectively. In unified tensor space, a well-founded tensor low-rank regularization is adopted to impose on the self-representation coefficient tensor to ensure global consensus among different views. In view-specific feature space, hypergraph-induced hyper-Laplacian regularization is utilized to preserve the local geometrical structure embedded in a high-dimensional ambient space. An efficient algorithm is then derived to solve the optimization problem of the established model with theoretical convergence guarantee. Furthermore, the proposed model can be extended to semisupervised classification without introducing any additional parameters. An extensive experiment of our method is conducted on many challenging datasets, where a clear advance over state-of-the-art multiview clustering and multiview semisupervised classification approaches is achieved.
Interval type-2 fuzzy logic for dynamic parameter adaptation in a modified gravitational search algorithm

In this paper a method for dynamically adjusting parameters in meta-heuristics based on interval type-2 fuzzy logic is proposed. Nowadays meta-heuristic algorithms have become a powerful choice in solving complex optimization problems. The gravitational search algorithm (GSA) based on the Newton laws of gravity and acceleration can be used to solve optimization problems achieving good results, however like in other optimization algorithms a critical issue is an appropriate adjustment of its parameters depending on the type of problem. In this paper the main contribution is a proposed method aimed at dynamic parameter adjustment in GSA with the help of type-2 fuzzy logic. Simulation results on benchmark problems show the advantages of the proposed approach.