Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
VISTA: Boosting 3D Object Detection via Dual Cross-VIew SpaTial Attention

Detecting objects from LiDAR point clouds is of tremendous significance in autonomous driving. In spite of good progress, accurate and reliable 3D detection is yet to be achieved due to the sparsity and irregularity of LiDAR point clouds. Among existing strategies, multi-view methods have shown great promise by leveraging the more comprehensive information from both bird's eye view (BEV) and range view (RV). These multi-view methods either refine the proposals predicted from single view via fused features, or fuse the features without considering the global spatial context; their performance is limited consequently. In this paper, we propose to adaptively fuse multi-view features in a global spatial context via Dual Cross-VIew SpaTial Attention (VISTA). The proposed VISTA is a novel plug-and-play fusion module, wherein the multi-layer perceptron widely adopted in standard attention modules is replaced with a convolutional one. Thanks to the learned attention mechanism, VISTA can produce fused features of high quality for prediction of proposals. We decouple the classification and regression tasks in VISTA, and an additional constraint of attention variance is applied that enables the attention module to focus on specific targets instead of generic points. We conduct thorough experiments on the benchmarks of nuScenes and Waymo; results confirm the efficacy of our designs. At the time of submission, our method achieves 63.0% in overall mAP and 69.8% in NDS on the nuScenes benchmark, outperforming all published methods by up to 24% in safety-crucial categories such as cyclist. The source code in PyTorch is available at https://github.com/Gorilla-Lab-SCUT/VISTA
Constant-Round Fair SS-4PC for Private Decision Tree Evaluation

Multiparty computation (MPC) is a cryptographic method that enables a set of parties to compute an arbitrary joint function of the private inputs of all parties and does not reveal any information other than the output. MPC based on a secret sharing scheme (SS-MPC) and garbled circuit (GC) is known as the most common MPC schemes. Another cryptographic method, homomorphic encryption (HE), computes an arbitrary function represented as a circuit by using ciphertexts without decrypting them. These technologies are in a trade-off relationship for the communication/round complexities, and the computation cost. The private decision tree evaluation (PDTE) is one of the key applications of these technologies. There exist several constant-round PDTE protocols based on GC, HE, or the hybrid schemes that are secure even if a malicious adversary who can deviate from protocol specifications corrupts some parties. There also exist other protocols based only on SS-MPC that are secure only if a semi-honest adversary who follows the protocol specification corrupts some parties. However, to the best of our knowledge, there are currently no constant-round PDTE protocols based only on SS-MPC that are secure against a malicious adversary. In this work, we propose a constant-round four-party PDTE protocol that achieves malicious security. Our protocol provides the PDTE securely and efficiently even when the communication environment has a large latency.
Towards the One Learning Algorithm Hypothesis: A System-theoretic  Approach

The existence of a universal learning architecture in human cognition is a widely spread conjecture supported by experimental findings from neuroscience. While no low-level implementation can be specified yet, an abstract outline of human perception and learning is believed to entail three basic properties: (a) hierarchical attention and processing, (b) memory-based knowledge representation, and (c) progressive learning and knowledge compaction. We approach the design of such a learning architecture from a system-theoretic viewpoint, developing a closed-loop system with three main components: (i) a multi-resolution analysis pre-processor, (ii) a group-invariant feature extractor, and (iii) a progressive knowledge-based learning module. Multi-resolution feedback loops are used for learning, i.e., for adapting the system parameters to online observations. To design (i) and (ii), we build upon the established theory of wavelet-based multi-resolution analysis and the properties of group convolution operators. Regarding (iii), we introduce a novel learning algorithm that constructs progressively growing knowledge representations in multiple resolutions. The proposed algorithm is an extension of the Online Deterministic Annealing (ODA) algorithm based on annealing optimization, solved using gradient-free stochastic approximation. ODA has inherent robustness and regularization properties and provides a means to progressively increase the complexity of the learning model i.e. the number of the neurons, as needed, through an intuitive bifurcation phenomenon. The proposed multi-resolution approach is hierarchical, progressive, knowledge-based, and interpretable. We illustrate the properties of the proposed architecture in the context of the state-of-the-art learning algorithms and deep learning methods.
SSAT: A Symmetric Semantic-Aware Transformer Network for Makeup Transfer  and Removal

Makeup transfer is not only to extract the makeup style of the reference image, but also to render the makeup style to the semantic corresponding position of the target image. However, most existing methods focus on the former and ignore the latter, resulting in a failure to achieve desired results. To solve the above problems, we propose a unified Symmetric Semantic-Aware Transformer (SSAT) network, which incorporates semantic correspondence learning to realize makeup transfer and removal simultaneously. In SSAT, a novel Symmetric Semantic Corresponding Feature Transfer (SSCFT) module and a weakly supervised semantic loss are proposed to model and facilitate the establishment of accurate semantic correspondence. In the generation process, the extracted makeup features are spatially distorted by SSCFT to achieve semantic alignment with the target image, then the distorted makeup features are combined with unmodified makeup irrelevant features to produce the final result. Experiments show that our method obtains more visually accurate makeup transfer results, and user study in comparison with other state-of-the-art makeup transfer methods reflects the superiority of our method. Besides, we verify the robustness of the proposed method in the difference of expression and pose, object occlusion scenes, and extend it to video makeup transfer. Code will be available at https://gitee.com/sunzhaoyang0304/ssat-msp.
Five Starter Pieces: Quantum Information Science via Semi-definite  Programs

As the title indicates, this manuscript presents a brief, self-contained introduction to five fundamental problems in Quantum Information Science (QIS) that are especially well-suited to be formulated as Semi-definite Programs (SDP). We have in mind two audiences. The primary audience comprises of Operations Research (and Computer Science) graduate students who have familiarity with SDPs, but have found it daunting to become even minimally conversant with pre-requisites of QIS. The second audience consists of Physicists (and Electrical Engineers) already knowledgeable with modeling of QIS via SDP but interested in computational tools that are applicable more generally. For both audiences, we strive for rapid access to the unfamiliar material. For the first, we provide just enough required background material (from Quantum Mechanics, treated via matrices, and mapping them in Dirac notation) and simultaneously for the second audience we recreate, computationally in Jupyter notebooks, known closed-form solutions. We hope you will enjoy this little manuscript and gain understanding of the marvelous connection between SDP and QIS by self-study, or as a short seminar course. Ultimately, we hope this disciplinary outreach will fuel advances in QIS through their fruitful study via SDPs.
Dynamic and Traceable Data Integrity Verification Scheme for a Smart Home System

A smart home system composed of numerous smart devices has benefited people's life due to the feature of convenience. With the development of the smart home technology, huge amounts of data stored on external servers flows between different smart devices, and the integrity of these data is of great importance to the security of smart home systems. In this paper, we propose a blockchain based data integrity verification scheme that supports efficient dynamic operations for a smart home system. In verification scheme, we utilizes the home gateway (HG) to aggregate all the data information and design a data structure that can be efficiently and dynamically operated to store the tag information of the data, which can reduce the local storage pressure in smart home systems. Moreover, homomorphic verifiable tags are used to formulate verification strategies and record the interactions between HG, cloud service providers (CSP), and third-party auditor (TPA) on the blockchain so as to make the verification service traceable and useful. Then, the theoretical analysis and experiments prove that the scheme is effective and cost-acceptable in smart home systems.
Presentation Attack Detection Methods based on Gaze Tracking and Pupil  Dynamic: A Comprehensive Survey

Purpose of the research: In the biometric community, visible human characteristics are popular and viable for verification and identification on mobile devices. However, imposters are able to spoof such characteristics by creating fake and artificial biometrics to fool the system. Visible biometric systems have suffered a high-security risk of presentation attack. Methods: In the meantime, challenge-based methods, in particular, gaze tracking and pupil dynamic appear to be more secure methods than others for contactless biometric systems. We review the existing work that explores gaze tracking and pupil dynamic liveness detection. The principal results: This research analyzes various aspects of gaze tracking and pupil dynamic presentation attacks, such as state-of-the-art liveness detection algorithms, various kinds of artifacts, the accessibility of public databases, and a summary of standardization in this area. In addition, we discuss future work and the open challenges to creating a secure liveness detection based on challenge-based systems.
Decision trees

This chapter presents the process of creating and using decision trees to structure decision making. Properties of expected value and decision trees are presented along with examples that demonstrate the use of probability and expected value of perfect information.
An auxiliary logic on trees: On the tower-hardness of logics featuring reachability and submodel reasoning

We describe a set of simple features that are sufficient in order to make the satisfiability problem of logics interpreted on trees Tower -hard. We exhibit these features through an Auxiliary Logic on Trees (ALT ), a modal logic that essentially deals with reachability of a fixed node inside a forest and features modalities from sabotage modal logic to reason on submodels. After showing that ALT admits a Tower -complete satisfiability problem, we prove that this logic is captured by four other logics that were independently found to be Tower -complete: two-variables separation logic, quantified computation tree logic, modal logic of heaps and modal separation logic. As a by-product of establishing these connections, we discover strict fragments of these logics that are still non-elementary.
Learning a Weight Map for Weakly-Supervised Localization

In the weakly supervised localization setting, supervision is given as an image-level label. We propose to employ an image classifier $f$ and to train a generative network $g$ that outputs, given the input image, a per-pixel weight map that indicates the location of the object within the image. Network $g$ is trained by minimizing the discrepancy between the output of the classifier $f$ on the original image and its output given the same image weighted by the output of $g$. The scheme requires a regularization term that ensures that $g$ does not provide a uniform weight, and an early stopping criterion in order to prevent $g$ from over-segmenting the image. Our results indicate that the method outperforms existing localization methods by a sizable margin on the challenging fine-grained classification datasets, as well as a generic image recognition dataset. Additionally, the obtained weight map is also state-of-the-art in weakly supervised segmentation in fine-grained categorization datasets.
Khmer Text Classification Using Word Embedding and Neural Networks

Text classification is one of the fundamental tasks in natural language processing to label an open-ended text and is useful for various applications such as sentiment analysis. In this paper, we discuss various classification approaches for Khmer text, ranging from a classical TF-IDF algorithm with support vector machine classifier to modern word embedding-based neural network classifiers including linear layer model, recurrent neural network and convolutional neural network. A Khmer word embedding model is trained on a 30-million-Khmer-word corpus to construct word vector representations that are used to train three different neural network classifiers. We evaluate the performance of different approaches on a news article dataset for both multi-class and multi-label text classification tasks. The result suggests that neural network classifiers using a word embedding model consistently outperform the traditional classifier using TF-IDF. The recurrent neural network classifier provides a slightly better result compared to the convolutional network and the linear layer network.
BayesFlow Can Reliably Detect Model Misspecification and Posterior  Errors in Amortized Bayesian Inference

Neural density estimators have proven remarkably powerful in performing efficient simulation-based Bayesian inference in various research domains. In particular, the BayesFlow framework uses a two-step approach to enable amortized parameter estimation in settings where the likelihood function is implicitly defined by a simulation program. But how faithful is such inference when simulations are poor representations of reality? In this paper, we conceptualize the types of model misspecification arising in simulation-based inference and systematically investigate the performance of the BayesFlow framework under these misspecifications. We propose an augmented optimization objective which imposes a probabilistic structure on the latent data space and utilize maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) to detect potentially catastrophic misspecifications during inference undermining the validity of the obtained results. We verify our detection criterion on a number of artificial and realistic misspecifications, ranging from toy conjugate models to complex models of decision making and disease outbreak dynamics applied to real data. Further, we show that posterior inference errors increase as a function of the distance between the true data-generating distribution and the typical set of simulations in the latent summary space. Thus, we demonstrate the dual utility of MMD as a method for detecting model misspecification and as a proxy for verifying the faithfulness of amortized Bayesian inference.
Video Content Swapping Using GAN

Video generation is an interesting problem in computer vision. It is quite popular for data augmentation, special effect in move, AR/VR and so on. With the advances of deep learning, many deep generative models have been proposed to solve this task. These deep generative models provide away to utilize all the unlabeled images and videos online, since it can learn deep feature representations with unsupervised manner. These models can also generate different kinds of images, which have great value for visual application. However generating a video would be much more challenging since we need to model not only the appearances of objects in the video but also their temporal motion. In this work, we will break down any frame in the video into content and pose. We first extract the pose information from a video using a pre-trained human pose detection and use a generative model to synthesize the video based on the content code and pose code.
Deductive Association Networks

we introduce deductive association networks(DANs), a network that performs deductive reasoning. To have high-dimensional thinking, combining various axioms and putting the results back into another axiom is necessary to produce new relationships and results. For example, it would be given two propositions: "Socrates is a man." and "All men are mortals." and two propositions could be used to infer the new proposition, "Therefore Socrates is mortal.". To evaluate, we used MNIST Dataset, a handwritten numerical image dataset, to apply it to the group theory and show the results of performing deductive learning.
Causal Imitative Model for Autonomous Driving

Imitation learning is a powerful approach for learning autonomous driving policy by leveraging data from expert driver demonstrations. However, driving policies trained via imitation learning that neglect the causal structure of expert demonstrations yield two undesirable behaviors: inertia and collision. In this paper, we propose Causal Imitative Model (CIM) to address inertia and collision problems. CIM explicitly discovers the causal model and utilizes it to train the policy. Specifically, CIM disentangles the input to a set of latent variables, selects the causal variables, and determines the next position by leveraging the selected variables. Our experiments show that our method outperforms previous work in terms of inertia and collision rates. Moreover, thanks to exploiting the causal structure, CIM shrinks the input dimension to only two, hence, can adapt to new environments in a few-shot setting. Code is available at https://github.com/vita-epfl/CIM.
Pedagogical Word Recommendation: A novel task and dataset on  personalized vocabulary acquisition for L2 learners

When learning a second language (L2), one of the most important but tedious components that often demoralizes students with its ineffectiveness and inefficiency is vocabulary acquisition, or more simply put, memorizing words. In light of such, a personalized and educational vocabulary recommendation system that traces a learner's vocabulary knowledge state would have an immense learning impact as it could resolve both issues. Therefore, in this paper, we propose and release data for a novel task called Pedagogical Word Recommendation (PWR). The main goal of PWR is to predict whether a given learner knows a given word based on other words the learner has already seen. To elaborate, we collect this data via an Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) that is serviced to ~1M L2 learners who study for the standardized English exam, TOEIC. As a feature of this ITS, students can directly indicate words they do not know from the questions they solved to create wordbooks. Finally, we report the evaluation results of a Neural Collaborative Filtering approach along with an exploratory data analysis and discuss the impact and efficacy of this dataset as a baseline for future studies on this task.
Transformed K-means Clustering

In this work we propose a clustering framework based on the paradigm of transform learning. In simple terms the representation from transform learning is used for K-means clustering; however, the problem is not solved in such a na\"ive piecemeal fashion. The K-means clustering loss is embedded into the transform learning framework and the joint problem is solved using the alternating direction method of multipliers. Results on document clustering show that our proposed approach improves over the state-of-the-art.
Formation of communicative competence in future officers of public security as a subject of empirical research

The article is devoted to the study of the problem of communicative competence in the individual from a theoretical and empirical point of view. It explains the definitions put forward by foreign scholars in relation to the concept of communicative competence, the essence of the theoretical approaches. In particular, the degree of formation of communicative competence in future officers of public security was studied on the basis of empirical data, and reasonable conclusions and recommendations were developed.
Approximate quantum encryption with even shorter keys

Perfect encryption of a qubit state using the Quantum One-Time Pad (QOTP) requires 2 classical key bits. More generally, perfect QOTP encryption of a $2^n$-dimensional state requires $2n$ classical bits. However, almost-perfect encryption, with information-theoretic security, can be achieved with only little more than $1$ key bit per qubit. In this paper we slightly improve the key length. We show that key length $n+\frac23\log\frac1\varepsilon$ suffices to encrypt $n$ qubits in such a way that the cipherstate has trace distance $\leq\varepsilon$ from the fully mixed state. The previous best result was $n+2\log\frac1\varepsilon$. Similar to the previous literature, we expand the key to a $2n$-bit pseudorandom string which is then used as a QOTP key. In this expansion we make use of $2n$ bits of public randomness which are included as a classical part of the cipherstate. Our key expansion is slightly faster than in previous works.
Transfer Learning Capabilities of Untrained Neural Networks for MIMO CSI  Recreation

Machine learning (ML) applications for wireless communications have gained momentum on the standardization discussions for 5G advanced and beyond. One of the biggest challenges for real world ML deployment is the need for labeled signals and big measurement campaigns. To overcome those problems, we propose the use of untrained neural networks (UNNs) for MIMO channel recreation/estimation and low overhead reporting. The UNNs learn the propagation environment by fitting a few channel measurements and we exploit their learned prior to provide higher channel estimation gains. Moreover, we present a UNN for simultaneous channel recreation for multiple users, or multiple user equipment (UE) positions, in which we have a trade-off between the estimated channel gain and the number of parameters. Our results show that transfer learning techniques are effective in accessing the learned prior on the environment structure as they provide higher channel gain for neighbouring users. Moreover, we indicate how the under-parameterization of UNNs can further enable low-overhead channel state information (CSI) reporting.
Multicriteria interpretability driven Deep Learning

Deep Learning methods are renowned for their performances, yet their lack of interpretability prevents them from high-stakes contexts. Recent model agnostic methods address this problem by providing post-hoc interpretability methods by reverse-engineering the model's inner workings. However, in many regulated fields, interpretability should be kept in mind from the start, which means that post-hoc methods are valid only as a sanity check after model training. Interpretability from the start, in an abstract setting, means posing a set of soft constraints on the model's behavior by injecting knowledge and annihilating possible biases. We propose a Multicriteria technique that allows to control the feature effects on the model's outcome by injecting knowledge in the objective function. We then extend the technique by including a non-linear knowledge function to account for more complex effects and local lack of knowledge. The result is a Deep Learning model that embodies interpretability from the start and aligns with the recent regulations. A practical empirical example based on credit risk, suggests that our approach creates performant yet robust models capable of overcoming biases derived from data scarcity.