Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Prototypical Graph Contrastive Learning

Graph-level representations are critical in various real-world applications, such as predicting the properties of molecules. But in practice, precise graph annotations are generally very expensive and time-consuming. To address this issue, graph contrastive learning constructs instance discrimination task which pulls together positive pairs (augmentation pairs of the same graph) and pushes away negative pairs (augmentation pairs of different graphs) for unsupervised representation learning. However, since for a query, its negatives are uniformly sampled from all graphs, existing methods suffer from the critical sampling bias issue, i.e., the negatives likely having the same semantic structure with the query, leading to performance degradation. To mitigate this sampling bias issue, in this paper, we propose a Prototypical Graph Contrastive Learning (PGCL) approach. Specifically, PGCL models the underlying semantic structure of the graph data via clustering semantically similar graphs into the same group, and simultaneously encourages the clustering consistency for different augmentations of the same graph. Then given a query, it performs negative sampling via drawing the graphs from those clusters that differ from the cluster of query, which ensures the semantic difference between query and its negative samples. Moreover, for a query, PGCL further reweights its negative samples based on the distance between their prototypes (cluster centroids) and the query prototype such that those negatives having moderate prototype distance enjoy relatively large weights. This reweighting strategy is proved to be more effective than uniform sampling. Experimental results on various graph benchmarks testify the advantages of our PGCL over state-of-the-art methods. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/ha-lins/PGCL.
The right complexity measure in locally private estimation: It is not the Fisher information

We identify fundamental tradeoffs between statistical utility and privacy under local models of privacy in which data is kept private even from the statistician, providing instance-specific bounds for private estimation and learning problems by developing the local minimax risk. In contrast to approaches based on worst-case (minimax) error, which are conservative, this allows us to evaluate the difficulty of individual problem instances and delineate the possibilities for adaptation in private estimation and inference. Our main results show that the local modulus of continuity of the estimand with respect to the variation distance—as opposed to the Hellinger distance central to classical statistics—characterizes rates of convergence under locally private estimation for many notions of privacy, including differential privacy and its relaxations. As consequences of these results, we identify an alternative to the Fisher information for private estimation, giving a more nuanced understanding of the challenges of adaptivity and optimality.
Understanding Pooling in Graph Neural Networks

Many recent works in the field of graph machine learning have introduced pooling operators to reduce the size of graphs. In this article, we present an operational framework to unify this vast and diverse literature by describing pooling operators as the combination of three functions: selection, reduction, and connection (SRC). We then introduce a taxonomy of pooling operators, based on some of their key characteristics and implementation differences under the SRC framework. Finally, we propose three criteria to evaluate the performance of pooling operators and use them to investigate the behavior of different operators on a variety of tasks.
Multitargets Joint Training Lightweight Model for Object Detection of Substation

The object detection of the substation is the key to ensuring the safety and reliable operation of the substation. The traditional image detection algorithms use the corresponding texture features of single-class objects and would not handle other different class objects easily. The object detection algorithm based on deep networks has generalization, and its sizeable complex backbone limits the application in the substation monitoring terminals with weak computing power. This article proposes a multitargets joint training lightweight model. The proposed model uses the feature maps of the complex model and the labels of objects in images as training multitargets. The feature maps have deeper feature information, and the feature maps of complex networks have higher information entropy than lightweight networks have. This article proposes the heat pixels method to improve the adequate object information because of the imbalance of the proportion between the foreground and the background. The heat pixels method is designed as a kind of reverse network calculation and reflects the object's position to the pixels of the feature maps. The temperature of the pixels indicates the probability of the existence of the objects in the locations. Three different lightweight networks use the complex model feature maps and the traditional tags as the training multitargets. The public dataset VOC and the substation equipment dataset are adopted in the experiments. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model can effectively improve object detection accuracy and reduce the time-consuming and calculation amount.
Ideal-Theoretic Explanation of Capacity-Achieving Decoding

In this work, we present an abstract framework for some algebraic error-correcting codes with the aim of capturing codes that are list-decodable to capacity, along with their decoding algorithms. In the polynomial ideal framework, a code is specified by some ideals in a polynomial ring, messages are polynomials and the encoding of a message polynomial is the collection of residues of that polynomial modulo the ideals. We present an alternate way of viewing this class of codes in terms of linear operators, and show that this alternate view makes their algorithmic list-decodability amenable to analysis. Our framework leads to a new class of codes that we call affine Folded Reed-Solomon codes (which are themselves a special case of the broader class we explore). These codes are common generalizations of the well-studied Folded Reed-Solomon codes and Univariate Multiplicity codes as well as the less-studied Additive Folded Reed-Solomon codes, and lead to a large family of codes that were not previously known/studied. More significantly our framework also captures the algorithmic list-decodability of the constituent codes. Specifically, we present a unified view of the decoding algorithm for ideal-theoretic codes and show that the decodability reduces to the analysis of the distance of some related codes. We show that a good bound on this distance leads to a capacity-achieving performance of the underlying code, providing a unifying explanation of known capacity-achieving results. In the specific case of affine Folded Reed-Solomon codes, our framework shows that they are efficiently list-decodable up to capacity (for appropriate setting of the parameters), thereby unifying the previous results for Folded Reed-Solomon, Multiplicity and Additive Folded Reed-Solomon codes.
QUBO formulations for a system of linear equations

With the advent of quantum computers, many quantum computing algorithms are being developed. Solving linear systems is one of the most fundamental problems in modern science and engineering. The Harrow Hassidim-Lloyd algorithm, a monumental quantum algorithm for solving linear systems on gate model quantum computers, was invented and several advanced variations have been developed. The algorithm was difficult to apply to general linear equations because it required various conditions for the matrix. In this paper, we introduce a new algorithm that can be applied to all linear systems. For a given general square matrix A∈Rn×n and a vector b→∈Rn, we will find quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) models for a vector x→∈Rn that satisfies Ax→=b→. To formulate QUBO models for solving linear systems, we made use of a linear least-square problem with binary representation of the solution. We validated those QUBO models on the D-Wave system and discussed the results. For a simple system, we provide a Python code to calculate the matrix characterizing the relationship between the variables, and to print the test code that can be used directly in the D-Wave system.
Monte Carlo DropBlock for modeling uncertainty in object detection

With the advancements made in deep learning, computer vision problems have seen a great improvement in performance. However, in many real-world applications such as autonomous driving vehicles, the risk associated with incorrect predictions of objects or segmentation of images is very high. Standard deep learning models for object detection and segmentation such as YOLO models are often overconfident in their predictions and do not take into account the uncertainty in predictions on out-of-distribution data. In this work, we propose an efficient and effective approach, Monte-Carlo DropBlock (MC-DropBlock), to model uncertainty in YOLO and convolutional vision Transformers for object detection. The proposed approach applies drop-block during training time and testing time on the convolutional layer of the deep learning models such as YOLO and convolutional transformer. We theoretically show that this leads to a Bayesian convolutional neural network capable of capturing the epistemic uncertainty in the model. Additionally, we capture the aleatoric uncertainty in the data using a Gaussian likelihood. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach on modeling uncertainty in object detection and segmentation tasks using out-of-distribution experiments. Experimental results show that MC-DropBlock improves the generalization, calibration, and uncertainty modeling capabilities of YOLO models and convolutional Transformer models for object detection and segmentation.
Generating novel scene compositions from single images and videos

Given a large dataset for training, generative adversarial networks (GANs) can achieve remarkable performance for the image synthesis task. However, training GANs in extremely low data regimes remains a challenge as overfitting often occurs, leading to memorization or training divergence. In this work, we introduce SIV-GAN, an unconditional generative model that can generate new scene compositions from a single training image or a single video clip. We propose a two-branch discriminator architecture with content and layout branches that are designed to judge internal content and scene layout realism separately from each other. This discriminator design enables the synthesis of visually plausible, novel compositions of a scene with varying content and layout while preserving the context of the original sample. Compared to previous single-image GANs, our model generates more diverse images of higher quality while not being restricted to a single image setting. We further introduce a new challenging task of learning from a few frames of a single video. In this training setup the training images are highly similar to each other, which makes it difficult for prior GAN models to achieve a synthesis of both high quality and diversity.
Work in Progress: STEM Students’ Experiences with Educational Technology Tools

Dr. Anwar has over 12
Knowledge Distillation Using Hierarchical Self-Supervision Augmented Distribution

Knowledge distillation (KD) is an effective framework that aims to transfer meaningful information from a large teacher to a smaller student. Generally, KD often involves how to define and transfer knowledge. Previous KD methods often focus on mining various forms of knowledge, for example, feature maps and refined information. However, the knowledge is derived from the primary supervised task, and thus, is highly task-specific. Motivated by the recent success of self-supervised representation learning, we propose an auxiliary self-supervision augmented task to guide networks to learn more meaningful features. Therefore, we can derive soft self-supervision augmented distributions as richer dark knowledge from this task for KD. Unlike previous knowledge, this distribution encodes joint knowledge from supervised and self-supervised feature learning. Beyond knowledge exploration, we propose to append several auxiliary branches at various hidden layers, to fully take advantage of hierarchical feature maps. Each auxiliary branch is guided to learn self-supervision augmented tasks and distill this distribution from teacher to student. Overall, we call our KD method a hierarchical self-supervision augmented KD (HSSAKD). Experiments on standard image classification show that both offline and online HSSAKD achieves state-of-the-art performance in the field of KD. Further transfer experiments on object detection further verify that HSSAKD can guide the network to learn better features. The code is available at https://github.com/winycg/HSAKD.
Speech recognition datasets for low-resource Congolese languages

Large pre-trained Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models have shown improved performance in low-resource languages due to the increased availability of benchmark corpora and the advantages of transfer learning. However, only a limited number of languages possess ample resources to fully leverage transfer learning. In such contexts, benchmark corpora become crucial for advancing methods. In this article, we introduce two new benchmark corpora designed for low-resource languages spoken in the Democratic Republic of the Congo: the Lingala Read Speech Corpus, with 4 h of labelled audio, and the Congolese Speech Radio Corpus, which offers 741 h of unlabelled audio spanning four significant low-resource languages of the region. During data collection, Lingala Read Speech recordings of thirty-two distinct adult speakers, each with a unique context under various settings with different accents, were recorded. Concurrently, Congolese Speech Radio raw data were taken from the archive of broadcast station, followed by a designed curation process. During data preparation, numerous strategies have been utilised for pre-processing the data. The datasets, which have been made freely accessible to all researchers, serve as a valuable resource for not only investigating and developing monolingual methods and approaches that employ linguistically distant languages but also multilingual approaches with linguistically similar languages. Using techniques such as supervised learning and self-supervised learning, they are able to develop inaugural benchmarking of speech recognition systems for Lingala and mark the first instance of a multilingual model tailored for four Congolese languages spoken by an aggregated population of 95 million. Moreover, two models were applied to this dataset. The first is supervised learning modelling and the second is for self-supervised pre-training.
Objective Dimensions on Fishermen's Quality of Life

The purpose of this study was to find out fishermen’s quality of life construct validity used survey by involving 44 fishermen in Cimalaya, Karawang. Data analyzed by correlations test, cronbach’s alpha and factor analysis (CFA). The Study results revealed that there were four objective dimensions of fishermen’s quality of life that can be seen from the indicators: (1) income with value of 0.455; (2) Marital status with value of 0.545; (3) Health status with value of 0.691; and (4) Social relationship with value of 0.638. Those values were good since they were above 0.4 or had little tolerance to above 0.25. For this reason, the objective dimensions of quality of life can be measured in terms of harmony and ability which is the integration of quality of life.
EMF-Net: An edge-guided multi-feature fusion network for text manipulation detection

Text images have a more uniform background than natural images, making it difficult to capture tampering traces. Thus, it poses significant challenges to the detection and localization of tampered text images. To effectively detect tampered text images, we propose the edge-guided multi-feature fusion network (EMF-Net) including four different modules, the difference semantic discriminator (DSD), the edge-guidance feature aggregation module (EFAM), the edge supervised module (ESM), and the multi-branch attention-induced fusion module (MAFM). The proposed network combines RGB images and learned noise-sensitive features to deeply excavate the hidden tampered region features to improve the detection accuracy due to the insufficient feature information. Meanwhile, the multi-branch attention-induced fusion and semantic discriminator methods are integrated to reduce false alarms by shielding the feature interference in non-tampered regions and diminish the external interference. Furthermore, we craft a dataset of 12,000 text images and their tempered versions with three tempering operations including copy-move, splicing and inpainting. Extensive experiments have shown that the proposed network can improve the generalization performance and achieve the higher detection accuracy compared to current other state-of-the-art methods.
Occurrence and characteristics of elderly With Covid-19 in southern Brazil

This study aimed to describe the occurrence of COVID-19 in elderly patients treated at public health services in southern Brazil cities and their clinical and sociodemographic characteristics. This is a cross-sectional, observational, and retrospective study. From July 2020 to May 2021, medical records of elderly patients who underwent a test for COVID-19 at the molecular diagnostics laboratory of the University of Cruz Alta were selected. 310 elderly patients, with an average age of 60 to 99 years, were included in the study. Information was collected regarding the result of the RT-qPCR test, gender, symptoms, and comorbidities. We identified that 24.2% of the elderly evaluated in the study had a positive molecular diagnosis for COVID-19. The average age of the sample studied was 69 years (±8.89). Females had a higher proportion of positive cases (69.3%) compared to males (30.7%) (p=0.017). A higher proportion of individuals infected with SARS-Cov2 among those who reported cough, fever &gt;37°C and pre-existing cardiovascular diseases (p = 0.028; 0.015; 0.017 respectively) was also identified. Learning the clinical and sociodemographic profile of the elderly with COVID-19 can contribute to strategies for care and prevention of the disease in this group. The study findings indicate that greater attention should be given to the elderly with heart diseases and those who have fevers and coughs.
Multi-View Graph Learning by Joint Modeling of Consistency and Inconsistency

Graph learning has emerged as a promising technique for multi-view clustering due to its ability to learn a unified and robust graph from multiple views. However, existing graph learning methods mostly focus on the multi-view consistency issue, yet often neglect the inconsistency between views, which makes them vulnerable to possibly low-quality or noisy datasets. To overcome this limitation, we propose a new multi-view graph learning framework, which for the first time simultaneously and explicitly models multi-view consistency and inconsistency in a unified objective function, through which the consistent and inconsistent parts of each single-view graph as well as the unified graph that fuses the consistent parts can be iteratively learned. Though optimizing the objective function is NP-hard, we design a highly efficient optimization algorithm that can obtain an approximate solution with linear time complexity in the number of edges in the unified graph. Furthermore, our multi-view graph learning approach can be applied to both similarity graphs and dissimilarity graphs, which lead to two graph fusion-based variants in our framework. Experiments on 12 multi-view datasets have demonstrated the robustness and efficiency of the proposed approach. The code is available at https://github.com/youweiliang/Multi-view_Graph_Learning.
Tchebichef Transform Domain-Based Deep Learning Architecture for Image Super-Resolution

Recent advances in the area of artificial intelligence and deep learning have motivated researchers to apply this knowledge to solve multipurpose applications in the area of computer vision and image processing. Super-resolution (SR), in the past few years, has produced remarkable results using deep learning methods. The ability of deep learning methods to learn the nonlinear mapping from low-resolution (LR) images to their corresponding high-resolution (HR) images leads to compelling results for SR in diverse areas of research. In this article, we propose a deep learning-based image SR architecture in the Tchebichef transform domain. This is achieved by integrating a transform layer into the proposed architecture through a customized Tchebichef convolutional layer (TCL). The role of TCL is to convert the LR image from the spatial domain to the orthogonal transform domain using Tchebichef basis functions. The inversion of the transform mentioned earlier is achieved using another layer known as the inverse TCL (ITCL), which converts back the LR images from the transform domain to the spatial domain. It has been observed that using the Tchebichef transform domain for the task of SR takes the advantage of high and low- frequency representation of images that makes the task of SR simplified. Furthermore, a transfer learning-based approach is adopted to enhance the quality of images by considering Covid19 medical images as an additional experiment. It is shown that our architecture enhances the quality of X-ray and CT images of COVID-19, providing a better image quality that may help in clinical diagnosis. Experimental results obtained using the proposed Tchebichef transform domain SR (TTDSR) architecture provides competitive results when compared with most of the deep learning methods employed using a fewer number of trainable parameters.
RCT: Resource Constrained Training for Edge AI

Efficient neural network training is essential for in situ training of edge artificial intelligence (AI) and carbon footprint reduction in general. Train neural network on the edge is challenging because there is a large gap between limited resources on edge and the resource requirement of current training methods. Existing training methods are based on the assumption that the underlying computing infrastructure has sufficient memory and energy supplies. These methods involve two copies of the model parameters, which is usually beyond the capacity of on-chip memory in processors. The data movement between off-chip and on-chip memory incurs large amounts of energy. We propose resource constrained training (RCT) to realize resource-efficient training for edge devices and servers. RCT only keeps a quantized model throughout the training so that the memory requirement for model parameters in training is reduced. It adjusts per-layer bitwidth dynamically to save energy when a model can learn effectively with lower precision. We carry out experiments with representative models and tasks in image classification, natural language processing, and crowd counting applications. Experiments show that on average, 8-15-bit weight update is sufficient for achieving SOTA performance in these applications. RCT saves 63.5%-80% memory for model parameters and saves more energy for communications. Through experiments, we observe that the common practice on the first/last layer in model compression does not apply to efficient training. Also, interestingly, the more challenging a dataset is, the lower bitwidth is required for efficient training.