pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Horizontal and Vertical Differentiation: Approaching Endogenous Measurement in Intra-industry Trade
Authors: Sourish Dutta
Date: 2023-07-20 00:00:00

Studying intra-industry trade involves theoretical explanations and empirical methods to measure the phenomenon. Indicators have been developed to measure the intensity of intra-industry trade, leading to theoretical models explaining its determinants. It is essential to distinguish between horizontal and vertical differentiation in empirical analyses. The determinants and consequences of intra-industry trade depend on whether the traded products differ in quality. A method for distinguishing between vertical and horizontal differentiation involves comparing exports' unit value to imports for each industry's intra-industry trade. This approach has limitations, leading to the need for an alternative method.
Treatment And Follow-Up Guidelines For Multiple Brain Metastases: A Systematic Review
Authors: Ana Sofia Santos, Matheus Silva, Crystian Saraiva, José Soares, Victor Alves
Date: 2023-07-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Management

Brain metastases are a complication of primary cancer, representing the most common type of brain tumor in adults. The management of multiple brain metastases represents a clinical challenge worldwide in finding the optimal treatment for patients considering various individual aspects. Managing multiple metastases with stereotactic radiosurgery (SRS) is being increasingly used because of quality of life and neurocognitive preservation, which do not present such good outcomes when dealt with whole brain radiation therapy (WBRT). After treatment, analyzing the progression of the disease still represents a clinical issue, since it is difficult to determine a standard schedule for image acquisition. A solution could be the applying artificial intelligence, namely predictive models to forecast the incidence of new metastases in post-treatment images. Although there aren't many works on this subject, this could potentially bennefit medical professionals in early decision of the best treatment approaches.
Aggressive saliency-aware point cloud compression
Authors: Eleftheria Psatha, Dimitrios Laskos, Gerasimos Arvanitis, Konstantinos Moustakas
Date: 2023-07-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder

The increasing demand for accurate representations of 3D scenes, combined with immersive technologies has led point clouds to extensive popularity. However, quality point clouds require a large amount of data and therefore the need for compression methods is imperative. In this paper, we present a novel, geometry-based, end-to-end compression scheme, that combines information on the geometrical features of the point cloud and the user's position, achieving remarkable results for aggressive compression schemes demanding very small bit rates. After separating visible and non-visible points, four saliency maps are calculated, utilizing the point cloud's geometry and distance from the user, the visibility information, and the user's focus point. A combination of these maps results in a final saliency map, indicating the overall significance of each point and therefore quantizing different regions with a different number of bits during the encoding process. The decoder reconstructs the point cloud making use of delta coordinates and solving a sparse linear system. Evaluation studies and comparisons with the geometry-based point cloud compression (G-PCC) algorithm by the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG), carried out for a variety of point clouds, demonstrate that the proposed method achieves significantly better results for small bit rates.
Metaverse: A Young Gamer's Perspective
Authors: Ivan V. Bajić, Teo Saeedi-Bajić, Kai Saeedi-Bajić
Date: 2023-07-19 00:00:00

When developing technologies for the Metaverse, it is important to understand the needs and requirements of end users. Relatively little is known about the specific perspectives on the use of the Metaverse by the youngest audience: children ten and under. This paper explores the Metaverse from the perspective of a young gamer. It examines their understanding of the Metaverse in relation to the physical world and other technologies they may be familiar with, looks at some of their expectations of the Metaverse, and then relates these to the specific multimedia signal processing (MMSP) research challenges. The perspectives presented in the paper may be useful for planning more detailed subjective experiments involving young gamers, as well as informing the research on MMSP technologies targeted at these users.
StyleGAN2-based Out-of-Distribution Detection for Medical Imaging
Authors: McKell Woodland, John Wood, Caleb O'Connor, Ankit B. Patel, Kristy K. Brock
Date: 2023-07-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Computed Tomography (CT), Generative Adversarial Network, Out-of-Distribution Detection

One barrier to the clinical deployment of deep learning-based models is the presence of images at runtime that lie far outside the training distribution of a given model. We aim to detect these out-of-distribution (OOD) images with a generative adversarial network (GAN). Our training dataset was comprised of 3,234 liver-containing computed tomography (CT) scans from 456 patients. Our OOD test data consisted of CT images of the brain, head and neck, lung, cervix, and abnormal livers. A StyleGAN2-ADA architecture was employed to model the training distribution. Images were reconstructed using backpropagation. Reconstructions were evaluated using the Wasserstein distance, mean squared error, and the structural similarity index measure. OOD detection was evaluated with the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC). Our paradigm distinguished between liver and non-liver CT with greater than 90% AUROC. It was also completely unable to reconstruct liver artifacts, such as needles and ascites.
Multi-Scale U-Shape MLP for Hyperspectral Image Classification
Authors: Moule Lin, WeiPeng Jing, Donglin Di, Guangsheng Chen, Houbing Song
Date: 2023-07-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Decoder, Hyperspectral Image Classification, image-classification, Image Classification

Hyperspectral images have significant applications in various domains, since they register numerous semantic and spatial information in the spectral band with spatial variability of spectral signatures. Two critical challenges in identifying pixels of the hyperspectral image are respectively representing the correlated information among the local and global, as well as the abundant parameters of the model. To tackle this challenge, we propose a Multi-Scale U-shape Multi-Layer Perceptron (MUMLP) a model consisting of the designed MSC (Multi-Scale Channel) block and the UMLP (U-shape Multi-Layer Perceptron) structure. MSC transforms the channel dimension and mixes spectral band feature to embed the deep-level representation adequately. UMLP is designed by the encoder-decoder structure with multi-layer perceptron layers, which is capable of compressing the large-scale parameters. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate our model can outperform state-of-the-art methods across-the-board on three wide-adopted public datasets, namely Pavia University, Houston 2013 and Houston 2018
Signal Identification and Entrainment for Practical FMCW Radar Spoofing Attacks
Authors: Andrew M. Graff, Todd E. Humphreys
Date: 2023-07-20 00:00:00

This paper proposes a method of passively estimating the parameters of frequency-modulated-continuous-wave (FMCW) radar signals with a wide range of structural parameter values and analyzes how a malicious actor could employ such estimates to track and spoof a target radar. When radars are implemented to support automated driver assistance systems, an intelligent spoofer has the potential to substantially disrupt safe navigation by inducing its target to perceive false objects. Such a spoofer must acquire highly accurate estimates of the target radar's chirp sweep, timing, and frequency parameters while additionally tracking and compensating for time and Doppler shifts due to clock errors and relative movement. This is a difficult task for millimeter-wave radars due to severe Doppler shifts and fast sweep rates, especially when the spoofer uses off-the-shelf FMCW equipment. Algorithms and techniques for acquiring and tracking an FMCW radar are proposed and verified through simulation, which will help guide future decisions on appropriate radar spoofing countermeasures.
Practical Active Noise Control: Restriction of Maximum Output Power
Authors: Woon-Seng Gan, Dongyuan Shi, Xiaoyi Shen
Date: 2023-07-20 00:00:00

This paper presents some recent algorithms developed by the authors for real-time adaptive active noise (AANC) control systems. These algorithms address some of the common challenges faced by AANC systems, such as speaker saturation, system divergence, and disturbance rejection. Speaker saturation can introduce nonlinearity into the adaptive system and degrade the noise reduction performance. System divergence can occur when the secondary speaker units are over-amplified or when there is a disturbance other than the noise to be controlled. Disturbance rejection is important to prevent the adaptive system from adapting to unwanted signals. The paper provides guidelines for implementing and operating real-time AANC systems based on these algorithms.
Tight-frame-like Analysis-Sparse Recovery Using Non-tight Sensing Matrices
Authors: Kartheek Kumar Reddy Nareddy, Abijith Jagannath Kamath, Chandra Sekhar Seelamantula
Date: 2023-07-20 00:00:00
Tasks: compressed sensing, SSIM

The choice of the sensing matrix is crucial in compressed sensing. Random Gaussian sensing matrices satisfy the restricted isometry property, which is crucial for solving the sparse recovery problem using convex optimization techniques. However, tight-frame sensing matrices result in minimum mean-squared-error recovery given oracle knowledge of the support of the sparse vector. If the sensing matrix is not tight, could one achieve the recovery performance assured by a tight frame by suitably designing the recovery strategy? -- This is the key question addressed in this paper. We consider the analysis-sparse l1-minimization problem with a generalized l2-norm-based data-fidelity and show that it effectively corresponds to using a tight-frame sensing matrix. The new formulation offers improved performance bounds when the number of non-zeros is large. One could develop a tight-frame variant of a known sparse recovery algorithm using the proposed formalism. We solve the analysis-sparse recovery problem in an unconstrained setting using proximal methods. Within the tight-frame sensing framework, we rescale the gradients of the data-fidelity loss in the iterative updates to further improve the accuracy of analysis-sparse recovery. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithms offer superior analysis-sparse recovery performance. Proceeding further, we also develop deep-unfolded variants, with a convolutional neural network as the sparsifying operator. On the application front, we consider compressed sensing image recovery. Experimental results on Set11, BSD68, Urban100, and DIV2K datasets show that the proposed techniques outperform the state-of-the-art techniques, with performance measured in terms of peak signal-to-noise ratio and structural similarity index metric.
Analysis of Arctic Buoy Dynamics using the Discrete Fourier Transform and Principal Component Analysis
Authors: James H. Hepworth, Amit Kumar Mishra
Date: 2023-07-20 00:00:00

Sea-Ice drift affects various global processes including the air-sea-ice energy system, numerical ocean modelling, and maritime activity in the polar regions. Drift has been investigated via various technologies ranging from satellite based systems to ship or ice-borne processes. This paper analyses the dynamics of sea-drift in the Arctic over 2019-2021 by Fourier Analysis and Principal Component Analysis of displacement data generated from the drift tracks of Ice-Tethered Profilers. We show that the frequency characteristics of drift support the notion that it is a function of both slowly varying processes, and higher frequency, random, forcing. In addition, we show that displacement data features high correlation between deployment locations and, consequently, suggest that there is scope for the optimisation of profiler deployment locations and for the reduction in number of instruments required to capture the displacement characteristics of drift.
A Novel Unsupervised Graph Wavelet Autoencoder for Mechanical System Fault Detection
Authors: Tianfu Li, Chuang Sun, Ruqiang Yan, Xuefeng Chen
Date: 2023-07-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Fault Detection, Graph Neural Network

Reliable fault detection is an essential requirement for safe and efficient operation of complex mechanical systems in various industrial applications. Despite the abundance of existing approaches and the maturity of the fault detection research field, the interdependencies between condition monitoring data have often been overlooked. Recently, graph neural networks have been proposed as a solution for learning the interdependencies among data, and the graph autoencoder (GAE) architecture, similar to standard autoencoders, has gained widespread use in fault detection. However, both the GAE and the graph variational autoencoder (GVAE) have fixed receptive fields, limiting their ability to extract multiscale features and model performance. To overcome these limitations, we propose two graph neural network models: the graph wavelet autoencoder (GWAE), and the graph wavelet variational autoencoder (GWVAE). GWAE consists mainly of the spectral graph wavelet convolutional (SGWConv) encoder and a feature decoder, while GWVAE is the variational form of GWAE. The developed SGWConv is built upon the spectral graph wavelet transform which can realize multiscale feature extraction by decomposing the graph signal into one scaling function coefficient and several spectral graph wavelet coefficients. To achieve unsupervised mechanical system fault detection, we transform the collected system signals into PathGraph by considering the neighboring relationships of each data sample. Fault detection is then achieved by evaluating the reconstruction errors of normal and abnormal samples. We carried out experiments on two condition monitoring datasets collected from fuel control systems and one acoustic monitoring dataset from a valve. The results show that the proposed methods improve the performance by around 3%~4% compared to the comparison methods.
Power Allocation for Device-to-Device Interference Channel Using Truncated Graph Transformers
Authors: Dohoon Kim, Shenghui Song
Date: 2023-07-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Neural Network

Power control for the device-to-device interference channel with single-antenna transceivers has been widely analyzed with both model-based methods and learning-based approaches. Although the learning-based approaches, i.e., datadriven and model-driven, offer performance improvement, the widely adopted graph neural network suffers from learning the heterophilous power distribution of the interference channel. In this paper, we propose a deep learning architecture in the family of graph transformers to circumvent the issue. Experiment results show that the proposed methods achieve the state-of-theart performance across a wide range of untrained network configurations. Furthermore, we show there is a trade-off between model complexity and generality.
Real-World Evaluation of Full-Duplex Millimeter Wave Communication Systems
Authors: Ian P. Roberts, Yu Zhang, Tawfik Osman, Ahmed Alkhateeb
Date: 2023-07-20 00:00:00

Noteworthy strides continue to be made in the development of full-duplex millimeter wave (mmWave) communication systems, but most of this progress has been built on theoretical models and validated through simulation. In this work, we conduct a long overdue real-world evaluation of full-duplex mmWave systems using off-the-shelf 60 GHz phased arrays. Using an experimental full-duplex base station, we collect over 200,000 measurements of self-interference by electronically sweeping its transmit and receive beams across a dense spatial profile, shedding light on the effects of the environment, array positioning, and beam steering direction. We then call attention to five key challenges faced by practical full-duplex mmWave systems and, with these in mind, propose a general framework for beamforming-based full-duplex solutions. Guided by this framework, we introduce a novel solution called STEER+, a more robust version of recent work called STEER, and experimentally evaluate both in a real-world setting with actual downlink and uplink users. Rather than purely minimize self-interference as with STEER, STEER+ makes use of additional measurements to maximize spectral efficiency, which proves to make it much less sensitive to one's choice of design parameters. We experimentally show that STEER+ can reliably reduce self-interference to near or below the noise floor while maintaining high SNR on the downlink and uplink, thus enabling full-duplex operation purely via beamforming.
Terahertz Communications and Sensing for 6G and Beyond: A Comprehensive Review
Authors: Wei Jiang, Qiuheng Zhou, Jiguang He, Mohammad Asif Habibi, Sergiy Melnyk, Mohammed El Absi, Bin Han, Marco Di Renzo, Hans Dieter Schotten, Fa-Long Luo, Tarek S. El-Bawab, Markku Juntti, Merouane Debbah, Victor C. M. Leung
Date: 2023-07-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Survey

Next-generation cellular technologies, commonly referred to as the 6G, are envisioned to support a higher system capacity, better performance, and network sensing capabilities. The THz band is one potential enabler to this end due to the large unused frequency bands and the high spatial resolution enabled by the short signal wavelength and large bandwidth. Different from earlier surveys, this paper presents a comprehensive treatment and technology survey on THz communications and sensing in terms of advantages, applications, propagation characterization, channel modeling, measurement campaigns, antennas, transceiver devices, beamforming, networking, the integration of communications and sensing, and experimental testbeds. Starting from the motivation and use cases, we survey the development and historical perspective of THz communications and sensing with the anticipated 6G requirements. We explore the radio propagation, channel modeling, and measurement for the THz band. The transceiver requirements, architectures, technological challenges, and state-of-the-art approaches to compensate for the high propagation losses, including appropriate antenna design and beamforming solutions. We overview several related technologies that either are required by or are beneficial for THz systems and networks. The synergistic design of sensing and communications is explored in depth. Practical trials, demonstrations, and experiments are also summarized. The paper gives a holistic view of the current state of the art and highlights the open research challenges towards 6G and beyond.
Opportunities and challenges for deep learning in cell dynamics research
Authors: Binghao Chai, Christoforos Efstathiou, Haoran Yue, Viji M. Draviam
Date: 2023-07-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

With the growth of artificial intelligence (AI), there has been an increase in the adoption of computer vision and deep learning (DL) techniques for the evaluation of microscopy images and movies. This adoption has not only addressed hurdles in quantitative analysis of dynamic cell biological processes, but it has also started supporting advances in drug development, precision medicine and genome-phenome mapping. Here we survey existing AI-based techniques and tools, and open-source datasets, with a specific focus on the computational tasks of segmentation, classification, and tracking of cellular and subcellular structures and dynamics. We summarise long-standing challenges in microscopy video analysis from the computational perspective and review emerging research frontiers and innovative applications for deep learning-guided automation for cell dynamics research.
Computational modelling of angiogenesis: The importance of cell rearrangements during vascular growth
Authors: Daria Stepanova, Helen M. Byrne, Philip K. Maini, Tomás Alarcón
Date: 2023-07-18 00:00:00

Angiogenesis is the process wherein endothelial cells (ECs) form sprouts that elongate from the pre-existing vasculature to create new vascular networks. In addition to its essential role in normal development, angiogenesis plays a vital role in pathologies such as cancer, diabetes and atherosclerosis. Mathematical and computational modelling has contributed to unravelling its complexity. Many existing theoretical models of angiogenic sprouting are based on the 'snail-trail' hypothesis. This framework assumes that leading ECs positioned at sprout tips migrate towards low-oxygen regions while other ECs in the sprout passively follow the leaders' trails and proliferate to maintain sprout integrity. However, experimental results indicate that, contrary to the snail-trail assumption, ECs exchange positions within developing vessels, and the elongation of sprouts is primarily driven by directed migration of ECs. The functional role of cell rearrangements remains unclear. This review of the theoretical modelling of angiogenesis is the first to focus on the phenomenon of cell mixing during early sprouting. We start by describing the biological processes that occur during early angiogenesis, such as phenotype specification, cell rearrangements and cell interactions with the microenvironment. Next, we provide an overview of various theoretical approaches that have been employed to model angiogenesis, with particular emphasis on recent in silico models that account for the phenomenon of cell mixing. Finally, we discuss when cell mixing should be incorporated into theoretical models and what essential modelling components such models should include in order to investigate its functional role.
Modeling Motion Dynamics in Psychotherapy: a Dynamical Systems Approach
Authors: Itai Dattner
Date: 2023-07-12 00:00:00

This study introduces a novel mechanistic modeling and statistical framework for analyzing motion energy dynamics within psychotherapy sessions. We transform raw motion energy data into an interpretable narrative of therapist-patient interactions, thereby revealing unique insights into the nature of these dynamics. Our methodology is established through three detailed case studies, each shedding light on the complexities of dyadic interactions. A key component of our approach is an analysis spanning four years of one therapist's sessions, allowing us to distinguish between trait-like and state-like dynamics. This research represents a significant advancement in the quantitative understanding of motion dynamics in psychotherapy, with the potential to substantially influence both future research and therapeutic practice.
Important Clues that Facilitate Visual Emergence: Three Psychological Experiments
Authors: Jingmeng Li, Hui Wei
Date: 2023-07-10 00:00:00

Visual emergence is the phenomenon in which the visual system obtains a holistic perception after grouping and reorganizing local signals. The picture Dalmatian dog is known for its use in explaining visual emergence. This type of image, which consists of a set of discrete black speckles (speckles), is called an emerging image. Not everyone can find the dog in Dalmatian dog, and among those who can, the time spent varies greatly. Although Gestalt theory summarizes perceptual organization into several principles, it remains ambiguous how these principles affect the perception of emerging images. This study, therefore, designed three psychological experiments to explore the factors that influence the perception of emerging images. In the first, we found that the density of speckles in the local area and the arrangements of some key speckles played a key role in the perception of an emerging case. We set parameters in the algorithm to characterize these two factors. We then automatically generated diversified emerging-test images (ETIs) through the algorithm and verified their effectiveness in two subsequent experiments.