MetaF2N: Blind Image Super-Resolution by Learning Efficient Model Adaptation from Faces

Due to their highly structured characteristics, faces are easier to recover than natural scenes for blind image super-resolution. Therefore, we can extract the degradation representation of an image from the low-quality and recovered face pairs. Using the degradation representation, realistic low-quality images can then be synthesized to fine-tune the super-resolution model for the real-world low-quality image. However, such a procedure is time-consuming and laborious, and the gaps between recovered faces and the ground-truths further increase the optimization uncertainty. To facilitate efficient model adaptation towards image-specific degradations, we propose a method dubbed MetaF2N, which leverages the contained Faces to fine-tune model parameters for adapting to the whole Natural image in a Meta-learning framework. The degradation extraction and low-quality image synthesis steps are thus circumvented in our MetaF2N, and it requires only one fine-tuning step to get decent performance. Considering the gaps between the recovered faces and ground-truths, we further deploy a MaskNet for adaptively predicting loss weights at different positions to reduce the impact of low-confidence areas. To evaluate our proposed MetaF2N, we have collected a real-world low-quality dataset with one or multiple faces in each image, and our MetaF2N achieves superior performance on both synthetic and real-world datasets. Source code, pre-trained models, and collected datasets are available at https://github.com/yinzhicun/MetaF2N.

Auto-GPT for Online Decision Making: Benchmarks and Additional Opinions

Auto-GPT is an autonomous agent that leverages recent advancements in adapting Large Language Models (LLMs) for decision-making tasks. While there has been a growing interest in Auto-GPT stypled agents, questions remain regarding the effectiveness and flexibility of Auto-GPT in solving real-world decision-making tasks. Its limited capability for real-world engagement and the absence of benchmarks contribute to these uncertainties. In this paper, we present a comprehensive benchmark study of Auto-GPT styled agents in decision-making tasks that simulate real-world scenarios. Our aim is to gain deeper insights into this problem and understand the adaptability of GPT-based agents. We compare the performance of popular LLMs such as GPT-4, GPT-3.5, Claude, and Vicuna in Auto-GPT styled decision-making tasks. Furthermore, we introduce the Additional Opinions algorithm, an easy and effective method that incorporates supervised/imitation-based learners into the Auto-GPT scheme. This approach enables lightweight supervised learning without requiring fine-tuning of the foundational LLMs. We demonstrate through careful baseline comparisons and ablation studies that the Additional Opinions algorithm significantly enhances performance in online decision-making benchmarks, including WebShop and ALFWorld.

Efficient Computation of General Modules for ALC Ontologies (Extended Version)

We present a method for extracting general modules for ontologies formulated in the description logic ALC. A module for an ontology is an ideally substantially smaller ontology that preserves all entailments for a user-specified set of terms. As such, it has applications such as ontology reuse and ontology analysis. Different from classical modules, general modules may use axioms not explicitly present in the input ontology, which allows for additional conciseness. So far, general modules have only been investigated for lightweight description logics. We present the first work that considers the more expressive description logic ALC. In particular, our contribution is a new method based on uniform interpolation supported by some new theoretical results. Our evaluation indicates that our general modules are often smaller than classical modules and uniform interpolants computed by the state-of-the-art, and compared with uniform interpolants, can be computed in a significantly shorter time. Moreover, our method can be used for, and in fact improves, the computation of uniform interpolants and classical modules.

Automatic Detection of Industry Sectors in Legal Articles Using Machine Learning Approaches

The ability to automatically identify industry sector coverage in articles on legal developments, or any kind of news articles for that matter, can bring plentiful of benefits both to the readers and the content creators themselves. By having articles tagged based on industry coverage, readers from all around the world would be able to get to legal news that are specific to their region and professional industry. Simultaneously, writers would benefit from understanding which industries potentially lack coverage or which industries readers are currently mostly interested in and thus, they would focus their writing efforts towards more inclusive and relevant legal news coverage. In this paper, a Machine Learning-powered industry analysis approach which combined Natural Language Processing (NLP) with Statistical and Machine Learning (ML) techniques was investigated. A dataset consisting of over 1,700 annotated legal articles was created for the identification of six industry sectors. Text and legal based features were extracted from the text. Both traditional ML methods (e.g. gradient boosting machine algorithms, and decision-tree based algorithms) and deep neural network (e.g. transformer models) were applied for performance comparison of predictive models. The system achieved promising results with area under the receiver operating characteristic curve scores above 0.90 and F-scores above 0.81 with respect to the six industry sectors. The experimental results show that the suggested automated industry analysis which employs ML techniques allows the processing of large collections of text data in an easy, efficient, and scalable way. Traditional ML methods perform better than deep neural networks when only a small and domain-specific training data is available for the study.

A Review of Machine Learning-based Failure Management in Optical Networks

Failure management plays a significant role in optical networks. It ensures secure operation, mitigates potential risks, and executes proactive protection. Machine learning (ML) is considered to be an extremely powerful technique for performing comprehensive data analysis and complex network management and is widely utilized for failure management in optical networks to revolutionize the conventional manual methods. In this study, the background of failure management is introduced, where typical failure tasks, physical objects, ML algorithms, data source, and extracted information are illustrated in detail. An overview of the applications of ML in failure management is provided in terms of alarm analysis, failure prediction, failure detection, failure localization, and failure identification. Finally, the future directions on ML for failure management are discussed from the perspective of data, model, task, and emerging techniques.

Deep Learning Neural Networks for Emotion Classification from Text: Enhanced Leaky Rectified Linear Unit Activation and Weighted Loss

Accurate emotion classification for online reviews is vital for business organizations to gain deeper insights into markets. Although deep learning has been successfully implemented in this area, accuracy and processing time are still major problems preventing it from reaching its full potential. This paper proposes an Enhanced Leaky Rectified Linear Unit activation and Weighted Loss (ELReLUWL) algorithm for enhanced text emotion classification and faster parameter convergence speed. This algorithm includes the definition of the inflection point and the slope for inputs on the left side of the inflection point to avoid gradient saturation. It also considers the weight of samples belonging to each class to compensate for the influence of data imbalance. Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) combined with the proposed algorithm to increase the classification accuracy and decrease the processing time by eliminating the gradient saturation problem and minimizing the negative effect of data imbalance, demonstrated on a binary sentiment problem. The results show that the proposed solution achieves better classification performance in different data scenarios and different review types. The proposed model takes less convergence time to achieve model optimization with seven epochs against the current convergence time of 11.5 epochs on average. The proposed solution improves accuracy and reduces the processing time of text emotion classification. The solution provides an average class accuracy of 96.63% against a current average accuracy of 91.56%. It also provides a processing time of 23.3 milliseconds compared to the current average processing time of 33.2 milliseconds. Finally, this study solves the issues of gradient saturation and data imbalance. It enhances overall average class accuracy and decreases processing time.

Lessons from the AdKDD'21 Privacy-Preserving ML Challenge

Designing data sharing mechanisms providing performance and strong privacy guarantees is a hot topic for the Online Advertising industry. Namely, a prominent proposal discussed under the Improving Web Advertising Business Group at W3C only allows sharing advertising signals through aggregated, differentially private reports of past displays. To study this proposal extensively, an open Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning Challenge took place at AdKDD'21, a premier workshop on Advertising Science with data provided by advertising company Criteo. In this paper, we describe the challenge tasks, the structure of the available datasets, report the challenge results, and enable its full reproducibility. A key finding is that learning models on large, aggregated data in the presence of a small set of unaggregated data points can be surprisingly efficient and cheap. We also run additional experiments to observe the sensitivity of winning methods to different parameters such as privacy budget or quantity of available privileged side information. We conclude that the industry needs either alternate designs for private data sharing or a breakthrough in learning with aggregated data only to keep ad relevance at a reasonable level.

Uncertainty Detection in EEG Neural Decoding Models

EEG decoding systems based on deep neural networks have been widely used in decision making of brain computer interfaces (BCI). Their predictions, however, can be unreliable given the significant variance and noise in EEG signals. Previous works on EEG analysis mainly focus on the exploration of noise pattern in the source signal, while the uncertainty during the decoding process is largely unexplored. Automatically detecting and quantifying such decoding uncertainty is important for BCI motor imagery applications such as robotic arm control etc. In this work, we proposed an uncertainty estimation model (UE-EEG) to explore the uncertainty during the EEG decoding process, which considers both the uncertainty in the input signal and the uncertainty in the model. The model utilized dropout oriented method for model uncertainty estimation, and Bayesian neural network is adopted for modeling the uncertainty of input data. The model can be integrated into current widely used deep learning classifiers without change of architecture. We performed extensive experiments for uncertainty estimation in both intra-subject EEG decoding and cross-subject EEG decoding on two public motor imagery datasets, where the proposed model achieves significant improvement on the quality of estimated uncertainty and demonstrates the proposed UE-EEG is a useful tool for BCI applications.

Union and Intersection of all Justifications

We present new algorithm for computing the union and intersection of all justifications for a given ontological consequence without first computing the set of all justifications. Through an empirical evaluation, we show that our approach works well in practice for expressive DLs. In particular, the union of all justifications can be computed much faster than with existing justification-enumeration approaches. We further discuss how to use these results to repair ontologies efficiently.

BLCS: Brain-Like based Distributed Control Security in Cyber Physical Systems

Cyber-physical system (CPS) has operated, controlled and coordinated the physical systems integrated by a computing and communication core applied in industry 4.0. To accommodate CPS services, fog radio and optical networks (F-RON) has become an important supporting physical cyber infrastructure taking advantage of both the inherent ubiquity of wireless technology and the large capacity of optical networks. However, cyber security is the biggest issue in CPS scenario as there is a tradeoff between security control and privacy exposure in F-RON. To deal with this issue, we propose a brain-like based distributed control security (BLCS) architecture for F-RON in CPS, by introducing a brain-like security (BLS) scheme. BLCS can accomplish the secure cross-domain control among tripartite controllers verification in the scenario of decentralized F-RON for distributed computing and communications, which has no need to disclose the private information of each domain against cyber-attacks. BLS utilizes parts of information to perform control identification through relation network and deep learning of behavior library. The functional modules of BLCS architecture are illustrated including various controllers and brain-like knowledge base. The interworking procedures in distributed control security modes based on BLS are described. The overall feasibility and efficiency of architecture are experimentally verified on the software defined network testbed in terms of average mistrust rate, path provisioning latency, packet loss probability and blocking probability. The emulation results are obtained and dissected based on the testbed.