Reinforcing Competitive Multi-Agents for Playing So Long Sucker

This paper examines the use of classical deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithms, DQN, DDQN, and Dueling DQN, in the strategy game So Long Sucker (SLS), a diplomacy-driven game defined by coalition-building and strategic betrayal. SLS poses unique challenges due to its blend of cooperative and adversarial dynamics, making it an ideal platform for studying multi-agent learning and game theory. The study's primary goal is to teach autonomous agents the game's rules and strategies using classical DRL methods. To support this effort, the authors developed a novel, publicly available implementation of SLS, featuring a graphical user interface (GUI) and benchmarking tools for DRL algorithms. Experimental results reveal that while considered basic by modern DRL standards, DQN, DDQN, and Dueling DQN agents achieved roughly 50% of the maximum possible game reward. This suggests a baseline understanding of the game's mechanics, with agents favoring legal moves over illegal ones. However, a significant limitation was the extensive training required, around 2000 games, for agents to reach peak performance, compared to human players who grasp the game within a few rounds. Even after prolonged training, agents occasionally made illegal moves, highlighting both the potential and limitations of these classical DRL methods in semi-complex, socially driven games. The findings establish a foundational benchmark for training agents in SLS and similar negotiation-based environments while underscoring the need for advanced or hybrid DRL approaches to improve learning efficiency and adaptability. Future research could incorporate game-theoretic strategies to enhance agent decision-making in dynamic multi-agent contexts.

Anomaly Resilient Temporal QoS Prediction using Hypergraph Convoluted Transformer Network

Quality-of-Service (QoS) prediction is a critical task in the service lifecycle, enabling precise and adaptive service recommendations by anticipating performance variations over time in response to evolving network uncertainties and user preferences. However, contemporary QoS prediction methods frequently encounter data sparsity and cold-start issues, which hinder accurate QoS predictions and limit the ability to capture diverse user preferences. Additionally, these methods often assume QoS data reliability, neglecting potential credibility issues such as outliers and the presence of greysheep users and services with atypical invocation patterns. Furthermore, traditional approaches fail to leverage diverse features, including domain-specific knowledge and complex higher-order patterns, essential for accurate QoS predictions. In this paper, we introduce a real-time, trust-aware framework for temporal QoS prediction to address the aforementioned challenges, featuring an end-to-end deep architecture called the Hypergraph Convoluted Transformer Network (HCTN). HCTN combines a hypergraph structure with graph convolution over hyper-edges to effectively address high-sparsity issues by capturing complex, high-order correlations. Complementing this, the transformer network utilizes multi-head attention along with parallel 1D convolutional layers and fully connected dense blocks to capture both fine-grained and coarse-grained dynamic patterns. Additionally, our approach includes a sparsity-resilient solution for detecting greysheep users and services, incorporating their unique characteristics to improve prediction accuracy. Trained with a robust loss function resistant to outliers, HCTN demonstrated state-of-the-art performance on the large-scale WSDREAM-2 datasets for response time and throughput.

Demystifying Visual Features of Movie Posters for Multi-Label Genre Identification

In the film industry, movie posters have been an essential part of advertising and marketing for many decades, and continue to play a vital role even today in the form of digital posters through online, social media and OTT platforms. Typically, movie posters can effectively promote and communicate the essence of a film, such as its genre, visual style/ tone, vibe and storyline cue/ theme, which are essential to attract potential viewers. Identifying the genres of a movie often has significant practical applications in recommending the film to target audiences. Previous studies on movie genre identification are limited to subtitles, plot synopses, and movie scenes that are mostly accessible after the movie release. Posters usually contain pre-release implicit information to generate mass interest. In this paper, we work for automated multi-label genre identification only from movie poster images, without any aid of additional textual/meta-data information about movies, which is one of the earliest attempts of its kind. Here, we present a deep transformer network with a probabilistic module to identify the movie genres exclusively from the poster. For experimental analysis, we procured 13882 number of posters of 13 genres from the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), where our model performances were encouraging and even outperformed some major contemporary architectures.

Impact of Visual Context on Noisy Multimodal NMT: An Empirical Study for English to Indian Languages

The study investigates the effectiveness of utilizing multimodal information in Neural Machine Translation (NMT). While prior research focused on using multimodal data in low-resource scenarios, this study examines how image features impact translation when added to a large-scale, pre-trained unimodal NMT system. Surprisingly, the study finds that images might be redundant in this context. Additionally, the research introduces synthetic noise to assess whether images help the model deal with textual noise. Multimodal models slightly outperform text-only models in noisy settings, even with random images. The study's experiments translate from English to Hindi, Bengali, and Malayalam, outperforming state-of-the-art benchmarks significantly. Interestingly, the effect of visual context varies with source text noise: no visual context works best for non-noisy translations, cropped image features are optimal for low noise, and full image features work better in high-noise scenarios. This sheds light on the role of visual context, especially in noisy settings, opening up a new research direction for Noisy Neural Machine Translation in multimodal setups. The research emphasizes the importance of combining visual and textual information for improved translation in various environments.

Metal Oxide-based Gas Sensor Array for the VOCs Analysis in Complex Mixtures using Machine Learning

Detection of Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) from the breath is becoming a viable route for the early detection of diseases non-invasively. This paper presents a sensor array with three metal oxide electrodes that can use machine learning methods to identify four distinct VOCs in a mixture. The metal oxide sensor array was subjected to various VOC concentrations, including ethanol, acetone, toluene and chloroform. The dataset obtained from individual gases and their mixtures were analyzed using multiple machine learning algorithms, such as Random Forest (RF), K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), Decision Tree, Linear Regression, Logistic Regression, Naive Bayes, Linear Discriminant Analysis, Artificial Neural Network, and Support Vector Machine. KNN and RF have shown more than 99% accuracy in classifying different varying chemicals in the gas mixtures. In regression analysis, KNN has delivered the best results with R2 value of more than 0.99 and LOD of 0.012, 0.015, 0.014 and 0.025 PPM for predicting the concentrations of varying chemicals Acetone, Toluene, Ethanol, and Chloroform, respectively in complex mixtures. Therefore, it is demonstrated that the array utilizing the provided algorithms can classify and predict the concentrations of the four gases simultaneously for disease diagnosis and treatment monitoring.

TPMCF: Temporal QoS Prediction using Multi-Source Collaborative Features

Recently, with the rapid deployment of service APIs, personalized service recommendations have played a paramount role in the growth of the e-commerce industry. Quality-of-Service (QoS) parameters determining the service performance, often used for recommendation, fluctuate over time. Thus, the QoS prediction is essential to identify a suitable service among functionally equivalent services over time. The contemporary temporal QoS prediction methods hardly achieved the desired accuracy due to various limitations, such as the inability to handle data sparsity and outliers and capture higher-order temporal relationships among user-service interactions. Even though some recent recurrent neural-network-based architectures can model temporal relationships among QoS data, prediction accuracy degrades due to the absence of other features (e.g., collaborative features) to comprehend the relationship among the user-service interactions. This paper addresses the above challenges and proposes a scalable strategy for Temporal QoS Prediction using Multi-source Collaborative-Features (TPMCF), achieving high prediction accuracy and faster responsiveness. TPMCF combines the collaborative-features of users/services by exploiting user-service relationship with the spatio-temporal auto-extracted features by employing graph convolution and transformer encoder with multi-head self-attention. We validated our proposed method on WS-DREAM-2 datasets. Extensive experiments showed TPMCF outperformed major state-of-the-art approaches regarding prediction accuracy while ensuring high scalability and reasonably faster responsiveness.

Detecting Severity of Diabetic Retinopathy from Fundus Images using Ensembled Transformers

Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) is considered one of the primary concerns due to its effect on vision loss among most people with diabetes globally. The severity of DR is mostly comprehended manually by ophthalmologists from fundus photography-based retina images. This paper deals with an automated understanding of the severity stages of DR. In the literature, researchers have focused on this automation using traditional machine learning-based algorithms and convolutional architectures. However, the past works hardly focused on essential parts of the retinal image to improve the model performance. In this paper, we adopt transformer-based learning models to capture the crucial features of retinal images to understand DR severity better. We work with ensembling image transformers, where we adopt four models, namely ViT (Vision Transformer), BEiT (Bidirectional Encoder representation for image Transformer), CaiT (Class-Attention in Image Transformers), and DeiT (Data efficient image Transformers), to infer the degree of DR severity from fundus photographs. For experiments, we used the publicly available APTOS-2019 blindness detection dataset, where the performances of the transformer-based models were quite encouraging.

Deep Learning for Unsupervised Anomaly Localization in Industrial Images: A Survey

Currently, deep learning-based visual inspection has been highly successful with the help of supervised learning methods. However, in real industrial scenarios, the scarcity of defect samples, the cost of annotation, and the lack of a priori knowledge of defects may render supervised-based methods ineffective. In recent years, unsupervised anomaly localization algorithms have become more widely used in industrial inspection tasks. This paper aims to help researchers in this field by comprehensively surveying recent achievements in unsupervised anomaly localization in industrial images using deep learning. The survey reviews more than 120 significant publications covering different aspects of anomaly localization, mainly covering various concepts, challenges, taxonomies, benchmark datasets, and quantitative performance comparisons of the methods reviewed. In reviewing the achievements to date, this paper provides detailed predictions and analysis of several future research directions. This review provides detailed technical information for researchers interested in industrial anomaly localization and who wish to apply it to the localization of anomalies in other fields.

Deep Analysis of Visual Product Reviews

With the proliferation of the e-commerce industry, analyzing customer feedback is becoming indispensable to a service provider. In recent days, it can be noticed that customers upload the purchased product images with their review scores. In this paper, we undertake the task of analyzing such visual reviews, which is very new of its kind. In the past, the researchers worked on analyzing language feedback, but here we do not take any assistance from linguistic reviews that may be absent, since a recent trend can be observed where customers prefer to quickly upload the visual feedback instead of typing language feedback. We propose a hierarchical architecture, where the higher-level model engages in product categorization, and the lower-level model pays attention to predicting the review score from a customer-provided product image. We generated a database by procuring real visual product reviews, which was quite challenging. Our architecture obtained some promising results by performing extensive experiments on the employed database. The proposed hierarchical architecture attained a 57.48% performance improvement over the single-level best comparable architecture.

FES: A Fast Efficient Scalable QoS Prediction Framework

Quality-of-Service prediction of web service is an integral part of services computing due to its diverse applications in the various facets of a service life cycle, such as service composition, service selection, service recommendation. One of the primary objectives of designing a QoS prediction algorithm is to achieve satisfactory prediction accuracy. However, accuracy is not the only criteria to meet while developing a QoS prediction algorithm. The algorithm has to be faster in terms of prediction time so that it can be integrated into a real-time recommendation or composition system. The other important factor to consider while designing the prediction algorithm is scalability to ensure that the prediction algorithm can tackle large-scale datasets. The existing algorithms on QoS prediction often compromise on one goal while ensuring the others. In this paper, we propose a semi-offline QoS prediction model to achieve three important goals simultaneously: higher accuracy, faster prediction time, scalability. Here, we aim to predict the QoS value of service that varies across users. Our framework consists of multi-phase prediction algorithms: preprocessing-phase prediction, online prediction, and prediction using the pre-trained model. In the preprocessing phase, we first apply multi-level clustering on the dataset to obtain correlated users and services. We then preprocess the clusters using collaborative filtering to remove the sparsity of the given QoS invocation log matrix. Finally, we create a two-staged, semi-offline regression model using neural networks to predict the QoS value of service to be invoked by a user in real-time. Our experimental results on four publicly available WS-DREAM datasets show the efficiency in terms of accuracy, scalability, fast responsiveness of our framework as compared to the state-of-the-art methods.