TextCohesion
In this paper, we propose a pixel-wise detector named TextCohesion for scene text detection especially for those with arbitrary shapes. TextChohesion splits a text instance into 5 key components: a Text Skeleton, and four Directional pixel Regions. These components are easy to handle rather than directly control the entire text instance. We also introduce a confidence scoring mechanism to filter out the characters that are similar to texts. Our method can integrate text contexts intensively even grasp clues when it is very complex background. Experiments on challenging benchmarks demonstrate that our TextCohesion clearly outperform state-of-the-art methods and it achieves an F-measure of 84.6 and 86.3 on Total-Text and SCUT-CTW1500 respectively. …

Adversarial Contrastive Estimation
Learning by contrasting positive and negative samples is a general strategy adopted by many methods. Noise contrastive estimation (NCE) for word embeddings and translating embeddings for knowledge graphs are examples in NLP employing this approach. In this work, we view contrastive learning as an abstraction of all such methods and augment the negative sampler into a mixture distribution containing an adversarially learned sampler. The resulting adaptive sampler finds harder negative examples, which forces the main model to learn a better representation of the data. We evaluate our proposal on learning word embeddings, order embeddings and knowledge graph embeddings and observe both faster convergence and improved results on multiple metrics. …

Learning Curve
Plots relating performance to experience are widely used in machine learning. Performance is the error rate or accuracy of the learning system, while experience may be the number of training examples used for learning or the number of iterations used in optimizing the system model parameters. The machine learning curve is useful for many purposes including comparing different algorithms, choosing model parameters during design, adjusting optimization to improve convergence, and determining the amount of data used for training. …

Privacy-Preserving-Summation-Consistent (PPSC)
A distributed computing protocol consists of three components: (i) Data Localization: a network-wide dataset is decomposed into local datasets separately preserved at a network of nodes; (ii) Node Communication: the nodes hold individual dynamical states and communicate with the neighbors about these dynamical states; (iii) Local Computation: state recursions are computed at each individual node. Information about the local datasets enters the computation process through the node-to-node communication and the local computations, which may be leaked to dynamics eavesdroppers having access to global or local node states. In this paper, we systematically investigate this potential computational privacy risks in distributed computing protocols in the form of structured system identification, and then propose and thoroughly analyze a Privacy-Preserving-Summation-Consistent (PPSC) mechanism as a generic privacy encryption subroutine for consensus-based distributed computations. The central idea is that the consensus manifold is where we can both hide node privacy and achieve computational accuracy. In this first part of the paper, we demonstrate the computational privacy risks in distributed algorithms against dynamics eavesdroppers and particularly in distributed linear equation solvers, and then propose the PPSC mechanism and illustrate its usefulness. …