OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Assessing the Causal Impact of COVID-19 Related Policies on Outbreak Dynamics: A Case Study in the US
Authors: Jing Ma, Yushun Dong, Zheng Huang, Daniel Mietchen, Jundong Li
Venue: Conference WWW 2022
Year: 2022

Analyzing the causal impact of different policies in reducing the spread of COVID-19 is of critical importance. The main challenge here is the existence of unobserved confounders (e.g., vigilance of residents) which influence both the presence of policies and the spread of COVID-19. Besides, as the confounders may be time-varying, it is even more difficult to capture them. Fortunately, the increasing prevalence of web data from various online applications provides an important resource of time-varying observational data, and enhances the opportunity to capture the confounders from them, e.g., the vigilance of residents over time can be reflected by the popularity of Google searches about COVID-19 at different time periods. In this paper, we study the problem of assessing the causal effects of different COVID-19 related policies on the outbreak dynamics in different counties at any given time period. To this end, we integrate COVID-19 related observational data covering different U.S. counties over time, and then develop a neural network based causal effect estimation framework which learns the representations of time-varying (unobserved) confounders from the observational data. Experimental results indicate the effectiveness of our proposed framework in quantifying the causal impact of policies at different granularities, ranging from a category of policies with a certain goal to a specific policy type. Compared with baseline methods, our assessment of policies is more consistent with existing epidemiological studies of COVID-19. Besides, our assessment also provides insights for future policy-making.
Learning stable graphs from multiple environments with selection bias
Authors: Yue He 0001, Peng Cui 0001, Jianxin Ma, Hao Zou 0001, Xiaowei Wang, Hongxia Yang, Philip S. Yu
Venue: Conference KDD 2020
Year: 2020

Nowadays graph has become a general and powerful representation to describe the rich relationships among different kinds of entities via the underlying patterns encoded in its structure. The knowledge (more generally) accumulated in graph is expected to be able to cross populations from one to another and the past to future. However the data collection process of graph generation is full of known or unknown sample selection biases, leading to spurious correlations among entities, especially in the non-stationary and heterogeneous environments. In this paper, we target the problem of learning stable graphs from multiple environments with selection bias. We purpose a Stable Graph Learning (SGL) framework to learn a graph that can capture general relational patterns which are irrelevant with the selection bias in an unsupervised way. Extensive experimental results from both simulation and real data demonstrate that our method could significantly benefit the generalization capacity of graph structure.
Tree-augmented cross-modal encoding for complex-query video retrieval
Authors: Xun Yang 0001, Jianfeng Dong, Yixin Cao 0002, Xun Wang 0007, Meng Wang 0001, Tat-Seng Chua
Venue: Conference SIGIR 2020
Year: 2020

The rapid growth of user-generated videos on the Internet has intensified the need for text-based video retrieval systems. Traditional methods mainly favor the concept-based paradigm on retrieval with simple queries, which are usually ineffective for complex queries that carry far more complex semantics. Recently, embedding-based paradigm has emerged as a popular approach. It aims to map the queries and videos into a shared embedding space where semantically-similar texts and videos are much closer to each other. Despite its simplicity, it forgoes the exploitation of the syntactic structure of text queries, making it suboptimal to model the complex queries. To facilitate video retrieval with complex queries, we propose a Tree-augmented Cross-modal Encoding method by jointly learning the linguistic structure of queries and the temporal representation of videos. Specifically, given a complex user query, we first recursively compose a latent semantic tree to structurally describe the text query. We then design a tree-augmented query encoder to derive structure-aware query representation and a temporal attentive video encoder to model the temporal characteristics of videos. Finally, both the query and videos are mapped into a joint embedding space for matching and ranking. In this approach, we have a better understanding and modeling of the complex queries, thereby achieving a better video retrieval performance. Extensive experiments on large scale video retrieval benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.
Deconfounded video moment retrieval with causal intervention
Authors: Xun Yang 0001, Fuli Feng, Wei Ji 0008, Meng Wang 0001, Tat-Seng Chua
Venue: Conference SIGIR 2021
Year: 2021

We tackle the task of video moment retrieval (VMR), which aims to localize a specific moment in a video according to a textual query. Existing methods primarily model the matching relationship between query and moment by complex cross-modal interactions. Despite their effectiveness, current models mostly exploit dataset biases while ignoring the video content, thus leading to poor generalizability. We argue that the issue is caused by the hidden confounder in VMR, {i.e., temporal location of moments}, that spuriously correlates the model input and prediction. How to design robust matching models against the temporal location biases is crucial but, as far as we know, has not been studied yet for VMR. To fill the research gap, we propose a causality-inspired VMR framework that builds structural causal model to capture the true effect of query and video content on the prediction. Specifically, we develop a Deconfounded Cross-modal Matching (DCM) method to remove the confounding effects of moment location. It first disentangles moment representation to infer the core feature of visual content, and then applies causal intervention on the disentangled multimodal input based on backdoor adjustment, which forces the model to fairly incorporate each possible location of the target into consideration. Extensive experiments clearly show that our approach can achieve significant improvement over the state-of-the-art methods in terms of both accuracy and generalization (Codes: \color{blue}{\url{https://github.com/Xun-Yang/Causal_Video_Moment_Retrieval}}
Segmentation fusion for connectomics
Authors: Amelio Vázquez Reina, Michael Gelbart, Daniel Huang 0001, Jeff Lichtman, Eric L. Miller 0001, Hanspeter Pfister
Venue: Conference ICCV 2011
Year: 2011

We address the problem of automatic 3D segmentation of a stack of electron microscopy sections of brain tissue. Unlike previous efforts, where the reconstruction is usually done on a section-to-section basis, or by the agglomerative clustering of 2D segments, we leverage information from the entire volume to obtain a globally optimal 3D segmentation. To do this, we formulate the segmentation as the solution to a fusion problem. We first enumerate multiple possible 2D segmentations for each section in the stack, and a set of 3D links that may connect segments across consecutive sections. We then identify the fusion of segments and links that provide the most globally consistent segmentation of the stack. We show that this two-step approach of pre-enumeration and posterior fusion yields significant advantages and provides state-of-the-art reconstruction results. Finally, as part of this method, we also introduce a robust rotationally-invariant set of features that we use to learn and enumerate the above 2D segmentations. Our features outperform previous connectomic-specific descriptors without relying on a large set of heuristics or manually designed filter banks.
Advantages of Query Biased Summaries in Information Retrieval
Authors: Anastasios Tombros, Mark Sanderson
Venue: Conference SIGIR 1998
Year: 1998

This paper presents an investigation into the utility of document summarisation in the context of information retrieval, more specifically in the application of so called query biased (or user directed)summaries: summaries customised to reflect the information need expressed in a query.Employed in the retrieved document list displayed after a retrieval took place, the summaries' utility was evaluated in a task-based environment by measuring users' speed and accuracy in identifying relevant documents.This was compared to the performance achieved when users were presented with the more typical output of an IR system: a static predefined summary composed of the title and first few sentences of retrieved documents.The results from the evaluation indicate that the use of query biased summaries significantly improves both the accuracy and speed of user relevance judgements.
Experiments in Multilingual Information Retrieval Using the SPIDER System
Authors: Paraic Sheridan, Jean Paul Ballerini
Venue: Conference SIGIR 1996
Year: 1996

We introduce a new approach to multilingual information retrieval based on the use of thesaurus-based query expansion techniques applied over a collection of comparable multilingual documents. This approach has been built into the SPIDER information retrieval system and has been tested over a large collection of Italian documents. We have shown that the SPIDER system retrieves Italian documents in response to user queries written in German with better effectiveness than a baseline system evaluating Italian queries against Italian documents. Although the importantance of the SPIDER stemming algorithm for Italian must be stressed in these results, we have also achieved performance on multilingual retrieval tasks within 32% of the best SPIDER performance on Italian retrieval, by including a relevance feedback loop in the task of multilingual retrieval. 1 Introduction As far back as the early 1970&apos;s Prof. Gerard Salton at Cornell University performed experiments to investigate the feasib...
Learn from unlabeled videos for near-duplicate video retrieval
Authors: Xiangteng He, Yulin Pan, Mingqian Tang, Yiliang Lv, Yuxin Peng
Venue: Conference SIGIR 2022
Year: 2022

Near-duplicate video retrieval (NDVR) aims to find the copies or transformations of the query video from a massive video database. It plays an important role in many video related applications, including copyright protection, tracing, filtering and etc. Video representation and similarity search are crucial to any video retrieval system. To derive effective video representation, most video retrieval systems require a large amount of manually annotated data for training, making it costly inefficient. In addition, most retrieval systems are based on frame-level features for video similarity searching, making it expensive both storage wise and search wise. To address the above issues, we propose a video representation learning (VRL) approach to effectively address the above shortcomings. It first effectively learns video representation from unlabeled videos via contrastive learning to avoid the expensive cost of manual annotation. Then, it exploits transformer structure to aggregate frame-level features into clip-level to reduce both storage space and search complexity. It can learn the complementary and discriminative information from the interactions among clip frames, as well as acquire the frame permutation and missing invariant ability to support more flexible retrieval manners. Comprehensive experiments on two challenging near-duplicate video retrieval datasets, namely FIVR-200K and SVD, verify the effectiveness of our proposed VRL approach, which achieves the best performance of video retrieval on accuracy and efficiency.
ProtoPShare: Prototypical Parts Sharing for Similarity Discovery in Interpretable Image Classification
Authors: Dawid Rymarczyk, Lukasz Struski, Jacek Tabor, Bartosz Zielinski
Venue: Conference KDD 2021
Year: 2021

In this work, we introduce an extension to ProtoPNet called ProtoPShare which shares prototypical parts between classes. To obtain prototype sharing we prune prototypical parts using a novel data-dependent similarity. Our approach substantially reduces the number of prototypes needed to preserve baseline accuracy and finds prototypical similarities between classes. We show the effectiveness of ProtoPShare on the CUB-200-2011 and the Stanford Cars datasets and confirm the semantic consistency of its prototypical parts in user-study.
Predicting student performance using advanced learning analytics
Authors: Ali Daud, Naif Radi Aljohani, Rabeeh Ayaz Abbasi, Miltiadis D. Lytras, Farhat Abbas, Jalal S. Alowibdi
Venue: Conference WWW 2017
Year: 2017

Educational Data Mining (EDM) and Learning Analytics (LA) research have emerged as interesting areas of research, which are unfolding useful knowledge from educational databases for many purposes such as predicting students' success. The ability to predict a student's performance can be beneficial for actions in modern educational systems. Existing methods have used features which are mostly related to academic performance, family income and family assets; while features belonging to family expenditures and students' personal information are usually ignored. In this paper, an effort is made to investigate aforementioned feature sets by collecting the scholarship holding students' data from different universities of Pakistan. Learning analytics, discriminative and generative classification models are applied to predict whether a student will be able to complete his degree or not. Experimental results show that proposed method significantly outperforms existing methods due to exploitation of family expenditures and students' personal information feature sets. Outcomes of this EDM/LA research can serve as policy improvement method in higher education.
Sgcl: Contrastive representation learning for signed graphs
Authors: Lin Shu, Erxin Du, Yaomin Chang, Chuan Chen, Zibin Zheng, Xingxing Xing, Shaofeng Shen
Venue: Conference CIKM 2021
Year: 2021

Graph contrastive representation learning aims to learn discriminative node representations by contrasting positive and negative samples. It helps models learn more generalized representations to achieve better performances on downstream tasks, which has aroused increasing research interest in recent years. Simultaneously, signed graphs consisting of both positive and negative links have become ubiquitous with the growing popularity of social media. However, existing works on graph contrastive representation learning are only proposed for unsigned graphs (containing only positive links) and it remains unexplored how they could be applied to signed graphs due to the distinct semantics and complex relations between positive and negative links. Therefore we propose a novel Signed Graph Contrastive Learning model (SGCL) to bridge this gap, which to the best of our knowledge is the first research to employ graph contrastive representation learning on signed graphs. Concretely, we design two types of graph augmentations specific to signed graphs based on a significant signed social theory, i.e., balance theory. Besides, inter-view and intra-view contrastive learning are proposed to learn discriminative node representations from perspectives of graph augmentations and signed structures respectively. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed model over state-of-the-art methods on both real-world social datasets and online game datasets.
Contrastive learning for signed bipartite graphs
Authors: Zeyu Zhang, Jiamou Liu, Kaiqi Zhao, Song Yang, Xianda Zheng, Yifei Wang
Venue: Conference SIGIR 2023
Year: 2023

This paper is the first to use contrastive learning to improve the robustness of graph representation learning for signed bipartite graphs, which are commonly found in social networks, recommender systems, and paper review platforms. Existing contrastive learning methods for signed graphs cannot capture implicit relations between nodes of the same type in signed bipartite graphs, which have two types of nodes and edges only connect nodes of different types. We propose a Signed Bipartite Graph Contrastive Learning (SBGCL) method to learn robust node representation while retaining the implicit relations between nodes of the same type. SBGCL augments a signed bipartite graph with a novel two-level graph augmentation method. At the top level, we maintain two perspectives of the signed bipartite graph, one presents the original interactions between nodes of different types, and the other presents the implicit relations between nodes of the same type. At the bottom level, we employ stochastic perturbation strategies to create two perturbed graphs in each perspective. Then, we construct positive and negative samples from the perturbed graphs and design a multi-perspective contrastive loss to unify the node presentations learned from the two perspectives. Results show proposed model is effective over state-of-the-art methods on real-world datasets.
Individualized indicator for all: Stock-wise technical indicator optimization with stock embedding
Authors: Zhige Li, Derek Yang, Li Zhao, Jiang Bian, Tao Qin, Tie-Yan Liu
Venue: Conference KDD 2019
Year: 2019

As one of the most important investing approaches, technical analysis attempts to forecast stock movement by interpreting the inner rules from historic price and volume data. To address the vital noisy nature of financial market, generic technical analysis develops technical trading indicators, as mathematical summarization of historic price and volume data, to form up the foundation for robust and profitable investment strategies. However, an observation reveals that stocks with different properties have different affinities over technical indicators, which discloses a big challenge for the indicator-oriented stock selection and investment. To address this problem, in this paper, we design a Technical Trading Indicator Optimization(TTIO) framework that manages to optimize the original technical indicator by leveraging stock-wise properties. To obtain effective representations of stock properties, we propose a Skip-gram architecture to learn stock embedding inspired by a valuable knowledge repository formed by fund manager's collective investment behaviors. Based on the learned stock representations, TTIO further learns a re-scaling network to optimize the indicator's performance. Extensive experiments on real-world stock market data demonstrate that our method can obtain the very stock representations that are invaluable for technical indicator optimization since the optimized indicators can result in strong investing signals than original ones.
ORCAS: 20 Million Clicked Query-document Pairs for Analyzing Search
Authors: Nick Craswell, Daniel Campos, Bhaskar Mitra, Emine Yilmaz, Bodo Billerbeck
Venue: Conference CIKM 2020
Year: 2020

Users of Web search engines reveal their information needs through queries and clicks, making click logs a useful asset for information retrieval. However, click logs have not been publicly released for academic use, because they can be too revealing of personally or commercially sensitive information. This paper describes a click data release related to the TREC Deep Learning Track document corpus. After aggregation and filtering, including a k -anonymity requirement, we find 1.4 million of the TREC DL URLs have 18 million connections to 10 million distinct queries. Our dataset of these queries and connections to TREC documents is of similar size to proprietary datasets used in previous papers on query mining and ranking. We perform some preliminary experiments using the click data to augment the TREC DL training data, offering by comparison: 28x more queries, with 49x more connections to 4.4x more URLs in the corpus. We present a description of the dataset's generation process, characteristics, use in ranking and other potential uses.
Attribute and simile classifiers for face verification
Authors: Neeraj Kumar 0006, Alexander C. Berg, Peter N. Belhumeur, Shree K. Nayar
Venue: Conference ICCV 2009
Year: 2009

We present two novel methods for face verification. Our first method - “attribute” classifiers - uses binary classifiers trained to recognize the presence or absence of describable aspects of visual appearance (e.g., gender, race, and age). Our second method - “simile” classifiers - removes the manual labeling required for attribute classification and instead learns the similarity of faces, or regions of faces, to specific reference people. Neither method requires costly, often brittle, alignment between image pairs; yet, both methods produce compact visual descriptions, and work on real-world images. Furthermore, both the attribute and simile classifiers improve on the current state-of-the-art for the LFW data set, reducing the error rates compared to the current best by 23.92% and 26.34%, respectively, and 31.68% when combined. For further testing across pose, illumination, and expression, we introduce a new data set - termed PubFig - of real-world images of public figures (celebrities and politicians) acquired from the internet. This data set is both larger (60,000 images) and deeper (300 images per individual) than existing data sets of its kind. Finally, we present an evaluation of human performance.
Towards Fair Allocation in Social Commerce Platforms
Authors: Anjali Gupta, Shreyans J. Nagori, Abhijnan Chakraborty, Rohit Vaish, Sayan Ranu, Prajit Prashant Sinai Nadkarni, Narendra Varma Dasararaju, Muthusamy Chelliah
Venue: Conference WWW 2023
Year: 2023

Social commerce platforms are emerging businesses where producers sell products through re-sellers who advertise the products to other customers in their social network. Due to the increasing popularity of this business model, thousands of small producers and re-sellers are starting to depend on these platforms for their livelihood; thus, it is important to provide fair earning opportunities to them. The enormous product space in such platforms prohibits manual search, and motivates the need for recommendation algorithms to effectively allocate product exposure and, consequently, earning opportunities. In this work, we focus on the fairness of such allocations in social commerce platforms and formulate the problem of assigning products to re-sellers as a fair division problem with indivisible items under two-sided cardinality constraints, wherein each product must be given to at least a certain number of re-sellers and each re-seller must get a certain number of products. Our work systematically explores various well-studied benchmarks of fairness—including Nash social welfare, envy-freeness up to one item (EF1), and equitability up to one item (EQ1)—from both theoretical and experimental perspectives. We find that the existential and computational guarantees of these concepts known from the unconstrained setting do not extend to our constrained model. To address this limitation, we develop a mixed-integer linear program and other scalable heuristics that provide near-optimal approximation of Nash social welfare in simulated and real social commerce datasets. Overall, our work takes the first step towards achieving provable fairness alongside reasonable revenue guarantees on social commerce platforms.