OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Word Grounded Graph Convolutional Network
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have shown strong performance in learning text representations for various tasks such as text classification, due to its expressive power in modeling graph structure data (e.g., a literature citation network). Most existing GCNs are limited to deal with documents included in a pre-defined graph, i.e., it cannot be generalized to out-of-graph documents. To address this issue, we propose to transform the document graph into a word graph, to decouple data samples (i.e., documents in training and test sets) and a GCN model by using a document-independent graph. Such word-level GCN could therefore naturally inference out-of-graph documents in an inductive way. The proposed Word-level Graph (WGraph) can not only implicitly learning word presentation with commonly-used word co-occurrences in corpora, but also incorporate extra global semantic dependency derived from inter-document relationships (e.g., literature citations). An inductive Word-grounded Graph Convolutional Network (WGCN) is proposed to learn word and document representations based on WGraph in a supervised manner. Experiments on text classification with and without citation networks evidence that the proposed WGCN model outperforms existing methods in terms of effectiveness and efficiency.
Dynamic Graph Representation Learning for Depression Screening with Transformer
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Early detection of mental disorder is crucial as it enables prompt intervention and treatment, which can greatly improve outcomes for individuals suffering from debilitating mental affliction. The recent proliferation of mental health discussions on social media platforms presents research opportunities to investigate mental health and potentially detect instances of mental illness. However, existing depression detection methods are constrained due to two major limitations: (1) the reliance on feature engineering and (2) the lack of consideration for time-varying factors. Specifically, these methods require extensive feature engineering and domain knowledge, which heavily rely on the amount, quality, and type of user-generated content. Moreover, these methods ignore the important impact of time-varying factors on depression detection, such as the dynamics of linguistic patterns and interpersonal interactive behaviors over time on social media (e.g., replies, mentions, and quote-tweets). To tackle these limitations, we propose an early depression detection framework, ContrastEgo treats each user as a dynamic time-evolving attributed graph (ego-network) and leverages supervised contrastive learning to maximize the agreement of users' representations at different scales while minimizing the agreement of users' representations to differentiate between depressed and control groups. ContrastEgo embraces four modules, (1) constructing users' heterogeneous interactive graphs, (2) extracting the representations of users' interaction snapshots using graph neural networks, (3) modeling the sequences of snapshots using attention mechanism, and (4) depression detection using contrastive learning. Extensive experiments on Twitter data demonstrate that ContrastEgo significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of all the effectiveness metrics in various experimental settings.
Continual Facial Expression Recognition: A Benchmark
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Understanding human affective behaviour, especially in the dynamics of real-world settings, requires Facial Expression Recognition (FER) models to continuously adapt to individual differences in user expression, contextual attributions, and the environment. Current (deep) Machine Learning (ML)-based FER approaches pre-trained in isolation on benchmark datasets fail to capture the nuances of real-world interactions where data is available only incrementally, acquired by the agent or robot during interactions. New learning comes at the cost of previous knowledge, resulting in catastrophic forgetting. Lifelong or Continual Learning (CL), on the other hand, enables adaptability in agents by being sensitive to changing data distributions, integrating new information without interfering with previously learnt knowledge. Positing CL as an effective learning paradigm for FER, this work presents the Continual Facial Expression Recognition (ConFER) benchmark that evaluates popular CL techniques on FER tasks. It presents a comparative analysis of several CL-based approaches on popular FER datasets such as CK+, RAF-DB, and AffectNet and present strategies for a successful implementation of ConFER for Affective Computing (AC) research. CL techniques, under different learning settings, are shown to achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance across several datasets, thus motivating a discussion on the benefits of applying CL principles towards human behaviour understanding, particularly from facial expressions, as well the challenges entailed.
A Near-Optimal Deterministic Distributed Synchronizer
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2023
Year: 2023

We provide the first deterministic distributed synchronizer with near-optimal time complexity and message complexity overheads. Concretely, given any distributed algorithm $\mathcal{A}$ that has time complexity $T$ and message complexity $M$ in the synchronous message-passing model (subject to some care in defining the model), the synchronizer provides a distributed algorithm $\mathcal{A}'$ that runs in the asynchronous message-passing model with time complexity $T \cdot poly(\log n)$ and message complexity $(M+m)\cdot poly(\log n)$. Here, $n$ and $m$ denote the number of nodes and edges in the network, respectively. The synchronizer is deterministic in the sense that if algorithm $\mathcal{A}$ is deterministic, then so is algorithm $\mathcal{A}'$. Previously, only a randomized synchronizer with near-optimal overheads was known by seminal results of Awerbuch, Patt-Shamir, Peleg, and Saks [STOC 1992] and Awerbuch and Peleg [FOCS 1990]. We also point out and fix some inaccuracies in these prior works. As concrete applications of our synchronizer, we resolve some longstanding and fundamental open problems in distributed algorithms: we get the first asynchronous deterministic distributed algorithms with near-optimal time and message complexities for leader election, breadth-first search tree, and minimum spanning tree computations: these all have message complexity $\tilde{O}(m)$ message complexity. The former two have $\tilde{O}(D)$ time complexity, where $D$ denotes the network diameter, and the latter has $\tilde{O}(D+\sqrt{n})$ time complexity. All these bounds are optimal up to logarithmic factors. Previously all such near-optimal algorithms were either restricted to the synchronous setting or required randomization.
Autonomous GIS: the next-generation AI-powered GIS
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, demonstrate a strong understanding of human natural language and have been explored and applied in various fields, including reasoning, creative writing, code generation, translation, and information retrieval. By adopting LLM as the reasoning core, we introduce Autonomous GIS as an AI-powered geographic information system (GIS) that leverages the LLM's general abilities in natural language understanding, reasoning, and coding for addressing spatial problems with automatic spatial data collection, analysis, and visualization. We envision that autonomous GIS will need to achieve five autonomous goals: self-generating, self-organizing, self-verifying, self-executing, and self-growing. We developed a prototype system called LLM-Geo using the GPT-4 API in a Python environment, demonstrating what an autonomous GIS looks like and how it delivers expected results without human intervention using three case studies. For all case studies, LLM-Geo was able to return accurate results, including aggregated numbers, graphs, and maps, significantly reducing manual operation time. Although still in its infancy and lacking several important modules such as logging and code testing, LLM-Geo demonstrates a potential path toward the next-generation AI-powered GIS. We advocate for the GIScience community to dedicate more effort to the research and development of autonomous GIS, making spatial analysis easier, faster, and more accessible to a broader audience.
Towards L-System Captioning for Tree Reconstruction
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

This work proposes a novel concept for tree and plant reconstruction by directly inferring a Lindenmayer-System (L-System) word representation from image data in an image captioning approach. We train a model end-to-end which is able to translate given images into L-System words as a description of the displayed tree. To prove this concept, we demonstrate the applicability on 2D tree topologies. Transferred to real image data, this novel idea could lead to more efficient, accurate and semantically meaningful tree and plant reconstruction without using error-prone point cloud extraction, and other processes usually utilized in tree reconstruction. Furthermore, this approach bypasses the need for a predefined L-System grammar and enables species-specific L-System inference without biological knowledge.
Treasure What You Have: Exploiting Similarity in Deep Neural Networks for Efficient Video Processing
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Deep learning has enabled various Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Still, designing models with high accuracy and computational efficiency remains a significant challenge, especially in real-time video processing applications. Such applications exhibit high inter- and intra-frame redundancy, allowing further improvement. This paper proposes a similarity-aware training methodology that exploits data redundancy in video frames for efficient processing. Our approach introduces a per-layer regularization that enhances computation reuse by increasing the similarity of weights during training. We validate our methodology on two critical real-time applications, lane detection and scene parsing. We observe an average compression ratio of approximately 50% and a speedup of \sim 1.5x for different models while maintaining the same accuracy.
PriGen: Towards Automated Translation of Android Applications' Code to Privacy Captions
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

Mobile applications are required to give privacy notices to the users when they collect or share personal information. Creating consistent and concise privacy notices can be a challenging task for developers. Previous work has attempted to help developers create privacy notices through a questionnaire or predefined templates. In this paper, we propose a novel approach and a framework, called PriGen, that extends these prior work. PriGen uses static analysis to identify Android applications' code segments which process sensitive information (i.e. permission-requiring code segments) and then leverages a Neural Machine Translation model to translate them into privacy captions. We present the initial evaluation of our translation task for $\sim$300,000 code segments.
Can SAM Boost Video Super-Resolution?
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

The primary challenge in video super-resolution (VSR) is to handle large motions in the input frames, which makes it difficult to accurately aggregate information from multiple frames. Existing works either adopt deformable convolutions or estimate optical flow as a prior to establish correspondences between frames for the effective alignment and fusion. However, they fail to take into account the valuable semantic information that can greatly enhance it; and flow-based methods heavily rely on the accuracy of a flow estimate model, which may not provide precise flows given two low-resolution frames. In this paper, we investigate a more robust and semantic-aware prior for enhanced VSR by utilizing the Segment Anything Model (SAM), a powerful foundational model that is less susceptible to image degradation. To use the SAM-based prior, we propose a simple yet effective module -- SAM-guidEd refinEment Module (SEEM), which can enhance both alignment and fusion procedures by the utilization of semantic information. This light-weight plug-in module is specifically designed to not only leverage the attention mechanism for the generation of semantic-aware feature but also be easily and seamlessly integrated into existing methods. Concretely, we apply our SEEM to two representative methods, EDVR and BasicVSR, resulting in consistently improved performance with minimal implementation effort, on three widely used VSR datasets: Vimeo-90K, REDS and Vid4. More importantly, we found that the proposed SEEM can advance the existing methods in an efficient tuning manner, providing increased flexibility in adjusting the balance between performance and the number of training parameters. Code will be open-source soon.
A Semi-Automated Hybrid Schema Matching Framework for Vegetation Data Integration
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2023
Year: 2023

Integrating disparate and distributed vegetation data is critical for consistent and informed national policy development and management. Australia's National Vegetation Information System (NVIS) under the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water (DCCEEW) is the only nationally consistent vegetation database and hierarchical typology of vegetation types in different locations. Currently, this database employs manual approaches for integrating disparate state and territory datasets which is labour intensive and can be prone to human errors. To cope with the ever-increasing need for up to date vegetation data derived from heterogeneous data sources, a Semi-Automated Hybrid Matcher (SAHM) is proposed in this paper. SAHM utilizes both schema level and instance level matching following a two-tier matching framework. A key novel technique in SAHM called Multivariate Statistical Matching is proposed for automated schema scoring which takes advantage of domain knowledge and correlations between attributes to enhance the matching. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed framework, the performance of the individual as well as combined components of SAHM have been evaluated. The empirical evaluation shows the effectiveness of the proposed framework which outperforms existing state of the art methods like Cupid, Coma, Similarity Flooding, Jaccard Leven Matcher, Distribution Based Matcher, and EmbDI. In particular, SAHM achieves between 88% and 100% accuracy with significantly better F1 scores in comparison with state-of-the-art techniques. SAHM is also shown to be several orders of magnitude more efficient than existing techniques.
Domain Incremental Lifelong Learning in an Open World
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Lifelong learning (LL) is an important ability for NLP models to learn new tasks continuously. Architecture-based approaches are reported to be effective implementations for LL models. However, it is non-trivial to extend previous approaches to domain incremental LL scenarios since they either require access to task identities in the testing phase or cannot handle samples from unseen tasks. In this paper, we propose \textbf{Diana}: a \underline{d}ynam\underline{i}c \underline{a}rchitecture-based lifelo\underline{n}g le\underline{a}rning model that tries to learn a sequence of tasks with a prompt-enhanced language model. Four types of hierarchically organized prompts are used in Diana to capture knowledge from different granularities. Specifically, we dedicate task-level prompts to capture task-specific knowledge to retain high LL performances and maintain instance-level prompts to learn knowledge shared across input samples to improve the model's generalization performance. Moreover, we dedicate separate prompts to explicitly model unseen tasks and introduce a set of prompt key vectors to facilitate knowledge sharing between tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Diana outperforms state-of-the-art LL models, especially in handling unseen tasks. We release the code and data at \url{https://github.com/AlibabaResearch/DAMO-ConvAI/tree/main/diana}.
A Fused Gromov-Wasserstein Framework for Unsupervised Knowledge Graph Entity Alignment
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Entity alignment is the task of identifying corresponding entities across different knowledge graphs (KGs). Although recent embedding-based entity alignment methods have shown significant advancements, they still struggle to fully utilize KG structural information. In this paper, we introduce FGWEA, an unsupervised entity alignment framework that leverages the Fused Gromov-Wasserstein (FGW) distance, allowing for a comprehensive comparison of entity semantics and KG structures within a joint optimization framework. To address the computational challenges associated with optimizing FGW, we devise a three-stage progressive optimization algorithm. It starts with a basic semantic embedding matching, proceeds to approximate cross-KG structural and relational similarity matching based on iterative updates of high-confidence entity links, and ultimately culminates in a global structural comparison between KGs. We perform extensive experiments on four entity alignment datasets covering 14 distinct KGs across five languages. Without any supervision or hyper-parameter tuning, FGWEA surpasses 21 competitive baselines, including cutting-edge supervised entity alignment methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/squareRoot3/FusedGW-Entity-Alignment.
Clustering of Time-Varying Graphs Based on Temporal Label Smoothness
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

We propose a node clustering method for time-varying graphs based on the assumption that the cluster labels are changed smoothly over time. Clustering is one of the fundamental tasks in many science and engineering fields including signal processing, machine learning, and data mining. Although most existing studies focus on the clustering of nodes in static graphs, we often encounter time-varying graphs for time-series data, e.g., social networks, brain functional connectivity, and point clouds. In this paper, we formulate a node clustering of time-varying graphs as an optimization problem based on spectral clustering, with a smoothness constraint of the node labels. We solve the problem with a primal-dual splitting algorithm. Experiments on synthetic and real-world time-varying graphs are performed to validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
Autocorrelations Decay in Texts and Applicability Limits of Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

We show that the laws of autocorrelations decay in texts are closely related to applicability limits of language models. Using distributional semantics we empirically demonstrate that autocorrelations of words in texts decay according to a power law. We show that distributional semantics provides coherent autocorrelations decay exponents for texts translated to multiple languages. The autocorrelations decay in generated texts is quantitatively and often qualitatively different from the literary texts. We conclude that language models exhibiting Markov behavior, including large autoregressive language models, may have limitations when applied to long texts, whether analysis or generation.
Serial Contrastive Knowledge Distillation for Continual Few-shot Relation Extraction
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Continual few-shot relation extraction (RE) aims to continuously train a model for new relations with few labeled training data, of which the major challenges are the catastrophic forgetting of old relations and the overfitting caused by data sparsity. In this paper, we propose a new model, namely SCKD, to accomplish the continual few-shot RE task. Specifically, we design serial knowledge distillation to preserve the prior knowledge from previous models and conduct contrastive learning with pseudo samples to keep the representations of samples in different relations sufficiently distinguishable. Our experiments on two benchmark datasets validate the effectiveness of SCKD for continual few-shot RE and its superiority in knowledge transfer and memory utilization over state-of-the-art models.
Zero-Error Distributed Function Compression for Binary Arithmetic Sum
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

In this paper, we put forward the model of zero-error distributed function compression system of two binary memoryless sources X and Y, where there are two encoders En1 and En2 and one decoder De, connected by two channels (En1, De) and (En2, De) with the capacity constraints C1 and C2, respectively. The encoder En1 can observe X or (X,Y) and the encoder En2 can observe Y or (X,Y) according to the two switches s1 and s2 open or closed (corresponding to taking values 0 or 1). The decoder De is required to compress the binary arithmetic sum f(X,Y)=X+Y with zero error by using the system multiple times. We use (s1s2;C1,C2;f) to denote the model in which it is assumed that C1 \geq C2 by symmetry. The compression capacity for the model is defined as the maximum average number of times that the function f can be compressed with zero error for one use of the system, which measures the efficiency of using the system. We fully characterize the compression capacities for all the four cases of the model (s1s2;C1,C2;f) for s1s2= 00,01,10,11. Here, the characterization of the compression capacity for the case (01;C1,C2;f) with C1>C2 is highly nontrivial, where a novel graph coloring approach is developed. Furthermore, we apply the compression capacity for (01;C1,C2;f) to an open problem in network function computation that whether the best known upper bound of Guang et al. on computing capacity is in general tight.
PerFedRec++: Enhancing Personalized Federated Recommendation with Self-Supervised Pre-Training
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2023
Year: 2023

Federated recommendation systems employ federated learning techniques to safeguard user privacy by transmitting model parameters instead of raw user data between user devices and the central server. Nevertheless, the current federated recommender system faces challenges such as heterogeneity and personalization, model performance degradation, and communication bottleneck. Previous studies have attempted to address these issues, but none have been able to solve them simultaneously. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, named PerFedRec++, to enhance the personalized federated recommendation with self-supervised pre-training. Specifically, we utilize the privacy-preserving mechanism of federated recommender systems to generate two augmented graph views, which are used as contrastive tasks in self-supervised graph learning to pre-train the model. Pre-training enhances the performance of federated models by improving the uniformity of representation learning. Also, by providing a better initial state for federated training, pre-training makes the overall training converge faster, thus alleviating the heavy communication burden. We then construct a collaborative graph to learn the client representation through a federated graph neural network. Based on these learned representations, we cluster users into different user groups and learn personalized models for each cluster. Each user learns a personalized model by combining the global federated model, the cluster-level federated model, and its own fine-tuned local model. Experiments on three real-world datasets show that our proposed method achieves superior performance over existing methods.