OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
An Empirical Cross Domain-Specific Entity Recognition with Domain Vector
Authors: Wei Chen, Songqiao Han, Hailiang Huang
Venue: CIKM
Year: 2022

Recognizing terminology entities across domains from professional texts is an important but challenging task in NLP. Most existing methods focus on recognizing generic entities, but few methods are to recognize the domain-specific entities across domains due to the very large discrepancy of entity representations between the source and target domains. To address this issue, we introduce domain vectors and context vectors to represent domain-specific semantics of entities and domain-irrelevant semantics of the context words, respectively. Based on the two types of vectors, we present a simple yet effective novel cross-domain named entity recognition approach, which aligns entity distributions between domains and separates entity distributions from context distributions for easily identifying entities. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach can obtain significant improvement compared to existing cross-domain NER methods.
Scalable Graph Representation Learning via Locality-Sensitive Hashing
Authors: Xiusi Chen, Jyun-Yu Jiang, Wei Wang
Venue: CIKM
Year: 2022

A massive amount of research on graph representation learning has been carried out to learn dense features as graph embedding for information networks, thereby capturing the semantics in complex networks and benefiting a variety of downstream tasks. Most of the existing studies focus on structural properties, such as distances and neighborhood proximity between nodes. However, real-world information networks are dominated by the low-degree nodes because they are not only sparse but also subject to the Power law form. Due to the sparsity, proximity-based methods are incapable of deriving satisfactory representations for these tail nodes. To address this challenge, we propose a novel approach, Content-Preserving Locality-Sensitive Hashing~(CP-LSH), by incorporating the content information for representation learning. Specifically, we aim at preserving LSH-based content similarity between nodes to leverage the knowledge from popular nodes to long-tail nodes. We also propose a novel hashing trick to reduce the redundant space consumption so that CP-LSH is capable of tackling industry-scale data. Extensive offline experiments have been conducted on three large-scale public datasets. We also deploy CP-LSH to real-world recommendation systems in one of the largest e-commerce platforms for online experiments. Experimental results demonstrate that CP-LSH outperforms competitive baseline methods in node classification and link prediction tasks. Besides, the results of online experiments also indicate that CP-LSH is practical and robust for real-world production systems.
CyberWater: An Open Framework for Data and Model Integration in Water Science and Engineering
Authors: Ranran Chen, Feng Li, Drew Bieger, Fengguang Song, Yao Liang, Daniel Luna, Ryan Young, Xu Liang, Sudhakar Pamidighantam
Venue: CIKM
Year: 2022

The CyberWater project is to build an open-data open-model framework for easy and incremental integration of heterogeneous data sources and diverse scientific models across disciplines in the broad water domain. The CyberWater framework extends the open-data open-model framework called Meta-Scientific-Modeling (MSM) that provides a system-wide data and model integration platform. On top of MSM, the CyberWater framework provides a set of toolkits, and external system integration engines, to further facilitate users' scientific modeling and collaboration across disciplines. For example, the developed generic model agent toolkit enables users to integrate their computational models into CyberWater via graphical user interface configuration without coding, which further simplifies the data and model integration and model coupling. CyberWater adopts a graphical scientific workflow system, VisTrails, ensuring data provenance and reproducible computing. CyberWater supports novel access to high-performance computing resources on demand for users' computational expensive model tasks. We demonstrate merits of CyberWater by a use case of hydrologic modeling workflow.
GCF-RD: A Graph-based Contrastive Framework for Semi-Supervised Learning on Relational Databases
Authors: Runjin Chen, Tong Li, Yanyan Shen, Luyu Qiu, Kaidi Li, Caleb Chen Cao
Venue: CIKM
Year: 2022

Relational databases are the main storage model of structured data in most businesses, which usually involves multiple tables with key-foreign-key relationships. In practice, data analysts often want to pose predictive classification queries over relational databases. To answer such queries, many existing approaches perform supervised learning to train classification models, which heavily rely on the availability of sufficient labeled data. In this paper, we propose a novel graph-based contrastive framework for semi-supervised learning on relational databases, achieving promising predictive classification performance with only a handful of labeled data. Our framework utilizes contrastive learning to exploit additional supervision signals from massive unlabeled data. Specifically, we develop two contrastive graph views that are 1) advantageous for modeling complex relationships and correlations among structured data in a relational database, and 2) complementary to each other for learning robust representations of structured data to be classified. We also leverage label information in contrastive learning to mitigate its negative effect in knowledge transfer on the supervised counterpart. We conduct extensive experiments on three real-world relational databases and the results demonstrate that our framework is able to achieve the state-of-the-art predictive performance in limited labeled data settings, compared with various supervised and semi-supervised learning approaches.
Utilizing Contrastive Learning To Address Long Tail Issue in Product Categorization
Authors: Lei Chen, Tianqi Wang
Venue: CIKM
Year: 2022

Neural network models trained in a supervised learning way have become dominant. Although high performances can be achieved when training data is ample, the performance on labels with sparse training instances can be poor. This performance drift caused by imbalanced data is named as long tail issue and impacts many NN models used in reality. In this talk, we will firstly review machine learning approaches addressing the long-tail issue. Next, we will report on our effort on applying one recent LT-addressing method on the item categorization (IC) task that aims to classify product description texts into leaf nodes in a category taxonomy tree. In particular, we adopted a new method, which consists of decoupling the entire classification task into (a) learning representations using the K-positive contrastive loss (KCL) and (b) training a classifier on balanced data set, into IC tasks. Using SimCSE to be our self-learning backbone, we demonstrated that the proposed method works on the IC text classification task. In addition, we spotted a shortcoming in the KCL: false negative (FN) instances may harm the representation learning step. After eliminating FN instances, IC performance (measured by macro-F1) has been further improved.
CFS-MTL: A Causal Feature Selection Mechanism for Multi-task Learning via Pseudo-intervention
Authors: Zhongde Chen, Ruize Wu, Cong Jiang, Honghui Li, Xin Dong, Can Long, Yong He, Lei Cheng, Linjian Mo
Venue: CIKM
Year: 2022

Multi-task learning (MTL) has been successfully applied to a wide range of real-world applications. However, MTL models often suffer from performance degradation with negative transfer due to sharing all features without distinguishing their helpfulness for all tasks. To this end, many works on feature selection for multi-task learning (FS-MTL) have been proposed to alleviate negative transfer between tasks by learning features selectively for each specific task. However, due to latent confounders between features and task targets, the correlations captured by the feature selection modules proposed in these works may fail to reflect the actual effect of the features on the targets. This paper explains negative transfer in FS-MTL from a causal perspective and presents a novel architecture called Causal Feature Selection for Multi-task Learning(CFS-MTL). This method incorporates the idea of causal inference into feature selection for multi-task learning via pseudo-intervention. It aims to select features with more stable causal effects rather than spurious correlations for each task by regularizing the distance between feature ITEs and feature importance. We conduct extensive experiments based on three real-world datasets to demonstrate that our proposed CFS-MTL outperforms state-of-the-art MTL models significantly in the AUC metric.
DASH: An Agile Knowledge Graph System Disentangling Demands, Algorithms, Data Resources, and Humans
Authors: Shaowei Chen, Haoran Wang, Jie Liu, Jiahui Wu
Venue: CIKM
Year: 2022

Knowledge graph (KG) is an important branch of artificial intelligence, which has attracted increasing research interest. However, in most enterprises, it is challenging to quickly construct KGs with multi-source and heterogeneous data and apply KGs to meet diverse business demands. To deal with these challenges, we propose an agile knowledge graph system following the novel principle of disentangling Demands, Algorithms, data reSources, and Humans (DASH). Specifically, our system is equipped with prior information-based knowledge extraction, self-supervised knowledge integration, and hierarchical knowledge base question answering algorithms that have outstanding generalizability and portability. Meanwhile, we propose a semi-automatic data accumulation framework to reduce labor costs of data annotations. Based on DASH, we develop a Web application with easy-to-use functionalities such as canvases and drag-and-drop, and illustrate its usage in a financial scenario.
Learning to Generalize in Heterogeneous Federated Networks
Authors: Cen Chen, Tiandi Ye, Li Wang, Ming Gao
Venue: CIKM
Year: 2022

With the rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT), the need to expand the amount of data through data-sharing to improve the model performance of edge devices has become increasingly compelling. To effectively protect data privacy while leveraging data across silos, federated learning has emerged. However, in the real world applications, federated learning inevitably faeces both data and model heterogeneity challenges. To address the heterogeneity issues in federated networks, in this work, we seek to jointly learn a global feature representation that is robust across clients and potentially also generalizable to new clients. More specifically, we propose a personalized Federated optimization framework with Meta Critic (FedMC) that efficiently captures robust and generalizable domain-invariant knowledge across clients. Extensive experiments on four public datasets show that the proposed FedMC outperforms the competing state-of-the-art methods in heterogeneous federated learning settings. We have also performed detailed ablation analysis on the importance of different components of the proposed model.
Discriminative Language Model via Self-Teaching for Dense Retrieval
Authors: Lu Chen, Ruqing Zhang, Jiafeng Guo, Yixing Fan, Xueqi Cheng
Venue: CIKM
Year: 2022

Dense retrieval (DR) has shown promising results in many information retrieval (IR) related tasks, whose foundation is high-quality text representations for effective search. Taking the pre-trained language models (PLMs) as the text encoders has become a popular choice in DR. However, the learned representations based on these PLMs often lose the discriminative power, and thus hurt the recall performance, particularly as PLMs consider too much content of the input texts. Therefore, in this work, we propose to pre-train a discriminative language representation model, called DiscBERT, for DR. The key idea is that a good text representation should be able to automatically keep those discriminative features that could well distinguish different texts from each other in the semantic space. Specifically, inspired by knowledge distillation, we employ a simple yet effective training method, called self-teaching, to distill the model's knowledge constructed when training on the sampled representative tokens of a text sequence into the model's knowledge for the entire text sequence. By further fine-tuning on publicly available retrieval benchmark datasets, DiscBERT can outperform the state-of-the-art retrieval methods.
Towards Self-supervised Learning on Graphs with Heterophily
Authors: Jingfan Chen, Guanghui Zhu, Yifan Qi, Chunfeng Yuan, Yihua Huang
Venue: CIKM
Year: 2022

Recently emerged heterophilous graph neural networks have significantly reduced the reliance on the assumption of graph homophily where linked nodes have similar features and labels. These methods focus on a supervised setting that relies on labeling information heavily and presents the limitations on general graph downstream tasks. In this work, we propose a self-supervised representation learning paradigm on graphs with heterophily (namely HGRL) for improving the generalizability of node representations, where node representations are optimized without any label guidance. Inspired by the designs of existing heterophilous graph neural networks, HGRL learns the node representations by preserving the node original features and capturing informative distant neighbors. Such two properties are obtained through carefully designed pretext tasks that are optimized based on estimated high-order mutual information. Theoretical analysis interprets the connections between HGRL and existing advanced graph neural network designs. Extensive experiments on different downstream tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.
Task Publication Time Recommendation in Spatial Crowdsourcing
Authors: Xuanlei Chen, Yan Zhao, Kai Zheng
Venue: CIKM
Year: 2022

The increasing proliferation of networked and geo-positioned mobile devices brings about increased opportunities for Spatial Crowdsourcing (SC), which aims to enable effective location-based task assignment. We propose and study a novel SC framework, namely Task Assignment with Task Publication Time Recommendation. The framework consists of two phases, task publication time recommendation and task assignment. More specifically, the task publication time recommendation phase hybrids different learning models to recommend the suitable publication time for each task to ensure the timely task assignment and completion while reducing the waiting time of the task requester at the SC platform. We use a cross-graph neural network to learn the representations of task requesters by integrating the obtained representations from two semantic spaces and utilize the self-attention mechanism to learn the representations of task-publishing sequences from multiple perspectives. Then a fully connected layer is used to predict suitable task publication time based on the obtained representations. In the task assignment phase, we propose a greedy and a minimum cost maximum flow algorithm to achieve the efficient and the optimal task assignment, respectively. An extensive empirical study demonstrates the effectiveness and efficiency of our framework.
Dynamic Explicit Embedding Representation for Numerical Features in Deep CTR Prediction
Authors: Yuan Cheng
Venue: CIKM
Year: 2022

Click-Through Rate (CTR) prediction is a key problem in web search, recommendation systems, and online advertising display. Deep CTR models have achieved good performance due to adoption of the feature embedding and interaction. However, most research has focused on learning better feature interactions, with little attention to embedding representation. In this work, we propose a Dynamic Explicit Embedding Representation (DEER) for numerical features in deep CTR prediction, which can provide explicit and dynamic embedding representation for numerical features. The DEER framework is able to discretize numerical features automatically and dynamically, which can overcome the discontinuity problem in the representation of numeric information. Our methods are tested on two public datasets, and the experimental results show DEER can be applied to various deep CTR models, which also improve the performance effectively.
An Empirical Study on How People Perceive AI-generated Music
Authors: Hyeshin Chu, Joohee Kim, Seongouk Kim, Hongkyu Lim, Hyunwook Lee, Seungmin Jin, Jongeun Lee, Taehwan Kim, Sungahn Ko
Venue: CIKM
Year: 2022

Music creation is difficult because one must express one's creativity while following strict rules. The advancement of deep learning technologies has diversified the methods to automate complex processes and express creativity in music composition. However, prior research has not paid much attention to exploring the audiences' subjective satisfaction to improve music generation models. In this paper, we evaluate human satisfaction with the state-of-the-art automatic symbolic music generation models using deep learning. In doing so, we define a taxonomy for music generation models and suggest nine subjective evaluation metrics. Through an evaluation study, we obtained more than 700 evaluations from 100 participants, using the suggested metrics. Our evaluation study reveals that the token representation method and models' characteristics affect subjective satisfaction. Through our qualitative analysis, we deepen our understanding of AI-generated music and suggested evaluation metrics. Lastly, we present lessons learned and discuss future research directions of deep learning models for music creation.
A Dataset for Burned Area Delineation and Severity Estimation from Satellite Imagery
Authors: Luca Colomba, Alessandro Farasin, Simone Monaco, Salvatore Greco, Paolo Garza, Daniele Apiletti, Elena Baralis, Tania Cerquitelli
Venue: CIKM
Year: 2022

The ability to correctly identify areas damaged by forest wildfires is essential to plan and monitor the restoration process and estimate the environmental damages after such catastrophic events. The wide availability of satellite data, combined with the recent development of machine learning and deep learning methodologies applied to the computer vision field, makes it extremely interesting to apply the aforementioned techniques to the field of automatic burned area detection. One of the main issues in such a context is the limited amount of labeled data, especially in the context of semantic segmentation. In this paper, we introduce a publicly available dataset for the burned area detection problem for semantic segmentation. The dataset contains 73 satellite images of different forests damaged by wildfires across Europe with a resolution of up to 10m per pixel. Data were collected from the Sentinel-2 L2A satellite mission and the target labels were generated from the Copernicus Emergency Management Service (EMS) annotations, with five different severity levels, ranging from undamaged to completely destroyed. Finally, we report the benchmark values obtained by applying a Convolutional Neural Network on the proposed dataset to address the burned area identification problem.
AutoXAI: A Framework to Automatically Select the Most Adapted XAI Solution
Authors: Robin Cugny, Julien Aligon, Max Chevalier, Geoffrey Roman-Jimenez, Olivier Teste
Venue: CIKM
Year: 2022

A large number of XAI (eXplainable Artificial Intelligence) solutions have been proposed in recent years. Recently, thanks to new XAI evaluation metrics, it has become possible to compare these XAI solutions. However, selecting the most relevant XAI solution among all this diversity is still a tedious task, especially if a user has specific needs and constraints. In this paper, we propose AutoXAI, a framework that recommends the best XAI solution and its hyperparameters according to specified XAI evaluation metrics while considering the user's context (dataset, machine learning model, XAI needs and constraints). It adapts approaches from context-aware recommender systems on one side and strategies of optimization and evaluation from AutoML (Automated Machine Learning) on the other. Through two use cases, we show that AutoXAI recommends XAI solutions adapted to the user's needs with the best hyperparameters matching the user's constraints.
LCD: Adaptive Label Correction for Denoising Music Recommendation
Authors: Quanyu Dai, Yalei Lv, Jieming Zhu, Junjie Ye, Zhenhua Dong, Rui Zhang, Shu-Tao Xia, Ruiming Tang
Venue: CIKM
Year: 2022

Music recommendation is usually modeled as a Click-Through Rate (CTR) prediction problem, which estimates the probability of a user listening a recommended song. CTR prediction can be formulated as a binary classification problem where the played songs are labeled as positive samples and the skipped songs are labeled as negative samples. However, such naively defined labels are noisy and biased in practice, causing inaccurate model predictions. In this work, we first identify serious label noise issues in an industrial music App, and then propose an adaptive Label Correction method for Denoising (LCD) music recommendation by ensembling the noisy labels and the model outputs to encourage a consensus prediction. Extensive offline experiments are conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of LCD on both industrial and public datasets. Furthermore, in a one-week online AB test, LCD also significantly increases both the music play count and time per user by 1% to 5%.
Effective Neural Team Formation via Negative Samples
Authors: Arman Dashti, Saeed Samet, Hossein Fani
Venue: CIKM
Year: 2022

Forming teams of experts who collectively hold a set of required skills and can successfully cooperate is challenging due to the vast pool of feasible candidates with diverse backgrounds, skills, and personalities. Neural models have been proposed to address scalability while maintaining efficacy by learning the distributions of experts and skills from successful teams in the past in order to recommend future teams. However, such models are prone to overfitting when training data suffers from a long-tailed distribution, i.e., few experts have most of the successful collaborations, and the majority has participated sparingly. In this paper, we present an optimization objective that leverages both successful and virtually unsuccessful teams to overcome the long-tailed distribution problem. We propose three negative sampling heuristics that can be seamlessly employed during the training of neural models. We study the synergistic effects of negative samples on the performance of neural models compared to lack thereof on two large-scale benchmark datasets of computer science publications and movies, respectively. Our experiments show that neural models that take unsuccessful teams (negative samples) into account are more efficient and effective in training and inference, respectively.
OpeNTF: A Benchmark Library for Neural Team Formation
Authors: Arman Dashti, Karan Saxena, Dhwani Patel, Hossein Fani
Venue: CIKM
Year: 2022

We contribute OpeNTF, an open-source python-based benchmark library to support neural team formation research. Team formation falls under social information retrieval (Social IR), where the right group of experts should be retrieved to solve a task, which is intractable due to the vast pool of feasible candidates with diverse skills. Even though neural networks could successfully address efficiency while maintaining efficacy, they lack standard implementation and experimental details, which calls for excessive efforts in repeating or reproducing the results in new domains. OpeNTF provides a standard and reproducible platform for neural team formation. It incorporates a host of canonical neural models along with three large-scale training datasets from varying domains. Leveraging an object-oriented structure, OpeNTF readily accommodates the addition of new neural models and training datasets. The first of its kind in neural team formation, OpeNTF also offers negative sampling heuristics that can be seamlessly integrated during model training to boost efficiency and to improve the effectiveness of inference.