Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
UADB: Unsupervised Anomaly Detection Booster

Unsupervised Anomaly Detection (UAD) is a key data mining problem owing to its wide real-world applications. Due to the complete absence of supervision signals, UAD methods rely on implicit assumptions about anomalous patterns (e.g., scattered/sparsely/densely clustered) to detect anomalies. However, real-world data are complex and vary significantly across different domains. No single assumption can describe such complexity and be valid in all scenarios. This is also confirmed by recent research that shows no UAD method is omnipotent [1]. Based on above observations, instead of searching for a magic universal winner assumption, we seek to design a general UAD Booster (UADB) that empowers any UAD models with adaptability to different data. This is a challenging task given the heterogeneous model structures and assumptions adopted by existing UAD methods. To achieve this, we dive deep into the UAD problem and find that compared to normal data, anomalies (i) lack clear structure/pattern in feature space, thus (ii) harder to learn by model without a suitable assumption, and finally, leads to (iii) high variance between different learners. In light of these findings, we propose to (i) distill the knowledge of the source UAD model to an imitation learner (booster) that holds no data assumption, then (ii) exploit the variance between them to perform automatic correction, and thus (iii) improve the booster over the original UAD model. We use a neural network as the booster for its strong expressive power as a universal approximator and ability to perform flexible posthoc tuning. Note that UADB is a model-agnostic framework that can enhance heterogeneous UAD models in a unified way. Extensive experiments on over 80 tabular datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of UADB. To facilitate further research, code, figures, and datasets are available at UADB’s Github repository <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sup> .
Copula Guided Parallel Gibbs Sampling for Nonparametric and Coherent Topic Discovery (Extended Abstract)

In terms of the generative process, the Gamma-Gamma-Poisson Process (G2PP) is equivalent to the nonparametric topic model of Hierarchical Dirichlet Process (HDP). Considering the high computational cost of estimating parameters in HDP, a parallel G2PP was developed to generate topics efficiently via multi-threading. Unfortunately, the above model needs to predefine the number of topics. To address this issue, we first propose a Topic Self-Adaptive Model (TSAM) for nonparametric and parallel topic discovery. In TSAM, a monitor-executor mechanism is developed to manage the global topic information using a hierarchical structure of threads. Based on the apparatus of copulas, we further extend our TSAM to TSAMcop for coherent topic modeling by exploiting a copula guided parallel Gibbs sampling algorithm. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of both TSAM and TSAMcop.
Bipartite Graph based Multi-view Clustering (Extended Abstract)

In existing graph-based multi-view clustering algorithms, consensus cluster structures are explored by constructing similarity graphs of multiple views and then fusing them into a unified superior graph. However, they overlook consensus information when learning each graph independently, resulting in the undesirable unified graph with biases. To this end, we proposed a framework named bipartite graph based multi-view clustering (BIGMC) in [1] to tackle this challenge. To summarize, the key idea of BIGMC is to employ a small number of uniform anchors to represent the consensus information across views. In this way, BIGMC creates a bipartite graph between data points and anchors for each view, which are then fused to generate a unified bipartite graph. The unified graph would in turn improve each view bipartite graph and the anchor set. Finally, the clusters are formed directly using the unified graph. In this extended abstract, we also summarize the effectiveness of BIGMC as shown in experimental results originally presented in [1].
A Study of the Data Remaining on Second-Hand Mobile Devices in the UK

This study aimed to identify the level and type of information that remained on portable devices purchased from the secondhand market in the UK over the last few years.The sample for this study consisted of 100 secondhand mobile phones and tablets.The study aimed to determine the proportion of devices that still contained data and the type of data they contained.The study attempted to determine the level of personal identifiable information associated with the previous owner where data were identified.The research showed that when sensitive and personal data was present on a mobile device, in most cases, there had been no attempt to remove it.However, fifty-two percent of the mobile devices had been reset to the factory settings or had all the data erased, demonstrating the previous owner's attempt to remove permanently personal identifiable information.Twenty eight percent of the devices sold were not functional or recognized by the software used in the research.Twenty percent of the devices that contained data contained data that gave away the previous owner's identity.
StreamMLOps: Operationalizing Online Learning for Big Data Streaming &amp; Real-Time Applications

Continuously learning and serving from evolving streaming data and serving in real-time is a challenging problem. Traditionally, data is partitioned and processed in batches to train machine learning (ML) models. In industrial applications, static models’ performance drops over time (model degradation, concept drift), requiring new models to be trained with recent data and redeployed in production. The scientific community has been studying online and adaptive methods to address batch-learning limitations and continuously train AI tasks for industrial applications such as cyber-security, AIOps, anomaly scoring, and drift detection in stock markets. This paper deals with the MLOps aspects of deploying such online and dynamic models to address the requirements in the production systems for real-time applications. Our architectures - based on open-source tools such as Kafka and River - demonstrated how online learning methods could be scaled horizontally in production to meet the demands of a high-velocity streaming pipeline. We demonstrate an MLOps strategy to perform incremental learning from streaming data and continuously deploy the online learning model without pausing the inference pipeline. Indeed, the design satisfies requirements such as model versioning, monitoring, audibility and reproducibility of prediction in both a supervised and semi-supervised setting. Our experiments - for malicious URLs detection task - performed on high-dimensional and feature-evolving streaming data (more than 3 million features) establish the effectiveness and efficiency of online learning models compared to batch (static) machine learning regarding both time and space complexity. Finally, we provide some best practices on data engineering for deploying online models to process a real-time feature stream in production environments. Code is publicly available for reproducibility.
Dynamic Private Task Assignment under Differential Privacy

Data collection is indispensable for spatial crowd-sourcing services, such as resource allocation, policymaking, and scientific explorations. However, privacy issues make it challenging for users to share their information unless receiving sufficient compensation. Differential Privacy (DP) is a promising mechanism to release helpful information while protecting individuals’ privacy. However, most DP mechanisms only consider a fixed compensation for each user’s privacy loss. In this paper, we design a task assignment scheme that allows workers to dynamically improve their utility with dynamic distance privacy leakage. Specifically, we propose two solutions to improve the total utility of task assignment results, namely Private Utility Conflict-Elimination (PUCE) approach and Private Game Theory (PGT) approach, respectively. We prove that PUCE achieves higher utility than the state-of-the-art works. We demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our PUCE and PGT approaches on both real and synthetic data sets compared with the recent distance-based approach, Private Distance Conflict-Elimination (PDCE). PUCE is always better than PDCE slightly. PGT is 50% to 63% faster than PDCE and can improve 16% utility on average when worker range is large enough.
InferTurbo: A Scalable System for Boosting Full-graph Inference of Graph Neural Network over Huge Graphs

With the rapid development of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), more and more studies focus on system design to improve training efficiency while ignoring the efficiency of GNN inference. Actually, GNN inference is a non-trivial task, especially in industrial scenarios with giant graphs, given three main challenges, i.e., scalability tailored for full-graph inference on huge graphs, inconsistency caused by stochastic acceleration strategies (e.g., sampling), and the serious redundant computation issue. To address the above challenges, we propose a scalable system named InferTurbo to boost the GNN inference tasks in industrial scenarios. Inspired by the philosophy of "think-like-a-vertex", a GAS-like (Gather-Apply-Scatter) schema is proposed to describe the computation paradigm and data flow of GNN inference. The computation of GNNs is expressed in an iteration manner, in which a vertex would gather messages via in-edges and update its state information by forwarding an associated layer of GNNs with those messages and then send the updated information to other vertexes via out-edges. Following the schema, the proposed InferTurbo can be built with alternative backends (e.g., batch processing system or graph computing system). Moreover, InferTurbo introduces several strategies like shadow-nodes and partial-gather to handle nodes with large degrees for better load balancing. With InferTurbo, GNN inference can be hierarchically conducted over the full graph without sampling and redundant computation. Experimental results demonstrate that our system is robust and efficient for inference tasks over graphs containing some hub nodes with many adjacent edges. Meanwhile, the system gains a remarkable performance compared with the traditional inference pipeline, and it can finish a GNN inference task over a graph with tens of billions of nodes and hundreds of billions of edges within 2 hours.
Disconnected Emerging Knowledge Graph Oriented Inductive Link Prediction

Inductive link prediction (ILP) is to predict links for unseen entities in emerging knowledge graphs (KGs), considering the evolving nature of KGs. A more challenging scenario is that emerging KGs consist of only unseen entities without any edge connected to original KGs, called as disconnected emerging KGs (DEKGs). Existing studies for DEKGs only focus on predicting enclosing links, i.e., predicting links inside the emerging KG. The bridging links, which carry the evolutionary information from the original KG to DEKG, have not been investigated by previous work so far. To fill in the gap, we propose a novel model entitled DEKG-ILP (Disconnected Emerging Knowledge Graph Oriented Inductive Link Prediction) that consists of the following two components. (1) The module CLRM (Contrastive Learning-based Relation-specific Feature Modeling) is developed to extract global relation-based semantic features that are shared between original KGs and DEKGs with a novel sampling strategy. (2) The module GSM (GNN-based Subgraph Modeling) is proposed to extract the local subgraph topological information around each link in KGs. The extensive experiments conducted on several benchmark datasets demonstrate that DEKG-ILP has obvious performance improvements compared with state-of-the-art methods for both enclosing and bridging link prediction.
Automated Data Cleaning Can Hurt Fairness in Machine Learning-based Decision Making

In this paper, we interrogate whether data quality issues track demographic characteristics such as sex, race and age, and whether automated data cleaning — of the kind commonly used in production ML systems — impacts the fairness of predictions made by these systems. To the best of our knowledge, the impact of data cleaning on fairness in downstream tasks has not been investigated in the literature.We first analyze the tuples flagged by common error detection strategies in five research datasets. We find that, while specific data quality issues, such as higher rates of missing values, are associated with membership in historically disadvantaged groups, poor data quality does not generally track demographic group membership. As a follow-up, we conduct a large-scale empirical study on the impact of automated data cleaning on fairness, involving more than 26,000 model evaluations on five datasets. We observe that, while automated data cleaning has an insignificant impact on both accuracy and fairness in the majority of cases, it is more likely to worsen fairness than to improve it, especially when the cleaning techniques are not carefully chosen. This finding is both significant and worrying, given that it potentially implicates many production ML systems. We make our code and experimental results publicly available.The analysis we conducted in this paper is difficult, primarily because it requires that we think holistically about disparities in data quality, disparities in the effectiveness of data cleaning methods, and impacts of such disparities on ML model performance for different demographic groups. Such holistic analysis can and should be supported with the help of data engineering research. Towards this goal, we envision the development of fairness-aware data cleaning methods, and their integration into complex pipelines for ML-based decision making.
CREDENCE: Counterfactual Explanations for Document Ranking

Towards better explainability in the field of information retrieval, we present CREDENCE, an interactive tool capable of generating counterfactual explanations for document rankers. Embracing the unique properties of the ranking problem, we present counterfactual explanations in terms of document perturbations, query perturbations, and even other documents. Additionally, users may build and test their own perturbations, and extract insights about their query, documents, and ranker.
Efficient Parallel Mining of High-utility Itemsets on Multicore Processors

High-utility itemset mining is a generalized problem of well-known frequent itemset mining, which considers not only the frequency of occurrence but also quantitative criteria such as unit profit. Because it can be applied to a wider spectrum of knowledge discovery work, various algorithmic improvements have been studied over the past two decades. On the other hand, limited efforts have been made to take advantage of hardware performance despite significant changes in hardware trends. This paper presents a novel parallelization method called DPHIM (Dynamic Parallelization for High-utility Itemset Mining). DPHIM dynamically decomposes the execution of high-utility itemset mining into subtasks in order to leverage logical data parallelism, and carefully assigns the subtasks and their related data to physical resources such as processing cores and nearby memory in the NUMA-aware manner. Our intensive and extensive experiments have confirmed that DPHIM performs up to 65.23 times faster than the fully-tuned serial execution, up to 23.54 times faster than static partitioning, and up to 2.51 times faster than the best case of alternative dynamic parallel executions for a variety of datasets and configurations on DRAM. As well, we have demonstrated that DPHIM effectively worked on persistent memory; it offered similar thread scalability trends and was 1.07 to 2.43 times slower on persistent memory.
Enabling Time-Centric Computation for Efficient Temporal Graph Traversals From Multiple Sources (Extended abstract)

Temporal graph traversal is an approach for analyzing how information spreads throughout a network over time. A system has been recently proposed as an initial effort for efficient analyses against higher time complexity and infinitely evolving data unlike static graph. However, with the system, the response time for traversals from multiple sources is proportional to the number of sources; thus, application domains of the system can be limited. To resolve this problem, the state-of-the-art vertex-centric paradigm can be considered; however, we have found that the paradigm is not fitted into this computation. The paper proposes a novel time-centric computation approach for efficient all-pairs temporal graph traversals. One benefit of this approach is that users only need to focus on designing a repetitive task for graph elements that are valid at each sliding time, which simplifies the program logic and alleviates the burden of writing codes. Another benefit is that the approach is expected to enhance the performance by facilitating the reuse of intermediate results of multiple sources. The proposed approach is evaluated with a prototyped system, the recipes for existing algorithms, and the experiments with open temporal datasets. In addition, we also discuss how to handle ever-evolving real-world temporal networks.
Image Caption Enhancement with GRIT, Portable ResNet and BART Context-Tuning

This paper aims to create an image captioning novel architecture that infuses Grid and Region-based image caption transformer, ResNet, and BART language model to offer a more detail-oriented image captioning model. Conventional state-of-the-art image captioning models mainly focuses on region-based features. They rely on decent object detector architectures like Faster R-CNN to extract object-level information to describe the image’s content. Nevertheless, they cannot remove contextual information, high computational costs, and the ability to introduce in-depth external details of objects presented in the images—the replacement of conventional CNN-based detectors results in faster computation. The experiment can generate image captions comparatively fast with higher accuracy and details with contextual information.
Generative Cooperative Network for Person Image Generation

Person image generation is to synthesize realistic pedestrian images that follow the same distribution as the given dataset. Previous attempts can be generally categorized into two classes: some methods use human pose information as guidance and others try to generate person images from scratch. The former is to transfer the pose of a source image to a reference pose. The generated person image have the same identity as the source image. The latter takes a random noise from latent space as input, and the real person images are only used as references for the discriminator. While pose-guided person image generation is widely studied, generating-from-scratch methods are also worth exploring because they can synthesize person image with new identity, which is a useful manner of data augmentation. These two types of generating methods have their different advantages and disadvantages, and sometimes they are complementary. In this work, the authors design a Generative Cooperative Network (GCN) to jointly train two types of GANs. The two GANs serve different purposes, and can learn from each other during the cooperative learning procedure. The proposed approach is verified on public datasets, and the results show that our GCN improves the performance of the baseline methods. Comparisons with state-of-the-art methods also prove the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Decision Support System for Chronic Diseases Based on Drug-Drug Interactions

Many patients with chronic diseases resort to multiple medications to relieve various symptoms, which raises concerns about the safety of multiple medication use, as severe drug-drug antagonism can lead to serious adverse effects or even death. This paper presents a Decision Support System, called DSSDDI, based on drug-drug interactions to support doctors prescribing decisions. DSSDDI contains three modules, Drug-Drug Interaction (DDI) module, Medical Decision (MD) module and Medical Support (MS) module. The DDI module learns safer and more effective drug representations from the drug-drug interactions. To capture the potential causal relationship between DDI and medication use, the MD module considers the representations of patients and drugs as context, DDI and patients’ similarity as treatment, and medication use as outcome to construct counterfactual links for the representation learning. Furthermore, the MS module provides drug candidates to doctors with explanations. Experiments on the chronic data collected from the Hong Kong Chronic Disease Study Project and a public diagnostic data MIMIC-III demonstrate that DSSDDI can be a reliable reference for doctors in terms of safety and efficiency of clinical diagnosis, with significant improvements compared to baseline methods. Source code of the proposed DSSDDI is publicly available at https://github.com/TianBian95/DSSDDI.
PrivNUD: Effective Range Query Processing under Local Differential Privacy

Local differential privacy (LDP) has been established as a strong privacy standard for collecting sensitive information from users. Although it has attracted much research attention in recent years, the majority of existing works focus on applying LDP to frequency distribution estimation for each individual value in a discrete domain. This paper concerns the important range queries involving multiple discrete values. Till now, only a few works target this problem. They all rely on the B-ary tree to construct a uniform and hierarchical decomposition, so as to decrease the error when answering large range queries. However, the uniform splitting manner ignores the properties of decomposed sub-domains and processes them equally without preferences, which leads to significant performance penalty.In this paper, we tackle the problem head on: our proposal, privNUD, is a novel domain hierarchical decomposition mechanism. It dynamically decomposes each domain with a tailored granularity into some sub-domains, which sensitively considers the potential chances to answer one range query. The issue of granularity is carefully analyzed for better performance. It also can smartly prune the sub-domains with small frequencies. Besides, an adaptive user allocation technique is designed to dynamically decide the scale of users that are involved in each sub-domain’s frequency estimation. Extensive experiments using real and synthetic datasets demonstrate that privNUD achieves significantly higher result accuracy compared to the up-to-date solutions.