Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Value analysis with blockchain-based information transparency system to eliminate information distortion

Information distortion is common in supply chains, especially demand information distortion. An easily-thought way of eliminating information distortion is information sharing. Although there exist many information sharing mechanisms that can coordinate the supply chains, they are not easy to implement due to their rigid implementation conditions. Consequently, many upstream manufacturers in reality commonly buy data from downstream retailers to eliminate demand information distortion, or may build a blockchain-based information transparency system (BITS), which is an alternative way proposed in this paper. The main purpose of this paper is to investigate how the two alternative ways perform in eliminating demand information distortion within supply chains. In specific, we study a two-echelon supply chain consisting of one manufacturer and one retailer under three scenarios: benchmark scenario with demand distortion, demand distortion elimination through data buying and through constructing BITS. Our findings are the following (Babich and Hilary, 2020): Eliminating demand distortion by BITS can always bring the manufacturer additional value, but a higher information transparency of BITS is not always better to the manufacturer, and the manufacturer chooses a fully transparent BITS to eliminate demand distortion only when the demand distortion is relatively large (Carley and Lin, 1997); The data purchase way of eliminating demand distortion can bring additional value to the manufacturer only when the data-buying cost is not very large (Chen and Huang, 2007); As compared to the data-buying scenario to eliminate demand distortion, the BITS construction scenario can generate more additional values for the manufacturer if the demand volatility is relatively small, or when the cost coefficient of building BITS is relatively small (CachonGérard and Fisher, 2000); If the retailer bears the BITS construction cost, the retailer prefers to proactively share the BITS construction cost rather than passively bear it completely.
Towards the universal defense for query-based audio adversarial attacks on speech recognition system

Abstract Recently, studies show that deep learning-based automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems are vulnerable to adversarial examples (AEs), which add a small amount of noise to the original audio examples. These AE attacks pose new challenges to deep learning security and have raised significant concerns about deploying ASR systems and devices. The existing defense methods are either limited in application or only defend on results, but not on process. In this work, we propose a novel method to infer the adversary intent and discover audio adversarial examples based on the AEs generation process. The insight of this method is based on the observation: many existing audio AE attacks utilize query-based methods, which means the adversary must send continuous and similar queries to target ASR models during the audio AE generation process. Inspired by this observation, We propose a memory mechanism by adopting audio fingerprint technology to analyze the similarity of the current query with a certain length of memory query. Thus, we can identify when a sequence of queries appears to be suspectable to generate audio AEs. Through extensive evaluation on four state-of-the-art audio AE attacks, we demonstrate that on average our defense identify the adversary’s intent with over $$90\%$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mrow> <mml:mn>90</mml:mn> <mml:mo>%</mml:mo> </mml:mrow> </mml:math> accuracy. With careful regard for robustness evaluations, we also analyze our proposed defense and its strength to withstand two adaptive attacks. Finally, our scheme is available out-of-the-box and directly compatible with any ensemble of ASR defense models to uncover audio AE attacks effectively without model retraining.
Curriculum-guided Abstractive Summarization for Mental Health Online Posts

Automatically generating short summaries from users' online mental health posts could save counselors' reading time and reduce their fatigue so that they can provide timely responses to those seeking help for improving their mental state.Recent Transformersbased summarization models have presented a promising approach to abstractive summarization.They go beyond sentence selection and extractive strategies to deal with more complicated tasks such as novel word generation and sentence paraphrasing.Nonetheless, these models have a prominent shortcoming; their training strategy is not quite efficient, which restricts the model's performance.In this paper, we include a curriculum learning approach to reweigh the training samples, bringing about an efficient learning procedure.We apply our model on extreme summarization dataset of MENTSUM posts -a dataset of mental health related posts from Reddit social media.Compared to the state-of-the-art model, our proposed method makes substantial gains in terms of ROUGE and BERTSCORE evaluation metrics, yielding 3.5% (ROUGE-1), 10.4% (ROUGE-2), and 4.7% (ROUGE-L), 1.5% (BERTSCORE) relative improvements.
A Collaborative Transfer Learning Framework for Cross-domain Recommendation

In the recommendation systems, there are multiple business domains to meet the diverse interests and needs of users, and the click-through rate(CTR) of each domain can be quite different, which leads to the demand for CTR prediction modeling for different business domains. The industry solution is to use domain-specific models or transfer learning techniques for each domain. The disadvantage of the former is that the data from other domains is not utilized by a single domain model, while the latter leverage all the data from different domains, but the fine-tuned model of transfer learning may trap the model in a local optimum of the source domain, making it difficult to fit the target domain. Meanwhile, significant differences in data quantity and feature schemas between different domains, known as domain shift, may lead to negative transfer in the process of transferring. To overcome these challenges, we propose the Collaborative Cross-Domain Transfer Learning Framework (CCTL). CCTL evaluates the information gain of the source domain on the target domain using a symmetric companion network and adjusts the information transfer weight of each source domain sample using the information flow network. This approach enables full utilization of other domain data while avoiding negative migration. Additionally, a representation enhancement network is used as an auxiliary task to preserve domain-specific features. Comprehensive experiments on both public and real-world industrial datasets, CCTL achieved SOTA score on offline metrics. At the same time, the CCTL algorithm has been deployed in Meituan, bringing 4.37% CTR and 5.43% GMV lift, which is significant to the business.
UnifieR: A Unified Retriever for Large-Scale Retrieval

Large-scale retrieval is to recall relevant documents from a huge collection given a query. It relies on representation learning to embed documents and queries into a common semantic encoding space. According to the encoding space, recent retrieval methods based on pre-trained language models (PLM) can be coarsely categorized into either dense-vector or lexicon-based paradigms. These two paradigms unveil the PLMs' representation capability in different granularities, i.e., global sequence-level compression and local word-level contexts, respectively. Inspired by their complementary global-local contextualization and distinct representing views, we propose a new learning framework, Unifier, which unifies dense-vector and lexicon-based retrieval in one model with a dual-representing capability. Experiments on passage retrieval benchmarks verify its effectiveness in both paradigms. A uni-retrieval scheme is further presented with even better retrieval quality. We lastly evaluate the model on BEIR benchmark to verify its transferability.
Exploiting Intent Evolution in E-commercial Query Recommendation

Aiming at a better understanding of the search goals in the user search sessions, recent query recommender systems explicitly model the reformulations of queries, which hopes to estimate the intents behind these reformulations and thus benefit the next-query recommendation. However, in real-world e-commercial search scenarios, user intents are much more complicated and may evolve dynamically. Existing methods merely consider trivial reformulation intents from semantic aspects and fail to model dynamic reformulation intent flows in search sessions, leading to sub-optimal capacities to recommend desired queries. To deal with these limitations, we first explicitly define six types of query reformulation intents according to the desired products of two consecutive queries. We then apply two self-attentive encoders on top of two pre-trained large language models to learn the transition dynamics from semantic query and intent reformulation sequences, respectively. We develop an intent-aware query decoder to utilize the predicted intents for suggesting the next queries. We instantiate such a framework with an Intent-aware Variational AutoEncoder (IVAE) under deployment at Amazon. We conduct comprehensive experiments on two real-world e-commercial datasets from Amazon and one public dataset from BestBuy. Specifically, IVAE improves the Recall@15 by 25.44% and 60.47% on two Amazon datasets and 13.91% on BestBuy, respectively.
Cracking White-box DNN Watermarks via Invariant Neuron Transforms

Recently, how to protect the Intellectual Property (IP) of deep neural networks (DNN) becomes a major concern for the AI industry. To combat potential model piracy, recent works explore various watermarking strategies to embed secret identity messages into the prediction behaviors or the internals (e.g., weights and neuron activation) of the target model. Sacrificing less functionality and involving more knowledge about the target model, the latter branch of watermarking schemes (i.e., white-box model watermarking) is claimed to be accurate, credible and secure against most known watermark removal attacks, with emerging research efforts and applications in the industry.
A Unified Framework of Graph Information Bottleneck for Robustness and Membership Privacy

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved great success in modeling graph-structured data. However, recent works show that GNNs are vulnerable to adversarial attacks which can fool the GNN model to make desired predictions of the attacker. In addition, training data of GNNs can be leaked under membership inference attacks. This largely hinders the adoption of GNNs in high-stake domains such as e-commerce, finance and bioinformatics. Though investigations have been made in conducting robust predictions and protecting membership privacy, they generally fail to simultaneously consider the robustness and membership privacy. Therefore, in this work, we study a novel problem of developing robust and membership privacy-preserving GNNs. Our analysis shows that Information Bottleneck (IB) can help filter out noisy information and regularize the predictions on labeled samples, which can benefit robustness and membership privacy. However, structural noises and lack of labels in node classification challenge the deployment of IB on graph-structured data. To mitigate these issues, we propose a novel graph information bottleneck framework that can alleviate structural noises with neighbor bottleneck. Pseudo labels are also incorporated in the optimization to minimize the gap between the predictions on the labeled set and unlabeled set for membership privacy. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that our method can give robust predictions and simultaneously preserve membership privacy.
FedPseudo: Privacy-Preserving Pseudo Value-Based Deep Learning Models for Federated Survival Analysis

Survival analysis, aka time-to-event analysis, has a wide-ranging impact on patient care. Federated Survival Analysis (FSA) is an emerging Federated Learning (FL) paradigm for performing survival analysis on distributed decentralized data available at multiple medical institutions. FSA enables individual medical institutions, referred to as clients, to improve their survival predictions while ensuring privacy. However, FSA faces challenges due to non-linear and non-IID data distributions among clients, as well as bias caused by censoring. Although recent studies have adapted Cox Proportional Hazards (CoxPH) survival models for FSA, a systematic exploration of these challenges is currently lacking. In this paper, we address these critical challenges by introducing FedPseudo, a pseudo value-based deep learning framework for FSA. FedPseudo uses deep learning models to learn robust representations from non-linear survival data, leverages the power of pseudo values to handle non-uniform censoring, and employs FL algorithms such as FedAvg to learn model parameters. We propose a novel and simple approach for estimating pseudo values for FSA. We provide theoretical proof that the estimated pseudo values, referred to as Federated Pseudo Values, are consistent. Moreover, our empirical results demonstrate that they can be computed faster than traditional methods of deriving pseudo values. To ensure and enhance the privacy of both the estimated pseudo values and the shared model parameters, we systematically investigate the application of differential privacy (DP) on both the federated pseudo values and local model updates. Furthermore, we adapt V -Usable Information metric to quantify the informativeness of a client's data for training a survival model and utilize this metric to show the advantages of participating in FSA. We conducted extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world survival datasets to demonstrate that our FedPseudo framework achieves better performance than other FSA approaches and performs similarly to the best centrally trained deep survival model. Moreover, FedPseudo consistently achieves superior results across different censoring settings.
Node Classification Beyond Homophily: Towards a General Solution

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have become core building blocks behind a myriad of graph learning tasks. The vast majority of the existing GNNs are built upon, either implicitly or explicitly, the homophily assumption, which is not always true and could heavily degrade the performance of learning tasks. In response, GNNs tailored for heterophilic graphs have been developed. However, most of the existing works are designed for the specific GNN models to address heterophily, which lacks generality. In this paper, we study the problem from the structure learning perspective and propose a family of general solutions named ALT. It can work hand in hand with most of the existing GNNs to handle graphs with either low or high homophily. At the core of our method is learning to (1) decompose a given graph into two components, (2) extract complementary graph signals from these two components, and (3) adaptively integrate the graph signals for node classification. Moreover, analysis based on graph signal processing shows that our framework can empower a broad range of existing GNNs to have adaptive filter characteristics and further modulate the input graph signals, which is critical for handling complex homophilic/heterophilic patterns. The proposed ALT brings significant and consistent performance improvement in node classification for a wide range of GNNs over a variety of real-world datasets.
Composite Multi-modal Hashing

Multi-modal data describe the multi-perception observed information of the object in the real world from various aspects. Different from uni-modal [1–3] and cross-modal hashing [4–8] mentioned in the above chapters, composite multi-modal hashing technology [9–15] focuses on how to collaboratively fuse heterogeneous multi-modal features and perform the retrieval among different instances based on fused features.
Deception by Omission: Using Adversarial Missingness to Poison Causal Structure Learning

Causality-informed machine learning has been proposed as an avenue for achieving many of the goals of modern machine learning, from ensuring generalization under domain shifts to attaining fairness, robustness, and interpretability. A key component of causal machine learning is the inference of causal structures from observational data; in practice, this data may be incompletely observed. Prior work has demonstrated that adversarial perturbations of completely observed training data may be used to force the learning of inaccurate causal structural models (SCMs). However, when the data can be audited for correctness (e.g., it is cryptographically signed by its source), this adversarial mechanism is invalidated. This work introduces a novel attack methodology wherein the adversary deceptively omits a portion of the true training data to bias the learned causal structures in a desired manner (under strong signed sample input validation, this behavior seems to be the only strategy available to the adversary). Under this model, theoretically sound attack mechanisms are derived for the case of arbitrary SCMs, and a sample-efficient learning-based heuristic is given. Experimental validation of these approaches on real and synthetic data sets demonstrates the effectiveness of adversarial missingness attacks at deceiving popular causal structure learning algorithms.
Augmenting Recurrent Graph Neural Networks with a Cache

While graph neural networks (GNNs) provide a powerful way to learn structured representations, it remains challenging to learn long-range dependencies in graphs. Recurrent GNNs only partly address this problem. In this paper, we propose a general approach for augmenting recurrent GNNs with a cache memory to improve their expressivity, especially for modeling long-range dependencies. Specifically, we first introduce a method of augmenting recurrent GNNs with a cache of previous hidden states. Then we further propose a general Cache-GNN framework by adding additional modules, including attention mechanism and positional/structural encoders, to improve the expressivity. We show that the Cache-GNNs outperforms other models on synthetic datasets as well as tasks on real-world datasets that require long-range information.
Knowledge Graph Reasoning and Its Applications

The use of knowledge graphs has gained significant traction in a wide variety of applications, ranging from recommender systems and question answering to fact checking. By leveraging the wealth of information contained within knowledge graphs, it is possible to greatly enhance various downstream tasks, making reasoning over knowledge graphs an area of increasing interest. However, despite its popularity, knowledge graph reasoning remains a challenging problem. The first major challenge of knowledge graph reasoning lies in the nature of knowledge graphs themselves. Most knowledge graphs are incomplete, meaning that they may not capture all the relevant knowledge required for reasoning. As a result, reasoning on incomplete knowledge graphs can be difficult. Additionally, real-world knowledge graphs often evolve over time, which presents an additional challenge. The second challenge of knowledge graph reasoning pertains to the input data. In some KG reasoning applications, users may be unfamiliar with the background knowledge graph, leading to the possibility of asking ambiguous questions that can make KG reasoning tasks more challenging. Moreover, some applications require iterative reasoning, where users ask several related questions in sequence, further increasing the complexity of the task. The third challenge of knowledge graph reasoning concerns the algorithmic aspect. Due to the varied properties of relations in knowledge graphs, such as transitivity, symmetry, and asymmetry, designing an all-round KG reasoning model that fits all these properties can be challenging. Furthermore, most KG reasoning models tend to focus on solving a specific problem, lacking the generalization ability required to apply to other tasks. This tutorial aims to comprehensively review different aspects of knowledge graph reasoning applications and highlight open challenges and future directions. It is intended to benefit researchers and practitioners in the fields of data mining, artificial intelligence, and social science.
Connecting the Dots -- Density-Connectivity Distance unifies DBSCAN, k-Center and Spectral Clustering

Despite the popularity of density-based clustering, its procedural definition makes it difficult to analyze compared to clustering methods that minimize a loss function. In this paper, we reformulate DBSCAN through a clean objective function by introducing the density-connectivity distance (dc-dist), which captures the essence of density-based clusters by endowing the minimax distance with the concept of density. This novel ultrametric allows us to show that DBSCAN, k-center, and spectral clustering are equivalent in the space given by the dc-dist, despite these algorithms being perceived as fundamentally different in their respective literatures. We also verify that finding the pairwise dc-dists gives DBSCAN clusterings across all epsilon-values, simplifying the problem of parameterizing density-based clustering. We conclude by thoroughly analyzing density-connectivity and its properties -- a task that has been elusive thus far in the literature due to the lack of formal tools. Our code recreates every experiment below: https://github.com/Andrew-Draganov/dc_dist
Semi-Supervised Graph Imbalanced Regression

Data imbalance is easily found in annotated data when the observations of certain continuous label values are difficult to collect for regression tasks. When they come to molecule and polymer property predictions, the annotated graph datasets are often small because labeling them requires expensive equipment and effort. To address the lack of examples of rare label values in graph regression tasks, we propose a semi-supervised framework to progressively balance training data and reduce model bias via self-training. The training data balance is achieved by (1) pseudo-labeling more graphs for under-represented labels with a novel regression confidence measurement and (2) augmenting graph examples in latent space for remaining rare labels after data balancing with pseudo-labels. The former is to identify quality examples from unlabeled data whose labels are confidently predicted and sample a subset of them with a reverse distribution from the imbalanced annotated data. The latter collaborates with the former to target a perfect balance using a novel label-anchored mixup algorithm. We perform experiments in seven regression tasks on graph datasets. Results demonstrate that the proposed framework significantly reduces the error of predicted graph properties, especially in under-represented label areas.
Fusing Multimodal Signals on Hyper-complex Space for Extreme Abstractive Text Summarization (TL;DR) of Scientific Contents

The realm of scientific text summarization has experienced remarkable progress due to the availability of annotated brief summaries and ample data. However, the utilization of multiple input modalities, such as videos and audio, has yet to be thoroughly explored. At present, scientific multimodal-input-based text summarization systems tend to employ longer target summaries like abstracts, leading to an underwhelming performance in the task of text summarization.