bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Deep Semantic Graph Transformer for Multi-View 3D Human Pose Estimation
Authors: Zhang Lijun , Zhou Kangkang , Lu Feng , Zhou Xiang-Dong , Shi Yu
Published: March 2024

Most Graph Convolutional Networks based 3D human pose estimation (HPE) methods were involved in single-view 3D HPE and utilized certain spatial graphs, existing key problems such as depth ambiguity, insufficient feature representation, or limited receptive fields. To address these issues, we propose a multi-view 3D HPE framework based on deep semantic graph transformer, which adaptively learns and fuses multi-view significant semantic features of human nodes to improve 3D HPE performance. First, we propose a deep semantic graph transformer encoder to enrich spatial feature information. It deeply mines the position, spatial structure, and skeletal edge knowledge of joints and dynamically learns their correlations. Then, we build a progressive multi-view spatial-temporal feature fusion framework to mitigate joint depth uncertainty. To enhance the pose spatial representation, deep spatial semantic feature are interacted and fused across different viewpoints during monocular feature extraction. Furthermore, long-time relevant temporal dependencies are modeled and spatial-temporal information from all viewpoints is fused to intermediately supervise the depth. Extensive experiments on three 3D HPE benchmarks show that our method achieves state-of-the-art results. It can effectively enhance pose features, mitigate depth ambiguity in single-view 3D HPE, and improve 3D HPE performance without providing camera parameters. Codes and models are available at https://github.com/z0911k/SGraFormer.
Large Occluded Human Image Completion via Image-Prior Cooperating
Authors: Zhao Hengrun , Zeng Yu , Lu Huchuan , Wang Lijun
Published: March 2024

The completion of large occluded human body images poses a unique challenge for general image completion methods. The complex shape variations of human bodies make it difficult to establish a consistent understanding of their structures. Furthermore, as human vision is highly sensitive to human bodies, even slight artifacts can significantly compromise image fidelity. To address these challenges, we propose a large occluded human image completion (LOHC) model based on a novel image-prior cooperative completion strategy. Our model leverages human segmentation maps as a prior, and completes the image and prior simultaneously. Compared to the widely adopted prior-then-image completion strategy for object completion, this cooperative completion process fosters more effective interaction between the prior and image information. Our model consists of two stages. The first stage is a transformer-based auto-regressive network that predicts the overall structure of the missing area by generating a coarse completed image at a lower resolution. The second stage is a convolutional network that refines the coarse images. As the coarse result may not always be accurate, we propose a Dynamic Fusion Module (DFM) to selectively fuses the useful features from the coarse image with the original input at spatial and channel levels. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate our method’s superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods.
Any-Size-Diffusion: Toward Efficient Text-Driven Synthesis for Any-Size HD Images
Authors: Zheng Qingping , Guo Yuanfan , Deng Jiankang , Han Jianhua , Li Ying , Xu Songcen , Xu Hang
Published: March 2024

Stable diffusion, a generative model used in text-to-image synthesis, frequently encounters resolution-induced composition problems when generating images of varying sizes. This issue primarily stems from the model being trained on pairs of single-scale images and their corresponding text descriptions. Moreover, direct training on images of unlimited sizes is unfeasible, as it would require an immense number of text-image pairs and entail substantial computational expenses. To overcome these challenges, we propose a two-stage pipeline named Any-Size-Diffusion (ASD), designed to efficiently generate well-composed HD images of any size, while minimizing the need for high-memory GPU resources. Specifically, the initial stage, dubbed Any Ratio Adaptability Diffusion (ARAD), leverages a selected set of images with a restricted range of ratios to optimize the text-conditional diffusion model, thereby improving its ability to adjust composition to accommodate diverse image sizes. To support the creation of images at any desired size, we further introduce a technique called Fast Seamless Tiled Diffusion (FSTD) at the subsequent stage. This method allows for the rapid enlargement of the ASD output to any high-resolution size, avoiding seaming artifacts or memory overloads. Experimental results on the LAION-COCO and MM-CelebA-HQ benchmarks demonstrate that ASD can produce well-structured images of arbitrary sizes, cutting down the inference time by 2X compared to the traditional tiled algorithm. The source code is available at https://github.com/ProAirVerse/Any-Size-Diffusion.
Test-Time Adaptation via Style and Structure Guidance for Histological Image Registration
Authors: Zhou Shenglong , Xiong Zhiwei , Wu Feng
Published: March 2024

Image registration plays a crucial role in histological image analysis, encompassing tasks like multi-modality fusion and disease grading.
Traditional registration methods optimize objective functions for each image pair, yielding reliable accuracy but demanding heavy inference burdens.
Recently, learning-based registration methods utilize networks to learn the optimization process during training and apply a one-step forward process during testing.
While these methods offer promising registration performance with reduced inference time, they remain sensitive to appearance variances and local structure changes commonly encountered in histological image registration scenarios.
In this paper, for the first time, we propose a novel test-time adaptation method for histological image registration, aiming to improve the generalization ability of learning-based methods.
Specifically, we design two operations, style guidance and shape guidance, for the test-time adaptation process.
The former leverages style representations encoded by feature statistics to address the issue of appearance variances, while the latter incorporates shape representations encoded by HOG features to improve registration accuracy in regions with structural changes.
Furthermore, we consider the continuity of the model during the test-time adaptation process.
Different from the previous methods initialized by a given trained model, we introduce a smoothing strategy to leverage historical models for better generalization.
We conduct experiments with several representative learning-based backbones on the public histological dataset, demonstrating the superior registration performance of our test-time adaptation method.
Text Image Inpainting via Global Structure-Guided Diffusion Models
Authors: Zhu Shipeng , Fang Pengfei , Zhu Chenjie , Zhao Zuoyan , Xu Qiang , Xue Hui
Published: March 2024

Real-world text can be damaged by corrosion issues caused by environmental or human factors, which hinder the preservation of the complete styles of texts, e.g., texture and structure. These corrosion issues, such as graffiti signs and incomplete signatures, bring difficulties in understanding the texts, thereby posing significant challenges to downstream applications, e.g., scene text recognition and signature identification. Notably, current inpainting techniques often fail to adequately address this problem and have difficulties restoring accurate text images along with reasonable and consistent styles. Formulating this as an open problem of text image inpainting, this paper aims to build a benchmark to facilitate its study. In doing so, we establish two specific text inpainting datasets which contain scene text images and handwritten text images, respectively. Each of them includes images revamped by real-life and synthetic datasets, featuring pairs of original images, corrupted images, and other assistant information. On top of the datasets, we further develop a novel neural framework, Global Structure-guided Diffusion Model (GSDM), as a potential solution. Leveraging the global structure of the text as a prior, the proposed GSDM develops an efficient diffusion model to recover clean texts. The efficacy of our approach is demonstrated by thorough empirical study, including a substantial boost in both recognition accuracy and image quality. These findings not only highlight the effectiveness of our method but also underscore its potential to enhance the broader field of text image understanding and processing. Code and datasets are available at: https://github.com/blackprotoss/GSDM.
Enhancing Neural Radiance Fields with Adaptive Multi-Exposure Fusion: A Bilevel Optimization Approach for Novel View Synthesis
Authors: Zou Yang , Li Xingyuan , Jiang Zhiying , Liu Jinyuan
Published: March 2024

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have made significant strides in the modeling and rendering of 3D scenes. However, due to the complexity of luminance information, existing NeRF methods often struggle to produce satisfactory renderings when dealing with high and low exposure images. To address this issue, we propose an innovative approach capable of effectively modeling and rendering images under multiple exposure conditions. Our method adaptively learns the characteristics of images under different exposure conditions through an unsupervised evaluator-simulator structure for HDR (High Dynamic Range) fusion. This approach enhances NeRF's comprehension and handling of light variations, leading to the generation of images with appropriate brightness. Simultaneously, we present a bilevel optimization method tailored for novel view synthesis, aiming to harmonize the luminance information of input images while preserving their structural and content consistency. This approach facilitates the concurrent optimization of multi-exposure correction and novel view synthesis, in an unsupervised manner. Through comprehensive experiments conducted on the LOM and LOL datasets, our approach surpasses existing methods, markedly enhancing the task of novel view synthesis for multi-exposure environments and attaining state-of-the-art results. The source code can be found at https://github.com/Archer-204/AME-NeRF.
Approximation Scheme for Weighted Metric Clustering via Sherali-Adams
Authors: Avdiukhin Dmitrii , Chatziafratis Vaggos , Makarychev Konstantin , Yaroslavtsev Grigory
Published: March 2024

Motivated by applications to classification problems on metric data, we study Weighted Metric Clustering problem: given a metric d over n points and a k x k symmetric matrix A with non-negative entries, the goal is to find a k-partition of these points into clusters C1,...,Ck, while minimizing the sum of A[i,j] * d(u,v) over all pairs of clusters Ci and Cj and all pairs of points u from Ci and v from Cj. Specific choices of A lead to Weighted Metric Clustering capturing well-studied graph partitioning problems in metric spaces, such as Min-Uncut, Min-k-Sum, Min-k-Cut, and more.

Our main result is that Weighted Metric Clustering admits a polynomial-time approximation scheme (PTAS). Our algorithm handles all the above problems using the Sherali-Adams linear programming relaxation. This subsumes several prior works, unifies many of the techniques for various metric clustering objectives, and yields a PTAS for several new problems, including metric clustering on manifolds and a new family of hierarchical clustering objectives. Our experiments on the hierarchical clustering objective show that it better captures the ground-truth structural information compared to the popular Dasgupta's objective.
Testing Self-Reducible Samplers
Authors: Bhattacharyya Rishiraj , Chakraborty Sourav , Pote Yash , Sarkar Uddalok , Sen Sayantan
Published: March 2024

Samplers are the backbone of the implementations of any randomized algorithm. Unfortunately, obtaining an efficient algorithm to test the correctness of samplers is very hard to find. Recently, in a series of works, testers like Barbarik, Teq, Flash for testing of some particular kinds of samplers, like CNF-samplers and Horn-samplers, were obtained. However, their techniques have a significant limitation because one can not expect to use their methods to test for other samplers, such as perfect matching samplers or samplers for sampling linear extensions in posets.
In this paper, we present a new testing algorithm that works for such samplers and can estimate the distance of a new sampler from a known sampler (say, the uniform sampler).

Testing the identity of distributions is the heart of testing the correctness of samplers. This paper's main technical contribution is developing a new distance estimation algorithm for distributions over high-dimensional cubes using the recently proposed subcube conditioning sampling model. Given subcube conditioning access to an unknown distribution P, and a known distribution Q defined over an n-dimensional Boolean hypercube, our algorithm CubeProbeEst estimates the variation distance between P and Q within additive error using subcube conditional samples from P. Following the testing-via-learning paradigm, we also get a tester that distinguishes between the cases when P and Q are close or far in variation distance with high probability using subcube conditional samples.

This estimation algorithm CubeProbeEst in the subcube conditioning sampling model helps us to design the first tester for self-reducible samplers. The correctness of the tester is formally proved. Moreover, we implement CubeProbeEst to test the quality of three samplers for sampling linear extensions in posets.
Automatic Core-Guided Reformulation via Constraint Explanation and Condition Learning
Authors: Leo Kevin , Gange Grame , Garcia de la Banda Maria , Wallace Mark
Published: March 2024

SAT and propagation solvers often underperform for optimisation models whose objective sums many single-variable terms.
MaxSAT solvers avoid this by detecting and exploiting cores: subsets of these terms that cannot collectively take their lower bounds.
Previous work has shown manual analysis of cores can help define model reformulations likely to speed up solving for many model instances.
This paper presents a method to automate this process.
For each selected core the method identifies the instance constraints that caused it;
infers the model constraints and parameters that explain how these instance constraints were formed;
and learns the conditions that made those model constraint instances generate cores, while others did not.
It then uses this information to reformulate the objective.
The empirical evaluation shows this method can produce useful reformulations.
Importantly, the method can be useful in many other situations that require explaining a set of constraints.
Engineering an Exact Pseudo-Boolean Model Counter
Authors: Yang Suwei , Meel Kuldeep S.
Published: March 2024

Model counting, a fundamental task in computer science, involves determining the number of satisfying assignments to a Boolean formula, typically represented in conjunctive normal form (CNF). While model counting for CNF formulas has received extensive attention with a broad range of applications, the study of model counting for Pseudo-Boolean (PB) formulas has been relatively overlooked. Pseudo-Boolean formulas, being more succinct than propositional Boolean formulas, offer greater flexibility in representing real-world problems. Consequently, there is a crucial need to investigate efficient techniques for model counting for PB formulas.

In this work, we propose the first exact Pseudo-Boolean model counter, PBCount , that relies on knowledge compilation approach via algebraic decision diagrams. Our extensive empirical evaluation shows that PBCount can compute counts for 1513 instances while the current state-of-the-art approach could only handle 1013 instances. Our work opens up several avenues for future work in the context of model counting for PB formulas, such as the development of preprocessing techniques and exploration of approaches other than knowledge compilation.
Signed Graph Neural Ordinary Differential Equation for Modeling Continuous-Time Dynamics
Authors: Chen Lanlan , Wu Kai , Lou Jian , Liu Jing
Published: March 2024

Modeling continuous-time dynamics constitutes a foundational challenge, and uncovering inter-component correlations within complex systems holds promise for enhancing the efficacy of dynamic modeling. The prevailing approach of integrating graph neural networks with ordinary differential equations has demonstrated promising performance. However, they disregard the crucial signed information potential on graphs, impeding their capacity to accurately capture real-world phenomena and leading to subpar outcomes. In response, we introduce a novel approach: a signed graph neural ordinary differential equation, adeptly addressing the limitations of miscapturing signed information. Our proposed solution boasts both flexibility and efficiency. To substantiate its effectiveness, we seamlessly integrate our devised strategies into three preeminent graph-based dynamic modeling frameworks: graph neural ordinary differential equations, graph neural controlled differential equations, and graph recurrent neural networks. Rigorous assessments encompass three intricate dynamic scenarios from physics and biology, as well as scrutiny across four authentic real-world traffic datasets. Remarkably outperforming the trio of baselines, empirical results underscore the substantial performance enhancements facilitated by our proposed approach. Our code can be found at https://github.com/beautyonce/SGODE.
Deep Structural Knowledge Exploitation and Synergy for Estimating Node Importance Value on Heterogeneous Information Networks
Authors: Chen Yankai , Fang Yixiang , Wang Qiongyan , Cao Xin , King Irwin
Published: March 2024

The classic problem of node importance estimation has been conventionally studied with homogeneous network topology analysis. To deal with practical network heterogeneity, a few recent methods employ graph neural models to automatically learn diverse sources of information. However, the major concern revolves around that their fully adaptive learning process may lead to insufficient information exploration, thereby formulating the problem as the isolated node value prediction with underperformance and less interpretability. In this work, we propose a novel learning framework namely SKES. Different from previous automatic learning designs, SKES exploits heterogeneous structural knowledge to enrich the informativeness of node representations. Then based on a sufficiently uninformative reference, SKES estimates the importance value for any input node, by quantifying its informativeness disparity against the reference. This establishes an interpretable node importance computation paradigm. Furthermore, SKES dives deep into the understanding that "nodes with similar characteristics are prone to have similar importance values" whilst guaranteeing that such informativeness disparity between any different nodes is orderly reflected by the embedding distance of their associated latent features. Extensive experiments on three widely-evaluated benchmarks demonstrate the performance superiority of SKES over several recent competing methods.
Modeling Knowledge Graphs with Composite Reasoning
Authors: Cui Wanyun , Zhang Linqiu
Published: March 2024

The ability to combine multiple pieces of existing knowledge to infer new knowledge is both crucial and challenging. In this paper, we explore how facts of various entities are combined in the context of knowledge graph completion (KGC). We use composite reasoning to unify the views from different KGC models, including translational models, tensor factorization (TF)-based models, instance-based learning models, and KGC regularizers.

Moreover, our comprehensive examination of composite reasoning revealed an unexpected phenomenon: certain TF-based models learn embeddings with erroneous composite reasoning, which ultimately violates their fundamental collaborative filtering assumption and reduces their effects. This motivates us to reduce their composition error. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that mitigating the composition risk not only enhances the performance of TF-based models across all tested settings, but also surpass or is competitive with the state-of-the-art performance on two out of four benchmarks.
A Diffusion-Based Framework for Multi-Class Anomaly Detection
Authors: He Haoyang , Zhang Jiangning , Chen Hongxu , Chen Xuhai , Li Zhishan , Chen Xu , Wang Yabiao , Wang Chengjie , Xie Lei
Published: March 2024

Reconstruction-based approaches have achieved remarkable outcomes in anomaly detection. The exceptional image reconstruction capabilities of recently popular diffusion models have sparked research efforts to utilize them for enhanced reconstruction of anomalous images. Nonetheless, these methods might face challenges related to the preservation of image categories and pixel-wise structural integrity in the more practical multi-class setting. To solve the above problems, we propose a Difusion-based Anomaly Detection (DiAD) framework for multi-class anomaly detection, which consists of a pixel-space autoencoder, a latent-space Semantic-Guided (SG) network with a connection to the stable diffusion’s denoising network, and a feature-space pre-trained feature extractor. Firstly, The SG network is proposed for reconstructing anomalous regions while preserving the original image’s semantic information. Secondly, we introduce Spatial-aware Feature Fusion (SFF) block to maximize reconstruction accuracy when dealing with extensively reconstructed areas. Thirdly, the input and reconstructed images are processed by a pre-trained feature extractor to generate anomaly maps based on features extracted at different scales. Experiments on MVTec-AD and VisA datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach which surpasses the state-of-the-art methods, e.g., achieving 96.8/52.6 and 97.2/99.0 (AUROC/AP) for localization and detection respectively on multi-class MVTec-AD dataset. Code will be available at https://lewandofskee.github.io/projects/diad.
ViSTec: Video Modeling for Sports Technique Recognition and Tactical Analysis
Authors: He Yuchen , Yuan Zeqing , Wu Yihong , Cheng Liqi , Deng Dazhen , Wu Yingcai
Published: March 2024

The immense popularity of racket sports has fueled substantial demand in tactical analysis with broadcast videos. However, existing manual methods require laborious annotation, and recent attempts leveraging video perception models are limited to low-level annotations like ball trajectories, overlooking tactics that necessitate an understanding of stroke techniques. State-of-the-art action segmentation models also struggle with technique recognition due to frequent occlusions and motion-induced blurring in racket sports videos. To address these challenges, We propose ViSTec, a Video-based Sports Technique recognition model inspired by human cognition that synergizes sparse visual data with rich contextual insights. Our approach integrates a graph to explicitly model strategic knowledge in stroke sequences and enhance technique recognition with contextual inductive bias. A two-stage action perception model is jointly trained to align with the contextual knowledge in the graph. Experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms existing models by a significant margin. Case studies with experts from the Chinese national table tennis team validate our model's capacity to automate analysis for technical actions and tactical strategies. More details are available at: https://ViSTec2024.github.io/.
DAG-Aware Variational Autoencoder for Social Propagation Graph Generation
Authors: Hou Dongpeng , Gao Chao , Li Xuelong , Wang Zhen
Published: March 2024

Propagation models in social networks are critical, with extensive applications across various fields and downstream tasks. However, existing propagation models are often oversimplified, scenario-specific, and lack real-world user social attributes. These limitations detaching from real-world analysis lead to inaccurate representations of the propagation process in social networks. To address these issues, we propose a User Features Attention-based DAG-Aware Variational Autoencoder (DAVA) for propagation graph generation. First, nearly 1 million pieces of user attributes data are collected. Then DAVA can integrate the analysis of propagation graph topology and corresponding user attributes as prior knowledge. By leveraging a lightweight attention-based framework and a sliding window mechanism based on BFS permutations weighted by user influence, DAVA significantly enhances the ability to generate realistic, large-scale propagation data, yielding graph scales ten times greater than those produced by existing SOTA methods. Every module of DAVA has flexibility and extension that allows for easy substitution to suit other generation tasks. Additionally, we provide a comprehensive evaluation of DAVA, one focus is the effectiveness of generated data in improving the performance of downstream tasks. During the generation process, we discover the Credibility Erosion Effect by modifying the generation rules, revealing a social phenomenon in social network propagation.
Graph Invariant Learning with Subgraph Co-mixup for Out-of-Distribution Generalization
Authors: Jia Tianrui , Li Haoyang , Yang Cheng , Tao Tao , Shi Chuan
Published: March 2024

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have been demonstrated to perform well in graph representation learning, but always lacking in generalization capability when tackling out-of-distribution (OOD) data. Graph invariant learning methods, backed by the invariance principle among defined multiple environments, have shown effectiveness in dealing with this issue. However, existing methods heavily rely on well-predefined or accurately generated environment partitions, which are hard to be obtained in practice, leading to sub-optimal OOD generalization performances.
In this paper, we propose a novel graph invariant learning method based on invariant and variant patterns co-mixup strategy, which is capable of jointly generating mixed multiple environments and capturing invariant patterns from the mixed graph data. Specifically, we first adopt a subgraph extractor to identify invariant subgraphs. Subsequently, we design one novel co-mixup strategy, i.e., jointly conducting environment mixup and invariant mixup. For the environment mixup, we mix the variant environment-related subgraphs so as to generate sufficiently diverse multiple environments, which is important to guarantee the quality of the graph invariant learning. For the invariant mixup, we mix the invariant subgraphs, further encouraging to capture invariant patterns behind graphs while getting rid of spurious correlations for OOD generalization. We demonstrate that the proposed environment mixup and invariant mixup can mutually promote each other.
Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art under various distribution shifts.
Optimal Quasi-clique: Hardness, Equivalence with Densest-k-Subgraph, and Quasi-partitioned Community Mining
Authors: Konar Aritra , Sidiropoulos Nicholas D.
Published: March 2024

Dense subgraph discovery (DSD) is a key primitive in graph mining that typically deals with extracting cliques and near-cliques. In this paper, we revisit the optimal quasi-clique (OQC) formulation for DSD and establish that it is NP--hard. In addition, we reveal the hitherto unknown property that OQC can be used to explore the entire spectrum of densest subgraphs of all distinct sizes by appropriately varying a single hyperparameter, thereby forging an intimate link with the classic densest-k-subgraph problem (DkS). We corroborate these findings on real-world graphs by applying the simple greedy algorithm for OQC with improved hyperparameter tuning, to quickly generate high-quality approximations of the size-density frontier. Our findings indicate that OQC not only extracts high quality (near)-cliques, but also large and loosely-connected subgraphs that exhibit well defined local community structure. The latter discovery is particularly intriguing, since OQC is not explicitly geared towards community detection.
CONSIDER: Commonalities and Specialties Driven Multilingual Code Retrieval Framework
Authors: Li Rui , He Liyang , Liu Qi , Zhao Yuze , Zhang Zheng , Huang Zhenya , Su Yu , Wang Shijin
Published: March 2024

Multilingual code retrieval aims to find code snippets relevant to a user's query from a multilingual codebase, which plays a crucial role in software development and expands their application scenarios compared to classical monolingual code retrieval. Despite the performance improvements achieved by previous studies, two crucial problems are overlooked in the multilingual scenario. First, certain programming languages face data scarcity in specific domains, resulting in limited representation capabilities within those domains. Second, different programming languages can be used interchangeably within the same domain, making it challenging for multilingual models to accurately identify the intended programming language of a user's query. To address these issues, we propose the CommONalities and SpecIalties Driven Multilingual CodE Retrieval Framework (CONSIDER), which includes two modules. The first module enhances the representation of various programming languages by modeling pairwise and global commonalities among them. The second module introduces a novel contrastive learning negative sampling algorithm that leverages language confusion to automatically extract specific language features. Through our experiments, we confirm the significant benefits of our model in real-world multilingual code retrieval scenarios in various aspects. Furthermore, an evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed CONSIDER framework in monolingual scenarios as well. Our source code is available at https://github.com/smsquirrel/consider.
AT4CTR: Auxiliary Match Tasks for Enhancing Click-Through Rate Prediction
Authors: Liu Qi , Hou Xuyang , Lian Defu , Wang Zhe , Jin Haoran , Cheng Jia , Lei Jun
Published: March 2024

Click-through rate (CTR) prediction is a vital task in industrial recommendation systems. Most existing methods focus on the network architecture design of the CTR model for better accuracy and suffer from the data sparsity problem. Especially in industrial recommendation systems, the widely applied negative sample down-sampling technique due to resource limitation worsens the problem, resulting in a decline in performance. In this paper, we propose Auxiliary Match Tasks for enhancing Click-Through Rate (AT4CTR) prediction accuracy by alleviating the data sparsity problem. Specifically, we design two match tasks inspired by collaborative filtering to enhance the relevance modeling between user and item. As the "click" action is a strong signal which indicates the user's preference towards the item directly, we make the first match task aim at pulling closer the representation between the user and the item regarding the positive samples. Since the user's past click behaviors can also be treated as the user him/herself, we apply the next item prediction as the second match task. For both the match tasks, we choose the InfoNCE as their loss function. The two match tasks can provide meaningful training signals to speed up the model's convergence and alleviate the data sparsity. We conduct extensive experiments on one public dataset and one large-scale industrial recommendation dataset. The result demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed auxiliary match tasks. AT4CTR has been deployed in the real industrial advertising system and has gained remarkable revenue.
KG-TREAT: Pre-training for Treatment Effect Estimation by Synergizing Patient Data with Knowledge Graphs
Authors: Liu Ruoqi , Wu Lingfei , Zhang Ping
Published: March 2024

Treatment effect estimation (TEE) is the task of determining the impact of various treatments on patient outcomes. Current TEE methods fall short due to reliance on limited labeled data and challenges posed by sparse and high-dimensional observational patient data. To address the challenges, we introduce a novel pre-training and fine-tuning framework, KG-TREAT, which synergizes large-scale observational patient data with biomedical knowledge graphs (KGs) to enhance TEE. Unlike previous approaches, KG-TREAT constructs dual-focus KGs and integrates a deep bi-level attention synergy method for in-depth information fusion, enabling distinct encoding of treatment-covariate and outcome-covariate relationships. KG-TREAT also incorporates two pre-training tasks to ensure a thorough grounding and contextualization of patient data and KGs. Evaluation on four downstream TEE tasks shows KG-TREAT’s superiority over existing methods, with an average improvement of 7% in Area under the ROC Curve (AUC) and 9% in Influence Function-based Precision of Estimating Heterogeneous Effects (IF-PEHE). The effectiveness of our estimated treatment effects is further affirmed by alignment with established randomized clinical trial findings.
LAFA: Multimodal Knowledge Graph Completion with Link Aware Fusion and Aggregation
Authors: Shang Bin , Zhao Yinliang , Liu Jun , Wang Di
Published: March 2024

Recently, an enormous amount of research has emerged on multimodal knowledge graph completion (MKGC), which seeks to extract knowledge from multimodal data and predict the most plausible missing facts to complete a given multimodal knowledge graph (MKG). However, existing MKGC approaches largely ignore that visual information may introduce noise and lead to uncertainty when adding them to the traditional KG embeddings due to the contribution of each associated image to entity is different in diverse link scenarios. Moreover, treating each triple independently when learning entity embeddings leads to local structural and the whole graph information missing. To address these challenges, we propose a novel link aware fusion and aggregation based multimodal knowledge graph completion model named LAFA, which is composed of link aware fusion module and link aware aggregation module. The link aware fusion module alleviates noise of irrelevant visual information by calculating the importance between an entity and its associated images in different link scenarios, and fuses the visual and structural embeddings according to the importance through our proposed modality embedding fusion mechanism. The link aware aggregation module assigns neighbor structural information to a given central entity by calculating the importance between the entity and its neighbors, and aggregating the fused embeddings through linear combination according to the importance. Extensive experiments on standard datasets validate that LAFA can obtain state-of-the-art performance.
Mixed Geometry Message and Trainable Convolutional Attention Network for Knowledge Graph Completion
Authors: Shang Bin , Zhao Yinliang , Liu Jun , Wang Di
Published: March 2024

Knowledge graph completion (KGC) aims to study the embedding representation to solve the incompleteness of knowledge graphs (KGs). Recently, graph convolutional networks (GCNs) and graph attention networks (GATs) have been widely used in KGC tasks by capturing neighbor information of entities. However, Both GCNs and GATs based KGC models have their limitations, and the best method is to analyze the neighbors of each entity (pre-validating), while this process is prohibitively expensive. Furthermore, the representation quality of the embeddings can affect the aggregation of neighbor information (message passing). To address the above limitations, we propose a novel knowledge graph completion model with mixed geometry message and trainable convolutional attention network named MGTCA. Concretely, the mixed geometry message function generates rich neighbor message by integrating spatially information in the hyperbolic space, hypersphere space and Euclidean space jointly. To complete the autonomous switching of graph neural networks (GNNs) and eliminate the necessity of pre-validating the local structure of KGs, a trainable convolutional attention network is proposed by comprising three types of GNNs in one trainable formulation. Furthermore, a mixed geometry scoring function is proposed, which calculates scores of triples by novel prediction function and similarity function based on different geometric spaces. Extensive experiments on three standard datasets confirm the effectiveness of our innovations, and the performance of MGTCA is significantly improved compared to the state-of-the-art approaches.
Anchoring Path for Inductive Relation Prediction in Knowledge Graphs
Authors: Su Zhixiang , Wang Di , Miao Chunyan , Cui Lizhen
Published: March 2024

Aiming to accurately predict missing edges representing relations between entities, which are pervasive in real-world Knowledge Graphs (KGs), relation prediction plays a critical role in enhancing the comprehensiveness and utility of KGs. Recent research focuses on path-based methods due to their inductive and explainable properties. However, these methods face a great challenge when lots of reasoning paths do not form Closed Paths (CPs) in the KG. To address this challenge, we propose Anchoring Path Sentence Transformer (APST) by introducing Anchoring Paths (APs) to alleviate the reliance of CPs. Specifically, we develop a search-based description retrieval method to enrich entity descriptions and an assessment mechanism to evaluate the rationality of APs. APST takes both APs and CPs as the inputs of a unified Sentence Transformer architecture, enabling comprehensive predictions and high-quality explanations. We evaluate APST on three public datasets and achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in 30 of 36 transductive, inductive, and few-shot experimental settings.
Fine-Tuning Graph Neural Networks by Preserving Graph Generative Patterns
Authors: Sun Yifei , Zhu Qi , Yang Yang , Wang Chunping , Fan Tianyu , Zhu Jiajun , Chen Lei
Published: March 2024

Recently, the paradigm of pre-training and fine-tuning graph neural networks has been intensively studied and applied in a wide range of graph mining tasks.
Its success is generally attributed to the structural consistency between pre-training and downstream datasets, which, however, does not hold in many real-world scenarios.
Existing works have shown that the structural divergence between pre-training and downstream graphs significantly limits the transferability when using the vanilla fine-tuning strategy. This divergence leads to model overfitting on pre-training graphs and causes difficulties in capturing the structural properties of the downstream graphs.
In this paper, we identify the fundamental cause of structural divergence as the discrepancy of generative patterns between the pre-training and downstream graphs.
Furthermore, we propose G-Tuning to preserve the generative patterns of downstream graphs.
Given a downstream graph G, the core idea is to tune the pre-trained GNN so that it can reconstruct the generative patterns of G, the graphon W.
However, the exact reconstruction of a graphon is known to be computationally expensive. To overcome this challenge, we provide a theoretical analysis that establishes the existence of a set of alternative graphons called graphon bases for any given graphon. By utilizing a linear combination of these graphon bases, we can efficiently approximate W. This theoretical finding forms the basis of our model, as it enables effective learning of the graphon bases and their associated coefficients.
Compared with existing algorithms, G-Tuning demonstrates consistent performance improvement in 7 in-domain and 7 out-of-domain transfer learning experiments.
G^2SAM: Graph-Based Global Semantic Awareness Method for Multimodal Sarcasm Detection
Authors: Wei Yiwei , Yuan Shaozu , Zhou Hengyang , Wang Longbiao , Yan Zhiling , Yang Ruosong , Chen Meng
Published: March 2024

Multimodal sarcasm detection, aiming to detect the ironic sentiment within multimodal social data, has gained substantial popularity in both the natural language processing and computer vision communities. Recently, graph-based studies by drawing sentimental relations to detect multimodal sarcasm have made notable advancements. However, they have neglected exploiting graph-based global semantic congruity from existing instances to facilitate the prediction, which ultimately hinders the model's performance. In this paper, we introduce a new inference paradigm that leverages global graph-based semantic awareness to handle this task. Firstly, we construct fine-grained multimodal graphs for each instance and integrate them into semantic space to draw graph-based relations. During inference, we leverage global semantic congruity to retrieve k-nearest neighbor instances in semantic space as references for voting on the final prediction. To enhance the semantic correlation of representation in semantic space, we also introduce label-aware graph contrastive learning to further improve the performance. Experimental results demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in multimodal sarcasm detection. The code will be available at https://github.com/upccpu/G2SAM.
Feature Distribution Matching by Optimal Transport for Effective and Robust Coreset Selection
Authors: Xiao Weiwei , Chen Yongyong , Shan Qiben , Wang Yaowei , Su Jingyong
Published: March 2024

Training neural networks with good generalization requires large computational costs in many deep learning methods due to large-scale datasets and over-parameterized models. Despite the emergence of a number of coreset selection methods to reduce the computational costs, the problem of coreset distribution bias, i.e., the skewed distribution between the coreset and the entire dataset, has not been well studied. In this paper, we find that the closer the feature distribution of the coreset is to that of the entire dataset, the better the generalization performance of the coreset, particularly under extreme pruning. This motivates us to propose a simple yet effective method for coreset selection to alleviate the distribution bias between the coreset and the entire dataset, called feature distribution matching (FDMat). Unlike gradient-based methods, which selects samples with larger gradient values or approximates gradient values of the entire dataset, FDMat aims to select coreset that is closest to feature distribution of the entire dataset. Specifically, FDMat transfers coreset selection as an optimal transport problem from the coreset to the entire dataset in feature embedding spaces. Moreover, our method shows strong robustness due to the removal of samples far from the distribution, especially for the entire dataset containing noisy and class-imbalanced samples. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks show that FDMat can improve the performance of coreset selection than existing coreset methods. The code is available at https://github.com/successhaha/FDMat.
Fine-Tuning Large Language Model Based Explainable Recommendation with Explainable Quality Reward
Authors: Yang Mengyuan , Zhu Mengying , Wang Yan , Chen Linxun , Zhao Yilei , Wang Xiuyuan , Han Bing , Zheng Xiaolin , Yin Jianwei
Published: March 2024

Large language model-based explainable recommendation (LLM-based ER) systems can provide remarkable human-like explanations and have widely received attention from researchers. However, the original LLM-based ER systems face three low-quality problems in their generated explanations, i.e., lack of personalization, inconsistency, and questionable explanation data. To address these problems, we propose a novel LLM-based ER model denoted as LLM2ER to serve as a backbone and devise two innovative explainable quality reward models for fine-tuning such a backbone in a reinforcement learning paradigm, ultimately yielding a fine-tuned model denoted as LLM2ER-EQR, which can provide high-quality explanations. LLM2ER-EQR can generate personalized, informative, and consistent high-quality explanations learned from questionable-quality explanation datasets. Extensive experiments conducted on three real-world datasets demonstrate that our model can generate fluent, diverse, informative, and highly personalized explanations.
TriSampler: A Better Negative Sampling Principle for Dense Retrieval
Authors: Yang Zhen , Shao Zhou , Dong Yuxiao , Tang Jie
Published: March 2024

Negative sampling stands as a pivotal technique in dense retrieval, essential for training effective retrieval models and significantly impacting retrieval performance. While existing negative sampling methods have made commendable progress by leveraging hard negatives, a comprehensive guiding principle for constructing negative candidates and designing negative sampling distributions is still lacking. To bridge this gap, we embark on a theoretical analysis of negative sampling in dense retrieval. This exploration culminates in the unveiling of the quasi-triangular principle, a novel framework that elucidates the triangular-like interplay between query, positive document, and negative document. Fueled by this guiding principle, we introduce TriSampler, a straightforward yet highly effective negative sampling method. The keypoint of TriSampler lies in its ability to selectively sample more informative negatives within a prescribed constrained region. Experimental evaluation show that TriSampler consistently attains superior retrieval performance across a diverse of representative retrieval models.
Parallel Ranking of Ads and Creatives in Real-Time Advertising Systems
Authors: Yang Zhiguang , Sang Liufang , Wang Haoran , Chen Wenlong , Wang Lu , He Jie , Peng Changping , Lin Zhangang , Gan Chun , Shao Jingping
Published: March 2024

Creativity is the heart and soul of advertising services. Effective creatives can create a win-win scenario: advertisers each target users and achieve marketing objectives more effectively, users more quickly find products of interest, and platforms generate more advertising revenue. With the advent of AI-Generated Content, advertisers now can produce vast amounts of creative content at a minimal cost. The current challenge lies in how advertising systems can select the most pertinent creative in real-time for each user personally. Existing methods typically perform serial ranking of ads or creatives, limiting the creative module in terms of both effectiveness and efficiency. In this paper, we propose for the first time a novel architecture for online parallel estimation of ads and creatives ranking, as well as the corresponding offline joint optimization model. The online architecture enables sophisticated personalized creative modeling while reducing overall latency. The offline joint model for CTR estimation allows mutual awareness and collaborative optimization between ads and creatives. Additionally, we optimize the offline evaluation metrics for the implicit feedback sorting task involved in ad creative ranking. We conduct extensive experiments to compare ours with two state-of-the-art approaches. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in both offline evaluations and real-world advertising platforms online in terms of response time, CTR, and CPM.