bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
FLDM-VTON: Faithful Latent Diffusion Model for Virtual Try-on
Authors: Wang Chenhui , Chen Tao , Chen Zhihao , Huang Zhizhong , Jiang Taoran , Wang Qi , Shan Hongming
Published: July 2024

Despite their impressive generative performance, latent diffusion model-based virtual try-on (VTON) methods lack faithfulness to crucial details of the clothes, such as style, pattern, and text. To alleviate these issues caused by the diffusion stochastic nature and latent supervision, we propose a novel Faithful Latent Diffusion Model for VTON, termed FLDM-VTON. FLDM-VTON improves the conventional latent diffusion process in three major aspects. First, we propose incorporating warped clothes as both the starting point and local condition, supplying the model with faithful clothes priors. Second, we introduce a novel clothes flattening network to constrain generated try-on images, providing clothes-consistent faithful supervision. Third, we devise a clothes-posterior sampling for faithful inference, further enhancing the model performance over conventional clothes-agnostic Gaussian sampling. Extensive experimental results on the benchmark VITON-HD and Dress Code datasets demonstrate that our FLDM-VTON outperforms state-of-the-art baselines and is able to generate photo-realistic try-on images with faithful clothing details.
PointTFA: Training-Free Clustering Adaption for Large 3D Point Cloud Models
Authors: Wu Jinmeng , Cao Chong , Zhang Hao , Fernando Basura , Hao Yanbin , Hong Hanyu
Published: July 2024

The success of contrastive learning models like CLIP, known for aligning 2D image-text pairs, has inspired the development of triplet alignment for Large 3D Point Cloud Models (3D-PCM). Examples like ULIP integrate images, text, and point clouds into a unified semantic space. However, despite showing impressive zero-shot capabilities, frozen 3D-PCM still falls short compared to fine-tuned methods, especially when downstream 3D datasets are significantly different from upstream data. Addressing this, we propose a Data-Efficient, Training-Free 3D Adaptation method named PointTFA that adjusts ULIP outputs with representative samples. PointTFA comprises the Representative Memory Cache (RMC) for selecting a representative support set, Cloud Query Refactor (CQR) for reconstructing a query cloud using the support set, and Training-Free 3D Adapter (3D-TFA) for inferring query categories from the support set. A key advantage of PointTFA is that it introduces no extra training parameters, yet outperforms vanilla frozen ULIP, closely approaching few-shot fine-tuning training methods in downstream cloud classification tasks like ModelNet10 & 40 and ScanObjectNN. The code is available at: https://github.com/CaoChong-git/PointTFA.
KTCN: Enhancing Open-World Object Detection with Knowledge Transfer and Class-Awareness Neutralization
Authors: Xi Xing , Huang Yangyang , Lin Jinhao , Luo Ronghua
Published: July 2024

Open-World Object Detection (OWOD) has garnered widespread attention due to its ability to recall unannotated objects. Existing works generate pseudo-labels for the model using heuristic priors, which limits the model’s performance. In this paper, we leverage the knowledge of the large-scale visual model to provide supervision for unknown categories. Specifically, we use the Segment Anything Model (SAM) to generate raw pseudo-labels for potential objects and refine them through Intersection over Union (IOU) and the shortest bounding box side length. Nevertheless, the abundance of pseudo-labels still exacerbates the competition issue in the one-to-many label assignment. To address this, we propose the Dual Matching Label Assignment (DMLA) strategy. Furthermore, we propose the Class-Awareness Neutralizer (CAN) to reduce the model’s bias towards known categories. Evaluation results on open-world object detection benchmarks, including MS COCO and Pascal VOC, show that our method achieves nearly 200% the unknown recall rate of previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, reaching 41.5 U-Recall. Additionally, our approach does not add any extra parameters, maintaining the inference speed advantage of Faster R-CNN, leading the SOTA methods based on deformable DETR at a speed of over 10 FPS. Our code is available at https://github.com/xxyzll/KTCN.
DFMDA-Net: Dense Fusion and Multi-dimension Aggregation Network for Image Restoration
Authors: Yan Huibin , Wang Shuoyao
Published: July 2024

The U-shape (encoder-decoder) architecture, combined with effective blocks, has shown significant

success in image restoration. In U-shape models, there is insufficient focus on the feature fusion

problem between encoder and decoder features at

the same level. Current methods often employ simplistic operations like summation or concatenation,

which makes it difficult to strike a balance between

performance and complexity. To address this issue,

we propose a compression-in-the-middle mechanism, termed Integration-Compression-Integration

(ICI), which effectively conducts dense fusion and

avoids information loss. From the block design

perspective, we design a multi-dimension aggregation (MDA) mechanism, capable of effectively

aggregating features from both the channel and

spatial dimension. Combining the IntegrationCompression-Integration feature fusion and the

multi-dimension aggregation, our dense fusion and

multi-dimension aggregation network (DFMDANet) achieves superior performance over state-ofthe-art algorithms on 16 benchmarking datasets for

numerous image restoration tasks.
A Meta-Game Evaluation Framework for Deep Multiagent Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Li Zun , Wellman Michael P.
Published: July 2024

Evaluating deep multiagent reinforcement learning (MARL) algorithms is complicated by stochasticity in training and sensitivity of agent performance to the behavior of other agents. We propose a meta-game evaluation framework for deep MARL, by framing each MARL algorithm as a meta-strategy, and repeatedly sampling normal-form empirical games over combinations of meta-strategies resulting from different random seeds. Each empirical game captures both self-play and cross-play factors across seeds. These empirical games provide the basis for constructing a sampling distribution, using bootstrapping, over a variety of game analysis statistics. We use this approach to evaluate state-of-the-art deep MARL algorithms on a class of negotiation games. From statistics on individual payoffs, social welfare, and empirical best-response graphs, we uncover strategic relationships among self-play, population-based, model-free, and model-based MARL methods. We also investigate the effect of run-time search as a meta-strategy operator, and find via meta-game analysis that the search version of a meta-strategy generally leads to improved performance.
Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation in the Dark: Towards Data Distribution Compensation
Authors: Yang Haolin , Zhao Chaoqiang , Sheng Lu , Tang Yang
Published: July 2024

Nighttime self-supervised monocular depth estimation has received increasing attention in recent years. However, using night images for self-supervision is unreliable because the photometric consistency assumption is usually violated in the videos taken under complex lighting conditions. Even with domain adaptation or photometric loss repair, performance is still limited by the poor supervision of night images on trainable networks. In this paper, we propose a self-supervised nighttime monocular depth estimation method that does not use any night images during training. Our framework utilizes day images as a stable source for self-supervision and applies physical priors (e.g., wave optics, reflection model and read-shot noise model) to compensate for some key day-night differences. With day-to-night data distribution compensation, our framework can be trained in an efficient one-stage self-supervised manner. Though no nighttime images are considered during training, qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate that our method achieves SoTA depth estimating results on the challenging nuScenes-Night and RobotCar-Night compared with existing methods.
CIC: A Framework for Culturally-Aware Image Captioning
Authors: Yun Youngsik , Kim Jihie
Published: July 2024

Image Captioning generates descriptive sentences from images using Vision-Language Pre-trained models (VLPs) such as BLIP, which has improved greatly. However, current methods lack the generation of detailed descriptive captions for the cultural elements depicted in the images, such as the traditional clothing worn by people from Asian cultural groups. In this paper, we propose a new framework, Culturally-aware Image Captioning (CIC), that generates captions and describes cultural elements extracted from cultural visual elements in images representing cultures. Inspired by methods combining visual modality and Large Language Models (LLMs) through appropriate prompts, our framework (1) generates questions based on cultural categories from images, (2) extracts cultural visual elements from Visual Question Answering (VQA) using generated questions, and (3) generates culturally-aware captions using LLMs with the prompts. Our human evaluation conducted on 45 participants from 4 different cultural groups with a high understanding of the corresponding culture shows that our proposed framework generates more culturally descriptive captions when compared to the image captioning baseline based on VLPs. Resources can be found at https://shane3606.github.io/cic.
Towards Dynamic-Prompting Collaboration for Source-Free Domain Adaptation
Authors: Zhan Mengmeng , Wu Zongqian , Hu Rongyao , Hu Ping , Shen Heng Tao , Zhu Xiaofeng
Published: July 2024

In domain adaptation, challenges such as data privacy constraints can impede access to source data, catalyzing the development of source-free domain adaptation (SFDA) methods. However, current approaches heavily rely on models trained on source data, posing the risk of overfitting and suboptimal generalization.This paper introduces a dynamic prompt learning paradigm that harnesses the power of large-scale vision-language models to enhance the semantic transfer of source models. Specifically, our approach fosters robust and adaptive collaboration between the source-trained model and the vision-language model, facilitating the reliable extraction of domain-specific information from unlabeled target data, while consolidating domain-invariant knowledge. Without the need for accessing source data, our method amalgamates the strengths inherent in both traditional SFDA approaches and vision-language models, formulating a collaborative framework for addressing SFDA challenges. Extensive experiments conducted on three benchmark datasets showcase the superiority of our framework over previous SOTA methods.
Diffusion Mask-Driven Visual-language Tracking
Authors: Zhang Guangtong , Zhong Bineng , Liang Qihua , Mo Zhiyi , Song Shuxiang
Published: July 2024

Most existing visual-language trackers greatly rely on the initial language descriptions on a target object to extract their multi-modal features. However, the initial language descriptions are often inaccurate in a highly time-varying video sequence and thus greatly deteriorate their tracking performance due to the low quality of extracted multi-modal features. To address this challenge, we propose a Diffusion Mask-Driven

Visual-language Tracker (DMTrack) based on a diffusion model. Confronting the issue of low-quality multi-modal features due to inaccurate language descriptions, we leverage the diffusion model to capture high-quality semantic information from multi-modal features and transform it into target mask features. During the training phase, we further enhance the diffusion model's perception of pixel-level features by calculating the loss between the target mask features and the ground truth masks. Additionally, we perform joint localization of the target using both target mask features and visual features, instead of relying solely on multi-modal features for localization. Through extensive experiments on four tracking benchmarks (i.e., LaSOT, TNL2K, LaSOText, and OTB-Lang), we validate that our proposed Diffusion Mask-Driven Visual-language Tracker can improve the robustness and effectiveness of the model.
AK4Prompts: Aesthetics-driven Automatically Keywords-Ranking for Prompts in Text-To-Image Models
Authors: Zhang Haiyang , Wang Mengchao , He Shuai , Ming Anlong
Published: July 2024

Current text-to-image synthesis (TIS) models have demonstrated the ability to generate high-fidelity images based on textual prompts. However, the efficacy of these models heavily relies on the keywords present in the prompts, and there is a dearth of objective analysis regarding how different keywords impact the ultimate quality of generated results. Therefore, manual evaluation becomes necessary but limited and inefficient to ascertain the role played by keywords. In this paper, we propose automated keywords-ranking for prompts (AK4Prompts), a keyword evaluation model based on mainstream TIS models that explicitly quantifies the multidimensional impact of various keywords on image generation based on prompts. To enable personalized keyword evaluation based on prompt content, we propose decoupling the latent representations of keywords and prompts in TIS models, followed by integrating the semantic features of prompts into keywords. For quantitative and multidimensional evaluation, we align the fused features of keywords using HPSv2, aesthetic score, and CLIP score, each representing distinct factors contributing to keyword impact. Our AK4Prompts can flexibly and automatically select the keywords that best match the original prompt based on individual user preferences. Extensive experimental results show the superiority of AK4Prompts to improve the quality of generated images significantly over strong baselines. Our approach not only enhances usability and user experience but also addresses the current gap in automated analysis and evaluation of keyword effects. Our code is availableat https://github.com/mRobotit/AK4Prompts.
DANCE: Dual-View Distribution Alignment for Dataset Condensation
Authors: Zhang Hansong , Li Shikun , Lin Fanzhao , Wang Weiping , Qian Zhenxing , Ge Shiming
Published: July 2024

Dataset condensation addresses the problem of data burden by learning a small synthetic training set that preserves essential knowledge from the larger real training set. To date, the state-of-the-art (SOTA) results are often yielded by optimization-oriented methods, but their inefficiency hinders their application to realistic datasets. On the other hand, the Distribution-Matching (DM) methods show remarkable efficiency but sub-optimal results compared to optimization-oriented methods. In this paper, we reveal the limitations of current DM-based methods from the inner-class and inter-class views, i.e., Persistent Training and Distribution Shift. To address these problems, we propose a new DM-based method named Dual-view distribution AligNment for dataset CondEnsation (DANCE), which exploits a few pre-trained models to improve DM from both inner-class and inter-class views. Specifically, from the inner-class view, we construct multiple ``mid encoders'' to perform pseudo long-term distribution alignment, making the condensed set a good proxy of the real one during the whole training process; while from the inter-class view, we use the expert models to perform distribution calibration, ensuring the synthetic data remains in the real class region during condensing. Experiments demonstrate the proposed method achieves a SOTA performance while maintaining comparable efficiency with the original DM across various scenarios. Source codes are available at https://github.com/Hansong-Zhang/DANCE.
Shap-Mix: Shapley Value Guided Mixing for Long-Tailed Skeleton Based Action Recognition
Authors: Zhang Jiahang , Lin Lilang , Liu Jiaying
Published: July 2024

In real-world scenarios, human actions often fall into a long-tailed distribution. It makes the existing skeleton-based action recognition works, which are mostly designed based on balanced datasets, suffer from a sharp performance degradation. Recently, many efforts have been made to image/video long-tailed learning. However, directly applying them to skeleton data can be sub-optimal due to the lack of consideration of the crucial spatial-temporal motion patterns, especially for some modality-specific methodologies such as data augmentation. To this end, considering the crucial role of the body parts in the spatially concentrated human actions, we attend to the mixing augmentations and propose a novel method, Shap-Mix, which improves long-tailed learning by mining representative motion patterns for tail categories. Specifically, we first develop an effective spatial-temporal mixing strategy for the skeleton to boost representation quality. Then, the employed saliency guidance method is presented, consisting of the saliency estimation based on Shapley value and a tail-aware mixing policy. It preserves the salient motion parts of minority classes in mixed data, explicitly establishing the relationships between crucial body structure cues and high-level semantics. Extensive experiments on three large-scale skeleton datasets show our remarkable performance improvement under both long-tailed and balanced settings. Our project is publicly available at: https://jhang2020.github.io/Projects/Shap-Mix/Shap-Mix.html.
3DBench: A Scalable 3D Benchmark and Instruction-Tuning Dataset
Authors: Zhang Junjie , Hu Tianci , Huang Xiaoshui , Gong Yongshun , Zeng Dan
Published: July 2024

Evaluating the performance of Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs), integrating both point cloud and language, presents significant challenges. The lack of a comprehensive assessment hampers determining whether these models truly represent advancements, thereby impeding further progress in the field. Current evaluations heavily rely on classification and caption tasks, falling short in providing a thorough assessment of MLLMs. A pressing need exists for a more sophisticated evaluation method capable of thoroughly analyzing the spatial understanding and expressive capabilities of these models. To address these issues, we introduce a scalable 3D benchmark, accompanied by a large-scale instruction-tuning dataset known as 3DBench, providing an extensible platform for a comprehensive evaluation of MLLMs. Specifically, we establish the benchmark that spans a wide range of spatial and semantic scales, from object-level to scene-level, addressing both perception and planning tasks. Furthermore, we present a rigorous pipeline for automatically constructing scalable 3D instruction-tuning datasets, covering 10 diverse multi-modal tasks with more than 0.23 million QA pairs generated in total. Thorough experiments evaluating trending MLLMs, comparisons against existing datasets, and variations of training protocols demonstrate the superiority of 3DBench, offering valuable insights into current limitations and potential research directions. Codes are available at https://github.com/Inshsang/3DBench.
GenSeg: On Generating Unified Adversary for Segmentation
Authors: Zhang Yuxuan , Shi Zhenbo , Yang Wei , Wang Shuchang , Wang Shaowei , Xue Yinxing
Published: July 2024

Great advancements in semantic, instance, and panoptic segmentation have been made in recent years, yet the top-performing models remain vulnerable to imperceptible adversarial perturbation. Current attacks on segmentation primarily focus on a single task, and these methods typically rely on iterative instance-specific strategies, resulting in limited attack transferability and low efficiency. In this paper, we propose GenSeg, a Generative paradigm that creates unified adversaries for Segmentation tasks. In particular, we propose an intermediate-level objective to enhance attack transferability, including a mutual agreement loss for feature deviation, and a prototype obfuscating loss to disrupt intra-class and inter-class relationships. Moreover, GenSeg crafts an adversary in a single forward pass, significantly boosting the attack efficiency. Besides, we unify multiple segmentation tasks to GenSeg in a novel category-and-mask view, which makes it possible to attack these segmentation tasks within this unified framework, and conduct cross-domain and cross-task attacks as well. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of GenSeg in black-box attacks compared with state-of-the-art attacks. To our best knowledge, GenSeg is the first approach capable of conducting cross-domain and cross-task attacks on segmentation tasks, which are closer to real-world scenarios.
CoFInAl: Enhancing Action Quality Assessment with Coarse-to-Fine Instruction Alignment
Authors: Zhou Kanglei , Li Junlin , Cai Ruizhi , Wang Liyuan , Zhang Xingxing , Liang Xiaohui
Published: July 2024

Action Quality Assessment (AQA) is pivotal for quantifying actions across domains like sports and medical care. Existing methods often rely on pre-trained backbones from large-scale action recognition datasets to boost performance on smaller AQA datasets. However, this common strategy yields suboptimal results due to the inherent struggle of these backbones to capture the subtle cues essential for AQA. Moreover, fine-tuning on smaller datasets risks overfitting. To address these issues, we propose Coarse-to-Fine Instruction Alignment (CoFInAl). Inspired by recent advances in large language model tuning, CoFInAl aligns AQA with broader pre-trained tasks by reformulating it as a coarse-to-fine classification task. Initially, it learns grade prototypes for coarse assessment and then utilizes fixed sub-grade prototypes for fine-grained assessment. This hierarchical approach mirrors the judging process, enhancing interpretability within the AQA framework. Experimental results on two long-term AQA datasets demonstrate CoFInAl achieves state-of-the-art performance with significant correlation gains of 5.49% and 3.55% on Rhythmic Gymnastics and Fis-V, respectively. Our Code is available at https://github.com/ZhouKanglei/CoFInAl_AQA.
MISA: MIning Saliency-Aware Semantic Prior for Box Supervised Instance Segmentation
Authors: Zhu Hao , Zhu Yan , Xiao Jiayu , Ma Yike , Zhang Yucheng , Li Jintao , Dai Feng
Published: July 2024

Box supervised instance segmentation (BSIS) aims to achieve an effective trade-off between annotation costs and model performance by solely relying on bounding box annotations during training process. However, we observe that BSIS model is bottlenecked by the intricate objective under limited guidance, and tends to sacrifice segmentation capability in order to effectively recognize multiple instances. To boost the BSIS model's perceptual ability for object shape and contour, we introduce MISA, that is, MIning Saliency-Aware semantic prior from a well-optimized box supervised semantic segmentation (BSSS) network, and incorporating cross-model guidance into the learning process of BSIS. Specifically, we first design a Frequency-Space Distillation (FSD) module to extract assorted salient prior knowledge from BSSS model, and perform cross-model alignment for transfering the prior to BSIS model. Furthermore, we introduce Semantic-Enhanced Pairwise Affinity (SEPA), which borrows the object perceptual ability of BSSS model to emphasize the contribution of salient objects for pairwise affinity, providing more accurate guidance for the BSIS network. Extensive experiments show that our proposed MISA consistently surpasses the existing state-of-the-art methods by a large margin in the BSIS scenario.
Truth Table Net: Scalable, Compact & Verifiable Neural Networks with a Dual Convolutional Small Boolean Circuit Networks Form
Authors: Benamira Adrien , Peyrin Thomas , Yap Trevor , Guérand Tristan , Hooi Bryan
Published: July 2024

We introduce "Truth Table net"' (TTnet), a novel Deep Neural Network (DNN) architecture designed to provide excellent scalability/compactness trade-offs among DNNs, allowing in turn to tackle the DNN challenge of fast formal verification. TTnet is constructed using Learning Truth Table (LTT) filters, analogous to how a Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN) is built upon convolutional filters. The differentiable LTT filters are unique by their dual form: they are both a neural network-based function and a small-sized truth table that can be computed within a practical time frame. This characteristic guarantees, by design and independently of the overall architecture, the ability to practically extract an efficient (in terms of the number of logical gates) and functionally equivalent Conjunctive Normal Form (CNF) Boolean logic gate implementation. This CNF circuit is even optimal when the LTT truth table's input bit size n < 12. In particular, TTnet architecture is the first differentiable DNN with as dual form a compact logic gate representation that can scale to datasets larger than CIFAR-10: we achieve an accuracy of 41% on the ImageNet dataset while ensuring that each LTT filter truth table is fully computable within 2^{16} operations. We further compare the compactness and scalability performances of TTnet Boolean logic circuit representation to state-of-the-art differentiable logic DNNs across tabular, MNIST, and CIFAR-10 datasets. We emphasize that TTnet is the first solution to the open problem of designing differentiable convolutional neural networks with an exact dual logic gate circuit representation, bridging the gap between symbolic AI and trainable DCNNs. Finally, as improving DNNs compactness in Boolean logic circuit form reduces the complexity of their formal verification, we demonstrate TTnet effectiveness in exact sound and complete formal verification. Notably, our model achieves robustness verification in 10ms vs 100s for traditional state-of-the-art DNNs solvers.
Efficient Cost-Minimization Schemes for Electrical Energy Demand Satisfaction by Prosumers in Microgrids with Battery Storage Capabilities
Authors: Codazzi Laura , Csáji Gergely , Mnich Matthias
Published: July 2024

We introduce and study various models for satisfying electrical energy demands of prosumers in a microgrid, while optimizing their costs.

Each prosumer has individual demands of electrical energy, which can vary day-by-day, and which they can satisfy by either generating electrical energy through a self-operated mini power plant like a solar panel, through buying from an external energy provider, such as the main grid or by trading with other prosumers.

Our models take into account two key aspects motivated by real-life scenarios: first, we consider a daily volatility of prices for buying and selling the energy, and second, the possibility to store the self-generated energy in a battery of finite capacity to be either self-consumed or sold to other prosumers in the future.

We provide a thorough complexity analysis, as well as efficient algorithms, so that prosumers can minimize their overall cost over the entire time horizon. As a byproduct, we also solve a new, generalized version of the KNAPSACK problem which may be of independent interest.

We complement our theoretical findings by extensive experimental evaluations on realistic data sets.
A SAT Solver + Computer Algebra Attack on the Minimum Kochen–Specker Problem
Authors: Li Zhengyu , Bright Curtis , Ganesh Vijay
Published: July 2024

One of the fundamental results in quantum foundations is the Kochen–Specker (KS) theorem, which states that any theory whose predictions agree with quantum mechanics must be contextual, i.e., a quantum observation cannot be understood as revealing a pre-existing value. The theorem hinges on the existence of a mathematical object called a KS vector system. While many KS vector systems are known, the problem of finding the minimum KS vector system in three dimensions (3D) has remained stubbornly open for over 55 years. To address the minimum KS problem, we present a new verifiable proof-producing method based on a combination of a Boolean satisfiability (SAT) solver and a computer algebra system (CAS) that uses an isomorph-free orderly generation technique that is very effective in pruning away large parts of the search space. Our method shows that a KS system in 3D must contain at least 24 vectors. We show that our sequential and parallel Cube-and-Conquer (CnC) SAT+CAS methods are significantly faster than SAT-only, CAS-only, and a prior CAS-based method of Uijlen and Westerbaan. Further, while our parallel pipeline is somewhat slower than the parallel CnC version of the recently introduced Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMS) method, this is in part due to the overhead of proof generation. Finally, we provide the first computer-verifiable proof certificate of a lower bound to the KS problem with a size of 40.3 TiB in order 23.
Enhancing Scalability of Metric Differential Privacy via Secret Dataset Partitioning and Benders Decomposition
Authors: Qiu Chenxi
Published: July 2024

Metric Differential Privacy (mDP) extends the concept of Differential Privacy (DP) to serve as a new paradigm of data perturbation. It is designed to protect secret data represented in general metric space, such as text data encoded as word embeddings or geo-location data on the road network or grid maps. To derive an optimal data perturbation mechanism under mDP, a widely used method is linear programming (LP), which, however, might suffer from a polynomial explosion of decision variables, rendering it impractical in large-scale mDP.

In this paper, our objective is to develop a new computation framework to enhance the scalability of the LP-based mDP. Considering the connections established by the mDP constraints among the secret records, we partition the original secret dataset into various subsets. Building upon the partition, we reformulate the LP problem for mDP and solve it via Benders Decomposition, which is composed of two stages: (1) a master program to manage the perturbation calculation across subsets, and (2) a set of subproblems, each managing the perturbation derivation within a subset. Our experimental results on multiple datasets, including geo-location data in the road network/grid maps, text data, and synthetic data, underscore our proposed mechanism’s superior scalability and efficiency.
Rethinking the Soft Conflict Pseudo Boolean Constraint on MaxSAT Local Search Solvers
Authors: Zheng Jiongzhi , Chen Zhuo , Li Chu-Min , He Kun
Published: July 2024

MaxSAT is an optimization version of the famous NP-complete Satisfiability problem (SAT). Algorithms for MaxSAT mainly include complete solvers and local search incomplete solvers. In many complete solvers, once a better solution is found, a Soft conflict Pseudo Boolean (SPB) constraint will be generated to enforce the algorithm to find better solutions. In many local search algorithms, clause weighting is a key technique for effectively guiding the search directions. In this paper, we propose to transfer the SPB constraint into the clause weighting system of the local search method, leading the algorithm to better solutions. We further propose an adaptive clause weighting strategy that breaks the tradition of using constant values to adjust clause weights. Based on the above methods, we propose a new local search algorithm called SPB-MaxSAT that provides new perspectives for clause weighting on MaxSAT local search solvers. Extensive experiments demonstrate the excellent performance of the proposed methods.
Real-World Networks Are Low-Dimensional: Theoretical and Practical Assessment
Authors: Friedrich Tobias , Göbel Andreas , Katzmann Maximilian , Schiller Leon
Published: July 2024

Recent empirical evidence suggests that real-world networks have very low underlying dimensionality. We provide a theoretical explanation for this phenomenon as well as develop a linear-time algorithm for detecting the underlying dimensionality of such networks.

Our theoretical analysis considers geometric inhomogeneous random graphs (GIRGs), a geometric random graph model, which captures a variety of properties observed in real-world networks. These properties include a heterogeneous degree distribution and non-vanishing clustering coefficient, which is the probability that two random neighbors of a vertex are adjacent. Our first result shows that the clustering coefficient of GIRGs scales inverse exponentially with respect to the number of dimensions d, when the latter is at most logarithmic in n, the number of vertices. Hence, for a GIRG to behave like many real-world networks and have a non-vanishing clustering coefficient, it must come from a geometric space of o(log n) dimensions.

Our analysis on GIRGs allows us to obtain a linear-time algorithm for determining the dimensionality of a network. Our algorithm bridges the gap between theory and practice, as it comes with a rigorous proof of correctness and yields results comparable to prior empirical approaches, as indicated by our experiments on real-world instances. The efficiency of our algorithm makes it applicable to very large data-sets. We conclude that very low dimensionalities (from 1 to 10) are needed to explain properties of real-world networks.
Reconstructing Missing Variables for Multivariate Time Series Forecasting via Conditional Generative Flows
Authors: Hu Xuanming , Fan Wei , Chen Haifeng , Wang Pengyang , Fu Yanjie
Published: July 2024

The Variable Subset Forecasting (VSF) problem, where the majority of variables are unavailable in the inference stage of multivariate forecasting, has been an important but under-explored task with broad impacts in many real-world applications. Missing values, absent inter-correlation, and the impracticality of retraining largely hinder the ability of multivariate forecasting models to capture inherent relationships among variables, impacting their performance. However, existing approaches towards these issues either heavily rely on local temporal correlation or face limitations in fully recovering missing information from the unavailable subset, accompanied by notable computational expenses. To address these problems, we propose a novel density estimation solution to recover the information of missing variables via flows-based generative framework. In particular, a novel generative network for time series, namely Time-series Reconstruction Flows (TRF), is proposed to estimate and reconstruct the missing variable subset. In addition, a novel meta-training framework, Variable-Agnostic Meta Learning, has been developed to enhance the generalization ability of TRF, enabling it to adapt to diverse missing variables situations. Finally, extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method compared with baseline methods.
Exploring the Role of Node Diversity in Directed Graph Representation Learning
Authors: Huang Jincheng , Mo Yujie , Hu Ping , Shi Xiaoshuang , Yuan Shangbo , Zhang Zeyu , Zhu Xiaofeng
Published: July 2024

Many methods of Directed Graph Neural Networks (DGNNs) are designed to equally treat nodes in the same neighbor set (i.e., out-neighbor set and in-neighbor set) for every node, without considering the node diversity in directed graphs, so they are often unavailable to adaptively acquire suitable information from neighbors of different directions. To alleviate this issue, in this paper, we investigate a new way to first consider node diversity for representation learning on directed graphs, i.e., neighbor diversity and degree diversity, and then propose a new NDDGNN framework to adaptively assign weights to both outgoing information and incoming information at the node level. Extensive experiments on seven real-world datasets validate the superior performance of our method compared to state-of-the-art methods in terms of both node classification and link prediction tasks.
Langshaw: Declarative Interaction Protocols Based on Sayso and Conflict
Authors: Singh Munindar P. , Christie V. Samuel H. , Chopra Amit K.
Published: July 2024

Current languages for specifying multiagent protocols either over-constrain protocol enactments or complicate capturing their meanings. We propose Langshaw, a declarative protocol language based on (1) sayso, a new construct that captures who has priority over setting each attribute, and (2) nono and nogo, two constructs to capture conflicts between actions. Langshaw combines flexibility with an information model to express meaning. We give a formal semantics for Langshaw, procedures for determining the safety and liveness of a protocol, and a method to generate a message-oriented protocol (embedding needed coordination) suitable for flexible asynchronous enactment.
Enhancing Dual-Target Cross-Domain Recommendation with Federated Privacy-Preserving Learning
Authors: Lin Zhenghong , Huang Wei , Zhang Hengyu , Xu Jiayu , Liu Weiming , Liao Xinting , Wang Fan , Wang Shiping , Tan Yanchao
Published: July 2024

Recently, dual-target cross-domain recommendation (DTCDR) has been proposed to alleviate the data sparsity problem by sharing the common knowledge across domains simultaneously. However, existing methods often assume that personal data containing abundant identifiable information can be directly accessed, which results in a controversial privacy leakage problem of DTCDR. To this end, we introduce the P2DTR framework, a novel approach in DTCDR while protecting private user information. Specifically, we first design a novel inter-client knowledge extraction mechanism, which exploits the private set intersection algorithm and prototype-based federated learning to enable collaboratively modeling among multiple users and a server. Furthermore, to improve the recommendation performance based on the extracted common knowledge across domains, we proposed an intra-client enhanced recommendation, consisting of a constrained dominant set (CDS) propagation mechanism and dual-recommendation module. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets validate that our proposed P2DTR framework achieves superior utility under a privacy-preserving guarantee on both domains.
Fast and Continual Knowledge Graph Embedding via Incremental LoRA
Authors: Liu Jiajun , Ke Wenjun , Wang Peng , Wang Jiahao , Gao Jinhua , Shang Ziyu , Li Guozheng , Xu Zijie , Ji Ke , Li Yining
Published: July 2024

Continual Knowledge Graph Embedding (CKGE) aims to efficiently learn new knowledge and simultaneously preserve old knowledge. Dominant approaches primarily focus on alleviating catastrophic forgetting of old knowledge but neglect efficient learning for the emergence of new knowledge. However, in real-world scenarios, knowledge graphs (KGs) are continuously growing, which brings a significant challenge to fine-tuning KGE models efficiently. To address this issue, we propose a fast CKGE framework (FastKGE), incorporating an incremental low-rank adapter (IncLoRA) mechanism to efficiently acquire new knowledge while preserving old knowledge. Specifically, to mitigate catastrophic forgetting, FastKGE isolates and allocates new knowledge to specific layers based on the fine-grained influence between old and new KGs. Subsequently, to accelerate fine-tuning, FastKGE devises an efficient IncLoRA mechanism, which embeds the specific layers into incremental low-rank adapters with fewer training parameters. Moreover, IncLoRA introduces adaptive rank allocation, which makes the LoRA aware of the importance of entities and adjusts its rank scale adaptively. We conduct experiments on four public datasets and two new datasets with a larger initial scale. Experimental results demonstrate that FastKGE can reduce training time by 34%-49% while still achieving competitive link prediction performance against state-of-the-art models on four public datasets (average MRR score of 21.0% vs. 21.1%). Meanwhile, on two newly constructed datasets, FastKGE saves 51%-68% training time and improves link prediction performance by 1.5%.
Multi-Modal Sarcasm Detection Based on Dual Generative Processes
Authors: Ma Huiying , He Dongxiao , Wang Xiaobao , Jin Di , Ge Meng , Wang Longbiao
Published: July 2024

With the advancement of the internet, sarcastic sentiment expression on social media has grown increasingly diverse. Consequently, multimodal sarcasm detection has emerged as a valuable tool for users to comprehend and interpret sarcastic expressions. Previous research suggests that effectively integrating three modalities (namely image, text, and their inconsistencies) enhances sarcasm detection. However, in some instances, sarcasm detection can be achieved using a single modality, while others necessitate multiple modalities for accurate recognition. This variability suggests that each modality contributes differently to sarcasm detection, and employing a traditional fusion method may introduce bias in the information, unable to explicitly demonstrate the prediction ability of each modality. Therefore, we propose a multimodal sarcasm detection method based on dual generative processes. The dual generative processes map features into the same semantic space to deeply explore emotional inconsistencies between modalities. Concurrently, by incorporating the concept of strong and weak modalities, we explicitly model the modalities' contributions based on prediction performance and autonomously adjust the weight distribution. Experimental results on publicly available multi-modal sarcasm detection datasets validate the superiority of our proposed model.
Unsupervised Deep Graph Structure and Embedding Learning
Authors: Shen Xiaobo , Shi Lei , Gong Xiuwen , Pan Shirui
Published: July 2024

Graph Neural Network (GNN) is powerful in graph embedding learning, but its performance has been shown to be heavily degraded under adversarial attacks. Deep graph structure learning (GSL) is proposed to defend attack by jointly learning graph structure and graph embedding, typically in node classification task. Label supervision is expensive in real-world applications, and thus unsupervised GSL is more challenging and still remains less studied. To fulfill this gap, this paper proposes a new unsupervised GSL method, i.e., unsupervised property GNN (UPGNN). UPGNN first refines graph structure by exploring properties of low rank, sparsity, feature smoothness. UPGNN employs graph mutual information loss to learn graph embedding by maximizing its correlation with refined graph. The proposed UPGNN learns graph structure and embedding without label supervision, and thus can be applied various downstream tasks. We further propose Accelerated UPGNN (AUPGNN) to reduce computational complexity, providing a efficient alternative to UPGNN. Our extensive experiments on node classification and clustering demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method over the state-of-the-arts especially under heavy perturbation.
Efficient Correlated Subgraph Searches for AI-powered Drug Discovery
Authors: Shiokawa Hiroaki , Naoi Yuma , Matsugu Shohei
Published: July 2024

Correlated subgraph searches (CSSs) are essential building blocks for AI-powered drug discovery. Given a query molecule modeled as a graph, CSS finds top-k molecules correlated to the query in a database. However, the cost increases exponentially with the molecule size. Herein we present Corgi, a framework to accelerate CSS methods while ensuring top-k search accuracy. Corgi dynamically excludes unnecessary subgraphs to overcome the expensive cost without sacrificing search accuracy. Our experimental analysis confirms that Corgi has a shorter running time and improved accuracy compared to existing state-of-the-art methods, while a case study demonstrates that Corgi is suitable for practical AI-powered drug discovery.
SemanticMask: A Contrastive View Design for Anomaly Detection in Tabular Data
Authors: Tao Shuting , Zhu Tongtian , Wang Hongwei , Meng Xiangming
Published: July 2024

Contrastive learning based on data augmentation techniques has recently achieved substantial advancement in learning a representation well-suited for anomaly detection in image domain. However, due to the lack of spatial structure, designing effective data augmentation methods for tabular data remains challenging. Conventional techniques, such as random mask, disregard the inter-feature correlations and fail to accurately represent the data. To address this issue, we propose a novel augmentation technique called SemanticMask which leverages the semantic information from column names to generate better augmented views. SemanticMask aims to ensure that the shared information between views contains sufficient information for anomaly detection without redundancy. We analyze the relationship between shared information and anomaly detection performance and empirically demonstrate that good views for tabular anomaly detection tasks are feature-dependent. Our experiment results validate the superiority of SemanticMask over the state-of-the-art anomaly detection methods and existing augmentation techniques for tabular data. In further evaluations of the multi-class novelty detection task, SemanticMask also significantly outperforms the baseline.
Joint Domain Adaptive Graph Convolutional Network
Authors: Yang Niya , Wang Ye , Yu Zhizhi , He Dongxiao , Huang Xin , Jin Di
Published: July 2024

In the realm of cross-network tasks, graph domain adaptation is an effective tool due to its ability to transfer abundant labels from nodes in the source domain to those in the target domain. Existing adversarial domain adaptation methods mainly focus on domain-wise alignment. These approaches, while effective in mitigating the marginal distribution shift between the two domains, often ignore the integral aspect of structural alignment, potentially leading to negative transfer. To address this issue, we propose a joint adversarial domain adaptive graph convolutional network (JDA-GCN) that is uniquely augmented with structural graph alignment, so as to enhance the efficacy of knowledge transfer. Specifically, we construct a structural graph to delineate the interconnections among nodes within identical categories across the source and target domains. To further refine node representation, we integrate the local consistency matrix with the global consistency matrix, thereby leveraging the learning of the sub-structure similarity of nodes to enable more robust and effective representation of nodes. Empirical evaluation on diverse real-world datasets substantiates the superiority of our proposed method, marking a significant advancement over existing state-of-the-art graph domain adaptation algorithms.
LG-GNN: Local-Global Adaptive Graph Neural Network for Modeling Both Homophily and Heterophily
Authors: Yu Zhizhi , Feng Bin , He Dongxiao , Wang Zizhen , Huang Yuxiao , Feng Zhiyong
Published: July 2024

Most Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are based on the homophily assumption, where nodes with the same labels or similar features tend to be connected to each other. However, real-world graphs often do not adhere to this homophily assumption. Currently, most researches aggregate multi-hop neighbor information to discover more potentially relevant nodes. However, in the aggregation process of GNNs, the difference in modeling global and local information is not considered, inevitably leading to information loss. Motivated by this limitation, we propose LG-GNN, a local-global adaptive graph neural network for modeling both homophily and heterophily. Specifically, we model the long-range structural similarity and local feature similarity between nodes from global and local perspectives, in order to capture distant dependencies in highly heterophilic networks while reducing the mixing of locally dissimilar feature nodes, thereby increasing the effectiveness of information aggregation in highly heterophilic graphs. Extensive experiments on a wide range of real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed approach performs well in both heterophilic and homophilic graphs.