bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
VCformer: Variable Correlation Transformer with Inherent Lagged Correlation for Multivariate Time Series Forecasting
Authors: Yang Yingnan , Zhu Qingling , Chen Jianyong
Published: July 2024

Multivariate time series (MTS) forecasting has been extensively applied across diverse domains, such as weather prediction and energy consumption. However, current studies still rely on the vanilla point-wise self-attention mechanism to capture cross-variable dependencies, which is inadequate in extracting the intricate cross-correlation implied between variables. To fill this gap, we propose Variable Correlation Transformer (VCformer), which utilizes Variable Correlation Attention (VCA) module to mine the correlations among variables. Specifically, based on the stochastic process theory, VCA calculates and integrates the cross-correlation scores corresponding to different lags between queries and keys, thereby enhancing its ability to uncover multivariate relationships. Additionally, inspired by Koopman dynamics theory, we also develop Koopman Temporal Detector (KTD) to better address non-stationarity in time series. The two key components enable VCformer to extract both multivariate correlations and temporal dependencies. Our extensive experiments on eight real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of VCformer, achieving top-tier performance compared to other state-of-the-art baseline models. Code is available at this repository: https://github.com/CSyyn/VCformer.
A Deep Probabilistic Spatiotemporal Framework for Dynamic Graph Representation Learning with Application to Brain Disorder Identification
Authors: Yap Sin-Yee , Loo Junn Yong , Ting Chee-Ming , Noman Fuad , Phan Raphaël C.-W. , Razi Adeel , Dowe David L.
Published: July 2024

Recent applications of pattern recognition techniques on brain connectome classification using functional connectivity (FC) are shifting towards acknowledging the non-Euclidean topology and dynamic aspects of brain connectivity across time. In this paper, a deep spatiotemporal variational Bayes (DSVB) framework is proposed to learn time-varying topological structures in dynamic FC networks for identifying autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in human participants. The framework incorporates a spatial-aware recurrent neural network with an attention-based message passing scheme to capture rich spatiotemporal patterns across dynamic FC networks. To overcome model overfitting on limited training datasets, an adversarial training strategy is introduced to learn graph embedding models that generalize well to unseen brain networks. Evaluation on the ABIDE resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging dataset shows that our proposed framework substantially outperforms state-of-the-art methods in identifying patients with ASD. Dynamic FC analyses with DSVB-learned embeddings reveal apparent group differences between ASD and healthy controls in brain network connectivity patterns and switching dynamics of brain states.
Pointsoup: High-Performance and Extremely Low-Decoding-Latency Learned Geometry Codec for Large-Scale Point Cloud Scenes
Authors: You Kang , Liu Kai , Yu Li , Gao Pan , Ding Dandan
Published: July 2024

Despite considerable progress being achieved in point cloud geometry compression, there still remains a challenge in effectively compressing large-scale scenes with sparse surfaces. Another key challenge lies in reducing decoding latency, a crucial requirement in real-world application. In this paper, we propose Pointsoup, an efficient learning-based geometry codec that attains high-performance and extremely low-decoding-latency simultaneously. Inspired by conventional Trisoup codec, a point model-based strategy is devised to characterize local surfaces. Specifically, skin features are embedded from local windows via an attention-based encoder, and dilated windows are introduced as cross-scale priors to infer the distribution of quantized features in parallel. During decoding, features undergo fast refinement, followed by a folding-based point generator that reconstructs point coordinates with fairly fast speed. Experiments show that Pointsoup achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmarks with significantly lower decoding complexity, i.e., up to 90~160× faster than the G-PCCv23 Trisoup decoder on a comparatively low-end platform (e.g., one RTX 2080Ti). Furthermore, it offers variable-rate control with a single neural model (2.9MB), which is attractive for industrial practitioners.
FedES: Federated Early-Stopping for Hindering Memorizing Heterogeneous Label Noise
Authors: Zeng Bixiao , Yang Xiaodong , Chen Yiqiang , Shen Zhiqi , Yu Hanchao , Zhang Yingwei
Published: July 2024

Federated learning (FL) facilitates collaborative model training across distributed clients while maintaining privacy. Federated noisy label learning (FNLL) is more of a challenge for data inaccessibility and noise heterogeneity. Existing works primarily assume clients are either noisy or clean, which may lack the flexibility to adapt to diverse label noise across different clients, especially when entirely clean or noisy clients are not the majority. To address this, we propose a general noise-robust federated learning framework called Federated Early-Stopping (FedES), which adaptively updates critical parameters of each local model based on their noise rates, thereby avoiding overfitting to noisy labels. FedES is composed of two stages: federated noise estimation and parameter-adaptive local updating \& global aggregation. We introduce a signed distance based on local and global gradients during a federated round to estimate clients' noise rates without requiring additional information. Based on this measure, we employ various degrees of early-stopping during local updating on the clients, and further, a noise-aware global aggregation is employed to achieve noise-robust learning. Extensive experiments conducted on varying synthetic and real-world label noise demonstrate the superior performance of FedES over the state-of-the-art methods.
CMACE: CMAES-based Counterfactual Explanations for Black-box Models
Authors: Yin Xudong , Yang Yao
Published: July 2024

Explanatory Artificial Intelligence plays a vital role in machine learning, due to its widespread application in decision-making scenarios, e.g., credit lending. Counterfactual Explanation (CFE) is a new kind of explanatory method that involves asking “what if ”, i.e. what would have happened if model inputs slightly change. To answer the question, Counterfactual Explanation aims at finding a minimum perturbation in model inputs leading to a different model decision. Compared with model-agnostic approaches, model-specific CFE approaches designed only for specific type of models usually have better performance in finding optimal counterfactual perturbations, owing to access to the inner workings of models. To deal with this dilemma, this work first proposes CMAES-based Counterfactual Explanations (CMACE): an effective model-agnostic counterfactual generating approach based on Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (CMA-ES) and a warm starting scheme that provides good initialization of the counterfactual's mean and covariance parameters for CMA-ES taking advantage of prior information of training samples. CMACE significantly outperforms another state-of-art (SOTA) model-agnostic approach (Bayesian Counterfactual Generator, BayCon) with various experimental settings. Extensive experiments also demonstrate that CMACE is superior to a SOTA model-specific approach (Flexible Optimizable Counterfactual Explanations for Tree Ensembles, FOCUS) that is designed for tree-based models using gradient-based optimization.
Learning from Long-Tailed Noisy Data with Sample Selection and Balanced Loss
Authors: Zhang Lefan , Tian Zhang-Hao , Zhou Wujun , Wang Wei
Published: July 2024

The success of deep learning depends on large-scale and well-curated training data, while data in real-world applications are commonly long-tailed and noisy. Existing methods are usually dependent on label frequency to tackle class imbalance, while the model bias on different classes is not directly related to label frequency and the true label frequency is inaccessible under label noise. To solve this, we propose a robust method for learning from long-tailed noisy data with sample selection and balanced loss. Specifically, we separate the noisy training data into clean labeled set and unlabeled set with sample selection, and train the deep neural network in a semi-supervised manner with a balanced loss based on model bias. Extensive experiments on benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods.
Exploring Cross-Domain Few-Shot Classification via Frequency-Aware Prompting
Authors: Zhang Tiange , Cai Qing , Gao Feng , Qi Lin , Dong Junyu
Published: July 2024

Cross-Domain Few-Shot Learning has witnessed great stride with the development of meta-learning. However, most existing methods pay more attention to learning domain-adaptive inductive bias (meta-knowledge) through feature-wise manipulation or task diversity improvement while neglecting the phenomenon that deep networks tend to rely more on high-frequency cues to make the classification decision, which thus degenerates the robustness of learned inductive bias since high-frequency information is vulnerable and easy to be disturbed by noisy information. Hence in this paper, we make one of the first attempts to propose a Frequency-Aware Prompting method with mutual attention for Cross-Domain Few-Shot classification, which can let networks simulate the human visual perception of selecting different frequency cues when facing new recognition tasks. Specifically, a frequency-aware prompting mechanism is first proposed, in which high-frequency components of the decomposed source image are switched either with normal distribution sampling or zeroing to get frequency-aware augment samples. Then, a mutual attention module is designed to learn generalizable inductive bias under CD-FSL settings. More importantly, the proposed method is a plug-and-play module that can be directly applied to most off-the-shelf CD-FLS methods. Experimental results on CD-FSL benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method as well as robustly improve the performance of existing CD-FLS methods. Resources at https://github.com/tinkez/FAP_CDFSC.
Personalized Federated Learning for Cross-City Traffic Prediction
Authors: Zhang Yu , Lu Hua , Liu Ning , Xu Yonghui , Li Qingzhong , Cui Lizhen
Published: July 2024

Traffic prediction plays an important role in urban computing. However, many cities face data scarcity due to low levels of urban development. Although many approaches transfer knowledge from data-rich cities to data-scarce cities, the centralized training paradigm cannot uphold data privacy. For the sake of inter-city data privacy, Federated Learning has been used, which follows a decentralized training paradigm to enhance traffic knowledge of data-scarce cities. However, spatio-temporal data heterogeneity causes client drift, leading to unsatisfactory traffic prediction performance. In this work, we propose a novel personalized Federated learning method for Cross-city Traffic Prediction (pFedCTP). It learns traffic knowledge from multiple data-rich source cities and transfers the knowledge to a data-scarce target city while preserving inter-city data privacy. In the core of pFedCTP lies a Spatio-Temporal Neural Network (ST-Net) for clients to learn traffic representation. We decouple the ST-Net to learn space-independent traffic patterns to overcome cross-city spatial heterogeneity. Besides, pFedCTP adaptively interpolates the layer-wise global and local parameters to deal with temporal heterogeneity across cities. Extensive experiments on four real-world traffic datasets demonstrate significant advantages of pFedCTP over representative state-of-the-art methods.
Pre-training General User Representation with Multi-type APP Behaviors
Authors: Zhang Yuren , Hou Min , Zhang Kai , Yuan Yuqing , Song Chao , Ye Zhihao , Chen Enhong , Yu Yang
Published: July 2024

In numerous user-centric services on mobile applications (apps), accurately mining user interests and generating effective user representations are paramount. Traditional approaches, which often involve training task-specific user representations, are becoming increasingly impractical due to their high computational costs and limited adaptability.

This paper introduces a novel solution to this challenge: the Multi-type App-usage Fusion Network (MAFN). MAFN innovatively pre-trains universal user representations, leveraging multi-type app behaviors to overcome key limitations in existing methods. We address two primary challenges: 1) the varying frequency of user behaviors (ranging from low-frequency actions like (un)installations to high-frequency yet insightful app launches); and 2) the integration of multi-type behaviors to form a cohesive representation. Our approach involves the creation of novel pre-training tasks that harness self-supervised signals from diverse app behaviors, capturing both long-term and short-term user interests. MAFN's unique fusion approach effectively amalgamates these interests into a unified vector space, facilitating the development of a versatile, general-purpose user representation. With a practical workflow, extensive experiments with three typical downstream tasks on real-world datasets verify the effectiveness of our approach.
Active Deep Multi-view Clustering
Authors: Zhao Helin , Chen Wei , Zhou Peng
Published: July 2024

Deep multi-view clustering has been widely studied. However, since it is an unsupervised task, where no labels are used to guide the training, it is still unreliable especially when handling complicated data. Although deep semi-supervised multi-view clustering can alleviate this problem by using some supervised information, the supervised information is often pregiven or randomly selected. Unfortunately, as we know, the clustering performance highly depends on the quality of the supervised information and most of the semi-supervised methods ignore the supervised information selection. To tackle this problem, in this paper, we propose a novel active deep multi-view clustering method, which can actively select important data for querying human annotations. In this method, we carefully design a fusion module, an active selection module, a supervised module, and an unsupervised module, and integrate them into a unified framework seamlessly. In this framework, we can obtain a more reliable clustering result with as few annotations as possible. The extensive experiments on benchmark data sets show that our method can outperform state-of-the-art unsupervised and semi-supervised methods, demonstrating the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method. The code is available at https://github.com/wodedazhuozi/ADMC .
Constrained Intrinsic Motivation for Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Zheng Xiang , Ma Xingjun , Shen Chao , Wang Cong
Published: July 2024

This paper investigates two fundamental problems that arise when utilizing Intrinsic Motivation (IM) for reinforcement learning in Reward-Free Pre-Training (RFPT) tasks and Exploration with Intrinsic Motivation (EIM) tasks: 1) how to design an effective intrinsic objective in RFPT tasks, and 2) how to reduce the bias introduced by the intrinsic objective in EIM tasks.

Existing IM methods suffer from static skills, limited state coverage, sample inefficiency in RFPT tasks, and suboptimality in EIM tasks.

To tackle these problems, we propose Constrained Intrinsic Motivation (CIM) for RFPT and EIM tasks, respectively: 1) CIM for RFPT maximizes the lower bound of the conditional state entropy subject to an alignment constraint on the state encoder network for efficient dynamic and diverse skill discovery and state coverage maximization; 2) CIM for EIM leverages constrained policy optimization to adaptively adjust the coefficient of the intrinsic objective to mitigate the distraction from the intrinsic objective.

In various MuJoCo robotics environments, we empirically show that CIM for RFPT greatly surpasses fifteen IM methods for unsupervised skill discovery in terms of skill diversity, state coverage, and fine-tuning performance. Additionally, we showcase the effectiveness of CIM for EIM in redeeming intrinsic rewards when task rewards are exposed from the beginning. Our code is available at https://github.com/x-zheng16/CIM.
Balancing Multimodal Learning via Online Logit Modulation
Authors: Zong Daoming , Ding Chaoyue , Li Baoxiang , Li Jiakui , Zheng Ken
Published: July 2024

Multimodal learning is provably superior to unimodal learning. However, in practice, the best-performing unimodal networks often outperform jointly trained multimodal networks. This phenomenon can be attributed to the varying convergence and generalization rates across different modalities, leading to the dominance of one modality and causing underfitting of other modalities in simple multimodal joint training. To mitigate this issue, we propose two key ingredients: i) disentangling the learning of unimodal features and multimodal interaction through an intermediate representation fusion block; ii) modulating the logits of different modalities via dynamic coefficients during training to align their magnitudes with the target values, referred to as online logit modulation (OLM). Remarkably, OLM is model-agnostic and can be seamlessly integrated with most existing multimodal training frameworks. Empirical evidence shows that our approach brings significant enhancements over baselines on a wide range of multimodal tasks, covering video, audio, text, image, and depth modalities.
Federated Prompt Learning for Weather Foundation Models on Devices
Authors: Chen Shengchao , Long Guodong , Shen Tao , Jiang Jing , Zhang Chengqi
Published: July 2024

On-device intelligence for weather forecasting uses local deep learning models to analyze weather patterns without centralized cloud computing, holds significance for supporting human activates. Federated Learning is a promising solution for such forecasting by enabling collaborative model training without sharing raw data. However, it faces three main challenges that hinder its reliability: (1) data heterogeneity among devices due to geographic differences; (2) data homogeneity within individual devices and (3) communication overload from sending large model parameters for collaboration. To address these challenges, this paper propose Federated Prompt learning for Weather Foundation Models on Devices (FedPoD), which enables devices to obtain highly customized models while maintaining communication efficiency. Concretely, our Adaptive Prompt Tuning leverages lightweight prompts guide frozen foundation model to generate more precise predictions, also conducts prompt-based multi-level communication to encourage multi-source knowledge fusion and regulate optimization. Additionally, Dynamic Graph Modeling constructs graphs from prompts, prioritizing collaborative training among devices with similar data distributions to against heterogeneity. Extensive experiments demonstrates FedPoD leads the performance among state-of-the-art baselines across various setting in real-world on-device weather forecasting datasets.
Vertical Symbolic Regression via Deep Policy Gradient
Authors: Jiang Nan , Nasim Md , Xue Yexiang
Published: July 2024

Vertical Symbolic Regression (VSR) has recently been proposed to expedite the discovery of symbolic equations with many independent variables from experimental data. VSR reduces the search spaces following the vertical discovery path by building from reduced-form equations involving a subset of variables to all variables. While deep neural networks have shown promise in enhancing symbolic regression, directly integrating VSR with deep networks faces challenges such as gradient propagation and engineering complexities due to the tree representation of expressions. We propose Vertical Symbolic Regression using Deep Policy Gradient (VSR-DPG) and demonstrate that VSR-DPG can recover ground-truth equations involving multiple input variables, significantly beyond both deep reinforcement learning-based approaches and previous VSR variants. Our VSR-DPG models symbolic regression as a sequential decision-making process, in which equations are built from repeated applications of grammar rules. The integrated deep model is trained to maximize a policy gradient objective. Experimental results demonstrate that our VSR-DPG significantly outperforms popular baselines in identifying both algebraic equations and ordinary differential equations on a series of benchmarks.
Privacy-Preserving UCB Decision Process Verification via zk-SNARKs
Authors: Jiang Xikun , Lyu He , Ying Chenhao , Xu Yibin , Düdder Boris , Luo Yuan
Published: July 2024

With the increasingly widespread application of machine learning, how to strike a balance between protecting the privacy of data and algorithm parameters and ensuring the verifiability of machine learning has always been a challenge. This study explores the intersection of reinforcement learning and data privacy, specifically addressing the Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problem with the Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) algorithm. We introduce zkUCB, an innovative algorithm that employs the Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge (zk-SNARKs) to enhance UCB. zkUCB is carefully designed to safeguard the confidentiality of training data and algorithmic parameters, ensuring transparent UCB decision-making.

Experiments highlight zkUCB's superior performance, attributing its enhanced reward to judicious quantization bit usage that reduces information entropy in the decision-making process. zkUCB's proof size and verification time scale linearly with the execution steps of zkUCB. This showcases zkUCB's adept balance between data security and operational efficiency. This approach contributes significantly to the ongoing discourse on reinforcing data privacy in complex decision-making processes, offering a promising solution for privacy-sensitive applications.
OUCopula: Bi-Channel Multi-Label Copula-Enhanced Adapter-Based CNN for Myopia Screening Based on OU-UWF Images
Authors: Li Yang , Huang Qiuyi , Zhong Chong , Yang Danjuan , Li Meiyan , Welsh A.H. , Liu Aiyi , Fu Bo , Liu Catherine C. , Zhou Xingtao
Published: July 2024

Myopia screening using cutting-edge ultra-widefield (UWF) fundus imaging is potentially significant for ophthalmic outcomes. Current multidisciplinary research between ophthalmology and deep learning (DL) concentrates primarily on disease classification and diagnosis using single-eye images, largely ignoring joint modeling and prediction for Oculus Uterque (OU, both eyes). Inspired by the complex relationships between OU and the high correlation between the (continuous) outcome labels (Spherical Equivalent and Axial Length), we propose a framework of copula-enhanced adapter convolutional neural network (CNN) learning with OU UWF fundus images (OUCopula) for joint prediction of multiple clinical scores. We design a novel bi-channel multi-label CNN which can (1) take bi-channel image inputs subject to both high correlation and heterogeneity (by sharing the same backbone network and employing adapters to parameterize the channel-wise discrepancy), and (2) incorporate correlation information between continuous output labels (using a copula). Solid experiments show that OUCopula achieves satisfactory performance in myopia score prediction compared to backbone models. Moreover, OUCopula can far exceed the performance of models constructed for single-eye inputs.

Importantly, our study also hints at the potential extension of the bi-channel model to a multi-channel paradigm and the generalizability of OUCopula across various backbone CNNs. The code and the supplementary materials are available at: github.com/Charley-HUANG/OUCopula.
Dynamic Many-Objective Molecular Optimization: Unfolding Complexity with Objective Decomposition and Progressive Optimization
Authors: Shin Dong-Hee , Son Young-Han , Lee Deok-Joong , Han Ji-Wung , Kam Tae-Eui
Published: July 2024

Molecular discovery has received significant attention across various scientific fields by enabling the creation of novel chemical compounds. In recent years, the majority of studies have approached this process as a multi-objective optimization problem. Despite notable advancements, most methods optimize only up to four molecular objectives and are mainly designed for scenarios with a predetermined number of objectives. However, in real-world applications, the number of molecular objectives can be more than four (many-objective) and additional objectives may be introduced over time (dynamic-objective). To fill this gap, we propose DyMol, the first method designed to tackle the dynamic many-objective molecular optimization problem by utilizing a novel divide-and-conquer approach combined with a decomposition strategy. Additionally, we comprehensively integrate convergence, Pareto diversity, and structural diversity into the optimization process to provide efficient exploration of the search space. We validate the superior performance of our method using the practical molecular optimization (PMO) benchmark. The source code and supplementary material are available online.
Improving Paratope and Epitope Prediction by Multi-Modal Contrastive Learning and Interaction Informativeness Estimation
Authors: Wang Zhiwei , Wang Yongkang , Zhang Wen
Published: July 2024

Accurately predicting antibody-antigen binding residues, i.e., paratopes and epitopes, is crucial in antibody design. However, existing methods solely focus on uni-modal data (either sequence or structure), disregarding the complementary information present in multi-modal data, and most methods predict paratopes and epitopes separately, overlooking their specific spatial interactions. In this paper, we propose a novel Multi-modal contrastive learning and Interaction informativeness estimation-based method for Paratope and Epitope prediction, named MIPE, by using both sequence and structure data of antibodies and antigens. MIPE implements a multi-modal contrastive learning strategy, which maximizes representations of binding and non-binding residues within each modality and meanwhile aligns uni-modal representations towards effective modal representations. To exploit the spatial interaction information, MIPE also incorporates an interaction informativeness estimation that computes the estimated interaction matrices between antibodies and antigens, thereby approximating them to the actual ones. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method in predicting paratopes and epitopes compared to baselines. Additionally, the ablation studies and visualizations demonstrate the superiority of MIPE owing to the better representations acquired through multi-modal contrastive learning and the interaction patterns comprehended by the interaction informativeness estimation.
Domain Adaptive and Fine-grained Anomaly Detection for Single-cell Sequencing Data and Beyond
Authors: Xu Kaichen , Ding Yueyang , Hou Suyang , Zhan Weiqiang , Chen Nisang , Wang Jun , Sun Xiaobo
Published: July 2024

Fined-grained anomalous cell detection from affected tissues is critical for clinical diagnosis and pathological research. Single-cell sequencing data provide unprecedented opportunities for this task. However, current anomaly detection methods struggle to handle domain shifts prevalent in multi-sample and multi-domain single-cell sequencing data, leading to suboptimal performance. Moreover, these methods fall short of distinguishing anomalous cells into pathologically distinct subtypes. In response, we propose ACSleuth, a novel, reconstruction deviation-guided generative framework that integrates the detection, domain adaptation, and fine-grained annotating of anomalous cells into a methodologically cohesive workflow. Notably, we present the first theoretical analysis of using reconstruction deviations output by generative models for anomaly detection in lieu of domain shifts. This analysis informs us to develop a novel and superior maximum mean discrepancy-based anomaly scorer in ACSleuth. Extensive benchmarks over various single-cell data and other types of tabular data demonstrate ACSleuth's superiority over the state-of-the-art methods in identifying and subtyping anomalies in multi-sample and multi-domain contexts. Our code is available at https://github.com/Catchxu/ACsleuth.
SEMANTIFY: Unveiling Memes with Robust Interpretability beyond Input Attribution
Authors: Bandyopadhyay Dibyanayan , Ganguly Asmit , Gain Baban , Ekbal Asif
Published: July 2024

Memes, initially created for humor and social commentary, have transformed into platforms for offensive online content. Detecting such content is crucial; however, existing deep learning-based meme offensiveness classifiers lack transparency, functioning as opaque black-box systems. While Integrated Gradient and similar input-attribution interpretability methods exist, they often yield inadequate and irrelevant keywords. To bridge this gap, we introduce SEMANTIFY, a novel system featuring a theoretically grounded multi-step filtering process. SEMANTIFY extracts meaningful "tokens" from a predefined vocabulary, generating a pertinent and comprehensive set of interpretable keywords. These extracted keywords reveal the model's awareness of hidden meanings in memes, enhancing transparency. Evaluation of SEMANTIFY using interpretability metrics, including 'leakage-adjusted simulatability,' demonstrates its superiority over various baselines by up to 2.5 points. Human evaluation of 'relatedness' and 'exhaustiveness' of extracted keywords further validates its effectiveness. Additionally, a qualitative analysis of extracted keywords serves as a case study, unveiling model error cases and their reasons. SEMANTIFY contributes to the advancement of more interpretable multimodal systems for meme offensiveness detection, fostering trust for real-world applications.
PEACH: Pretrained-Embedding Explanation across Contextual and Hierarchical Structure
Authors: Cao Feiqi , Han Soyeon Caren , Chung Hyunsuk
Published: July 2024

In this work, we propose a novel tree-based explanation technique, PEACH (Pretrained-embedding Explanation Across Contextual and Hierarchical Structure), that can explain how text-based documents are classified by using any pretrained contextual embeddings in a tree-based human-interpretable manner. Note that PEACH can adopt any contextual embeddings of the PLMs as a training input for the decision tree.

Using the proposed PEACH, we perform a comprehensive analysis of several contextual embeddings on nine different NLP text classification benchmarks. This analysis demonstrates the flexibility of the model by appling several PLM contextual embeddings, its attribute selections, scaling, and clustering methods. Furthermore, we show the utility of explanations by visualising the feature selection and important trend of text classification via human-interpretable word-cloud-based trees, which clearly identify model mistakes and assist in dataset debugging. Besides interpretability, PEACH outperforms or is similar to those from pretrained models. Code and Appendix are in https://github.com/adlnlp/peach.
Improving Pseudo Labels with Global-Local Denoising Framework for Cross-lingual Named Entity Recognition
Authors: Ding Zhuojun , Wei Wei , Qu Xiaoye , Chen Dangyang
Published: July 2024

Cross-lingual named entity recognition (NER) aims to train an NER model for the target language leveraging only labeled source language data and unlabeled target language data. Prior approaches either perform label projection on translated source language data or employ a source model to assign pseudo labels for target language data and train a target model on these pseudo-labeled data to generalize to the target language. However, these automatic labeling procedures inevitably introduce noisy labels, thus leading to a performance drop. In this paper, we propose a Global-Local Denoising framework (GLoDe) for cross-lingual NER. Specifically, GLoDe introduces a progressive denoising strategy to rectify incorrect pseudo labels by leveraging both global and local distribution information in the semantic space. The refined pseudo-labeled target language data significantly improves the model's generalization ability. Moreover, previous methods only consider improving the model with language-agnostic features, however, we argue that target language-specific features are also important and should never be ignored. To this end, we employ a simple auxiliary task to achieve this goal. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets with six target languages demonstrate that our proposed GLoDe significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art methods.
Span-based Unified Named Entity Recognition Framework via Contrastive Learning
Authors: Mao Hongli , Mao Xian-Ling , Tang Hanlin , Shang Yu-Ming , Gao Xiaoyan , Ma Ao-Jie , Huang Heyan
Published: July 2024

Traditional Named Entity Recognition (NER) models are typically designed for domain-specific datasets and limited to fixed predefined types, resulting in difficulty generalizing to new domains. Recently, prompt-based generative methods attempt to mitigate this constraint by training models jointly on diverse datasets and extract specified entities via prompt instructions. However, due to autoregressive structure, these methods cannot directly model entity span and suffer from slow sequential decoding. To address these issues, we propose a novel Span-based Unified NER framework via contrastive learning (SUNER), which aligns text span and entity type representations in a shared semantic space to extract entities in parallel. Specifically, we first extract mention spans without considering entity types to better generalize across datasets. Then, by leveraging the power of contrastive learning and well-designed entity marker structure, we map candidate spans and their textual type descriptions into the same vector representation space to differentiate entities across domains. Extensive experiments on both supervised and zero/few-shot settings demonstrate that proposed SUNER model achieves better performance and higher efficiency than previous state-of-the-art unified NER models.
Putting Back the Stops: Integrating Syntax with Neural Topic Models
Authors: Nagda Mayank , Fellenz Sophie
Published: July 2024

Syntax and semantics are two key concepts for language understanding. Topic models typically represent the semantics of a text corpus, while removing syntactic information during preprocessing. Without preprocessing, the generated topics become uninterpretable because the syntactic words dominate generated topics. To learn interpretable topics while keeping valuable syntactic information, we propose a novel framework that can simultaneously learn both syntactic and semantic topics from the corpus without requiring any preprocessing. A context network leverages textual dependencies to distinguish between syntactic and semantic words, while a composite VAE topic model learns two sets of topics. We demonstrate on seven datasets that our proposed method effectively captures both syntactic and semantic representations of a corpus while outperforming state-of-the-art neural topic models and statistical topic models in terms of topic quality.
Attention Based Document-level Relation Extraction with None Class Ranking Loss
Authors: Xu Xiaolong , Li Chenbin , Xiang Haolong , Qi Lianyong , Zhang Xuyun , Dou Wanchun
Published: July 2024

Through document-level relation extraction (RE), the analysis of the global relation between entities in the text is feasible, and more comprehensive and accurate semantic information can be obtained. In document-level RE, the model needs to infer the implicit relations between two entities in different sentences. To obtain more semantic information, existing methods mainly focus on exploring entity representations. However, they ignore the correlations and indivisibility between relations, entities and contexts. Furthermore, current methods only independently estimate the cases of predefined relations, ignoring the case of "no relation'', which results in poor prediction. To address the above issues, we propose a document-level RE method based on attention mechanisms, which considers the case of "no relation''. Specifically, our approach leverages graph attention and multi-head attention networks to capture the correlations and indivisibility among relations, entities, and contexts, respectively. In addition, a novel multi-label loss function that promotes large margins in label confidence scores between each predefined class and the none class is employed to improve the prediction performance. Extensive experiments conducted on benchmarking datasets demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines with higher accuracy.
Incorporating Schema-Aware Description into Document-Level Event Extraction
Authors: Xu Zijie , Wang Peng , Ke Wenjun , Li Guozheng , Liu Jiajun , Ji Ke , Chen Xiye , Wu Chenxiao
Published: July 2024

Document-level event extraction (DEE) aims to extract the structured event information from a given document, facing two critical challenges: (1) event arguments always scatter across sentences (arguments-scattering); (2) multiple events can co-occur in one document (multi-event). Most recent studies mainly follow two simplified settings to ease the challenges: one simplifies DEE with the no-trigger-words design (NDEE), and the other focuses on event argument extraction (DEAE), a sub-task of DEE. However, the former excludes trigger extraction and suffers from error propagation in the sub-tasks. The latter relies heavily on the gold triggers as prerequisites and struggles to distinguish multiple arguments playing the same role in different events. To address the limitations above, we propose a novel joint trigger and argument extraction paradigm SEELE to enhance the DEE model via incorporating SchEma-awarE descriptions into Document-Level Event extraction. Specifically, the schema-aware descriptions are leveraged from two aspects: (1) guiding the attention mechanism among event-aware tokens across sentences, which relieves arguments-scattering without error propagation; (2) performing the fine-grained contrastive learning to distinguish different events, which mitigates multi-event without gold triggers. Extensive experiments show the superiority of SEELE, achieving notable improvements (2.1% to 9.7% F1) on three NDEE datasets and competitive performance on two DEAE datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/TheoryRhapsody/SEELE.
Modeling Selective Feature Attention for Lightweight Text Matching
Authors: Zang Jianxiang , Liu Hui
Published: July 2024

Representation-based Siamese networks have risen to popularity in lightweight text matching due to their low deployment and inference costs. While word-level attention mechanisms have been implemented within Siamese networks to improve performance, we propose Feature Attention (FA), a novel downstream block designed to enrich the modeling of dependencies among embedding features. Employing "squeeze-and-excitation" techniques, the FA block dynamically adjusts the emphasis on individual features, enabling the network to concentrate more on features that significantly contribute to the final classification. Building upon FA, we introduce a dynamic "selection" mechanism called Selective Feature Attention (SFA), which leverages a stacked BiGRU Inception structure. The SFA block facilitates multi-scale semantic extraction by traversing different stacked BiGRU layers, encouraging the network to selectively concentrate on semantic information and embedding features across varying levels of abstraction. Both the FA and SFA blocks offer a seamless integration capability with various Siamese networks, showcasing a plug-and-play characteristic. Experimental evaluations conducted across diverse text matching baselines and benchmarks underscore the indispensability of modeling feature attention and the superiority of the "selection" mechanism.
KG-CoT: Chain-of-Thought Prompting of Large Language Models over Knowledge Graphs for Knowledge-Aware Question Answering
Authors: Zhao Ruilin , Zhao Feng , Wang Long , Wang Xianzhi , Xu Guandong
Published: July 2024

Large language models (LLMs) encounter challenges such as hallucination and factual errors in knowledge-intensive tasks. One the one hand, LLMs sometimes struggle to generate reliable answers based on the black-box parametric knowledge, due to the lack of responsible knowledge. Moreover, fragmented knowledge facts extracted by knowledge retrievers fail to provide explicit and coherent reasoning paths for improving LLM reasoning. To address these challenges, we propose KG-CoT, a novel knowledge-augmented paradigm that leverages a small-scale step-by-step graph reasoning model to reason over knowledge graphs (KGs) and utilizes a reasoning path generation method to generate chains of reasoning with high confidence for large-scale LLMs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our KG-CoT significantly improves the performance of LLMs on knowledge-intensive question answering tasks, such as multi-hop, single-hop, and open-domain question answering benchmarks, without fine-tuning LLMs. KG-CoT outperforms the CoT prompting as well as prior retrieval-augmented and knowledge base question answering baselines. Moreover, KG-CoT can reduce the number of API calls and cost and generalize to various LLM backbones in a lightweight plug-and-play manner.
D3ETR: Decoder Distillation for Detection Transformer
Authors: Chen Xiaokang , Chen Jiahui , Liu Yan , Tang Jiaxiang , Zeng Gang
Published: July 2024

Although various knowledge distillation (KD) methods for CNN-based detectors have been proven effective in improving small students, build- ing baselines and recipes for DETR-based detec- tors remains a challenge. This paper concentrates on the transformer decoder of DETR-based detec- tors and explores KD methods suitable for them. However, the random order of the decoder outputs poses a challenge for knowledge distillation as it provides no direct correspondence between the pre- dictions of the teacher and the student. To this end, we propose MixMatcher that aligns the de- coder outputs of DETR-based teacher and student, by mixing two teacher-student matching strategies for combined advantages. The first strategy, Adap- tive Matching, applies bipartite matching to adap- tively match the outputs of the teacher and the stu- dent in each decoder layer. The second strategy, Fixed Matching, fixes the correspondence between the outputs of the teacher and the student with the same object queries as input, which alleviates in- stability of bipartite matching in Adaptive Match- ing. Using both strategies together produces bet- ter results than using either strategy alone. Based on MixMatcher, we devise Decoder Distillation for DEtection TRansformer (D3ETR), which dis- tills knowledge in decoder predictions and attention maps from the teacher to student. D3ETR shows superior performance on various DETR-based de- tectors with different backbones. For instance, D3ETR improves Conditional DETR-R50-C5 by 8.3 mAP under 12 epochs training setting with Conditional DETR-R101-C5 serving as the teacher. The code will be released.
Approximate Dec-POMDP Solving Using Multi-Agent A*
Authors: Koops Wietze , Junges Sebastian , Jansen Nils
Published: July 2024

We present an A*-based algorithm to compute policies for finite-horizon Dec-POMDPs. Our goal is to sacrifice optimality in favor of scalability for larger horizons. The main ingredients of our approach are (1) using clustered sliding window memory, (2) pruning the A* search tree, and (3) using novel A* heuristics. Our experiments show competitive performance to the state-of-the-art. Moreover, for multiple benchmarks, we achieve superior performance. In addition, we provide an A* algorithm that finds upper bounds for the optimum, tailored towards problems with long horizons. The main ingredient is a new heuristic that periodically reveals the state, thereby limiting the number of reachable beliefs. Our experiments demonstrate the efficacy and scalability of the approach.
EVE: Efficient Zero-Shot Text-Based Video Editing With Depth Map Guidance and Temporal Consistency Constraints
Authors: Chen Yutao , Dong Xingning , Gan Tian , Zhou Chunluan , Yang Ming , Guo Qingpei
Published: July 2024

Motivated by the superior performance of image diffusion models, more and more researchers strive to extend these models to the text-based video editing task. Nevertheless, current video editing tasks mainly suffer from the dilemma between the high fine-tuning cost and the limited generation capacity. Compared with images, we conjecture that videos necessitate more constraints to preserve the temporal consistency during editing. Towards this end, we propose EVE, a robust and Efficient zero-shot Video Editing method. Under the guidance of depth maps and temporal consistency constraints, EVE derives satisfactory video editing results with an affordable computational and time cost. Moreover, recognizing the absence of a publicly available video editing dataset for fair comparisons, we construct a new benchmark named ZVE-50 dataset. Through comprehensive experimentation, we validate that EVE achieves a satisfactory trade-off between performance and efficiency. Codebase, datasets, and video editing demos are available at https://github.com/alipay/Ant-Multi-Modal-Framework/blob/main/prj/EVE.
A Better Approximation for Bipartite Traveling Tournament in Inter-League Sports Scheduling
Authors: Zhao Jingyang , Xiao Mingyu
Published: July 2024

The bipartite traveling tournament problem (BTTP) was initially introduced by Hoshino and Kawarabayashi (AAAI 2011) to address inter-league sports scheduling, which aims to design a feasible bipartite tournament between two n-team leagues under some constraints such that the total traveling distance of all participating teams is minimized. Since its introduction, several heuristic methods have been developed to design feasible schedules for NBA, NPB and so on. In terms of solution quality with a theoretical guarantee, previously only a (2+ε) approximation is known for the case that n≡0 (mod 3). Whether there are similar results for the cases that n≡1 (mod 3) and n≡2 (mod 3) was asked in the literature. In this paper, we answer this question positively by proposing a (3/2+ε)-approximation algorithm for any n and any constant ε>0, which also improves the previous ratio for the case that n≡0 (mod 3).
HVOFusion: Incremental Mesh Reconstruction Using Hybrid Voxel Octree
Authors: Liu Shaofan , Chen Junbo , Zhu Jianke
Published: July 2024

Incremental scene reconstruction is essential to the navigation in robotics. Most of the conventional methods typically make use of either TSDF (truncated signed distance functions) volume or neural networks to implicitly represent the surface. Due to the voxel representation or involving with time-consuming sampling, they have difficulty in balancing speed, memory storage, and surface quality. In this paper, we propose a novel hybrid voxel-octree approach to effectively fuse octree with voxel structures so that we can take advantage of both implicit surface and explicit triangular mesh representation. Such sparse structure preserves triangular faces in the leaf nodes and produces partial meshes sequentially for incremental reconstruction. This storage scheme allows us to naturally optimize the mesh in explicit 3D space to achieve higher surface quality. We iteratively deform the mesh towards the target and recovers vertex colors by optimizing a shading model. Experimental results on several datasets show that our proposed approach is capable of quickly and accurately reconstructing a scene with realistic colors. Code is available at https://github.com/Frankuzi/HVOFusion