bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Identification of Necessary Semantic Undertakers in the Causal View for Image-Text Matching
Authors: Zhang Huatian , Zhang Lei , Zhang Kun , Mao Zhendong
Published: March 2024

Image-text matching bridges vision and language, which is a fundamental task in multimodal intelligence. Its key challenge lies in how to capture visual-semantic relevance. Fine-grained semantic interactions come from fragment alignments between image regions and text words. However, not all fragments contribute to image-text relevance, and many existing methods are devoted to mining the vital ones to measure the relevance accurately. How well image and text relate depends on the degree of semantic sharing between them. Treating the degree as an effect and fragments as its possible causes, we define those indispensable causes for the generation of the degree as necessary undertakers, i.e., if any of them did not occur, the relevance would be no longer valid. In this paper, we revisit image-text matching in the causal view and uncover inherent causal properties of relevance generation. Then we propose a novel theoretical prototype for estimating the probability-of-necessity of fragments, PN_f, for the degree of semantic sharing by means of causal inference, and further design a Necessary Undertaker Identification Framework (NUIF) for image-text matching, which explicitly formalizes the fragment's contribution to image-text relevance by modeling PN_f in two ways. Extensive experiments show our method achieves state-of-the-art on benchmarks Flickr30K and MSCOCO.
AvatarVerse: High-Quality & Stable 3D Avatar Creation from Text and Pose
Authors: Zhang Huichao , Chen Bowen , Yang Hao , Qu Liao , Wang Xu , Chen Li , Long Chao , Zhu Feida , Du Daniel , Zheng Min
Published: March 2024

Creating expressive, diverse and high-quality 3D avatars from highly customized text descriptions and pose guidance is a challenging task, due to the intricacy of modeling and texturing in 3D that ensure details and various styles (realistic, fictional, etc). We present AvatarVerse, a stable pipeline for generating expressive high-quality 3D avatars from nothing but text descriptions and pose guidance. In specific, we introduce a 2D diffusion model conditioned on DensePose signal to establish 3D pose control of avatars through 2D images, which enhances view consistency from partially observed scenarios. It addresses the infamous Janus Problem and significantly stablizes the generation process. Moreover, we propose a progressive high-resolution 3D synthesis strategy, which obtains substantial improvement over the quality of the created 3D avatars. To this end, the proposed AvatarVerse pipeline achieves zero-shot 3D modeling of 3D avatars that are not only more expressive, but also in higher quality and fidelity than previous works. Rigorous qualitative evaluations and user studies showcase AvatarVerse's superiority in synthesizing high-fidelity 3D avatars, leading to a new standard in high-quality and stable 3D avatar creation. Our project page is: https://avatarverse3d.github.io/ .
MotionGPT: Finetuned LLMs Are General-Purpose Motion Generators
Authors: Zhang Yaqi , Huang Di , Liu Bin , Tang Shixiang , Lu Yan , Chen Lu , Bai Lei , Chu Qi , Yu Nenghai , Ouyang Wanli
Published: March 2024

Generating realistic human motion from given action descriptions has experienced significant advancements because of the emerging requirement of digital humans. While recent works have achieved impressive results in generating motion directly from textual action descriptions, they often support only a single modality of the control signal, which limits their application in the real digital human industry. This paper presents a Motion General-Purpose generaTor (MotionGPT) that can use multimodal control signals, e.g., text and single-frame poses, for generating consecutive human motions by treating multimodal signals as special input tokens in large language models (LLMs). Specifically, we first quantize multimodal control signals into discrete codes and then formulate them in a unified prompt instruction to ask the LLMs to generate the motion answer. Our MotionGPT demonstrates a unified human motion generation model with multimodal control signals by tuning a mere 0.4% of LLM parameters. To the best of our knowledge, MotionGPT is the first method to generate human motion by multimodal control signals, which we hope can shed light on this new direction. Visit our webpage at https://qiqiapink.github.io/MotionGPT/.
ArtBank: Artistic Style Transfer with Pre-trained Diffusion Model and Implicit Style Prompt Bank
Authors: Zhang Zhanjie , Zhang Quanwei , Xing Wei , Li Guangyuan , Zhao Lei , Sun Jiakai , Lan Zehua , Luan Junsheng , Huang Yiling , Lin Huaizhong
Published: March 2024

Artistic style transfer aims to repaint the content image with the learned artistic style. Existing artistic style transfer methods can be divided into two categories: small model-based approaches and pre-trained large-scale model-based approaches. Small model-based approaches can preserve the content strucuture, but fail to produce highly realistic stylized images and introduce artifacts and disharmonious patterns; Pre-trained large-scale model-based approaches can generate highly realistic stylized images but struggle with preserving the content structure. To address the above issues, we propose ArtBank, a novel artistic style transfer framework, to generate highly realistic stylized images while preserving the content structure of the content images. Specifically, to sufficiently dig out the knowledge embedded in pre-trained large-scale models, an Implicit Style Prompt Bank (ISPB), a set of trainable parameter matrices, is designed to learn and store knowledge from the collection of artworks and behave as a visual prompt to guide pre-trained large-scale models to generate highly realistic stylized images while preserving content structure. Besides, to accelerate training the above ISPB, we propose a novel Spatial-Statistical-based self-Attention Module (SSAM). The qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method over state-of-the-art artistic style transfer methods. Code is available at https://github.com/Jamie-Cheung/ArtBank.
Spatio-Temporal Fusion for Human Action Recognition via Joint Trajectory Graph
Authors: Zheng Yaolin , Huang Hongbo , Wang Xiuying , Yan Xiaoxu , Xu Longfei
Published: March 2024

Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) and Transformers have been widely applied to skeleton-based human action recognition, with each offering unique advantages in capturing spatial relationships and long-range dependencies. However, for most GCN methods, the construction of topological structures relies solely on the spatial information of human joints, limiting their ability to directly capture richer spatio-temporal dependencies. Additionally, the self-attention modules of many Transformer methods lack topological structure information, restricting the robustness and generalization of the models. To address these issues, we propose a Joint Trajectory Graph (JTG) that integrates spatio-temporal information into a uniform graph structure. We also present a Joint Trajectory GraphFormer (JT-GraphFormer), which directly captures the spatio-temporal relationships among all joint trajectories for human action recognition. To better integrate topological information into spatio-temporal relationships, we introduce a Spatio-Temporal Dijkstra Attention (STDA) mechanism to calculate relationship scores for all the joints in JTG. Furthermore, we incorporate the Koopman operator into the classification stage to enhance the model's representation ability and classification performance. Experiments demonstrate that JT-GraphFormer achieves outstanding performance in human action recognition tasks, outperforming state-of-the-art methods on the NTU RGB+D, NTU RGB+D 120, and N-UCLA datasets.
PVALane: Prior-Guided 3D Lane Detection with View-Agnostic Feature Alignment
Authors: Zheng Zewen , Zhang Xuemin , Mou Yongqiang , Gao Xiang , Li Chengxin , Huang Guoheng , Pun Chi-Man , Yuan Xiaochen
Published: March 2024

Monocular 3D lane detection is essential for a reliable autonomous driving system and has recently been rapidly developing. Existing popular methods mainly employ a predefined 3D anchor for lane detection based on front-viewed (FV) space, aiming to mitigate the effects of view transformations. However, the perspective geometric distortion between FV and 3D space in this FV-based approach introduces extremely dense anchor designs, which ultimately leads to confusing lane representations. In this paper, we introduce a novel prior-guided perspective on lane detection and propose an end-to-end framework named PVALane, which utilizes 2D prior knowledge to achieve precise and efficient 3D lane detection. Since 2D lane predictions can provide strong priors for lane existence, PVALane exploits FV features to generate sparse prior anchors with potential lanes in 2D space. These dynamic prior anchors help PVALane to achieve distinct lane representations and effectively improve the precision of PVALane due to the reduced lane search space. Additionally, by leveraging these prior anchors and representing lanes in both FV and bird-eye-viewed (BEV) spaces, we effectively align and merge semantic and geometric information from FV and BEV features. Extensive experiments conducted on the OpenLane and ONCE-3DLanes datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our method compared to existing state-of-the-art approaches and exhibit excellent robustness.
AMSP-UOD: When Vortex Convolution and Stochastic Perturbation Meet Underwater Object Detection
Authors: Zhou Jingchun , He Zongxin , Lam Kin-Man , Wang Yudong , Zhang Weishi , Guo Chunle , Li Chongyi
Published: March 2024

In this paper, we present a novel Amplitude-Modulated Stochastic Perturbation and Vortex Convolutional Network, AMSP-UOD, designed for underwater object detection. AMSP-UOD specifically addresses the impact of non-ideal imaging factors on detection accuracy in complex underwater environments. To mitigate the influence of noise on object detection performance, we propose AMSP Vortex Convolution (AMSP-VConv) to disrupt the noise distribution, enhance feature extraction capabilities, effectively reduce parameters, and improve network robustness. We design the Feature Association Decoupling Cross Stage Partial (FAD-CSP) module, which strengthens the association of long and short range features, improving the network performance in complex underwater environments. Additionally, our sophisticated post-processing method, based on non-maximum suppression with aspect-ratio similarity thresholds, optimizes detection in dense scenes, such as waterweed and schools of fish, improving object detection accuracy. Extensive experiments on the URPC and RUOD datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy and noise immunity. AMSP-UOD proposes an innovative solution with the potential for real-world applications. Our code is available at https://github.com/zhoujingchun03/AMSP-UOD.
SOGDet: Semantic-Occupancy Guided Multi-View 3D Object Detection
Authors: Zhou Qiu , Cao Jinming , Leng Hanchao , Yin Yifang , Kun Yu , Zimmermann Roger
Published: March 2024

In the field of autonomous driving, accurate and comprehensive perception of the 3D environment is crucial.
Bird's Eye View (BEV) based methods have emerged as a promising solution for 3D object detection using multi-view images as input.
However, existing 3D object detection methods often ignore the physical context in the environment, such as sidewalk and vegetation, resulting in sub-optimal performance.
In this paper, we propose a novel approach called SOGDet (Semantic-Occupancy Guided Multi-view 3D Object Detection), that leverages a 3D semantic-occupancy branch to improve the accuracy of 3D object detection.
In particular, the physical context modeled by semantic occupancy helps the detector to perceive the scenes in a more holistic view.
Our SOGDet is flexible to use and can be seamlessly integrated with most existing BEV-based methods.
To evaluate its effectiveness, we apply this approach to several state-of-the-art baselines and conduct extensive experiments on the exclusive nuScenes dataset.
Our results show that SOGDet consistently enhance the performance of three baseline methods in terms of nuScenes Detection Score (NDS) and mean Average Precision (mAP).
This indicates that the combination of 3D object detection and 3D semantic occupancy leads to a more comprehensive perception of the 3D environment, thereby aiding build more robust autonomous driving systems.
The codes are available at: https://github.com/zhouqiu/SOGDet.
Boosting Few-Shot Learning via Attentive Feature Regularization
Authors: Zhu Xingyu , Wang Shuo , Lu Jinda , Hao Yanbin , Liu Haifeng , He Xiangnan
Published: March 2024

Few-shot learning (FSL) based on manifold regularization aims to improve the recognition capacity of novel objects with limited training samples by mixing two samples from different categories with a blending factor. However, this mixing operation weakens the feature representation due to the linear interpolation and the overlooking of the importance of specific channels. To solve these issues, this paper proposes attentive feature regularization (AFR) which aims to improve the feature representativeness and discriminability. In our approach, we first calculate the relations between different categories of semantic labels to pick out the related features used for regularization. Then, we design two attention-based calculations at both the instance and channel levels. These calculations enable the regularization procedure to focus on two crucial aspects: the feature complementarity through adaptive interpolation in related categories and the emphasis on specific feature channels. Finally, we combine these regularization strategies to significantly improve the classifier performance. Empirical studies on several popular FSL benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of AFR, which improves the recognition accuracy of novel categories without the need to retrain any feature extractor, especially in the 1-shot setting. Furthermore, the proposed AFR can seamlessly integrate into other FSL methods to improve classification performance.
End-to-End Verification for Subgraph Solving
Authors: Gocht Stephan , McCreesh Ciaran , Myreen Magnus O. , Nordström Jakob , Oertel Andy , Tan Yong Kiam
Published: March 2024

Modern subgraph-finding algorithm implementations consist of thousands of lines of highly optimized code, and this complexity raises questions about their trustworthiness. Recently, some state-of-the-art subgraph solvers have been enhanced to output machine-verifiable proofs that their results are correct. While this significantly improves reliability, it is not a fully satisfactory solution, since end-users have to trust both the proof checking algorithms and the translation of the high-level graph problem into a low-level 0-1 integer linear program (ILP) used for the proofs.

In this work, we present the first formally verified toolchain capable of full end-to-end verification for subgraph solving, which closes both of these trust gaps. We have built encoder frontends for various graph problems together with a 0-1 ILP (a.k.a. pseudo-Boolean) proof checker, all implemented and formally verified in the CakeML ecosystem. This toolchain is flexible and extensible, and we use it to build verified proof checkers for both decision and optimization graph problems, namely, subgraph isomorphism, maximum clique, and maximum common (connected) induced subgraph. Our experimental evaluation shows that end-to-end formal verification is now feasible for a wide range of hard graph problems.
An Approximate Skolem Function Counter
Authors: Shaw Arijit , Juba Brendan , Meel Kuldeep S.
Published: March 2024

One approach to probabilistic inference involves counting the number of models of a given Boolean formula. Here, we are interested in inferences involving higher-order objects, i.e., functions. We study the following task: Given a Boolean specification between a set of inputs and outputs, count the number of functions of inputs such that the specification is met. Such functions are called Skolem functions.

We are motivated by the recent development of scalable approaches to Boolean function synthesis. This stands in relation to our problem analogously to the relationship between Boolean satisfiability and the model counting problem. Yet, counting Skolem functions poses considerable new challenges. From the complexity-theoretic standpoint, counting Skolem functions is not only #P-hard; it is quite unlikely to have an FPRAS (Fully Polynomial Randomized Approximation Scheme) as the problem of synthesizing a Skolem function remains challenging, even given access to an NP oracle.

The primary contribution of this work is the first algorithm, SkolemFC, that computes the number of Skolem functions. SkolemFC relies on technical connections between counting functions and propositional model counting: our algorithm makes a linear number of calls to an approximate model counter and computes an estimate of the number of Skolem functions with theoretical guarantees. Our prototype displays impressive scalability, handling benchmarks comparably to state-of-the-art Skolem function synthesis engines, even though counting all such functions ostensibly poses a greater challenge than synthesizing a single function.
Multimodal Graph Neural Architecture Search under Distribution Shifts
Authors: Cai Jie , Wang Xin , Li Haoyang , Zhang Ziwei , Zhu Wenwu
Published: March 2024

Multimodal graph neural architecture search (MGNAS) has shown great success for automatically designing the optimal multimodal graph neural network (MGNN) architecture by leveraging multimodal representation, crossmodal information and graph structure in one unified framework. However, existing MGNAS fails to handle distribution shifts that naturally exist in multimodal graph data, since the searched architectures inevitably capture spurious statistical correlations under distribution shifts. To solve this problem, we propose a novel Out-of-distribution Generalized Multimodal Graph Neural Architecture Search (OMG-NAS) method which optimizes the MGNN architecture with respect to its performance on decorrelated OOD data. Specifically, we propose a multimodal graph representation decorrelation strategy, which encourages the searched MGNN model to output representations that eliminate spurious correlations through iteratively optimizing the feature weights and controller. In addition, we propose a global sample weight estimator that facilitates the sharing of optimal sample weights learned from existing architectures. This design promotes the effective estimation of the sample weights for candidate MGNN architectures to generate decorrelated multimodal graph representations, concentrating more on the truly predictive relations between invariant features and ground-truth labels. Extensive experiments on real-world multimodal graph datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method over SOTA baselines.
KGTS: Contrastive Trajectory Similarity Learning over Prompt Knowledge Graph Embedding
Authors: Chen Zhen , Zhang Dalin , Feng Shanshan , Chen Kaixuan , Chen Lisi , Han Peng , Shang Shuo
Published: March 2024

Trajectory similarity computation serves as a fundamental functionality of various spatial information applications. Although existing deep learning similarity computation methods offer better efficiency and accuracy than non-learning solutions, they are still immature in trajectory embedding and suffer from poor generality and heavy preprocessing for training. Targeting these limitations, we propose a novel framework named KGTS based on knowledge graph grid embedding, prompt trajectory embedding, and unsupervised contrastive learning for improved trajectory similarity computation. Specifically, we first embed map grids with a GRot embedding method to vigorously grasp the neighbouring relations of grids. Then, a prompt trajectory embedding network incorporates the resulting grid embedding and extracts trajectory structure and point order information. It is trained by unsupervised contrastive learning, which not only alleviates the heavy preprocessing burden but also provides exceptional generality with creatively designed strategies for positive sample generation. The prompt trajectory embedding adopts a customized prompt paradigm to mitigate the gap between the grid embedding and the trajectory embedding. Extensive experiments on two real-world trajectory datasets demonstrate the superior performance of KGTS over state-of-the-art methods.
Discovering Sequential Patterns with Predictable Inter-event Delays
Authors: Cüppers Joscha , Krieger Paul , Vreeken Jilles
Published: March 2024

Summarizing sequential data with serial episodes allows non-trivial insight into the data generating process. Existing methods penalize gaps in pattern occurrences equally, regardless of where in the pattern these occur. This results in a strong bias against patterns with long inter-event delays, and in addition that regularity in terms of delays is not rewarded or discovered---even though both aspects provide key insight.
In this paper we tackle both these problems by explicitly modeling inter-event delay distributions. That is, we are not only interested in discovering the patterns, but also in describing how many times steps typically occur between their individual events. We formalize the problem in terms of the Minimum Description Length principle, by which we say the best set of patterns is the one that compresses the data best. The resulting optimization problem does not lend itself to exact optimization, and hence we propose Hopper to heuristically mine high quality patterns. Extensive experiments show that Hopper efficiently recovers the ground truth, discovers meaningful patterns from real-world data, and outperforms existing methods in discovering long-delay patterns.
Enhancing Job Recommendation through LLM-Based Generative Adversarial Networks
Authors: Du Yingpeng , Luo Di , Yan Rui , Wang Xiaopei , Liu Hongzhi , Zhu Hengshu , Song Yang , Zhang Jie
Published: March 2024

Recommending suitable jobs to users is a critical task in online recruitment platforms. While existing job recommendation methods encounter challenges such as the low quality of users' resumes, which hampers their accuracy and practical effectiveness.With the rapid development of large language models (LLMs), utilizing the rich external knowledge encapsulated within them, as well as their powerful reasoning capabilities, is a promising way to complete users' resumes for more accurate recommendations. However, directly leveraging LLMs to enhance recommendation results is not a one-size-fits-all solution, as LLMs may suffer from fabricated generation and few-shot problems, which degrade the quality of resume completion.

In this paper, we propose a novel LLM-based approach for job recommendation. To alleviate the limitation of fabricated generation for LLMs, we extract accurate and valuable information beyond users' self-description, which helps the LLMs better profile users for resume completion. Specifically, we not only extract users' explicit properties (e.g., skills, interests) from their self-description but also infer users' implicit characteristics from their behaviors for more accurate and meaningful resume completion. Nevertheless, some users still suffer from few-shot problems, which arise due to scarce interaction records, leading to limited guidance for high-quality resume generation. To address this issue, we propose aligning unpaired low-quality with high-quality generated resumes by Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), which can refine the resume representations for better recommendation results. Extensive experiments on three large real-world recruitment datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.
StockMixer: A Simple Yet Strong MLP-Based Architecture for Stock Price Forecasting
Authors: Fan Jinyong , Shen Yanyan
Published: March 2024

Stock price forecasting is a fundamental yet challenging task in quantitative investment. Various researchers have developed a combination of neural network models (e.g., RNNs, GNNs, Transformers) for capturing complex indicator, temporal and stock correlations of the stock data.While complex architectures are highly expressive, they are often difficult to optimize and the performances are often compromised by the limited stock data. In this paper, we propose a simple MLP-based architecture named StockMixer which is easy to optimize and enjoys strong predictive performance. StockMixer performs indicator mixing, followed by time mixing, and finally stock mixing. Unlike the standard MLP-based mixing, we devise the time mixing to exchange multi-scale time patch information and realize the stock mixing by exploiting stock-to-market and market-to-stock influences explicitly. Extensive experiments on real stock benchmarks demonstrate our proposed StockMixer outperforms various state-of-the-art forecasting methods with a notable margin while reducing memory usage and runtime cost.Code is available at https://github.com/SJTU-Quant/StockMixer.
Zero-1-to-3: Domain-Level Zero-Shot Cognitive Diagnosis via One Batch of Early-Bird Students towards Three Diagnostic Objectives
Authors: Gao Weibo , Liu Qi , Wang Hao , Yue Linan , Bi Haoyang , Gu Yin , Yao Fangzhou , Zhang Zheng , Li Xin , He Yuanjing
Published: March 2024

Cognitive diagnosis seeks to estimate the cognitive states of students by exploring their logged practice quiz data. It plays a pivotal role in personalized learning guidance within intelligent education systems. In this paper, we focus on an important, practical, yet often underexplored task: domain-level zero-shot cognitive diagnosis (DZCD), which arises due to the absence of student practice logs in newly launched domains. Recent cross-domain diagnostic models have been demonstrated to be a promising strategy for DZCD. These methods primarily focus on how to transfer student states across domains. However, they might inadvertently incorporate non-transferable information into student representations, thereby limiting the efficacy of knowledge transfer. To tackle this, we propose Zero-1-to-3, a domain-level zero-shot cognitive diagnosis framework via one batch of early-bird students towards three diagnostic objectives. Our approach initiates with pre-training a diagnosis model with dual regularizers, which decouples student states into domain-shared and domain-specific parts. The shared cognitive signals can be transferred to the target domain, enriching the cognitive priors for the new domain, which ensures the cognitive state propagation objective. Subsequently, we devise a strategy to generate simulated practice logs for cold-start students through analyzing the behavioral patterns from early-bird students, fulfilling the domain-adaption goal. Consequently, we refine the cognitive states of cold-start students as diagnostic outcomes via virtual data, aligning with the diagnosis-oriented goal. Finally, extensive experiments on six real-world datasets highlight the efficacy of our model for DZCD and its practical application in question recommendation. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/bigdata-ustc/Zero-1-to-3.
VITA: ‘Carefully Chosen and Weighted Less’ Is Better in Medication Recommendation
Authors: Kim Taeri , Heo Jiho , Kim Hongil , Shin Kijung , Kim Sang-Wook
Published: March 2024

We address the medication recommendation problem, which aims to recommend effective medications for a patient's current visit by utilizing information (e.g., diagnoses and procedures) given at the patient's current and past visits. While there exist a number of recommender systems designed for this problem, we point out that they are challenged in accurately capturing the relation (spec., the degree of relevance) between the current and each of the past visits for the patient when obtaining her current health status, which is the basis for recommending medications. To address this limitation, we propose a novel medication recommendation framework, named VITA, based on the following two novel ideas: (1) relevant-Visit selectIon; (2) Target-aware Attention. Through extensive experiments using real-world datasets, we demonstrate the superiority of VITA (spec., up to 5.67% higher accuracy, in terms of Jaccard, than the best competitor) and the effectiveness of its two core ideas. The code is available at https://github.com/jhheo0123/VITA.
Graph Disentangled Contrastive Learning with Personalized Transfer for Cross-Domain Recommendation
Authors: Liu Jing , Sun Lele , Nie Weizhi , Jing Peiguang , Su Yuting
Published: March 2024

Cross-Domain Recommendation (CDR) has been proven to effectively alleviate the data sparsity problem in Recommender System (RS). Recent CDR methods often disentangle user features into domain-invariant and domain-specific features for efficient cross-domain knowledge transfer. Despite showcasing robust performance, three crucial aspects remain unexplored for existing disentangled CDR approaches: i) The significance nuances of the interaction behaviors are ignored in generating disentangled features; ii)
The user features are disentangled irrelevant to the individual items to be recommended; iii) The general knowledge transfer overlooks the user's personality when interacting with diverse items. To this end, we propose a Graph Disentangled Contrastive framework for CDR (GDCCDR) with personalized transfer by meta-networks. An adaptive parameter-free filter is proposed to gauge the significance of diverse interactions, thereby facilitating more refined disentangled representations. In sight of the success of Contrastive Learning (CL) in RS, we propose two CL-based constraints for item-aware disentanglement. Proximate CL ensures the coherence of domain-invariant features between domains, while eliminatory CL strives to disentangle features within each domains using mutual information between users and items. Finally, for domain-invariant features, we adopt meta-networks to achieve personalized transfer. Experimental results on four real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of GDCCDR over state-of-the-art methods.
Learning Accurate and Bidirectional Transformation via Dynamic Embedding Transportation for Cross-Domain Recommendation
Authors: Liu Weiming , Chen Chaochao , Liao Xinting , Hu Mengling , Tan Yanchao , Wang Fan , Zheng Xiaolin , Ong Yew Soon
Published: March 2024

With the rapid development of Internet and Web techniques, Cross-Domain Recommendation (CDR) models have been widely explored for resolving the data-sparsity
and cold-start problem. Meanwhile, most CDR models should utilize explicit domain-shareable information (e.g., overlapped users or items) for knowledge transfer across domains. However, this assumption may not be always satisfied since users and items are always non-overlapped in real practice. The performance of many previous works will be severely impaired when these domain-shareable information are not available. To address the aforementioned issues, we propose the Joint Preference Exploration and Dynamic Embedding Transportation model (JPEDET) in this paper which is a novel framework for solving the CDR problem when users and items are non-overlapped. JPEDET includes two main modules, i.e., joint preference exploration module and dynamic embedding transportation module. The joint preference exploration module aims to fuse rating and review information for modelling user preferences. The dynamic embedding transportation module is set to share knowledge via neural ordinary equations for dual transformation across domains. Moreover, we innovatively propose the dynamic transport flow equipped with linear interpolation guidance on barycentric Wasserstein path for achieving accurate and bidirectional transformation. Our empirical study on Amazon datasets demonstrates that JPEDET significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art models under the CDR setting.
Plug-In Diffusion Model for Sequential Recommendation
Authors: Ma Haokai , Xie Ruobing , Meng Lei , Chen Xin , Zhang Xu , Lin Leyu , Kang Zhanhui
Published: March 2024

Pioneering efforts have verified the effectiveness of the diffusion models in exploring the informative uncertainty for recommendation. Considering the difference between recommendation and image synthesis tasks, existing methods have undertaken tailored refinements to the diffusion and reverse process. However, these approaches typically use the highest-score item in corpus for user interest prediction, leading to the ignorance of the user's generalized preference contained within other items, thereby remaining constrained by the data sparsity issue. To address this issue, this paper presents a novel Plug-in Diffusion Model for Recommendation (PDRec) framework, which employs the diffusion model as a flexible plugin to jointly take full advantage of the diffusion-generating user preferences on all items. Specifically, PDRec first infers the users' dynamic preferences on all items via a time-interval diffusion model and proposes a Historical Behavior Reweighting (HBR) mechanism to identify the high-quality behaviors and suppress noisy behaviors. In addition to the observed items, PDRec proposes a Diffusion-based Positive Augmentation (DPA) strategy to leverage the top-ranked unobserved items as the potential positive samples, bringing in informative and diverse soft signals to alleviate data sparsity. To alleviate the false negative sampling issue, PDRec employs Noise-free Negative Sampling (NNS) to select stable negative samples for ensuring effective model optimization. Extensive experiments and analyses on four datasets have verified the superiority of the proposed PDRec over the state-of-the-art baselines and showcased the universality of PDRec as a flexible plugin for commonly-used sequential encoders in different recommendation scenarios. The code is available in https://github.com/hulkima/PDRec.
ModWaveMLP: MLP-Based Mode Decomposition and Wavelet Denoising Model to Defeat Complex Structures in Traffic Forecasting
Authors: Sun Ke , Liu Pei , Li Pengfei , Liao Zhifang
Published: March 2024

Traffic prediction is the core issue of Intelligent Transportation Systems. Recently, researchers have tended to use complex structures, such as transformer-based structures, for tasks such as traffic prediction. Notably, traffic data is simpler to process compared to text and images, which raises questions about the necessity of these structures. Additionally, when handling traffic data, researchers tend to manually design the model structure based on the data features, which makes the structure of traffic prediction redundant and the model generalizability limited. To address the above, we introduce the ‘ModWaveMLP’—A multilayer perceptron (MLP) based model designed according to mode decomposition and wavelet noise reduction information learning concepts. The model is based on simple MLP structure, which achieves the separation and prediction of different traffic modes and does not depend on additional features introduced such as the topology of the traffic network. By performing experiments on real-world datasets METR-LA and PEMS-BAY, our model achieves SOTA, outperforms GNN and transformer-based models, and outperforms those that introduce additional feature data with better generalizability, and we further demonstrate the effectiveness of the various parts of the model through ablation experiments. This offers new insights to subsequent researchers involved in traffic model design. The code is available at: https://github.com/Kqingzheng/ModWaveMLP.
Motif-Aware Riemannian Graph Neural Network with Generative-Contrastive Learning
Authors: Sun Li , Huang Zhenhao , Wang Zixi , Wang Feiyang , Peng Hao , Yu Philip S.
Published: March 2024

Graphs are typical non-Euclidean data of complex structures. In recent years, Riemannian graph representation learning has emerged as an exciting alternative to Euclidean ones. However, Riemannian methods are still in an early stage: most of them present a single curvature (radius) regardless of structural complexity, suffer from numerical instability due to the exponential/logarithmic map, and lack the ability to capture motif regularity. In light of the issues above, we propose the problem of Motif-aware Riemannian Graph Representation Learning, seeking a numerically stable encoder to capture motif regularity in a diverse-curvature manifold without labels. To this end, we present a novel Motif-aware Riemannian model with Generative-Contrastive learning (MotifRGC), which conducts a minmax game in Riemannian manifold in a self-supervised manner. First, we propose a new type of Riemannian GCN (D-GCN), in which we construct a diverse-curvature manifold by a product layer with the diversified factor, and replace the exponential/logarithmic map by a stable kernel layer. Second, we introduce a motif-aware Riemannian generative-contrastive learning to capture motif regularity in the constructed manifold and learn motif-aware node representation without external labels. Empirical results show the superiority of MofitRGC.
End-to-End Learning of LTLf Formulae by Faithful LTLf Encoding
Authors: Wan Hai , Liang Pingjia , Du Jianfeng , Luo Weilin , Ye Rongzhen , Peng Bo
Published: March 2024

It is important to automatically discover the underlying tree-structured formulae from large amounts of data. In this paper, we examine learning linear temporal logic on finite traces (LTLf) formulae, which is a tree structure syntactically and characterizes temporal properties semantically. Its core challenge is to bridge the gap between the concise tree-structured syntax and the complex LTLf semantics. Besides, the learning quality is endangered by explosion of the search space and wrong search bias guided by imperfect data. We tackle these challenges by proposing an LTLf encoding method to parameterize a neural network so that the neural computation is able to simulate the inference of LTLf formulae. We first identify faithful LTLf encoding, a subclass of LTLf encoding, which has a one-to-one correspondence to LTLf formulae. Faithful encoding guarantees that the learned parameter assignment of the neural network can directly be interpreted to an LTLf formula. With such an encoding method, we then propose an end-to-end approach, TLTLf, to learn LTLf formulae through neural networks parameterized by our LTLf encoding method. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance with up to 7% improvement in accuracy, highlighting the benefits of introducing the faithful LTLf encoding.
Exploring Large Language Model for Graph Data Understanding in Online Job Recommendations
Authors: Wu Likang , Qiu Zhaopeng , Zheng Zhi , Zhu Hengshu , Chen Enhong
Published: March 2024

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing tasks, demonstrating their exceptional capabilities in various domains. However, their potential for graph semantic mining in job recommendations remains largely unexplored. This paper focuses on unveiling the capability of large language models in understanding behavior graphs and leveraging this understanding to enhance recommendations in online recruitment, including promoting out-of-distribution (OOD) applications. We present a novel framework that harnesses the rich contextual information and semantic representations provided by large language models to analyze behavior graphs and uncover underlying patterns and relationships. Specifically, we propose a meta-path prompt constructor that aids LLM recommender in grasping the semantics of behavior graphs for the first time and design a corresponding path augmentation module to alleviate the prompt bias introduced by path-based sequence input. By facilitating this capability, our framework enables personalized and accurate job recommendations for individual users. We evaluate the effectiveness of our approach on comprehensive real-world datasets and demonstrate its ability to improve the relevance and quality of recommended results. This research not only sheds light on the untapped potential of large language models but also provides valuable insights for developing advanced recommendation systems in the recruitment market. The findings contribute to the growing field of natural language processing and offer practical implications for enhancing job search experiences.
NestE: Modeling Nested Relational Structures for Knowledge Graph Reasoning
Authors: Xiong Bo , Nayyeri Mojtaba , Luo Linhao , Wang Zihao , Pan Shirui , Staab Steffen
Published: March 2024

Reasoning with knowledge graphs (KGs) has primarily focused on triple-shaped facts. Recent advancements have been explored to enhance the semantics of these facts by incorporating more potent representations, such as hyper-relational facts. However, these approaches are limited to atomic facts, which describe a single piece of information. This paper extends beyond atomic facts and delves into nested facts, represented by quoted triples where subjects and objects are triples themselves (e.g., ((BarackObama, holds_position, President), succeed_by, (DonaldTrump, holds_position, President))). These nested facts enable the expression of complex semantics like situations over time and logical patterns} over entities and relations. In response, we introduce NestE, a novel KG embedding approach that captures the semantics of both atomic and nested factual knowledge. NestE represents each atomic fact as a 1*3 matrix, and each nested relation is modeled as a 3*3 matrix that rotates the 1*3 atomic fact matrix through matrix multiplication. Each element of the matrix is represented as a complex number in the generalized 4D hypercomplex space, including (spherical) quaternions, hyperbolic quaternions, and split-quaternions. Through thorough analysis, we demonstrate the embedding's efficacy in capturing diverse logical patterns over nested facts, surpassing the confines of first-order logic-like expressions. Our experimental results showcase NestE's significant performance gains over current baselines in triple prediction and conditional link prediction. The code and pre-trained models are open available at https://github.com/xiongbo010/NestE.
Explainable Origin-Destination Crowd Flow Interpolation via Variational Multi-Modal Recurrent Graph Auto-Encoder
Authors: Zhou Qiang , Lu Xinjiang , Gu Jingjing , Zheng Zhe , Jin Bo , Zhou Jingbo
Published: March 2024

Origin-destination (OD) crowd flow, if more accurately inferred at a fine-grained level, has the potential to enhance the efficacy of various urban applications. While in practice for mining OD crowd flow with effect, the problem of spatially interpolating OD crowd flow occurs since the ineluctable missing values. This problem is further complicated by the inherent scarcity and noise nature of OD crowd flow data. In this paper, we propose an uncertainty-aware interpolative and explainable framework, namely UApex, for realizing reliable and trustworthy OD crowd flow interpolation. Specifically, we first design a Variational Multi-modal Recurrent Graph Auto-Encoder (VMR-GAE) for uncertainty-aware OD crowd flow interpolation. A key idea here is to formulate the problem as semi-supervised learning on directed graphs. Next, to mitigate the data scarcity, we incorporate a distribution alignment mechanism that can introduce supplementary modals into variational inference. Then, a dedicated decoder with a Poisson prior is proposed for OD crowd flow interpolation. Moreover, to make VMR-GAE more trustworthy, we develop an efficient and uncertainty-aware explainer that can provide explanations from the spatiotemporal topology perspective via the Shapley value. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets validate that VMR-GAE outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines. Also, an exploratory empirical study shows that the proposed explainer can generate meaningful spatiotemporal explanations.
Optimistic Policy Gradient in Multi-Player Markov Games with a Single Controller: Convergence beyond the Minty Property
Authors: Anagnostides Ioannis , Panageas Ioannis , Farina Gabriele , Sandholm Tuomas
Published: March 2024

Policy gradient methods enjoy strong practical performance in numerous tasks in reinforcement learning. Their theoretical understanding in multiagent settings, however, remains limited, especially beyond two-player competitive and potential Markov games. In this paper, we develop a new framework to characterize optimistic policy gradient methods in multi-player Markov games with a single controller. Specifically, under the further assumption that the game exhibits an equilibrium collapse, in that the marginals of coarse correlated equilibria (CCE) induce Nash equilibria (NE), we show convergence to stationary epsilon-NE in O(1/epsilon^2) iterations, where O suppresses polynomial factors in the natural parameters of the game. Such an equilibrium collapse is well-known to manifest itself in two-player zero-sum Markov games, but also occurs even in a class of multi-player Markov games with separable interactions, as established by recent work. As a result, we bypass known complexity barriers for computing stationary NE when either of our assumptions fails. Our approach relies on a natural generalization of the classical Minty property that we introduce, which we anticipate to have further applications beyond Markov games.
Completing Priceable Committees: Utilitarian and Representation Guarantees for Proportional Multiwinner Voting
Authors: Brill Markus , Peters Jannik
Published: March 2024

When selecting committees based on preferences of voters, a variety of different criteria can be considered. Two natural objectives are maximizing the utilitarian welfare (the sum of voters' utilities) and coverage (the number of represented voters) of the selected committee. Previous work has studied the impact on utilitarian welfare and coverage when requiring the committee to satisfy minimal requirements such as justified representation or weak proportionality. In this paper, we consider the impact of imposing much more demanding proportionality axioms. We identify a class of voting rules that achieve strong guarantees on utilitarian welfare and coverage when combined with appropriate completions. This class is defined via a weakening of priceability and contains prominent rules such as the Method of Equal Shares. We show that committees selected by these rules (i) can be completed to achieve optimal coverage and (ii) can be completed to achieve an asymptotically optimal approximation to the utilitarian welfare if they additionally satisfy EJR+. Answering an open question of Elkind et al. (2022), we use the Greedy Justified Candidate Rule to obtain the best possible utilitarian guarantee subject to proportionality. We also consider completion methods suggested in the participatory budgeting literature and other objectives besides welfare and coverage.
The Complexity of Computing Robust Mediated Equilibria in Ordinal Games
Authors: Conitzer Vincent
Published: March 2024

Usually, to apply game-theoretic methods, we must specify utilities
precisely, and we run the risk that the solutions we compute are not
robust to errors in this specification. Ordinal games provide an
attractive alternative: they require specifying only which outcomes
are preferred to which other ones. Unfortunately, they provide little
guidance for how to play unless there are pure Nash equilibria;
evaluating mixed strategies appears to fundamentally require cardinal
utilities.

In this paper, we observe that we can in fact make good use of mixed
strategies in ordinal games if we consider settings that allow for
folk theorems. These allow us to find equilibria that are robust, in
the sense that they remain equilibria no matter which cardinal
utilities are the correct ones -- as long as they are consistent with
the specified ordinal preferences. We analyze this concept and study
the computational complexity of finding such equilibria in a range of
settings.