pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Towards Robust Recommendation: A Review and an Adversarial Robustness Evaluation Library
Authors: Lei Cheng, Xiaowen Huang, Jitao Sang, Jian Yu
Date: 2024-04-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Robustness, Non-Adversarial Robustness, Recommendation Systems

Recently, recommender system has achieved significant success. However, due to the openness of recommender systems, they remain vulnerable to malicious attacks. Additionally, natural noise in training data and issues such as data sparsity can also degrade the performance of recommender systems. Therefore, enhancing the robustness of recommender systems has become an increasingly important research topic. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive overview of the robustness of recommender systems. Based on our investigation, we categorize the robustness of recommender systems into adversarial robustness and non-adversarial robustness. In the adversarial robustness, we introduce the fundamental principles and classical methods of recommender system adversarial attacks and defenses. In the non-adversarial robustness, we analyze non-adversarial robustness from the perspectives of data sparsity, natural noise, and data imbalance. Additionally, we summarize commonly used datasets and evaluation metrics for evaluating the robustness of recommender systems. Finally, we also discuss the current challenges in the field of recommender system robustness and potential future research directions. Additionally, to facilitate fair and efficient evaluation of attack and defense methods in adversarial robustness, we propose an adversarial robustness evaluation library--ShillingREC, and we conduct evaluations of basic attack models and recommendation models. ShillingREC project is released at https://github.com/chengleileilei/ShillingREC.
A Taxation Perspective for Fair Re-ranking
Authors: Chen Xu, Xiaopeng Ye, Wenjie Wang, Liang Pang, Jun Xu, Tat-Seng Chua
Date: 2024-04-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Ethics, Fairness, Re-Ranking

Fair re-ranking aims to redistribute ranking slots among items more equitably to ensure responsibility and ethics. The exploration of redistribution problems has a long history in economics, offering valuable insights for conceptualizing fair re-ranking as a taxation process. Such a formulation provides us with a fresh perspective to re-examine fair re-ranking and inspire the development of new methods. From a taxation perspective, we theoretically demonstrate that most previous fair re-ranking methods can be reformulated as an item-level tax policy. Ideally, a good tax policy should be effective and conveniently controllable to adjust ranking resources. However, both empirical and theoretical analyses indicate that the previous item-level tax policy cannot meet two ideal controllable requirements: (1) continuity, ensuring minor changes in tax rates result in small accuracy and fairness shifts; (2) controllability over accuracy loss, ensuring precise estimation of the accuracy loss under a specific tax rate. To overcome these challenges, we introduce a new fair re-ranking method named Tax-rank, which levies taxes based on the difference in utility between two items. Then, we efficiently optimize such an objective by utilizing the Sinkhorn algorithm in optimal transport. Upon a comprehensive analysis, Our model Tax-rank offers a superior tax policy for fair re-ranking, theoretically demonstrating both continuity and controllability over accuracy loss. Experimental results show that Tax-rank outperforms all state-of-the-art baselines in terms of effectiveness and efficiency on recommendation and advertising tasks.
Un análisis bibliométrico de la producción científica acerca del agrupamiento de trayectorias GPS
Authors: Gary Reyes, Laura Lanzarini, César Estrebou, Aurelio F. Bariviera
Date: 2024-04-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Clustering, Trajectory Clustering

Clustering algorithms or methods for GPS trajectories are in constant evolution due to the interest aroused in part of the scientific community. With the development of clustering algorithms considered traditional, improvements to these algorithms and even unique methods considered as "novelty" for science have emerged. This work aims to analyze the scientific production that exists around the topic "GPS trajectory clustering" by means of bibliometrics. Therefore, a total of 559 articles from the main collection of Scopus were analyzed, previously filtering the generated sample to discard any article that does not have a direct relationship with the topic to be analyzed. This analysis establishes an ideal environment for other disciplines and researchers, since it provides a current state of the trend of the subject of study in their field of research. -- Los algoritmos o m\'etodos de agrupamiento para trayectorias GPS se encuentran en constante evoluci\'on debido al inter\'es que despierta en parte de la comunidad cient\'ifica. Con el desarrollo de los algoritmos de agrupamiento considerados tradicionales han surgido mejoras a estos algoritmos e incluso m\'etodos \'unicos considerados como "novedad" para la ciencia. Este trabajo tiene como objetivo analizar la producci\'on cient\'ifica que existe alrededor del tema "agrupamiento de trayectorias GPS" mediante la bibliometr\'ia. Por lo tanto, fueron analizados un total de 559 art\'iculos de la colecci\'on principal de Scopus, realizando previamente un filtrado de la muestra generada para descartar todo aquel art\'iculo que no tenga una relaci\'on directa con el tema a analizar. Este an\'alisis establece un ambiente ideal para otras disciplinas e investigadores, ya que entrega un estado actual de la tendencia que lleva la tem\'atica de estudio en su campo de investigaci\'on.
SetCSE: Set Operations using Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings
Authors: Kang Liu
Date: 2024-04-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Information Retrieval, Retrieval, Sentence, Sentence Embedding, Sentence-Embedding, Sentence Embeddings, Sentence Retrieval

Taking inspiration from Set Theory, we introduce SetCSE, an innovative information retrieval framework. SetCSE employs sets to represent complex semantics and incorporates well-defined operations for structured information querying under the provided context. Within this framework, we introduce an inter-set contrastive learning objective to enhance comprehension of sentence embedding models concerning the given semantics. Furthermore, we present a suite of operations, including SetCSE intersection, difference, and operation series, that leverage sentence embeddings of the enhanced model for complex sentence retrieval tasks. Throughout this paper, we demonstrate that SetCSE adheres to the conventions of human language expressions regarding compounded semantics, provides a significant enhancement in the discriminatory capability of underlying sentence embedding models, and enables numerous information retrieval tasks involving convoluted and intricate prompts which cannot be achieved using existing querying methods.
Revealing and Utilizing In-group Favoritism for Graph-based Collaborative Filtering
Authors: Hoin Jung, Hyunsoo Cho, Myungje Choi, Joowon Lee, Jung Ho Park, Myungjoo Kang
Date: 2024-04-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Collaborative Filtering

When it comes to a personalized item recommendation system, It is essential to extract users' preferences and purchasing patterns. Assuming that users in the real world form a cluster and there is common favoritism in each cluster, in this work, we introduce Co-Clustering Wrapper (CCW). We compute co-clusters of users and items with co-clustering algorithms and add CF subnetworks for each cluster to extract the in-group favoritism. Combining the features from the networks, we obtain rich and unified information about users. We experimented real world datasets considering two aspects: Finding the number of groups divided according to in-group preference, and measuring the quantity of improvement of the performance.
KamerRaad: Enhancing Information Retrieval in Belgian National Politics through Hierarchical Summarization and Conversational Interfaces
Authors: Alexander Rogiers, Maarten Buyl, Bo Kang, Tijl De Bie
Date: 2024-04-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Retrieval

KamerRaad is an AI tool that leverages large language models to help citizens interactively engage with Belgian political information. The tool extracts and concisely summarizes key excerpts from parliamentary proceedings, followed by the potential for interaction based on generative AI that allows users to steadily build up their understanding. KamerRaad's front-end, built with Streamlit, facilitates easy interaction, while the back-end employs open-source models for text embedding and generation to ensure accurate and relevant responses. By collecting feedback, we intend to enhance the relevancy of our source retrieval and the quality of our summarization, thereby enriching the user experience with a focus on source-driven dialogue.
Leveraging Intra-modal and Inter-modal Interaction for Multi-Modal Entity Alignment
Authors: Zhiwei Hu, Víctor Gutiérrez-Basulto, Zhiliang Xiang, Ru Li, Jeff Z. Pan
Date: 2024-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Entity Alignment, Knowledge Graphs, Multi-modal Entity Alignment

Multi-modal entity alignment (MMEA) aims to identify equivalent entity pairs across different multi-modal knowledge graphs (MMKGs). Existing approaches focus on how to better encode and aggregate information from different modalities. However, it is not trivial to leverage multi-modal knowledge in entity alignment due to the modal heterogeneity. In this paper, we propose a Multi-Grained Interaction framework for Multi-Modal Entity Alignment (MIMEA), which effectively realizes multi-granular interaction within the same modality or between different modalities. MIMEA is composed of four modules: i) a Multi-modal Knowledge Embedding module, which extracts modality-specific representations with multiple individual encoders; ii) a Probability-guided Modal Fusion module, which employs a probability guided approach to integrate uni-modal representations into joint-modal embeddings, while considering the interaction between uni-modal representations; iii) an Optimal Transport Modal Alignment module, which introduces an optimal transport mechanism to encourage the interaction between uni-modal and joint-modal embeddings; iv) a Modal-adaptive Contrastive Learning module, which distinguishes the embeddings of equivalent entities from those of non-equivalent ones, for each modality. Extensive experiments conducted on two real-world datasets demonstrate the strong performance of MIMEA compared to the SoTA. Datasets and code have been submitted as supplementary materials.
An Offline Reinforcement Learning Algorithm Customized for Multi-Task Fusion in Large-Scale Recommender Systems
Authors: Peng Liu, Cong Xu, Ming Zhao, Jiawei Zhu, Bin Wang, Yi Ren
Date: 2024-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Efficient Exploration, Multi-Task Learning, Offline RL, Recommendation Systems, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

As the last critical stage of RSs, Multi-Task Fusion (MTF) is responsible for combining multiple scores outputted by Multi-Task Learning (MTL) into a final score to maximize user satisfaction, which determines the ultimate recommendation results. Recently, to optimize long-term user satisfaction within a recommendation session, Reinforcement Learning (RL) is used for MTF in the industry. However, the offline RL algorithms used for MTF so far have the following severe problems: 1) to avoid out-of-distribution (OOD) problem, their constraints are overly strict, which seriously damage their performance; 2) they are unaware of the exploration policy used for producing training data and never interact with real environment, so only suboptimal policy can be learned; 3) the traditional exploration policies are inefficient and hurt user experience. To solve the above problems, we propose a novel method named IntegratedRL-MTF customized for MTF in large-scale RSs. IntegratedRL-MTF integrates offline RL model with our online exploration policy to relax overstrict and complicated constraints, which significantly improves its performance. We also design an extremely efficient exploration policy, which eliminates low-value exploration space and focuses on exploring potential high-value state-action pairs. Moreover, we adopt progressive training mode to further enhance our model's performance with the help of our exploration policy. We conduct extensive offline and online experiments in the short video channel of Tencent News. The results demonstrate that our model outperforms other models remarkably. IntegratedRL-MTF has been fully deployed in our RS and other large-scale RSs in Tencent, which have achieved significant improvements.
DiffTraj: Generating GPS Trajectory with Diffusion Probabilistic Model
Authors: Yuanshao Zhu, Yongchao Ye, Shiyao Zhang, Xiangyu Zhao, James J. Q. Yu
Date: 2023-04-23 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11
Tasks: Denoising, model

Pervasive integration of GPS-enabled devices and data acquisition technologies has led to an exponential increase in GPS trajectory data, fostering advancements in spatial-temporal data mining research. Nonetheless, GPS trajectories contain personal geolocation information, rendering serious privacy concerns when working with raw data. A promising approach to address this issue is trajectory generation, which involves replacing original data with generated, privacy-free alternatives. Despite the potential of trajectory generation, the complex nature of human behavior and its inherent stochastic characteristics pose challenges in generating high-quality trajectories. In this work, we propose a spatial-temporal diffusion probabilistic model for trajectory generation (DiffTraj). This model effectively combines the generative abilities of diffusion models with the spatial-temporal features derived from real trajectories. The core idea is to reconstruct and synthesize geographic trajectories from white noise through a reverse trajectory denoising process. Furthermore, we propose a Trajectory UNet (Traj-UNet) deep neural network to embed conditional information and accurately estimate noise levels during the reverse process. Experiments on two real-world datasets show that DiffTraj can be intuitively applied to generate high-fidelity trajectories while retaining the original distributions. Moreover, the generated results can support downstream trajectory analysis tasks and significantly outperform other methods in terms of geo-distribution evaluations.
Unleashing the Power of Multi-Task Learning: A Comprehensive Survey Spanning Traditional, Deep, and Pretrained Foundation Model Eras
Authors: Jun Yu, Yutong Dai, Xiaokang Liu, Jin Huang, Yishan Shen, Ke Zhang, Rong Zhou, Eashan Adhikarla, Wenxuan Ye, Yixin Liu, Zhaoming Kong, Kai Zhang, Yilong Yin, Vinod Namboodiri, Brian D. Davison, Jason H. Moore, Yong Chen
Date: 2024-04-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Task Learning, Prognosis, Recommendation Systems, Survey

MTL is a learning paradigm that effectively leverages both task-specific and shared information to address multiple related tasks simultaneously. In contrast to STL, MTL offers a suite of benefits that enhance both the training process and the inference efficiency. MTL's key advantages encompass streamlined model architecture, performance enhancement, and cross-domain generalizability. Over the past twenty years, MTL has become widely recognized as a flexible and effective approach in various fields, including CV, NLP, recommendation systems, disease prognosis and diagnosis, and robotics. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of the evolution of MTL, encompassing the technical aspects of cutting-edge methods from traditional approaches to deep learning and the latest trend of pretrained foundation models. Our survey methodically categorizes MTL techniques into five key areas: regularization, relationship learning, feature propagation, optimization, and pre-training. This categorization not only chronologically outlines the development of MTL but also dives into various specialized strategies within each category. Furthermore, the survey reveals how the MTL evolves from handling a fixed set of tasks to embracing a more flexible approach free from task or modality constraints. It explores the concepts of task-promptable and -agnostic training, along with the capacity for ZSL, which unleashes the untapped potential of this historically coveted learning paradigm. Overall, we hope this survey provides the research community with a comprehensive overview of the advancements in MTL from its inception in 1997 to the present in 2023. We address present challenges and look ahead to future possibilities, shedding light on the opportunities and potential avenues for MTL research in a broad manner. This project is publicly available at https://github.com/junfish/Awesome-Multitask-Learning.
Probing Unlearned Diffusion Models: A Transferable Adversarial Attack Perspective
Authors: Xiaoxuan Han, Songlin Yang, Wei Wang, Yang Li, Jing Dong
Date: 2024-04-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack

Advanced text-to-image diffusion models raise safety concerns regarding identity privacy violation, copyright infringement, and Not Safe For Work content generation. Towards this, unlearning methods have been developed to erase these involved concepts from diffusion models. However, these unlearning methods only shift the text-to-image mapping and preserve the visual content within the generative space of diffusion models, leaving a fatal flaw for restoring these erased concepts. This erasure trustworthiness problem needs probe, but previous methods are sub-optimal from two perspectives: (1) Lack of transferability: Some methods operate within a white-box setting, requiring access to the unlearned model. And the learned adversarial input often fails to transfer to other unlearned models for concept restoration; (2) Limited attack: The prompt-level methods struggle to restore narrow concepts from unlearned models, such as celebrity identity. Therefore, this paper aims to leverage the transferability of the adversarial attack to probe the unlearning robustness under a black-box setting. This challenging scenario assumes that the unlearning method is unknown and the unlearned model is inaccessible for optimization, requiring the attack to be capable of transferring across different unlearned models. Specifically, we employ an adversarial search strategy to search for the adversarial embedding which can transfer across different unlearned models. This strategy adopts the original Stable Diffusion model as a surrogate model to iteratively erase and search for embeddings, enabling it to find the embedding that can restore the target concept for different unlearning methods. Extensive experiments demonstrate the transferability of the searched adversarial embedding across several state-of-the-art unlearning methods and its effectiveness for different levels of concepts.
Attention-aware non-rigid image registration for accelerated MR imaging
Authors: Aya Ghoul, Jiazhen Pan, Andreas Lingg, Jens Kübler, Patrick Krumm, Kerstin Hammernik, Daniel Rueckert, Sergios Gatidis, Thomas Küstner
Date: 2024-04-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, Image Registration, Motion Estimation

Accurate motion estimation at high acceleration factors enables rapid motion-compensated reconstruction in Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) without compromising the diagnostic image quality. In this work, we introduce an attention-aware deep learning-based framework that can perform non-rigid pairwise registration for fully sampled and accelerated MRI. We extract local visual representations to build similarity maps between the registered image pairs at multiple resolution levels and additionally leverage long-range contextual information using a transformer-based module to alleviate ambiguities in the presence of artifacts caused by undersampling. We combine local and global dependencies to perform simultaneous coarse and fine motion estimation. The proposed method was evaluated on in-house acquired fully sampled and accelerated data of 101 patients and 62 healthy subjects undergoing cardiac and thoracic MRI. The impact of motion estimation accuracy on the downstream task of motion-compensated reconstruction was analyzed. We demonstrate that our model derives reliable and consistent motion fields across different sampling trajectories (Cartesian and radial) and acceleration factors of up to 16x for cardiac motion and 30x for respiratory motion and achieves superior image quality in motion-compensated reconstruction qualitatively and quantitatively compared to conventional and recent deep learning-based approaches. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/lab-midas/GMARAFT.
Neural Modes: Self-supervised Learning of Nonlinear Modal Subspaces
Authors: Jiahong Wang, Yinwei Du, Stelian Coros, Bernhard Thomaszewski
Date: 2024-04-26 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: Self-Supervised Learning

We propose a self-supervised approach for learning physics-based subspaces for real-time simulation. Existing learning-based methods construct subspaces by approximating pre-defined simulation data in a purely geometric way. However, this approach tends to produce high-energy configurations, leads to entangled latent space dimensions, and generalizes poorly beyond the training set. To overcome these limitations, we propose a self-supervised approach that directly minimizes the system's mechanical energy during training. We show that our method leads to learned subspaces that reflect physical equilibrium constraints, resolve overfitting issues of previous methods, and offer interpretable latent space parameters.
Regression of Dense Distortion Field from a Single Fingerprint Image
Authors: Xiongjun Guan, Yongjie Duan, Jianjiang Feng, Jie zhou
Date: 2024-04-26 00:00:00
Tasks: regression

Skin distortion is a long standing challenge in fingerprint matching, which causes false non-matches. Previous studies have shown that the recognition rate can be improved by estimating the distortion field from a distorted fingerprint and then rectifying it into a normal fingerprint. However, existing rectification methods are based on principal component representation of distortion fields, which is not accurate and are very sensitive to finger pose. In this paper, we propose a rectification method where a self-reference based network is utilized to directly estimate the dense distortion field of distorted fingerprint instead of its low dimensional representation. This method can output accurate distortion fields of distorted fingerprints with various finger poses and distortion patterns. We conducted experiments on FVC2004 DB1\_A, expanded Tsinghua Distorted Fingerprint database (with additional distorted fingerprints in diverse finger poses and distortion patterns) and a latent fingerprint database. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method achieves the state-of-the-art rectification performance in terms of distortion field estimation and rectified fingerprint matching.