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Dynamic Position-aware Network for Fine-grained Image Recognition
null
Most weakly supervised fine-grained image recognition (WFGIR) approaches predominantly focus on learning the discriminative details which contain the visual variances and position clues. The position clues can be indirectly learnt by utilizing context information of discriminative visual content. However, this will cause the selected discriminative regions containing some non-discriminative information introduced by the position clues. These analysis motivate us to directly introduce position clues into visual content to only focus on the visual variances, achieving more precise discriminative region localization. Though important, position modelling usually requires significant pixel/region annotations and therefore is labor-intensive. To address this issue, we propose an end-to-end Dynamic Position-aware Network (DP-Net) to directly incorporate the position clues into visual content and dynamically align them without extra annotations, which eliminates the effect of position information for visual variances of subcategories. In particular, the DP-Net consists of: 1) Position Encoding Module, which learns a set of position-aware parts by directly adding the learnable position information into the horizontal/vertical visual content of images; 2) Position-vision Aligning Module, which dynamically aligns both visual content and learnable position information via performing graph convolution on position-aware parts; 3) Position-vision Reorganization Module, which projects the aligned position clues and visual content into the Euclidean space to construct a position-aware feature maps. Finally, the position-aware feature maps are used which is implicitly applied the aligned visual content and position clues for more accurate discriminative regions localization. Extensive experiments verify that DP-Net yields the best performance under the same settings with most competitive approaches, on CUB Bird, Stanford-Cars, and FGVC Aircraft datasets.
Shijie Wang, Haojie Li, Zhihui Wang, Wanli Ouyang
null
null
2,021
aaai
Learning to Attack Real-World Models for Person Re-identification via Virtual-Guided Meta-Learning
null
Recent advances in person re-identification (re-ID) have led to impressive retrieval accuracy. However, existing re-ID models are challenged by the adversarial examples crafted by adding quasi-imperceptible perturbations. Moreover, re-ID systems face the domain shift issue that training and testing domains are not consistent. In this study, we argue that learning powerful attackers with high universality that works well on unseen domains is an important step in promoting the robustness of re-ID systems. Therefore, we introduce a novel universal attack algorithm called ``MetaAttack'' for person re-ID. MetaAttack can mislead re-ID models on unseen domains by a universal adversarial perturbation. Specifically, to capture common patterns across different domains, we propose a meta-learning scheme to seek the universal perturbation via the gradient interaction between meta-train and meta-test formed by two datasets. We also take advantage of a virtual dataset (PersonX), instead of real ones, to conduct meta-test. This scheme not only enables us to learn with more comprehensive variation factors but also mitigates the negative effects caused by biased factors of real datasets. Experiments on three large-scale re-ID datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in attacking re-ID models on unseen domains. Our final visualization results reveal some new properties of existing re-ID systems, which can guide us in designing a more robust re-ID model. Code and supplemental material are available at url{https://github.com/FlyingRoastDuck/MetaAttack_AAAI21}.
Fengxiang Yang, Zhun Zhong, Hong Liu, Zheng Wang, Zhiming Luo, Shaozi Li, Nicu Sebe, Shin'ichi Satoh
null
null
2,021
aaai
PGNet: Real-time Arbitrarily-Shaped Text Spotting with Point Gathering Network
null
The reading of arbitrarily-shaped text has received increasing research attention. However, existing text spotters are mostly built on two-stage frameworks or character-based methods, which suffer from either Non-Maximum Suppression (NMS), Region-of-Interest (RoI) operations, or character-level annotations. In this paper, to address the above problems, we propose a novel fully convolutional Point Gathering Network (PGNet) for reading arbitrarily-shaped text in real-time. The PGNet is a single-shot text spotter, where the pixel-level character classification map is learned with proposed PG-CTC loss avoiding the usage of character-level annotations. With a PG-CTC decoder, we gather high-level character classification vectors from two-dimensional space and decode them into text symbols without NMS and RoI operations involved, which guarantees high efficiency. Additionally, reasoning the relations between each character and its neighbors, a graph refinement module (GRM) is proposed to optimize the coarse recognition and improve the end-to-end performance. Experiments prove that the proposed method achieves competitive accuracy, meanwhile significantly improving the running speed. In particular, in Total-Text, it runs at 46.7 FPS, surpassing the previous spotters with a large margin.
Pengfei Wang, Chengquan Zhang, Fei Qi, Shanshan Liu, Xiaoqiang Zhang, Pengyuan Lyu, Junyu Han, Jingtuo Liu, Errui Ding, Guangming Shi
null
null
2,021
aaai
Non-Autoregressive Coarse-to-Fine Video Captioning
null
It is encouraged to see that progress has been made to bridge videos and natural language. However, mainstream video captioning methods suffer from slow inference speed due to the sequential manner of autoregressive decoding, and prefer generating generic descriptions due to the insufficient training of visual words (e.g., nouns and verbs) and inadequate decoding paradigm. In this paper, we propose a non-autoregressive decoding based model with a coarse-to-fine captioning procedure to alleviate these defects. In implementations, we employ a bi-directional self-attention based network as our language model for achieving inference speedup, based on which we decompose the captioning procedure into two stages, where the model has different focuses. Specifically, given that visual words determine the semantic correctness of captions, we design a mechanism of generating visual words to not only promote the training of scene-related words but also capture relevant details from videos to construct a coarse-grained sentence ``template''. Thereafter, we devise dedicated decoding algorithms that fill in the ``template'' with suitable words and modify inappropriate phrasing via iterative refinement to obtain a fine-grained description. Extensive experiments on two mainstream video captioning benchmarks, i.e., MSVD and MSR-VTT, demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance, generates diverse descriptions, and obtains high inference efficiency.
Bang Yang, Yuexian Zou, Fenglin Liu, Can Zhang
null
null
2,021
aaai
C2F-FWN: Coarse-to-Fine Flow Warping Network for Spatial-Temporal Consistent Motion Transfer
null
Human video motion transfer (HVMT) aims to synthesize videos that one person imitates other persons' actions. Although existing GAN-based HVMT methods have achieved great success, they either fail to preserve appearance details due to the loss of spatial consistency between synthesized and exemplary images, or generate incoherent video results due to the lack of temporal consistency among video frames. In this paper, we propose Coarse-to-Fine Flow Warping Network (C2F-FWN) for spatial-temporal consistent HVMT. Particularly, C2F-FWN utilizes coarse-to-fine flow warping and Layout-Constrained Deformable Convolution (LC-DConv) to improve spatial consistency, and employs Flow Temporal Consistency (FTC) Loss to enhance temporal consistency. In addition, provided with multi-source appearance inputs, C2F-FWN can support appearance attribute editing with great flexibility and efficiency. Besides public datasets, we also collected a large-scale HVMT dataset named SoloDance for evaluation. Extensive experiments conducted on our SoloDance dataset and the iPER dataset show that our approach outperforms state-of-art HVMT methods in terms of both spatial and temporal consistency. Source code and the SoloDance dataset are available at https://github.com/wswdx/C2F-FWN.
Dongxu Wei, Xiaowei Xu, Haibin Shen, Kejie Huang
null
null
2,021
aaai
Teacher Guided Neural Architecture Search for Face Recognition
null
Knowledge distillation is an effective tool to compress large pre-trained convolutional neural networks (CNNs) or their ensembles into models applicable to mobile and embedded devices. However, with expected flops or latency, existing methods are hand-crafted heuristics. They propose to pre-define the target student network for knowledge distillation, which may be sub-optimal because it requires much effort to explore a powerful student from the large design space. In this paper, we develop a novel teacher guided neural architecture search method to directly search for a student network with flexible channel and layer sizes. Specifically, we define the search space as the number of the channels/layers, which is sampled based on the probability distribution and is learned by minimizing the search objective of the student network. The maximum probability for the size in each distribution serves as the final searched width and depth of the target student network. Extensive experiments on a variety of face recognition benchmarks have demonstrated the superiority of our method over the state-of-the-art alternatives.
Xiaobo Wang
null
null
2,021
aaai
Co-mining: Self-Supervised Learning for Sparsely Annotated Object Detection
null
Object detectors usually achieve promising results with the supervision of complete instance annotations. However, their performance is far from satisfactory with sparse instance annotations. Most existing methods for sparsely annotated object detection either re-weight the loss of hard negative samples or convert the unlabeled instances into ignored regions to reduce the interference of false negatives. We argue that these strategies are insufficient since they can at most alleviate the negative effect caused by missing annotations. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective mechanism, called Co-mining, for sparsely annotated object detection. In our Co-mining, two branches of a siamese network predict the pseudo-label sets for each other. To enhance multi-view learning and better mine unlabeled instances, the original image and corresponding augmented image are used as the inputs of two branches of the siamese network, respectively. Co-mining can serve as a general training mechanism applied to most of modern object detectors. Experiments are performed on MS COCO dataset with three different sparsely annotated settings using two typical frameworks: anchor-based detector RetinaNet and anchor-free detector FCOS. Experimental results show that our Co-mining with RetinaNet achieves 1.4%∼2.1% improvements compared with different baselines and surpasses existing methods under the same sparsely annotated setting.
Tiancai Wang, Tong Yang, Jiale Cao, Xiangyu Zhang
null
null
2,021
aaai
Semantic Consistency Networks for 3D Object Detection
null
Detecting 3D objects from point clouds is a significant yet challenging issue in many applications. While most existing approaches seek to leverage geometric information of point clouds, few studies accommodate the inherent semantic characteristics of each point and the consistency between the geometric and semantic cues. In this work, we propose a novel semantic consistency network (SCNet) driven by a natural principle: the class of a predicted 3D bounding box should be consistent with the classes of all the points inside this box. Specifically, our SCNet consists of a feature extraction structure, a detection decision structure, and a semantic segmentation structure. In inference, the feature extraction and the detection decision structures are used to detect 3D objects. In training, the semantic segmentation structure is jointly trained with the other two structures to produce more robust and applicative model parameters. A novel semantic consistency loss is proposed to regulate the output 3D object boxes and the segmented points to boost the performance. Our model is evaluated on two challenging datasets and achieves comparable results to the state-of-the-art methods.
Wenwen Wei, Ping Wei, Nanning Zheng
null
null
2,021
aaai
Deep Multi-Task Learning for Diabetic Retinopathy Grading in Fundus Images
null
Recent years have witnessed the growing interest in disease severity grading, especially for ocular diseases based on fundus images. The existing grading methods are usually trained with high resolution (HR) images. However, the grading performance decreases a lot given low resolution (LR) images, which are common in practice. In this paper, we mainly focus on diabetic retinopathy (DR) grading with LR fundus images. According to our analysis on the DR task, we find that: 1) image super-resolution (ISR) can boost the performance of DR grading and lesion segmentation; 2) the lesion segmentation regions of fundus images are highly consistent with pathological regions for DR grading. Thus, we propose a deep multi-task learning based DR grading (DeepMT-DR) method for LR fundus images, which simultaneously handles the auxiliary tasks of ISR and lesion segmentation. Specifically, based on our findings, we propose a hierarchical deep learning structure that simultaneously processes the low-level task of ISR, the mid-level task of lesion segmentation and the high-level task of DR grading. Moreover, a novel task-aware loss is developed to encourage ISR to focus on the pathological regions for its subsequent tasks: lesion segmentation and DR grading. Extensive experimental results show that our DeepMT-DR method significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art methods for DR grading over two public datasets. In addition, our method achieves comparable performance in two auxiliary tasks of ISR and lesion segmentation.
Xiaofei Wang, Mai Xu, Jicong Zhang, Lai Jiang, Liu Li
null
null
2,021
aaai
Generalising without Forgetting for Lifelong Person Re-Identification
null
Existing person re-identification (Re-ID) methods mostly prepare all training data in advance, while real-world Re-ID data are inherently captured over time or from different locations, which requires a model to be incrementally generalised from sequential learning of piecemeal new data without forgetting what is already learned. In this work, we call this lifelong person Re-ID, characterised by solving a problem of unseen class identification subject to continuous new domain generalisation and adaptation with class imbalanced learning. We formulate a new Generalising without Forgetting method (GwFReID) for lifelong Re-ID and design a comprehensive learning objective that accounts for classification coherence, distribution coherence and representation coherence in a unified framework. This design helps to simultaneously learn new information, distil old knowledge and solve class imbalance, which enables GwFReID to incrementally improve model generalisation without catastrophic forgetting of what is already learned. Extensive experiments on eight Re-ID benchmarks, CIFAR-100 and ImageNet show the superiority of GwFReID over the state-of-the-art methods.
Guile Wu, Shaogang Gong
null
null
2,021
aaai
Geodesic-HOF: 3D Reconstruction Without Cutting Corners
null
Single-view 3D object reconstruction is a challenging fundamental problem in machine perception, largely due to the morphological diversity of objects in the natural world. In particular, high curvature regions are not always represented accurately by methods trained with common set-based loss functions such as Chamfer Distance, resulting in reconstructions short-circuiting the surface or "cutting corners." To address this issue, we propose an approach to 3D reconstruction that embeds points on the surface of an object into a higher-dimensional space that captures both the original 3D surface as well as geodesic distances between points on the surface of the object. The precise specification of these additional "lifted" coordinates ultimately yields useful surface information without requiring excessive additional computation during either training or testing, in comparison with existing approaches. Our experiments show that taking advantage of these learned lifted coordinates yields better performance for estimating surface normals and generating surfaces than using point cloud reconstructions alone. Further, we find that this learned geodesic embedding space provides useful information for applications such as unsupervised object decomposition.
Ziyun Wang, Eric A. Mitchell, Volkan Isler, Daniel D. Lee
null
null
2,021
aaai
Very Important Person Localization in Unconstrained Conditions: A New Benchmark
null
This paper presents a new high-quality dataset for Very Important Person Localization (VIPLoc), named Unconstrained-7k. Generally, current datasets: 1) are limited in scale; 2) built under simple and constrained conditions, where the number of disturbing non-VIPs is not large, the scene is relatively simple, and the face of VIP is always in frontal view and salient. To tackle these problems, the proposed Unconstrained-7k dataset is featured in two aspects. First, it contains over 7,000 annotated images, making it the largest VIPLoc dataset under unconstrained conditions to date. Second, our dataset is collected freely on the Internet, including multiple scenes, where images are in unconstrained conditions. VIPs in the new dataset are in different settings, e.g., large view variation, varying sizes, occluded, and complex scenes. Meanwhile, each image has more persons (> 20), making the dataset more challenging. As a minor contribution, motivated by the observation that VIPs are highly related to not only neighbors but also iconic objects, this paper proposes a Joint Social Relation and Individual Interaction Graph Neural Networks (JSRII-GNN) for VIPLoc. Experiments show that the JSRII-GNN yields competitive accuracy on NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association), MS (Multi-scene), and Unconstrained-7k datasets. https://github.com/xiaowang1516/VIPLoc.
Xiao Wang, Zheng Wang, Toshihiko Yamasaki, Wenjun Zeng
null
null
2,021
aaai
MVFNet: Multi-View Fusion Network for Efficient Video Recognition
null
Conventionally, spatiotemporal modeling network and its complexity are the two most concentrated research topics in video action recognition. Existing state-of-the-art methods have achieved excellent accuracy regardless of the complexity meanwhile efficient spatiotemporal modeling solutions are slightly inferior in performance. In this paper, we attempt to acquire both efficiency and effectiveness simultaneously. First of all, besides traditionally treating H x W x T video frames as space-time signal (viewing from the Height-Width spatial plane), we propose to also model video from the other two Height-Time and Width-Time planes, to capture the dynamics of video thoroughly. Secondly, our model is designed based on 2D CNN backbones and model complexity is well kept in mind by design. Specifically, we introduce a novel multi-view fusion (MVF) module to exploit video dynamics using separable convolution for efficiency. It is a plug-and-play module and can be inserted into off-the-shelf 2D CNNs to form a simple yet effective model called MVFNet. Moreover, MVFNet can be thought of as a generalized video modeling framework and it can specialize to be existing methods such as C2D, SlowOnly, and TSM under different settings. Extensive experiments are conducted on popular benchmarks (i.e., Something-Something V1 & V2, Kinetics, UCF-101, and HMDB-51) to show its superiority. The proposed MVFNet can achieve state-of-the-art performance with 2D CNN's complexity.
Wenhao Wu, Dongliang He, Tianwei Lin, Fu Li, Chuang Gan, Errui Ding
null
null
2,021
aaai
Holistic Multi-View Building Analysis in the Wild with Projection Pooling
null
We address six different classification tasks related to fine-grained building attributes: construction type, number of floors, pitch and geometry of the roof, facade material, and occupancy class. Tackling such a remote building analysis problem became possible only recently due to growing large-scale datasets of urban scenes. To this end, we introduce a new benchmarking dataset, consisting of 49426 images (top-view and street-view) of 9674 buildings. These photos are further assembled, together with the geometric metadata. The dataset showcases various real-world challenges, such as occlusions, blur, partially visible objects, and a broad spectrum of buildings. We propose a new emph{projection pooling layer}, creating a unified, top-view representation of the top-view and the side views in a high-dimensional space. It allows us to utilize the building and imagery metadata seamlessly. Introducing this layer improves classification accuracy -- compared to highly tuned baseline models -- indicating its suitability for building analysis.
Zbigniew Wojna, Krzysztof Maziarz, Łukasz Jocz, Robert Pałuba, Robert Kozikowski, Iason Kokkinos
null
null
2,021
aaai
Graph-to-Graph: Towards Accurate and Interpretable Online Handwritten Mathematical Expression Recognition
null
Recent handwritten mathematical expression recognition (HMER) approaches treat the problem as an image-to-markup generation task where the handwritten formula is translated into a sequence (e.g. LaTeX). The encoder-decoder framework is widely used to solve this image-to-sequence problem. However, (i) for structured mathematical formula, the hierarchical structure neither in the formula nor in the markup has been explored adequately. In addition, (ii) existing image-to-markup methods could not explicitly segment mathematical symbols in the formula corresponding to each target markup token. In this paper, we address the above issues by formulating the HMER as a graph-to-graph (G2G) learning problem. Graph is more flexible and general for structure representation and learning compared with image or sequence. At the core of our method lies the embedding of input formula and output markup into graphs on primitives, with Graph Neural Networks (GNN) to explore the structural information, and a novel sub-graph attention mechanism to match primitives in the input and output graphs. We conduct extensive experiments on CROHME datasets to demonstrate the benefits of the proposed G2G model. Our method yields significant improvements over previous SOTA image-to-markup systems. Moreover, it explicitly resolves the symbol segmentation problem while still being trained end-to-end, making the whole system much more accurate and interpretable.
Jin-Wen Wu, Fei Yin, Yan-Ming Zhang, Xu-Yao Zhang, Cheng-Lin Liu
null
null
2,021
aaai
Precise Yet Efficient Semantic Calibration and Refinement in ConvNets for Real-time Polyp Segmentation from Colonoscopy Videos
null
We propose a novel convolutional neural network (ConvNet) equipped with two new semantic calibration and refinement approaches for automatic polyp segmentation from colonoscopy videos. While ConvNets set state-of-the-are performance for this task, it is still difficult to achieve satisfactory results in a real-time manner, which is a necessity in clinical practice. The main obstacle is the huge semantic gap between high-level features and low-level features, making it difficult to take full advantage of complementary semantic information contained in these hierarchical features. Compared with existing solutions, which either directly aggregate these features without considering the semantic gap or employ sophisticated non-local modeling techniques to refine semantic information by introduce many extra computational costs, the proposed ConvNet is able to more precisely yet efficiently calibrate and refine semantic information for better segmentation performance without increasing model complexity; we call the proposed ConvNet as SCR-Net, which has two key modules. We first propose a semantic calibration module (SCM) to effectively transmit the semantic information from high-level layers to low-level layers by learning the semantic-spatial relations during the training procedure. We then propose a semantic refinement module (SRM) to, based on the features calibrated by SCM, enhance the discrimination capability of the features for targeting objects. Extensive experiments on the Kvasir-SEG dataset demonstrate that the proposed SCR-Net is capable of achieving better segmentation accuracy than state-of-the-art approaches with a faster speed. The proposed techniques are general enough to be applied to similar applications where precise and efficient multi-level feature fusion is critical. The code is available at https://github.com/jiafuz/SCR-Net.
Huisi Wu, Jiafu Zhong, Wei Wang, Zhenkun Wen, Jing Qin
null
null
2,021
aaai
Efficient Object-Level Visual Context Modeling for Multimodal Machine Translation: Masking Irrelevant Objects Helps Grounding
null
Visual context provides grounding information for multimodal machine translation (MMT). However, previous MMT models and probing studies on visual features suggest that visual information is less explored in MMT as it is often redundant to textual information. In this paper, we propose an Object-level Visual Context modeling framework (OVC) to efficiently capture and explore visual information for multimodal machine translation. With detected objects, the proposed OVC encourages MMT to ground translation on desirable visual objects by masking irrelevant objects in the visual modality. We equip the proposed with an additional object-masking loss to achieve this goal. The object-masking loss is estimated according to the similarity between masked objects and the source texts so as to encourage masking source-irrelevant objects. Additionally, in order to generate vision-consistent target words, we further propose a vision-weighted translation loss for OVC. Experiments on MMT datasets demonstrate that the proposed OVC model outperforms state-of-the-art MMT models and analyses show that masking irrelevant objects helps grounding in MMT.
Dexin Wang, Deyi Xiong
null
null
2,021
aaai
Decentralised Learning from Independent Multi-Domain Labels for Person Re-Identification
null
Deep learning has been successful for many computer vision tasks due to the availability of shared and centralised large-scale training data. However, increasing awareness of privacy concerns poses new challenges to deep learning, especially for human subject related recognition such as person re-identification (Re-ID). In this work, we solve the Re-ID problem by decentralised learning from non-shared private training data distributed at multiple user sites of independent multi-domain label spaces. We propose a novel paradigm called Federated Person Re-Identification (FedReID) to construct a generalisable global model (a central server) by simultaneously learning with multiple privacy-preserved local models (local clients). Specifically, each local client receives global model updates from the server and trains a local model using its local data independent from all the other clients. Then, the central server aggregates transferrable local model updates to construct a generalisable global feature embedding model without accessing local data so to preserve local privacy. This client-server collaborative learning process is iteratively performed under privacy control, enabling FedReID to realise decentralised learning without sharing distributed data nor collecting any centralised data. Extensive experiments on ten Re-ID benchmarks show that FedReID achieves compelling generalisation performance beyond any locally trained models without using shared training data, whilst inherently protects the privacy of each local client. This is uniquely advantageous over contemporary Re-ID methods.
Guile Wu, Shaogang Gong
null
null
2,021
aaai
Towards Robust Visual Information Extraction in Real World: New Dataset and Novel Solution
null
Visual Information Extraction (VIE) has attracted considerable attention recently owing to its various advanced applications such as document understanding, automatic marking and intelligent education. Most existing works decoupled this problem into several independent sub-tasks of text spotting (text detection and recognition) and information extraction, which completely ignored the high correlation among them during optimization. In this paper, we propose a robust Visual Information Extraction System (VIES) towards real-world scenarios, which is an unified end-to-end trainable framework for simultaneous text detection, recognition and information extraction by taking a single document image as input and outputting the structured information. Specifically, the information extraction branch collects abundant visual and semantic representations from text spotting for multimodal feature fusion and conversely, provides higher-level semantic clues to contribute to the optimization of text spotting. Moreover, regarding the shortage of public benchmarks, we construct a fully-annotated dataset called EPHOIE (https://github.com/HCIILAB/EPHOIE), which is the first Chinese benchmark for both text spotting and visual information extraction. EPHOIE consists of 1,494 images of examination paper head with complex layouts and background, including a total of 15,771 Chinese handwritten or printed text instances. Compared with the state-of-the-art methods, our VIES shows significant superior performance on the EPHOIE dataset and achieves a 9.01% F-score gain on the widely used SROIE dataset under the end-to-end scenario.
Jiapeng Wang, Chongyu Liu, Lianwen Jin, Guozhi Tang, Jiaxin Zhang, Shuaitao Zhang, Qianying Wang, Yaqiang Wu, Mingxiang Cai
null
null
2,021
aaai
Weakly Supervised Deep Hyperspherical Quantization for Image Retrieval
null
Deep quantization methods have shown high efficiency on large-scale image retrieval. However, current models heavily rely on ground-truth information, hindering the application of quantization in label-hungry scenarios. A more realistic demand is to learn from inexhaustible uploaded images that are associated with informal tags provided by amateur users. Though such sketchy tags do not obviously reveal the labels, they actually contain useful semantic information for supervising deep quantization. To this end, we propose Weakly-Supervised Deep Hyperspherical Quantization (WSDHQ), which is the first work to learn deep quantization from weakly tagged images. Specifically, 1) we use word embeddings to represent the tags and enhance their semantic information based on a tag correlation graph. 2) To better preserve semantic information in quantization codes and reduce quantization error, we jointly learn semantics-preserving embeddings and supervised quantizer on hypersphere by employing a well-designed fusion layer and tailor-made loss functions. Extensive experiments show that WSDHQ can achieve state-of-art performance in weakly-supervised compact coding.
Jinpeng Wang, Bin Chen, Qiang Zhang, Zaiqiao Meng, Shangsong Liang, Shutao Xia
null
null
2,021
aaai
SAT-based Decision Tree Learning for Large Data Sets
null
Decision trees of low depth are beneficial for understanding and interpreting the data they represent. Unfortunately, finding a decision tree of lowest depth that correctly represents given data is NP-hard. Hence known algorithms either (i) utilize heuristics that do not optimize the depth or (ii) are exact but scale only to small or medium-sized instances. We propose a new hybrid approach to decision tree learning, combining heuristic and exact methods in a novel way. More specifically, we employ SAT encodings repeatedly to local parts of a decision tree provided by a standard heuristic, leading to a global depth improvement. This allows us to scale the power of exact SAT-based methods to almost arbitrarily large data sets. We evaluate our new approach experimentally on a range of real-world instances that contain up to several thousand samples. In almost all cases, our method successfully decreases the depth of the initial decision tree; often, the decrease is significant.
Andre Schidler, Stefan Szeider
null
null
2,021
aaai
Self-Domain Adaptation for Face Anti-Spoofing
null
Although current face anti-spoofing methods achieve promising results under intra-dataset testing, they suffer from poor generalization to unseen attacks. Most existing works adopt domain adaptation (DA) or domain generalization (DG) techniques to address this problem. However, the target domain is often unknown during training which limits the utilization of DA methods. DG methods can conquer this by learning domain invariant features without seeing any target data. However, they fail in utilizing the information of target data. In this paper, we propose a self-domain adaptation framework to leverage the unlabeled test domain data at inference. Specifically, a domain adaptor is designed to adapt the model for test domain. In order to learn a better adaptor, a meta-learning based adaptor learning algorithm is proposed using the data of multiple source domains at the training step. At test time, the adaptor is updated using only the test domain data according to the proposed unsupervised adaptor loss to further improve the performance. Extensive experiments on four public datasets validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Jingjing Wang, Jingyi Zhang, Ying Bian, Youyi Cai, Chunmao Wang, Shiliang Pu
null
null
2,021
aaai
Region-aware Global Context Modeling for Automatic Nerve Segmentation from Ultrasound Images
null
We present a novel deep learning model equipped with a new region-aware global context modeling technique for automatic nerve segmentation from ultrasound images, which is a challenging task due to (1) the large variation and blurred boundaries of targets, (2) the large amount of speckle noise in ultrasound images, and (3) the inherent real-time requirement of this task. It is essential to efficiently capture long-range dependencies by global context modeling for a segmentation network to overcome these challenges. Traditional global context modeling techniques usually explore pixel-aware correlations to establish long-range dependencies, which are usually computation-intensive and greatly degrade time performance. In addition, in this application, pixel-aware modeling may inevitably introduce much speckle noise in the computation and potentially degrade segmentation performance. In this paper, we propose a novel region-aware modeling technique to establish long-range dependencies based on different regions to improve segmentation accuracy while maintaining real-time performance; we call it region-aware pyramid aggregation (RPA) module. In order to adaptively divide the feature maps into a set of semantic-independent regions, we develop an attention mechanism and integrate it into the spatial pyramid network to evaluate the semantic similarity of different regions. We further develop an adaptive pyramid fusion (APF) module to dynamically fuse the multi-level features generated from the decoder to refining the segmentation results. We conducted extensive experiments on a famous public ultrasound nerve image segmentation dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms our rivals in terms of segmentation accuracy. The code is available at https://github.com/jsonliu-szu/RAGCM.
Huisi Wu, Jiasheng Liu, Wei Wang, Zhenkun Wen, Jing Qin
null
null
2,021
aaai
Towards More Practical and Efficient Automatic Dominance Breaking
null
Dominance breaking is shown to be an effective technique to improve the solving speed of Constraint Optimization Problems (COPs). The paper proposes separate techniques to generalize and make more efficient the nogood generation phase of an automated dominance breaking framework by Lee and Zhong's. The first contribution is in giving conditions that allow skipping the checking of non-efficiently checkable constraints and yet still produce sufficient useful nogoods, thus opening up possibilities to apply the technique on COPs that were previously impractical. The second contribution identifies and avoids the generation of dominance breaking nogoods that are both logically and propagation redundant. The nogood generation model is strengthened using the notion of Common Assignment Elimination to avoid generation of nogoods that are subsumed by other nogoods, thus reducing the search space substantially. Extensive experimentation confirms the benefits of the new proposals.
Jimmy H.M. Lee, Allen Z. Zhong
null
null
2,021
aaai
Learning Comprehensive Motion Representation for Action Recognition
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For action recognition learning, 2D CNN-based methods are efficient but may yield redundant features due to applying the same 2D convolution kernel to each frame. Recent efforts attempt to capture motion information by establishing inter-frame connections while still suffering the limited temporal receptive field or high latency. Moreover, the feature enhancement is often only performed by channel or space dimension in action recognition. To address these issues, we first devise a Channel-wise Motion Enhancement (CME) module to adaptively emphasize the channels related to dynamic information with a channel-wise gate vector. The channel gates generated by CME incorporate the information from all the other frames in the video. We further propose a Spatial-wise Motion Enhancement (SME) module to focus on the regions with the critical target in motion, according to the point-to-point similarity between adjacent feature maps. The intuition is that the change of background is typically slower than the motion area. Both CME and SME have clear physical meaning in capturing action clues. By integrating the two modules into the off-the-shelf 2D network, we finally obtain a Comprehensive Motion Representation (CMR) learning method for action recognition, which achieves competitive performance on Something-Something V1 & V2 and Kinetics-400. On the temporal reasoning datasets Something-Something V1 and V2, our method outperforms the current state-of-the-art by 2.3% and 1.9% when using 16 frames as input, respectively.
Mingyu Wu, Boyuan Jiang, Donghao Luo, Junchi Yan, Yabiao Wang, Ying Tai, Chengjie Wang, Jilin Li, Feiyue Huang, Xiaokang Yang
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2,021
aaai
Anticipating Future Relations via Graph Growing for Action Prediction
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Predicting actions from partially observed videos is challenging as the partial videos containing incomplete action executions have insufficient discriminative information for classification. Recent progress has been made through enriching the features of the observed video part or generating the features for the unobserved video part, but without explicitly modeling the fine-grained evolution of visual object relations over both space and time. In this paper, we investigate how the interaction and correlation between visual objects evolve and propose a graph growing method to anticipate future object relations from limited video observations for reliable action prediction. There are two tasks in our method. First, we work with spatial-temporal graph neural networks to reason object relations in the observed video part. Then, we synthesize the spatial-temporal relation representation for the unobserved video part via graph node generation and aggregation. These two tasks are jointly learned to enable the anticipated future relation representation informative to action prediction. Experimental results on two action video datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
Xinxiao Wu, Jianwei Zhao, Ruiqi Wang
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2,021
aaai
Parallel Constraint Acquisition
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Constraint acquisition systems assist the non-expert user in modelling her problem as a constraint network. QUACQ is a sequential constraint acquisition algorithm that generates queries as (partial) examples to be classified as positive or negative. The drawbacks are that the user may need to answer a great number of such examples, within a significant waiting time between two examples, to learn all the constraints. In this paper, we propose PACQ, a portfolio-based parallel constraint acquisition system. The design of PACQ benefits from having several users sharing the same target problem. Moreover, each user is involved in a particular acquisition session, opened in parallel to improve the overall performance of the whole system.We prove the correctness of PACQ and we give an experimental evaluation that shows that our approach improves on QUACQ.
Nadjib Lazaar
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2,021
aaai
Temporal Relational Modeling with Self-Supervision for Action Segmentation
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Temporal relational modeling in video is essential for human action understanding, such as action recognition and action segmentation. Although Graph Convolution Networks (GCNs) have shown promising advantages in relation reasoning on many tasks, it is still a challenge to apply graph convolution networks on long video sequences effectively. The main reason is that large number of nodes (i.e., video frames) makes GCNs hard to capture and model temporal relations in videos. To tackle this problem, in this paper, we introduce an effective GCN module, Dilated Temporal Graph Reasoning Module (DTGRM), designed to model temporal relations and dependencies between video frames at various time spans. In particular, we capture and model temporal relations via constructing multi-level dilated temporal graphs where the nodes represent frames from different moments in video. Moreover, to enhance temporal reasoning ability of the proposed model, an auxiliary self-supervised task is proposed to encourage the dilated temporal graph reasoning module to find and correct wrong temporal relations in videos. Our DTGRM model outperforms state-of-the-art action segmentation models on three challenging datasets: 50Salads, Georgia Tech Egocentric Activities (GTEA), and the Breakfast dataset. The code is available at https://github.com/redwang/DTGRM.
Dong Wang, Di Hu, Xingjian Li, Dejing Dou
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2,021
aaai
Camera-Aware Proxies for Unsupervised Person Re-Identification
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This paper tackles the purely unsupervised person re-identification (Re-ID) problem that requires no annotations. Some previous methods adopt clustering techniques to generate pseudo labels and use the produced labels to train Re-ID models progressively. These methods are relatively simple but effective. However, most clustering-based methods take each cluster as a pseudo identity class, neglecting the large intra-ID variance caused mainly by the change of camera views. To address this issue, we propose to split each single cluster into multiple proxies and each proxy represents the instances coming from the same camera. These camera-aware proxies enable us to deal with large intra-ID variance and generate more reliable pseudo labels for learning. Based on the camera-aware proxies, we design both intra and inter-camera contrastive learning components for our Re-ID model to effectively learn the ID discrimination ability within and across cameras. Meanwhile, a proxy-balanced sampling strategy is also designed, which facilitates our learning further. Extensive experiments on three large-scale Re-ID datasets show that our proposed approach outperforms most unsupervised methods by a significant margin. Especially, on the challenging MSMT17 dataset, we gain 14.3 percent Rank-1 and 10.2 percent mAP improvements when compared to the second place. Code is available at: https://github.com/Terminator8758/CAP-master.
Menglin Wang, Baisheng Lai, Jianqiang Huang, Xiaojin Gong, Xian-Sheng Hua
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2,021
aaai
Satisfiability and Algorithms for Non-uniform Random k-SAT
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Solving Satisfiability is at the core of a wide range of applications from Knowledge Representation to Logic Programming to Software and Hardware Verification. One of the models of Satisfiability, the Random Satisfiability problem, has received much attention in the literature both, as a useful benchmark for SAT solvers, and as an exciting mathematical object. In this paper we tackle a somewhat nonstandard type of Random Satisfiability, the one where instances are not chosen uniformly from a certain class of instances, but rather from a certain nontrivial distribution. More precisely, we use so-called Configuration Model, in which we start with a distribution of degrees (the number of occurrences) of a variable, sample the degree of each variable and then generate a random instance with the prescribed degrees. It has been proposed previously that by properly selecting the starting distribution (to be, say, power law or lognorm) one can approximate at least some aspect of `industrial' instances of SAT. Here we suggest an algorithm that solves such problems for a wide range of degree distributions and obtain a necessary and a sufficient condition for the satisfiability of such formulas.
Oleksii Omelchenko, Andrei Bulatov
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2,021
aaai
Scalable Verification of Quantized Neural Networks
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Formal verification of neural networks is an active topic of research, and recent advances have significantly increased the size of the networks that verification tools can handle. However, most methods are designed for verification of an idealized model of the actual network which works over real arithmetic and ignores rounding imprecisions. This idealization is in stark contrast to network quantization, which is a technique that trades numerical precision for computational efficiency and is, therefore, often applied in practice. Neglecting rounding errors of such low-bit quantized neural networks has been shown to lead to wrong conclusions about the network's correctness. Thus, the desired approach for verifying quantized neural networks would be one that takes these rounding errors into account. In this paper, we show that verifying the bit-exact implementation of quantized neural networks with bit-vector specifications is PSPACE-hard, even though verifying idealized real-valued networks and satisfiability of bit-vector specifications alone are each in NP. Furthermore, we explore several practical heuristics toward closing the complexity gap between idealized and bit-exact verification. In particular, we propose three techniques for making SMT-based verification of quantized neural networks more scalable. Our experiments demonstrate that our proposed methods allow a speedup of up to three orders of magnitude over existing approaches.
Thomas A. Henzinger, Mathias Lechner, Đorđe Žikelić
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2,021
aaai
Unsupervised 3D Learning for Shape Analysis via Multiresolution Instance Discrimination
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We propose an unsupervised method for learning a generic and efficient shape encoding network for different shape analysis tasks. Our key idea is to jointly encode and learn shape and point features from unlabeled 3D point clouds. For this purpose, we adapt HRNet to octree-based convolutional neural networks for jointly encoding shape and point features with fused multiresolution subnetworks and design a simple-yet-efficient Multiresolution Instance Discrimination (MID) loss for jointly learning the shape and point features. Our network takes a 3D point cloud as input and output both shape and point features. After training, Our network is concatenated with simple task-specific back-ends and fine-tuned for different shape analysis tasks. We evaluate the efficacy and generality of our method with a set of shape analysis tasks, including shape classification, semantic shape segmentation, as well as shape registration tasks. With simple back-ends, our network demonstrates the best performance among all unsupervised methods and achieves competitive performance to supervised methods. For fine-grained shape segmentation on the PartNet dataset, our method even surpasses existing supervised methods by a large margin.
Peng-Shuai Wang, Yu-Qi Yang, Qian-Fang Zou, Zhirong Wu, Yang Liu, Xin Tong
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2,021
aaai
LCollision: Fast Generation of Collision-Free Human Poses using Learned Non-Penetration Constraints
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We present LCollision, a learning-based method that synthesizes collision-free 3D human poses. At the crux of our approach is a novel deep architecture that simultaneously decodes new human poses from the latent space and predicts colliding body parts. These two components of our architecture are used as the objective function and surrogate hard constraints in a constrained optimization for collision-free human pose generation. A novel aspect of our approach is the use of a bilevel autoencoder that decomposes whole-body collisions into groups of collisions between localized body parts. By solving the constrained optimizations, we show that a significant amount of collision artifacts can be resolved. Furthermore, in a large test set of 2.5 × 10 6 randomized poses from SCAPE, our architecture achieves a collision-prediction accuracy of 94.1% with 80× speedup over exact collision detection algorithms. To the best of our knowledge, LCollision is the first approach that accelerates collision detection and resolves penetrations using a neural network.
Qingyang Tan, Zherong Pan, Dinesh Manocha
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2,021
aaai
Integrated Optimization of Bipartite Matching and Its Stochastic Behavior: New Formulation and Approximation Algorithm via Min-cost Flow Optimization
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The research field of stochastic matching has yielded many developments for various applications. In most stochastic matching problems, the probability distributions inherent in the nodes and edges are set a priori, and are not controllable. However, many matching services have options, which we call control variables, that affect the probability distributions and thus what constitutes an optimum matching. Although several methods for optimizing the values of the control variables have been developed, their optimization in consideration of the matching problem is still in its infancy. In this paper, we formulate an optimization problem for determining the values of the control variables so as to maximize the expected value of matching weights. Since this problem involves hard to evaluate objective values and is non-convex, we construct an approximation algorithm via a minimum-cost flow algorithm that can find 3-approximation solutions rapidly. Simulations on real data from a ride-hailing platform and a crowd-sourcing market show that the proposed method can find solutions with high profits of the service provider in practical time.
Yuya Hikima, Yasunori Akagi, Hideaki Kim, Masahiro Kohjima, Takeshi Kurashima, Hiroyuki Toda
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2,021
aaai
Dependency Stochastic Boolean Satisfiability: A Logical Formalism for NEXPTIME Decision Problems with Uncertainty
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Stochastic Boolean Satisfiability (SSAT) is a logical formalism to model decision problems with uncertainty, such as Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) for verification of probabilistic systems. SSAT, however, is limited by its descriptive power within the PSPACE complexity class. More complex problems, such as the NEXPTIME-complete Decentralized POMDP (Dec-POMDP), cannot be succinctly encoded with SSAT. To provide a logical formalism of such problems, we generalize the Dependency Quantified Boolean Formula (DQBF), a representative problem in the NEXPTIME-complete class, to its stochastic variant, named Dependency SSAT (DSSAT), and show that DSSAT is also NEXPTIME-complete. We demonstrate the potential applications of DSSAT to circuit synthesis of probabilistic and approximate design. Furthermore, to study the descriptive power of DSSAT, we establish a polynomial-time reduction from Dec-POMDP to DSSAT. With the theoretical foundations paved in this work, we hope to encourage the development of DSSAT solvers for potential broad applications.
Nian-Ze Lee, Jie-Hong R. Jiang
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2,021
aaai
Symmetric Component Caching for Model Counting on Combinatorial Instances
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Given a propositional formula ψ, the model counting problem, also referred to as #SAT, seeks to compute the number of satisfying assignments (or models) of ψ. Modern search-based model counting algorithms are built on conflict-driven clause learning, combined with the caching of certain subformulas (called components) encountered during the search process. Despite significant progress in these algorithms over the years, state-of-the-art model counters often struggle to handle large but structured instances that typically arise in combinatorial settings. Motivated by the observation that these counters do not exploit the inherent symmetries exhibited in such instances, we revisit the component caching architecture employed in current counters and introduce a novel caching scheme that focuses on identifying symmetric components. We first prove the soundness of our approach, and then integrate it into the state-of-the-art model counter GANAK. Our extensive experiments on hard combinatorial instances demonstrate that the resulting counter, SymGANAK, leads to improvements over GANAK both in terms of PAR-2 score and the number of instances solved.
Timothy van Bremen, Vincent Derkinderen, Shubham Sharma, Subhajit Roy, Kuldeep S. Meel
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2,021
aaai
The Power of Literal Equivalence in Model Counting
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The past two decades have seen the significant improvements of the scalability of practical model counters, which have been quite influential in many applications from artificial intelligence to formal verification. While most of exact counters fall into two categories, search-based and compilation-based, Huang and Darwiche's remarkable observation ties these two categories: the trace of a search-based exact model counter corresponds to a Decision-DNNF formula. Taking advantage of literal equivalences, this paper designs an efficient model counting technique such that its trace is a generalization of Decision-DNNF formula. We first propose a generalization of Decision-DNNF, called CCDD, to capture literal equivalences, then show that CCDD supports model counting in linear time, and finally design a model counter, called ExactMC, whose trace corresponds to CCDD. We perform an extensive experimental evaluation over a comprehensive set of benchmarks and conduct performance comparison of ExactMC vis-a-vis the state of the art counters, c2d, Dsharp, miniC2D, D4, ADDMC, and Ganak. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates ExactMC can solve 885 instances while the prior state of the art could solve only 843 instances, representing a significant improvement of 42 instances.
Yong Lai, Kuldeep S. Meel, Roland H. C. Yap
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2,021
aaai
Smooth Convex Optimization Using Sub-Zeroth-Order Oracles
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We consider the problem of minimizing a smooth, Lipschitz, convex function over a compact, convex set using sub-zeroth-order oracles: an oracle that outputs the sign of the directional derivative for a given point and a given direction, an oracle that compares the function values for a given pair of points, and an oracle that outputs a noisy function value for a given point. We show that the sample complexity of optimization using these oracles is polynomial in the relevant parameters. The optimization algorithm that we provide for the comparator oracle is the first algorithm with a known rate of convergence that is polynomial in the number of dimensions. We also give an algorithm for the noisy-value oracle that incurs sublinear regret in the number of queries and polynomial regret in the number of dimensions.
Mustafa O. Karabag, Cyrus Neary, Ufuk Topcu
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2,021
aaai
A SAT-based Resolution of Lam’s Problem
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In 1989, computer searches by Lam, Thiel, and Swiercz experimentally resolved Lam's problem from projective geometry—the long-standing problem of determining if a projective plane of order ten exists. Both the original search and an independent verification in 2011 discovered no such projective plane. However, these searches were each performed using highly specialized custom-written code and did not produce nonexistence certificates. In this paper, we resolve Lam's problem by translating the problem into Boolean logic and use satisfiability (SAT) solvers to produce nonexistence certificates that can be verified by a third party. Our work uncovered consistency issues in both previous searches—highlighting the difficulty of relying on special-purpose search code for nonexistence results.
Curtis Bright, Kevin K. H. Cheung, Brett Stevens, Ilias Kotsireas, Vijay Ganesh
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2,021
aaai
An Improved Upper Bound for SAT
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We show that the CNF satisfiability problem can be solved O^*(1.2226^m) time, where m is the number of clauses in the formula, improving the known upper bounds O^*(1.234^m) given by Yamamoto 15 years ago and O^*(1.239^m) given by Hirsch 22 years ago. By using an amortized technique and careful case analysis, we successfully avoid the bottlenecks in previous algorithms and get the improvement.
Huairui Chu, Mingyu Xiao, Zhe Zhang
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2,021
aaai
A Sharp Leap from Quantified Boolean Formula to Stochastic Boolean Satisfiability Solving
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Stochastic Boolean Satisfiability (SSAT) is a powerful representation for the concise encoding of quantified decision problems with uncertainty. While it shares commonalities with quantified Boolean formula (QBF) satisfiability and has the same PSPACE-complete complexity, SSAT solving tends to be more challenging as it involves expensive model counting, a.k.a. Sharp-SAT. To date, SSAT solvers, especially those imposing no restrictions on quantification levels, remain much lacking. In this paper, we present a new SSAT solver based on the framework of clause selection and cube distribution previously proposed for QBF solving. With model counting integrated and learning techniques strengthened, our solver is general and effective. Experimental results demonstrate the overall superiority of the proposed algorithm in both solving performance and memory usage compared to the state-of-the-art solvers on a number of benchmark formulas.
Pei-Wei Chen, Yu-Ching Huang, Jie-Hong R. Jiang
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2,021
aaai
Backdoor Decomposable Monotone Circuits and Propagation Complete Encodings
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We describe a compilation language of backdoor decomposable monotone circuits (BDMCs) which generalizes several concepts appearing in the literature, e.g. DNNFs and backdoor trees. A C-BDMC sentence is a monotone circuit which satisfies decomposability property (such as in DNNF) in which the inputs (or leaves) are associated with CNF encodings from a given base class C. We consider the class of propagation complete (PC) encodings as a base class and we show that PC-BDMCs are polynomially equivalent to PC encodings. Additionally, we use this to determine the properties of PC-BDMCs and PC encodings with respect to the knowledge compilation map including the list of efficient operations on the languages.
Petr Kučera, Petr Savický
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2,021
aaai
Finding Diverse Trees, Paths, and More
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Mathematical modeling is a standard approach to solve many real-world problems and diversity of solutions is an important issue, emerging in applying solutions obtained from mathematical models to real-world problems. Many studies have been devoted to finding diverse solutions. Baste et al. (Algorithms 2019, IJCAI 2020) recently initiated the study of computing diverse solutions of combinatorial problems from the perspective of fixed-parameter tractability. They considered problems of finding r solutions that maximize some diversity measures (the minimum or sum of the pairwise Hamming distances among them) and gave some fixed-parameter tractable algorithms for the diverse version of several well-known problems, such as Vertex Cover, Feedback Vertex Set, d-Hitting Set}, and problems on bounded-treewidth graphs. In this work, we further investigate the (fixed-parameter) tractability of problems of finding diverse spanning trees, paths, and several subgraphs. In particular, we show that, given a graph G and an integer r, the problem of computing r spanning trees of G maximizing the sum of the pairwise Hamming distances among them can be solved in polynomial time. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first polynomial-time solvable case for finding diverse solutions of unbounded size.
Tesshu Hanaka, Yasuaki Kobayashi, Kazuhiro Kurita, Yota Otachi
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2,021
aaai
Solving Infinite-Domain CSPs Using the Patchwork Property
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The constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) has important applications in computer science and AI. In particular, infinite-domain CSPs have been intensively used in subareas of AI such as spatio-temporal reasoning. Since constraint satisfaction is a computationally hard problem, much work has been devoted to identifying restricted problems that are efficiently solvable. One way of doing this is to restrict the interactions of variables and constraints, and a highly successful approach is to bound the treewidth of the underlying primal graph. Bodirsky & Dalmau [J. Comput. System. Sci., 79(1), 2013] and Huang et al. [Artif. Intell., 195, 2013] proved that CSP(Γ) can be solved in n^(f(w)) time (where n is the size of the instance, w is the treewidth of the primal graph and f is a computable function) for certain classes of constraint languages Γ. We improve this bound to f(w)n^(O(1)), where the function f only depends on the language Γ, for CSPs whose basic relations have the patchwork property. Hence, such problems are fixed-parameter tractable and our algorithm is asymptotically faster than the previous ones. Additionally, our approach is not restricted to binary constraints, so it is applicable to a strictly larger class of problems than that of Huang et al. However, there exist natural problems that are covered by Bodirsky & Dalmau's algorithm but not by ours.
Konrad K Dabrowski, Peter Jonsson, Sebastian Ordyniak, George Osipov
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2,021
aaai
Necessary and Sufficient Conditions for Avoiding Reopenings in Best First Suboptimal Search with General Bounding Functions
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Recent work introduced XDP and XUP priority functions for best-first bounded-suboptimal search that do not need to perform state re-expansions as long as the search heuristic is consistent. However, that work had several limitations that are rectified here. This paper analyzes the sufficiency and necessity of the conditions used to formulate XDP and XUP. The analysis presents a simpler proof and generalizes the result in three aspects: (1) the priority function no longer has to be differentiable everywhere, (2) the quality of the solution does not have to be bounded by a constant factor, and (3) directed graphs are handled correctly. These results allow the introduction of more priority functions, such as piecewise linear functions, and more variants of bounded-suboptimal search, such as constant suboptimality. Several new priority functions are presented in this paper that, according to empirical results, can significantly outperform existing approaches including XDP.
Jingwei Chen, Nathan R. Sturtevant
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2,021
aaai
Online Search with Maximum Clearance
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We study the setting in which a mobile searcher must locate a hidden target in a bounded or unbounded search domain, with no information about the hider's position. In particular, we consider online search, in which the performance of the search strategy is evaluated by its worst case competitive ratio. We introduce a multi-criteria search problem in which the searcher has a budget on its allotted search time, and the objective is to design strategies that are competitively efficient, respect the budget, and maximize the total searched ground. We give analytically optimal strategies for the line and the star domains, and efficient heuristics for general networks.
Spyros Angelopoulos, Malachi Voss
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2,021
aaai
Cutting to the Core of Pseudo-Boolean Optimization: Combining Core-Guided Search with Cutting Planes Reasoning
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Core-guided techniques have revolutionized Boolean satisfiability approaches to optimization problems (MaxSAT), but the process at the heart of these methods, strengthening bounds on solutions by repeatedly adding cardinality constraints, remains a bottleneck. Cardinality constraints require significant work to be re-encoded to SAT, and SAT solvers are notoriously weak at cardinality reasoning. In this work, we lift core-guided search to pseudo-Boolean (PB) solvers, which deal with more general PB optimization problems and operate natively with cardinality constraints. The cutting planes method used in such solvers allows us to derive stronger cardinality constraints, which yield better updates to solution bounds, and the increased efficiency of objective function reformulation also makes it feasible to switch repeatedly between lower-bounding and upper- bounding search. A thorough evaluation on applied and crafted benchmarks shows that our core-guided PB solver significantly improves on the state of the art in pseudo-Boolean optimization.
Jo Devriendt, Stephan Gocht, Emir Demirović, Jakob Nordström, Peter J. Stuckey
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2,021
aaai
Disjunctive Temporal Problems under Structural Restrictions
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The disjunctive temporal problem (DTP) is an expressive temporal formalism that extends Dechter et al.'s simple temporal problem. The DTP is well studied in the literature and has many important applications. It is known that deciding satisfiability of DTPs is NP-hard and that, in many cases, single-exponential algorithms (running in O(c^n) time) do not exist under the Exponential-Time Hypothesis. The computational hardness makes it worthwhile to identify restricted problems that are efficiently solvable. One way of doing this is to restrict the interactions of variables and constraints. We show that instances of DTP of any arity with integers bounded by poly(n) can be solved in n^{f(w)} time, where n denotes the problem size, w is the treewidth of the incidence graph and f is a computable function; in other words, this problem is in the complexity class XP and it can be solved in polynomial time whenever w is fixed. We complement this result by showing that binary DTPs that only involve the integers 0 and 1 are not fixed-parameter tractable with respect to treewidth, i.e. they do not admit a f(w)poly(n)$ time algorithm for any computable function f, under standard complexity assumptions. For instances with unbounded integers, we show that even binary DTPs parameterized by treewidth cannot be in XP, unless P = NP.
Konrad K Dabrowski, Peter Jonsson, Sebastian Ordyniak, George Osipov
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2,021
aaai
Combining Reinforcement Learning and Constraint Programming for Combinatorial Optimization
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Combinatorial optimization has found applications in numerous fields, from aerospace to transportation planning and economics. The goal is to find an optimal solution among a finite set of possibilities. The well-known challenge one faces with combinatorial optimization is the state-space explosion problem: the number of possibilities grows exponentially with the problem size, which makes solving intractable for large problems. In the last years, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has shown its promise for designing good heuristics dedicated to solve NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems. However, current approaches have an important shortcoming: they only provide an approximate solution with no systematic ways to improve it or to prove optimality. In another context, constraint programming (CP) is a generic tool to solve combinatorial optimization problems. Based on a complete search procedure, it will always find the optimal solution if we allow an execution time large enough. A critical design choice, that makes CP non-trivial to use in practice, is the branching decision, directing how the search space is explored. In this work, we propose a general and hybrid approach, based on DRL and CP, for solving combinatorial optimization problems. The core of our approach is based on a dynamic programming formulation, that acts as a bridge between both techniques. We experimentally show that our solver is efficient to solve three challenging problems: the traveling salesman problem with time windows, the 4-moments portfolio optimization problem, and the 0-1 knapsack problem. Results obtained show that the framework introduced outperforms the stand-alone RL and CP solutions, while being competitive with industrial solvers.
Quentin Cappart, Thierry Moisan, Louis-Martin Rousseau, Isabeau Prémont-Schwarz, Andre A. Cire
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2,021
aaai
New Length Dependent Algorithm for Maximum Satisfiability Problem
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In this paper, we study the computational complexity of the Maximum Satisfiability problem in terms of the length L of a given formula. We present an algorithm with running time O(1.0927^L), hence, improving the previously known best upper bound O(1.1058^L) developed more than 20 years ago by Bansal and Raman. Theoretically speaking, our algorithm increases the length of solvable formulas by 13.3% (compare this to the recent breakthrough result for Maximum Satisfiability problem with respect to the number of clauses by Xu et al. in 2019 giving a 7.5% improvement). Besides, we propose a significantly simpler algorithm with running time O(1.1049^L). The algorithm outperforms Bansal's and Raman's algorithm in simplicity and running time.
Vasily Alferov, Ivan Bliznets
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2,021
aaai
Learning To Scale Mixed-Integer Programs
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Many practical applications require the solution of numerically challenging linear programs (LPs) and mixed integer programs (MIPs). Scaling is a widely used preconditioning technique that aims at reducing the error propagation of the involved linear systems, thereby improving the numerical behavior of the dual simplex algorithm and, consequently, LP-based branch-and-bound. A reliable scaling method often makes the difference whether these problems can be solved correctly or not. In this paper, we investigate the use of machine learning to choose at the beginning of the solution process between two common scaling methods: Standard scaling and Curtis-Reid scaling. The latter often, but not always, leads to a more robust solution process, but may suffer from longer solution times. Rather than training for overall solution time, we propose to use the attention level of a MIP solution process as a learning label. We evaluate the predictive power of a random forest approach and a linear regressor that learns the (square-root of the) difference in attention level. It turns out that the resulting classification not only reduces various types of numerical errors by large margins, but it also improves the performance of the dual simplex algorithm. The learned model has been implemented within the FICO Xpress MIP solver and it is used by default since release 8.9, May 2020, to determine the scaling algorithm Xpress applies before solving an LP or a MIP.
Timo Berthold, Gregor Hendel
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2,021
aaai
Learning from History: Modeling Temporal Knowledge Graphs with Sequential Copy-Generation Networks
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Large knowledge graphs often grow to store temporal facts that model the dynamic relations or interactions of entities along the timeline. Since such temporal knowledge graphs often suffer from incompleteness, it is important to develop time-aware representation learning models that help to infer the missing temporal facts. While the temporal facts are typically evolving, it is observed that many facts often show a repeated pattern along the timeline, such as economic crises and diplomatic activities. This observation indicates that a model could potentially learn much from the known facts appeared in history. To this end, we propose a new representation learning model for temporal knowledge graphs, namely CyGNet, based on a novel time-aware copy-generation mechanism. CyGNet is not only able to predict future facts from the whole entity vocabulary, but also capable of identifying facts with repetition and accordingly predicting such future facts with reference to the known facts in the past. We evaluate the proposed method on the knowledge graph completion task using five benchmark datasets. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of CyGNet for predicting future facts with repetition as well as de novo fact prediction.
Cunchao Zhu, Muhao Chen, Changjun Fan, Guangquan Cheng, Yan Zhang
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null
2,021
aaai
Certifying Parity Reasoning Efficiently Using Pseudo-Boolean Proofs
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The dramatic improvements in combinatorial optimization algorithms over the last decades have had a major impact in artificial intelligence, operations research, and beyond, but the output of current state-of-the-art solvers is often hard to verify and is sometimes wrong. For Boolean satisfiability (SAT) solvers proof logging has been introduced as a way to certify correctness, but the methods used seem hard to generalize to stronger paradigms. What is more, even for enhanced SAT techniques such as parity (XOR) reasoning, cardinality detection, and symmetry handling, it has remained beyond reach to design practically efficient proofs in the standard DRAT format. In this work, we show how to instead use pseudo-Boolean inequalities with extension variables to concisely justify XOR reasoning. Our experimental evaluation of a SAT solver integration shows a dramatic decrease in proof logging and verification time compared to existing DRAT methods. Since our method is a strict generalization of DRAT, and readily lends itself to expressing also 0-1 programming and even constraint programming problems, we hope this work points the way towards a unified approach for efficient machine-verifiable proofs for a rich class of combinatorial optimization paradigms.
Stephan Gocht, Jakob Nordström
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2,021
aaai
Relation-Aware Neighborhood Matching Model for Entity Alignment
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Entity alignment which aims at linking entities with the same meaning from different knowledge graphs (KGs) is a vital step for knowledge fusion. Existing research focused on learning embeddings of entities by utilizing structural information of KGs for entity alignment. These methods can aggregate information from neighboring nodes but may also bring noise from neighbors. Most recently, several researchers attempted to compare neighboring nodes in pairs to enhance the entity alignment. However, they ignored the relations between entities which are also important for neighborhood matching. In addition, existing methods paid less attention to the positive interactions between the entity alignment and the relation alignment. To deal with these issues, we propose a novel Relation-aware Neighborhood Matching model named RNM for entity alignment. Specifically, we propose to utilize the neighborhood matching to enhance the entity alignment. Besides comparing neighbor nodes when matching neighborhood, we also try to explore useful information from the connected relations. Moreover, an iterative framework is designed to leverage the positive interactions between the entity alignment and the relation alignment in a semi-supervised manner. Experimental results on three real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed model RNM performs better than state-of-the-art methods.
Yao Zhu, Hongzhi Liu, Zhonghai Wu, Yingpeng Du
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2,021
aaai
Optimising Automatic Calibration of Electric Muscle Stimulation
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Electrical Muscle Stimulation (EMS) has become a popular interaction technology in Human-Computer Interaction; allowing the computer to take direct control of the user's body. To date, however, the explorations have been limited to coarse, toy examples, due to the low resolution of achievable control. To increase this resolution, the EMS needs to increase significantly in complexity - using large numbers of electrodes in complex patterns. The calibration of such a system remains an unsolved challenge. We present a new SAT-based black-box calibration method, which requires no spatial information about muscular or electrode positioning. The method encodes domain knowledge and observations in a constraint model, and uses these to prune the space of feasible control signals. In a simulated environment we find this method can scale reliably to large arrays while requiring only a modest number of trials, and preliminary tests on real hardware show we can effectively calibrate an electrode array in a few minutes.
Graeme Gange, Jarrod Knibbe
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null
2,021
aaai
Counting Maximal Satisfiable Subsets
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Given an unsatisfiable set of constraints F, a maximal satisfiable subset (MSS) is a maximal subset of constraints C ⊆ F such that C is satisfiable. Over the past two decades, the steady improvement in runtime performance of algorithms for finding MSS has led to an increased adoption of MSS-based techniques in wide variety of domains. Motivated by the progress in finding an MSS, the past decade has witnessed a surge of interest in design of algorithmic techniques to enumerate all the MSSes, which has subsequently led to discovery of new applications utilizing enumeration of MSSes. The development of techniques for finding and enumeration of MSSes mirrors a similar phenomenon of finding and enumeration of SAT solutions in the early 2000s, which subsequently motivated design of algorithmic techniques for model counting. In a similar spirit, we undertake study to investigate the feasibility of MSS counting techniques. In particular, the focus point of our investigation is to answer whether one can design efficient MSS counting techniques that do not rely on explicit MSS enumeration. The primary contribution of this work is an affirmative answer to the above question. Our tool, CountMSS, uses a novel architecture of a wrapper W and a remainder R such that the desired MSS count can be expressed as |W| − |R|. CountMSS relies on the advances in projected model counting to efficiently compute |W| and |R|. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates that CountMSS is able to scale to instances clearly beyond the reach of enumeration-based techniques.
Jaroslav Bendík, Kuldeep S. Meel
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2,021
aaai
Transformer-Style Relational Reasoning with Dynamic Memory Updating for Temporal Network Modeling
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Network modeling aims to learn the latent representations of nodes such that the representations preserve both network structures and node attribute information. This problem is fundamental due to its prevalence in numerous domains. However, existing approaches either target the static networks or struggle to capture the complicated temporal dependency, while most real-world networks evolve over time and the success of network modeling hinges on the understanding of how entities are temporally connected. In this paper, we present TRRN, a transformer-style relational reasoning network with dynamic memory updating, to deal with the above challenges. TRRN employs multi-head self-attention to reason over a set of memories, which provides a multitude of shortcut paths for information to flow from past observations to the current latent representations. By utilizing the policy networks augmented with differentiable binary routers, TRRN estimates the possibility of each memory being activated and dynamically updates the memories at the time steps when they are most relevant. We evaluate TRRN with the tasks of node classification and link prediction on four real temporal network datasets. Experimental results demonstrate the consistent performance gains for TRRN over the leading competitors.
Dongkuan Xu, Junjie Liang, Wei Cheng, Hua Wei, Haifeng Chen, Xiang Zhang
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2,021
aaai
Why Do Attributes Propagate in Graph Convolutional Neural Networks?
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Many efforts have been paid to enhance Graph Convolutional Network from the perspective of propagation under the philosophy that ``Propagation is the essence of the GCNNs". Unfortunately, its adverse effect is over-smoothing, which makes the performance dramatically drop. To prevent the over-smoothing, many variants are presented. However, the perspective of propagation can't provide an intuitive and unified interpretation to their effect on prevent over-smoothing. In this paper, we aim at providing a novel explanation to the question of "Why do attributes propagate in GCNNs?''. which not only gives the essence of the oversmoothing, but also illustrates why the GCN extensions, including multi-scale GCN and GCN with initial residual, can improve the performance. To this end, an intuitive Graph Representation Learning (GRL) framework is presented. GRL simply constrains the node representation similar with the original attribute, and encourages the connected nodes possess similar representations (pairwise constraint). Based on the proposed GRL, exiting GCN and its extensions can be proved as different numerical optimization algorithms, such as gradient descent, of our proposed GRL framework. Inspired by the superiority of conjugate gradient descent compared to common gradient descent, a novel Graph Conjugate Convolutional (GCC) network is presented to approximate the solution to GRL with fast convergence. Specifically, GCC adopts the obtained information of the last layer, which can be represented as the difference between the input and output of the last layer, as the input to the next layer. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of GCC.
Liang Yang, Chuan Wang, Junhua Gu, Xiaochun Cao, Bingxin Niu
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null
2,021
aaai
Dynamic Knowledge Graph Alignment
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Knowledge graph (KG for short) alignment aims at building a complete KG by linking the shared entities across complementary KGs. Existing approaches assume that KGs are static, despite the fact that almost every KG evolves over time. In this paper, we introduce the task of dynamic knowledge graph alignment, the main challenge of which is how to efficiently update entity embeddings for the evolving graph topology. Our key insight is to view the parameter matrix of GCN as a feature transformation operator and decouple the transformation process from the aggregation process. Based on that, we first propose a novel base algorithm (DINGAL-B) with topology-invariant mask gate and highway gate, which consistently outperforms 14 existing knowledge graph alignment methods in the static setting. More importantly, it naturally leads to two effective and efficient algorithms to align dynamic knowledge graph, including (1) DINGAL-O which leverages previous parameter matrices to update the embeddings of affected entities; and (2) DINGAL-U which resorts to newly obtained anchor links to fine-tune parameter matrices. Compared with their static counterpart (DINGAL-B), DINGAL-U and DINGAL-O are 10× and 100× faster respectively, with little alignment accuracy loss.
Yuchen Yan, Lihui Liu, Yikun Ban, Baoyu Jing, Hanghang Tong
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2,021
aaai
Dual Sparse Attention Network For Session-based Recommendation
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Session-based Recommendations recommend the next possible item for the user with anonymous sessions, whose challenge is that the user’s behavioral preference can only be analyzed in a limited sequence to meet their need. Recent advances evaluate the effectiveness of the attention mechanism in the session-based recommendation. However, two simplifying assumptions are made by most of these attention-based models. One is to regard the last-click as the query vector to denote the user’s current preference, and the other is to consider that all items within the session are favorable for the final result, including the effect of unrelated items (i.e., spurious user behaviors). In this paper, we propose a novel Dual Sparse Attention Network for the session-based recommendation called DSAN to address these shortcomings. In this proposed method, we explore a learned target item embedding to model the user’s current preference and apply an adaptively sparse transformation function to eliminate the effect of the unrelated items. Experimental results on two real public datasets show that the proposed method is superior to the state-of-the-art session-based recommendation algorithm in all tests and also demonstrate that not all actions within the session are useful. To make our results reproducible, we have published our code on https://github.com/SamHaoYuan/DSANForAAAI2021.
Jiahao Yuan, Zihan Song, Mingyou Sun, Xiaoling Wang, Wayne Xin Zhao
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null
2,021
aaai
Capturing Delayed Feedback in Conversion Rate Prediction via Elapsed-Time Sampling
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Conversion rate (CVR) prediction is one of the most critical tasks for digital display advertising. Commercial systems often require to update models in an online learning manner to catch up with the evolving data distribution. However, conversions usually do not happen immediately after user clicks. This may result in inaccurate labeling, which is called delayed feedback problem. In previous studies, delayed feedback problem is handled either by waiting positive label for a long period of time, or by consuming the negative sample on its arrival and then insert a positive duplicate when conversion happens later. Indeed, there is a trade-off between waiting for more accurate labels and utilizing fresh data, which is not considered in existing works. To strike a balance in this trade-off, we propose Elapsed-Time Sampling Delayed Feedback Model (ES-DFM), which models the relationship between the observed conversion distribution and the true conversion distribution. Then we optimize the expectation of true conversion distribution via importance sampling under the elapsed-time sampling distribution. We further estimate the importance weight for each instance, which is used as the weight of loss function in CVR prediction. To demonstrate the effectiveness of ES-DFM, we conduct extensive experiments on a public data and a private industrial dataset. Experimental results confirm that our method consistently outperforms the previous state-of-the-art results.
Jia-Qi Yang, Xiang Li, Shuguang Han, Tao Zhuang, De-Chuan Zhan, Xiaoyi Zeng, Bin Tong
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2,021
aaai
Cold-start Sequential Recommendation via Meta Learner
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This paper explores meta-learning in sequential recommendation to alleviate the item cold-start problem. Sequential recommendation aims to capture user's dynamic preferences based on historical behavior sequences and acts as a key component of most online recommendation scenarios. However, most previous methods have trouble recommending cold-start items, which are prevalent in those scenarios. As there is generally no side information in sequential recommendation task, previous cold-start methods could not be applied when only user-item interactions are available. Thus, we propose a Meta-learning-based Cold-Start Sequential Recommendation Framework, namely Mecos, to mitigate the item cold-start problem in sequential recommendation. This task is non-trivial as it targets at an important problem in a novel and challenging context. Mecos effectively extracts user preference from limited interactions and learns to match the target cold-start item with the potential user. Besides, our framework can be painlessly integrated with neural network-based models. Extensive experiments conducted on three real-world datasets verify the superiority of Mecos, with the average improvement up to 99%, 91%, and 70% in HR@10 over state-of-the-art baseline methods.
Yujia Zheng, Siyi Liu, Zekun Li, Shu Wu
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null
2,021
aaai
Relaxed Clustered Hawkes Process for Student Procrastination Modeling in MOOCs
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Hawkes processes have been shown to be efficient in modeling bursty sequences in a variety of applications, such as finance and social network activity analysis. Traditionally, these models parameterize each process independently and assume that the history of each point process can be fully observed. Such models could however be inefficient or even prohibited in certain real-world applications, such as in the field of education, where such assumptions are violated. Motivated by the problem of detecting and predicting student procrastination in students Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) with missing and partially observed data, in this work, we propose a novel personalized Hawkes process model (RCHawkes-Gamma) that discovers meaningful student behavior clusters by jointly learning all partially observed processes simultaneously, without relying on auxiliary features. Our experiments on both synthetic and real-world education datasets show that RCHawkes-Gamma can effectively recover student clusters and their temporal procrastination dynamics, resulting in better predictive performance of future student activities. Our further analyses of the learned parameters and their association with student delays show that the discovered student clusters unveil meaningful representations of various procrastination behaviors in students.
Mengfan Yao, Siqian Zhao, Shaghayegh Sahebi, Reza Feyzi Behnagh
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null
2,021
aaai
Modeling Heterogeneous Relations across Multiple Modes for Potential Crowd Flow Prediction
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Potential crowd flow prediction for new planned transportation sites is a fundamental task for urban planners and administrators. Intuitively, the potential crowd flow of the new coming site can be implied by exploring the nearby sites. However, the transportation modes of nearby sites (e.g. bus stations, bicycle stations) might be different from the target site (e.g. subway station), which results in severe data scarcity issues. To this end, we propose a data-driven approach, named MOHER, to predict the potential crowd flow in a certain mode for a new planned site. Specifically, we first identify the neighbor regions of the target site by examining the geographical proximity as well as the urban function similarity. Then, to aggregate these heterogeneous relations, we devise a cross-mode relational GCN, a novel relation-specific transformation model, which can learn not only the correlation but also the differences between different transportation modes. Afterward, we design an aggregator for inductive potential flow representation. Finally, an LTSM module is used for sequential flow prediction. Extensive experiments on real-world data sets demonstrate the superiority of the MOHER framework compared with the state-of-the-art algorithms.
Qiang Zhou, Jingjing Gu, Xinjiang Lu, Fuzhen Zhuang, Yanchao Zhao, Qiuhong Wang, Xiao Zhang
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null
2,021
aaai
A Unified Pretraining Framework for Passage Ranking and Expansion
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Pretrained language models have recently advanced a wide range of natural language processing tasks. Nowadays, the application of pretrained language models to IR tasks has also achieved impressive results. Typical methods either directly apply a pretrained model to improve the re-ranking stage, or use it to conduct passage expansion and term weighting for first-stage retrieval. We observe that the passage ranking and passage expansion tasks share certain inherent relations, and can benefit from each other. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a general pretraining framework to enhance both tasks with Unified Encoder-Decoder networks (UED). The overall ranking framework consists of two parts in a cascade manner: (1) passage expansion with a pretraining-based query generation method; (2) re-ranking of passage candidates from a traditional retrieval method with a pretrained transformer encoder. Both the two parts are based on the same pretrained UED model, where we jointly train the passage ranking and query generation tasks for further improving the full ranking pipeline. An extensive set of experiments have been conducted on two large-scale passage retrieval datasets to demonstrate the state-of-the-art results of the proposed framework in both the first-stage retrieval and the final re-ranking. In addition, we successfully deploy the framework to our online production system, which can stably serve industrial applications with a request volume of up to 100 QPS in less than 300ms.
Ming Yan, Chenliang Li, Bin Bi, Wei Wang, Songfang Huang
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null
2,021
aaai
Self-Supervised Prototype Representation Learning for Event-Based Corporate Profiling
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Event-based corporate profiling aims to assess the evolving operational status of the corresponding corporate from its event sequence. Existing studies on corporate profiling have partially addressed the problem via (i) case-by-case empirical analysis by leveraging traditional financial methods, or (ii) the automatic profile inference by reformulating the problem into a supervised learning task. However, both approaches heavily rely on domain knowledge and are labor-intensive. More importantly, the task-specific nature of both approaches prevents the obtained corporate profiles from being applied to diversified downstream applications. To this end, in this paper, we propose a Self-Supervised Prototype Representation Learning (SePaL) framework for dynamic corporate profiling. By exploiting the topological information of an event graph and exploring self-supervised learning techniques, SePaL can obtain unified corporate representations that are robust to event noises and can be easily fine-tuned to benefit various down-stream applications with only a few annotated data. Specifically, we first infer the initial cluster distribution of noise-resistant event prototypes based on latent representations of events. Then, we construct four permutation-invariant self-supervision signals to guide the representation learning of the event prototype. In terms of applications, we exploit the learned time-evolving corporate representations for both stock price spike prediction and corporate default risk evaluation. Experimental results on two real-world corporate event datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of SePaL for these two applications.
Zixuan Yuan, Hao Liu, Renjun Hu, Denghui Zhang, Hui Xiong
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null
2,021
aaai
Overcoming Catastrophic Forgetting in Graph Neural Networks with Experience Replay
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Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have recently received significant research attention due to their superior performance on a variety of graph-related learning tasks. Most of the current works focus on either static or dynamic graph settings, addressing a single particular task, e.g., node/graph classification, link prediction. In this work, we investigate the question: can GNNs be applied to continuously learning a sequence of tasks? Towards that, we explore the Continual Graph Learning (CGL) paradigm and present the Experience Replay based framework ER-GNN for CGL to alleviate the catastrophic forgetting problem in existing GNNs. ER-GNN stores knowledge from previous tasks as experiences and replays them when learning new tasks to mitigate the catastrophic forgetting issue. We propose three experience node selection strategies: mean of feature, coverage maximization, and influence maximization, to guide the process of selecting experience nodes. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our ER-GNN and shed light on the incremental graph (non-Euclidean) structure learning.
Fan Zhou, Chengtai Cao
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2,021
aaai
Coupled Layer-wise Graph Convolution for Transportation Demand Prediction
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Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) has been widely applied in transportation demand prediction due to its excellent ability to capture non-Euclidean spatial dependence among station-level or regional transportation demands. However, in most of the existing research, the graph convolution was implemented on a heuristically generated adjacency matrix, which could neither reflect the real spatial relationships of stations accurately, nor capture the multi-level spatial dependence of demands adaptively. To cope with the above problems, this paper provides a novel graph convolutional network for transportation demand prediction. Firstly, a novel graph convolution architecture is proposed, which has different adjacency matrices in different layers and all the adjacency matrices are self-learned during the training process. Secondly, a layer-wise coupling mechanism is provided, which associates the upper-level adjacency matrix with the lower-level one. It also reduces the scale of parameters in our model. Lastly, a unitary network is constructed to give the final prediction result by integrating the hidden spatial states with gated recurrent unit, which could capture the multi-level spatial dependence and temporal dynamics simultaneously. Experiments have been conducted on two real-world datasets, NYC Citi Bike and NYC Taxi, and the results demonstrate the superiority of our model over the state-of-the-art ones.
Junchen Ye, Leilei Sun, Bowen Du, Yanjie Fu, Hui Xiong
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null
2,021
aaai
Interpretable Clustering on Dynamic Graphs with Recurrent Graph Neural Networks
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We study the problem of clustering nodes in a dynamic graph, where the connections between nodes and nodes' cluster memberships may change over time, e.g., due to community migration. We first propose a dynamic stochastic block model that captures these changes, and a simple decay-based clustering algorithm that clusters nodes based on weighted connections between them, where the weight decreases at a fixed rate over time. This decay rate can then be interpreted as signifying the importance of including historical connection information in the clustering. However, the optimal decay rate may differ for clusters with different rates of turnover. We characterize the optimal decay rate for each cluster and propose a clustering method that achieves almost exact recovery of the true clusters. We then demonstrate the efficacy of our clustering algorithm with optimized decay rates on simulated graph data. Recurrent neural networks (RNNs), a popular algorithm for sequence learning, use a similar decay-based method, and we use this insight to propose two new RNN-GCN (graph convolutional network) architectures for semi-supervised graph clustering. We finally demonstrate that the proposed architectures perform well on real data compared to state-of-the-art graph clustering algorithms.
Yuhang Yao, Carlee Joe-Wong
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null
2,021
aaai
Heterogeneous Graph Structure Learning for Graph Neural Networks
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Heterogeneous Graph Neural Networks (HGNNs) have drawn increasing attention in recent years and achieved outstanding performance in many tasks. The success of the existing HGNNs relies on one fundamental assumption, i.e., the original heterogeneous graph structure is reliable. However, this assumption is usually unrealistic, since the heterogeneous graph in reality is inevitably noisy or incomplete. Therefore, it is vital to learn the heterogeneous graph structure for HGNNs rather than rely only on the raw graph structure. In light of this, we make the first attempt towards learning an optimal heterogeneous graph structure for HGNNs and propose a novel framework HGSL, which jointly performs Heterogeneous Graph Structure Learning and GNN parameters learning for classification task. Different from traditional GSL on homogeneous graph, considering the heterogeneity of different relations in heterogeneous graph, HGSL generates each relation subgraph independently. Specifically, in each generated relation subgraph, HGSL not only considers the feature similarity by generating feature similarity graph, but also considers the complex heterogeneous interactions in features and semantics by generating feature propagation graph and semantic graph. Then, these graphs are fused to a learned heterogeneous graph and optimized together with a GNN towards classification objective. Extensive experiments on real-world graphs demonstrate that the proposed framework significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.
Jianan Zhao, Xiao Wang, Chuan Shi, Binbin Hu, Guojie Song, Yanfang Ye
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null
2,021
aaai
Deep Graph-neighbor Coherence Preserving Network for Unsupervised Cross-modal Hashing
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Unsupervised cross-modal hashing (UCMH) has become a hot topic recently. Current UCMH focuses on exploring data similarities. However, current UCMH methods calculate the similarity between two data, mainly relying on the two data's cross-modal features. These methods suffer from inaccurate similarity problems that result in a suboptimal retrieval Hamming space, because the cross-modal features between the data are not sufficient to describe the complex data relationships, such as situations where two data have different feature representations but share the inherent concepts. In this paper, we devise a deep graph-neighbor coherence preserving network (DGCPN). Specifically, DGCPN stems from graph models and explores graph-neighbor coherence by consolidating the information between data and their neighbors. DGCPN regulates comprehensive similarity preserving losses by exploiting three types of data similarities (i.e., the graph-neighbor coherence, the coexistent similarity, and the intra- and inter-modality consistency) and designs a half-real and half-binary optimization strategy to reduce the quantization errors during hashing. Essentially, DGCPN addresses the inaccurate similarity problem by exploring and exploiting the data's intrinsic relationships in a graph. We conduct extensive experiments on three public UCMH datasets. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of DGCPN, e.g., by improving the mean average precision from 0.722 to 0.751 on MIRFlickr-25K using 64-bit hashing codes to retrieval texts from images. We will release the source code package and the trained model on https://github.com/Atmegal/DGCPN.
Jun Yu, Hao Zhou, Yibing Zhan, Dacheng Tao
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null
2,021
aaai
A Graph-based Relevance Matching Model for Ad-hoc Retrieval
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To retrieve more relevant, appropriate and useful documents given a query, finding clues about that query through the text is crucial. Recent deep learning models regard the task as a term-level matching problem, which seeks exact or similar query patterns in the document. However, we argue that they are inherently based on local interactions and do not generalise to ubiquitous, non-consecutive contextual relationships. In this work, we propose a novel relevance matching model based on graph neural networks to leverage the document-level word relationships for ad-hoc retrieval. In addition to the local interactions, we explicitly incorporate all contexts of a term through the graph-of-word text format. Matching patterns can be revealed accordingly to provide a more accurate relevance score. Our approach significantly outperforms strong baselines on two ad-hoc benchmarks. We also experimentally compare our model with BERT and show our advantages on long documents.
Yufeng Zhang, Jinghao Zhang, Zeyu Cui, Shu Wu, Liang Wang
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null
2,021
aaai
Coupling Macro-Sector-Micro Financial Indicators for Learning Stock Representations with Less Uncertainty
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While the stock movement prediction has been intensively studied, existing work suffers from weak generalization because of the uncertainty in both data and modeling. On one hand, training a stock representation on stochastic stock data in an end-to-end manner may lead to excessive modeling, which involves model uncertainty. On the other, the analysis of correlating stock data with its relevant factors involves data uncertainty. To simultaneously address such uncertainty both from data and modeling perspectives, a fundamental yet challenging task is to learn a better stock representation with less uncertainty by considering hierarchical couplings from the macro-level to the sector-and micro-level. Accordingly, we propose a copula-based contrastive predictive coding (Co-CPC) method. Co-CPC first models the dependence between a certain stock sector and relevant macroeconomic variables that are sequential and heterogeneous, e.g., macro-variables are associated with different time intervals, scales, and distributions. Then, by involving a macro-sector context, stock representations are learned in a self-supervised way that can further be used for downstream tasks like stock movement prediction. Extensive experiments on two typical stock datasets verify the effectiveness of our Co-CPC method.
Guifeng Wang, Longbing Cao, Hongke Zhao, Qi Liu, Enhong Chen
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null
2,021
aaai
Reinforcement Learning with a Disentangled Universal Value Function for Item Recommendation
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In recent years, there are great interests as well as many challenges in applying reinforcement learning (RL) to recommendation systems (RS). In this paper, we summarize three key practical challenges of large-scale RL-based recommender systems: massive state and action spaces, high-variance environment, and the unspecific reward setting in recommendation. All these problems remain largely unexplored in the existing literature and make the application of RL challenging. We develop a model-based reinforcement learning framework, called GoalRec. Inspired by the ideas of world model (model-based), value function estimation (model-free), and goal-based RL, a novel disentangled universal value function designed for item recommendation is proposed. It can generalize to various goals that the recommender may have, and disentangle the stochastic environmental dynamics and high-variance reward signals accordingly. As a part of the value function, free from the sparse and high-variance reward signals, a high-capacity reward-independent world model is trained to simulate complex environmental dynamics under a certain goal. Based on the predicted environmental dynamics, the disentangled universal value function is related to the user's future trajectory instead of a monolithic state and a scalar reward. We demonstrate the superiority of GoalRec over previous approaches in terms of the above three practical challenges in a series of simulations and a real application.
Kai Wang, Zhene Zou, Qilin Deng, Jianrong Tao, Runze Wu, Changjie Fan, Liang Chen, Peng Cui
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null
2,021
aaai
Taxonomy Completion via Triplet Matching Network
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Automatically constructing taxonomy finds many applications in e-commerce and web search. One critical challenge is as data and business scope grow in real applications, new concepts are emerging and needed to be added to the existing taxonomy. Previous approaches focus on the taxonomy expansion, i.e. finding an appropriate hypernym concept from the taxonomy for a new query concept. In this paper, we formulate a new task, “taxonomy completion”, by discovering both the hypernym and hyponym concepts for a query. We propose Triplet Matching Network (TMN), to find the appropriate pairs for a given query concept. TMN consists of one primal scorer and multiple auxiliary scorers. These auxiliary scorers capture various fine-grained signals (e.g., query to hypernym or query to hyponym semantics), and the primal scorer makes a holistic prediction on triplet based on the internal feature representations of all auxiliary scorers. Also, an innovative channel-wise gating mechanism that retains task-specific information in concept representations is introduced to further boost model performance. Experiments on four real-world large-scale datasets show that TMN achieves the best performance on both taxonomy completion task and the previous taxonomy expansion task, outperforming existing methods.
Jieyu Zhang, Xiangchen Song, Ying Zeng, Jiaze Chen, Jiaming Shen, Yuning Mao, Lei Li
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null
2,021
aaai
Learning to Truncate Ranked Lists for Information Retrieval
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Ranked list truncation is of critical importance in a variety of professional information retrieval applications such as patent search or legal search. The goal is to dynamically determine the number of returned documents according to some user-defined objectives, in order to reach a balance between the overall utility of the results and user efforts. Existing methods formulate this task as a sequential decision problem and take some pre-defined loss as a proxy objective, which suffers from the limitation of local decision and non-direct optimization. In this work, we propose a global decision based truncation model named AttnCut, which directly optimizes user-defined objectives for the ranked list truncation. Specifically, we take the successful transformer architecture to capture the global dependency within the ranked list for truncation decision, and employ the reward augmented maximum likelihood (RAML) for direct optimization. We consider two types of user-defined objectives which are of practical usage. One is the widely adopted metric such as F1 which acts as a balanced objective, and the other is the best F1 under some minimal recall constraint which represents a typical objective in professional search. Empirical results over the Robust04 and MQ2007 datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach as compared with the state-of-the-art baselines.
Chen Wu, Ruqing Zhang, Jiafeng Guo, Yixing Fan, Yanyan Lan, Xueqi Cheng
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null
2,021
aaai
Tripartite Collaborative Filtering with Observability and Selection for Debiasing Rating Estimation on Missing-Not-at-Random Data
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Most collaborative filtering (CF) models estimate missing ratings with an implicit assumption that the ratings are missing-at-random, which may cause the biased rating estimation and degraded performance since recent deep exploration shows that ratings may likely be missing-not-at-random (MNAR). To debias MNAR rating estimation, we introduce item observability and user selection to depict the generation of MNAR ratings and propose a tripartite CF (TCF) framework to jointly model the triple aspects of rating generation: item observability, user selection, and ratings, and to estimate the MNAR ratings. An item observability variable is introduced to a complete observability model to infer whether an item is observable to a user. TCF also conducts a complete rating model for rating generation and utilizes a user selection model dependent on the item observability and rating values to model user selection of the observable items. We further elaborately instantiate TCF as a Tripartite Probabilistic Matrix Factorization model (TPMF) by leveraging the probabilistic matrix factorization. Besides, TPMF introduces multifaceted dependency between user selection and ratings to model the influence of user selection on ratings. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets show that modeling item observability and user selection effectively debias MNAR rating estimation, and TPMF outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in estimating the MNAR ratings.
Qi Zhang, Longbing Cao, Chongyang Shi, Liang Hu
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null
2,021
aaai
GSNet: Learning Spatial-Temporal Correlations from Geographical and Semantic Aspects for Traffic Accident Risk Forecasting
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Traffic accident forecasting is of great importance to urban public safety, emergency treatment, and construction planning. However, it is very challenging since traffic accidents are affected by multiple factors, and have multi-scale dependencies on both spatial and temporal dimensional features. Meanwhile, traffic accidents are rare events, which leads to the zero-inflated issue. Existing traffic accident forecasting methods cannot deal with all above problems simultaneously. In this paper, we propose a novel model, named GSNet, to learn the spatial-temporal correlations from geographical and semantic aspects for traffic accident risk forecasting. In the model, a Spatial-Temporal Geographical Module is designed to capture the geographical spatial-temporal correlations among regions, while a Spatial-Temporal Semantic Module is proposed to model the semantic spatial-temporal correlations among regions. In addition, a weighted loss function is designed to solve the zero-inflated issue. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of GSNet against the state-of-the-art baseline methods.
Beibei Wang, Youfang Lin, Shengnan Guo, Huaiyu Wan
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null
2,021
aaai
How Do We Move: Modeling Human Movement with System Dynamics
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Modeling how human moves in the space is useful for policy-making in transportation, public safety, and public health. The human movements can be viewed as a dynamic process that human transits between states (e.g., locations) over time. In the human world where intelligent agents like humans or vehicles with human drivers play an important role, the states of agents mostly describe human activities, and the state transition is influenced by both the human decisions and physical constraints from the real-world system (e.g., agents need to spend time to move over a certain distance). Therefore, the modeling of state transition should include the modeling of the agent's decision process and the physical system dynamics. In this paper, we propose MoveSD to model state transition in human movement from a novel perspective, by learning the decision model and integrating the system dynamics. MoveSD learns the human movement with Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning and integrates the stochastic constraints from system dynamics in the learning process. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to learn to model the state transition of moving agents with system dynamics. In extensive experiments on real-world datasets, we demonstrate that the proposed method can generate trajectories similar to real-world ones, and outperform the state-of-the-art methods in predicting the next location and generating long-term future trajectories.
Hua Wei, Dongkuan Xu, Junjie Liang, Zhenhui (Jessie) Li
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2,021
aaai
Generalized Relation Learning with Semantic Correlation Awareness for Link Prediction
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Developing link prediction models to automatically complete knowledge graphs has recently been the focus of significant research interest. The current methods for the link prediction task have two natural problems: 1) the relation distributions in KGs are usually unbalanced, and 2) there are many unseen relations that occur in practical situations. These two problems limit the training effectiveness and practical applications of the existing link prediction models. We advocate a holistic understanding of KGs and we propose in this work a unified Generalized Relation Learning framework GRL to address the above two problems, which can be plugged into existing link prediction models. GRL conducts a generalized relation learning, which is aware of semantic correlations between relations that serve as a bridge to connect semantically similar relations. After training with GRL, the closeness of semantically similar relations in vector space and the discrimination of dissimilar relations are improved. We perform comprehensive experiments on six benchmarks to demonstrate the superior capability of GRL in the link prediction task. In particular, GRL is found to enhance the existing link prediction models making them insensitive to unbalanced relation distributions and capable of learning unseen relations.
Yao Zhang, Xu Zhang, Jun Wang, Hongru Liang, Wenqiang Lei, Zhe Sun, Adam Jatowt, Zhenglu Yang
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2,021
aaai
Reinforced Imitative Graph Representation Learning for Mobile User Profiling: An Adversarial Training Perspective
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In this paper, we study the problem of mobile user profiling, which is a critical component for quantifying users' characteristics in the human mobility modeling pipeline. Human mobility is a sequential decision-making process dependent on the users' dynamic interests. With accurate user profiles, the predictive model can perfectly reproduce users' mobility trajectories. In the reverse direction, once the predictive model can imitate users' mobility patterns, the learned user profiles are also optimal. Such intuition motivates us to propose an imitation-based mobile user profiling framework by exploiting reinforcement learning, in which the agent is trained to precisely imitate users' mobility patterns for optimal user profiles. Specifically, the proposed framework includes two modules: (1) representation module, that produces state combining user profiles and spatio-temporal context in real-time; (2) imitation module, where Deep Q-network (DQN) imitates the user behavior (action) based on the state that is produced by the representation module. However, there are two challenges in running the framework effectively. First, epsilon-greedy strategy in DQN makes use of the exploration-exploitation trade-off by randomly pick actions with the epsilon probability. Such randomness feeds back to the representation module, causing the learned user profiles unstable. To solve the problem, we propose an adversarial training strategy to guarantee the robustness of the representation module. Second, the representation module updates users' profiles in an incremental manner, requiring integrating the temporal effects of user profiles. Inspired by Long-short Term Memory (LSTM), we introduce a gated mechanism to incorporate new and old user characteristics into the user profile. In the experiment, we evaluate our proposed framework on real-world datasets. The extensive experimental results validate the superiority of our method comparing to baseline algorithms.
Dongjie Wang, Pengyang Wang, Kunpeng Liu, Yuanchun Zhou, Charles E Hughes, Yanjie Fu
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2,021
aaai
GaussianPath:A Bayesian Multi-Hop Reasoning Framework for Knowledge Graph Reasoning
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Recently, multi-hop reasoning over incomplete Knowledge Graphs (KGs) has attracted wide attention due to its desirable interpretability for downstream tasks, such as question answer and knowledge graph completion. Multi-Hop reasoning is a typical sequential decision problem, which can be formulated as a Markov decision process (MDP). Subsequently, some reinforcement learning (RL) based approaches are proposed and proven effective to train an agent for reasoning paths sequentially until reaching the target answer. However, these approaches assume that an entity/relation representation follows a one-point distribution. In fact, different entities and relations may contain different certainties. On the other hand, since REINFORCE used for updating the policy in these approaches is a biased policy gradients method, the agent is prone to be stuck in high reward paths rather than broad reasoning paths, which leads to premature and suboptimal exploitation. In this paper, we consider a Bayesian reinforcement learning paradigm to harness uncertainty into multi-hop reasoning. By incorporating uncertainty into the representation layer, the agent trained by RL has uncertainty in a region of the state space then it should be more efficient in exploring unknown or less known part of the KG. In our approach, we build a Bayesian Q-learning architecture as a state-action value function for estimating the expected long-term reward. As initialized by Gaussian prior or pre-trained prior distribution, the representation layer drives uncertainty that allows regularizing the training. We conducted extensive experiments on multiple KGs. Experimental results show a superior performance than other baselines, especially significant improvements on the automated extracted KG.
Guojia Wan, Bo Du
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2,021
aaai
A General Offline Reinforcement Learning Framework for Interactive Recommendation
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This paper studies the problem of learning interactive recommender systems from logged feedbacks without any exploration in online environments. We address the problem by proposing a general offline reinforcement learning framework for recommendation, which enables maximizing cumulative user rewards without online exploration. Specifically, we first introduce a probabilistic generative model for interactive recommendation, and then propose an effective inference algorithm for discrete and stochastic policy learning based on logged feedbacks. In order to perform offline learning more effectively, we propose five approaches to minimize the distribution mismatch between the logging policy and recommendation policy: support constraints, supervised regularization, policy constraints, dual constraints and reward extrapolation. We conduct extensive experiments on two public real-world datasets, demonstrating that the proposed methods can achieve superior performance over existing supervised learning and reinforcement learning methods for recommendation.
Teng Xiao, Donglin Wang
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2,021
aaai
Fairness-aware News Recommendation with Decomposed Adversarial Learning
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News recommendation is important for online news services. Existing news recommendation models are usually learned from users' news click behaviors. Usually the behaviors of users with the same sensitive attributes (e.g., genders) have similar patterns and news recommendation models can easily capture these patterns. It may lead to some biases related to sensitive user attributes in the recommendation results, e.g., always recommending sports news to male users, which is unfair since users may not receive diverse news information. In this paper, we propose a fairness-aware news recommendation approach with decomposed adversarial learning and orthogonality regularization, which can alleviate unfairness in news recommendation brought by the biases of sensitive user attributes. In our approach, we propose to decompose the user interest model into two components. One component aims to learn a bias-aware user embedding that captures the bias information on sensitive user attributes, and the other aims to learn a bias-free user embedding that only encodes attribute-independent user interest information for fairness-aware news recommendation. In addition, we propose to apply an attribute prediction task to the bias-aware user embedding to enhance its ability on bias modeling, and we apply adversarial learning to the bias-free user embedding to remove the bias information from it. Moreover, we propose an orthogonality regularization method to encourage the bias-free user embeddings to be orthogonal to the bias-aware one to better distinguish the bias-free user embedding from the bias-aware one. For fairness-aware news ranking, we only use the bias-free user embedding. Extensive experiments on benchmark dataset show that our approach can effectively improve fairness in news recommendation with minor performance loss.
Chuhan Wu, Fangzhao Wu, Xiting Wang, Yongfeng Huang, Xing Xie
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2,021
aaai
A Hybrid Probabilistic Approach for Table Understanding
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Tables of data are used to record vast amounts of socioeconomic, scientific, and governmental information. Although humans create tables using underlying organizational principles, unfortunately AI systems struggle to understand the contents of these tables. This paper introduces an end-to-end system for table understanding, the process of capturing the relational structure of data in tables. We introduce models that identify cell types, group these cells into blocks of data that serve a similar functional role, and predict the relationships between these blocks. We introduce a hybrid, neuro-symbolic approach, combining embedded representations learned from thousands of tables with probabilistic constraints that capture regularities in how humans organize tables. Our neuro-symbolic model is better able to capture positional invariants of headers and enforce homogeneity of data types. One limitation in this research area is the lack of rich datasets for evaluating end-to-end table understanding, so we introduce a new benchmark dataset comprised of 431 diverse tables from data.gov. The evaluation results show that our system achieves the state-of-the-art performance on cell type classification, block identification, and relationship prediction, improving over prior efforts by up to 7% of macro F1 score.
Kexuan Sun, Harsha Rayudu, Jay Pujara
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2,021
aaai
Knowledge-Driven Distractor Generation for Cloze-Style Multiple Choice Questions
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In this paper, we propose a novel configurable framework to automatically generate distractive choices for open-domain cloze-style multiple-choice questions. The framework incorporates a general-purpose knowledge base to effectively create a small distractor candidate set, and a feature-rich learning-to-rank model to select distractors that are both plausible and reliable. Experimental results on a new dataset across four domains show that our framework yields distractors outperforming previous methods both by automatic and human evaluation. The dataset can also be used as a benchmark for distractor generation research in the future.
Siyu Ren, Kenny Q. Zhu
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2,021
aaai
GraphMSE: Efficient Meta-path Selection in Semantically Aligned Feature Space for Graph Neural Networks
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Heterogeneous information networks (HINs) are ideal for describing real-world data with different types of entities and relationships. To carry out machine learning on HINs, meta-paths are widely utilized to extract semantics with pre-defined patterns, and models such as graph convolutional networks (GCNs) are thus enabled. However, previous works generally assume a fixed set of meta-paths, which is unrealistic as real-world data are overwhelmingly diverse. Therefore, it is appealing if meta-paths can be automatically selected given an HIN, yet existing works aiming at such problem possess drawbacks, such as poor efficiency and ignoring feature heterogeneity. To address these drawbacks, we propose GraphMSE, an efficient heterogeneous GCN combined with automatic meta-path selection. Specifically, we design highly efficient meta-path sampling techniques, and then injectively project sampled meta-path instances to vectors. We then design a novel semantic feature space alignment, aiming to align the meta-path instance vectors and hence facilitate meta-path selection. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that GraphMSE outperforms state-of-the-art counterparts, figures out important meta-paths, and is dramatically (e.g. 200 times) more efficient.
Yi Li, Yilun Jin, Guojie Song, Zihao Zhu, Chuan Shi, Yiming Wang
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2,021
aaai
Knowledge-Enhanced Hierarchical Graph Transformer Network for Multi-Behavior Recommendation
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Accurate user and item embedding learning is crucial for modern recommender systems. However, most existing recommendation techniques have thus far focused on modeling users' preferences over singular type of user-item interactions. Many practical recommendation scenarios involve multi-typed user interactive behaviors (e.g., page view, add-to-favorite and purchase), which presents unique challenges that cannot be handled by current recommendation solutions. In particular: i) complex inter-dependencies across different types of user behaviors; ii) the incorporation of knowledge-aware item relations into the multi-behavior recommendation framework; iii) dynamic characteristics of multi-typed user-item interactions. To tackle these challenges, this work proposes a Knowledge-Enhanced Hierarchical Graph Transformer Network (KHGT), to investigate multi-typed interactive patterns between users and items in recommender systems. Specifically, KHGT is build upon a graph-structured neural architecture to i) capture type-specific behavior semantics; ii) explicitly discriminate which types of user-item interactions are more important in assisting the forecasting task on the target behavior. Additionally, we further integrate the multi-modal graph attention layer with temporal encoding strategy, to empower the learned embeddings be reflective of both dedicated multiplex user-item and item-item collaborative relations, as well as the underlying interaction dynamics. Extensive experiments conducted on three real-world datasets show that KHGT consistently outperforms many state-of-the-art recommendation methods across various evaluation settings. Our implementation is available in https://github.com/akaxlh/KHGT.
Lianghao Xia, Chao Huang, Yong Xu, Peng Dai, Xiyue Zhang, Hongsheng Yang, Jian Pei, Liefeng Bo
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2,021
aaai
Self-Supervised Hypergraph Convolutional Networks for Session-based Recommendation
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Session-based recommendation (SBR) focuses on next-item prediction at a certain time point. As user profiles are generally not available in this scenario, capturing the user intent lying in the item transitions plays a pivotal role. Recent graph neural networks (GNNs) based SBR methods regard the item transitions as pairwise relations, which neglect the complex high-order information among items. Hypergraph provides a natural way to capture beyond-pairwise relations, while its potential for SBR has remained unexplored. In this paper, we fill this gap by modeling session-based data as a hypergraph and then propose a dual channel hypergraph convolutional network -- DHCN to improve SBR. Moreover, to enhance hypergraph modeling, we innovatively integrate self-supervised learning into the training of our network by maximizing mutual information between the session representations learned via the two channels in DHCN, serving as an auxiliary task to improve the recommendation task. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our model over the SOTA methods, and the ablation study validates the effectiveness and rationale of hypergraph modeling and self-supervised task. The implementation of our model is available via https://github.com/xiaxin1998/DHCN.
Xin Xia, Hongzhi Yin, Junliang Yu, Qinyong Wang, Lizhen Cui, Xiangliang Zhang
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2,021
aaai
Group Testing on a Network
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Group testing---where multiple samples are tested together using a single test kit and individual tests are performed only for samples in positive groups---is a popular strategy to optimize the use of testing resources. We investigate how to effectively group samples for testing based on a transmission network. We formalize the group assembling problem as a graph partitioning problem, where the goal is to minimize the expected number of tests needed to screen the entire network. The problem is shown to be computationally hard and thus we focus on designing effective heuristics for it. Using realistic epidemic models on real contact networks, we show that our approaches save up to 33% of resources---compared to the best baseline---at 4% prevalence, are still effective at higher prevalence, and are robust to missing transmission data.
Arlei Silva, Ambuj Singh
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2,021
aaai
FedRec++: Lossless Federated Recommendation with Explicit Feedback
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With the marriage of federated machine learning and recommender systems for privacy-aware preference modeling and personalization, there comes a new research branch called federated recommender systems aiming to build a recommendation model in a distributed way, i.e., each user is represented as a distributed client where his/her original rating data are not shared with the server or the other clients. Notice that, besides the sensitive information of a specific rating score assigned to a certain item by a user, the information of a user's rated set of items shall also be well protected. Some very recent works propose to randomly sample some unrated items for each user and then assign some virtual ratings, so that the server can not identify the scores and the set of rated items easily during the server-client interactions. However, the virtual ratings assigned to the randomly sampled items will inevitably introduce some noise to the model training process, which will then cause loss in recommendation performance. In this paper, we propose a novel lossless federated recommendation method (FedRec++) by allocating some denoising clients (i.e., users) to eliminate the noise in a privacy-aware manner. We further analyse our FedRec++ in terms of security and losslessness, and discuss its generality in the context of existing works. Extensive empirical studies clearly show the effectiveness of our FedRec++ in providing accurate and privacy-aware recommendation without much additional communication cost.
Feng Liang, Weike Pan, Zhong Ming
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2,021
aaai
Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning for Integrated Recommendation
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Integrated recommendation aims to jointly recommend heterogeneous items in the main feed from different sources via multiple channels, which needs to capture user preferences on both item and channel levels. It has been widely used in practical systems by billions of users, while few works concentrate on the integrated recommendation systematically. In this work, we propose a novel Hierarchical reinforcement learning framework for integrated recommendation (HRL-Rec), which divides the integrated recommendation into two tasks to recommend channels and items sequentially. The low-level agent is a channel selector, which generates a personalized channel list. The high-level agent is an item recommender, which recommends specific items from heterogeneous channels under the channel constraints. We design various rewards for both recommendation accuracy and diversity, and propose four losses for fast and stable model convergence. We also conduct an online exploration for sufficient training. In experiments, we conduct extensive offline and online experiments on a billion-level real-world dataset to show the effectiveness of HRL-Rec. HRL-Rec has also been deployed on WeChat Top Stories, affecting millions of users. The source codes are released in https://github.com/modriczhang/HRL-Rec.
Ruobing Xie, Shaoliang Zhang, Rui Wang, Feng Xia, Leyu Lin
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2,021
aaai
HMS: A Hierarchical Solver with Dependency-Enhanced Understanding for Math Word Problem
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Automatically solving math word problems is a crucial task for exploring the intelligence levels of machines in the general AI domain. It is highly challenging since it requires not only natural language understanding but also mathematical expression inference. Existing solutions usually explore sequence-to-sequence models to generate expressions, where the problems are simply encoded sequentially. However, such models are generally far from enough for understanding problems as similar to humans and lead to incorrect answers. To this end, in this paper, we propose a novel Hierarchical Math Solver (HMS) to make deep understanding and exploitation of problems. In problem understanding, imitating human reading habits, we propose a hierarchical word-clause-problem encoder. Specifically, we first split each problem into several clauses and learn problem semantics from the local clause level to the global problem level. Then, in clause understanding, we propose a dependency-based module to enhance clause semantics with the dependency structure of the problem. Next, in expression inference, we propose a novel tree-based decoder to generate the mathematical expression for the answer. In the decoder, we apply a hierarchical attention mechanism to enhance the problem semantics with context from different levels, and a pointer-generator network to guide the model to copy existing information and infer extra knowledge. Extensive experimental results on two widely used datasets demonstrate that HMS achieves not only better answers but also more reasonable inference.
Xin Lin, Zhenya Huang, Hongke Zhao, Enhong Chen, Qi Liu, Hao Wang, Shijin Wang
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2,021
aaai
Hybrid-order Stochastic Block Model
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Community detection is a research hotspot in machine learning and data mining. However, most of the existing community detection methods only rely on the lower-order connectivity patterns, while ignoring the higher-order connectivity patterns, and unable to capture the building blocks of the complex network. In recent years, some community detection methods based on higher-order structures have been developed, but they mainly focus on the motif network composed of higher-order structures, which violate the original lower-order topological structure and are affected by the fragmentation issue, resulting in the deviation of community detection results. Therefore, there is still a lack of community detection methods that can effectively utilize higher-order connectivity patterns and lower-order connectivity patterns. To overcome the above limitations, this paper proposes the Hybrid-order Stochastic Block Model (HSBM) from the perspective of the generative model. Based on the classical stochastic block model, the generation of lower-order structure and higher-order structure of the network is modeled uniformly, and the original topological properties of the network are maintained while using higher-order connectivity patterns. At the same time, a heuristic algorithm for community detection is proposed to optimize the objective function. Extensive experiments on six real-world datasets show that the proposed method outperforms the existing approaches.
Xunxun Wu, Chang-Dong Wang, Pengfei Jiao
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2,021
aaai
Towards Consumer Loan Fraud Detection: Graph Neural Networks with Role-Constrained Conditional Random Field
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Consumer loans, i.e., loans to finance consumers to buy certain types of expenditures, is increasingly popular in e-commerce platform. Different from traditional loans with mortgage, online consumer loans only take personal credit as collateral for loans. Consequently, loan fraud detection is particularly critical for lenders to avoid economic loss. Previous methods mainly leverage applicant's attributes and historical behavior for loan fraud detection. Although these methods gain success at detecting potential charge-offs, yet they perform worse when multiple persons with various roles (e.g., sellers, intermediaries) collude to apply fraudulent loan. To combat this challenge, we consider the problem of loan fraud detection via exploiting roles of users and multi-type social relationships among users. We propose a novel Graph neural network with a Role-constrained Conditional random field, namely GRC, to learn the representation of applicants and detect loan fraud based on the learned representation. The proposed model characterizes the multiple types of relationships via self-attention mechanism and employs conditional random field to constrain users with the same role to have similar representation. We validate the proposed model through experiments in large-scale auto-loan scenario. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art results in loan fraud detection on Alipay, one online credit payment service serving more than 450 million users in China.
Bingbing Xu, Huawei Shen, Bingjie Sun, Rong An, Qi Cao, Xueqi Cheng
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2,021
aaai
Rejection Sampling for Weighted Jaccard Similarity Revisited
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Efficiently computing the weighted Jaccard similarity has become an active research topic in machine learning and theory. For sparse data, the standard technique is based on the consistent weighed sampling (CWS). For dense data, however, methods based on rejection sampling (RS) can be much more efficient. Nevertheless, existing RS methods are still slow for practical purposes. In this paper, we propose to improve RS by a strategy, which we call efficient rejection sampling (ERS), based on ``early stopping + densification''. We analyze the statistical property of ERS and provide experimental results to compare ERS with RS and other algorithms for hashing weighted Jaccard. The results demonstrate that ERS significantly improves the existing methods for estimating the weighted Jaccard similarity in relatively dense data.
Xiaoyun Li, Ping Li
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2,021
aaai
Noninvasive Self-attention for Side Information Fusion in Sequential Recommendation
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Sequential recommender systems aim to model users’ evolving interests from their historical behaviors, and hence make customized time-relevant recommendations. Compared with traditional models, deep learning approaches such as CNN and RNN have achieved remarkable advancements in recommendation tasks. Recently, the BERT framework also emerges as a promising method, benefited from its self-attention mechanism in processing sequential data. However, one limitation of the original BERT framework is that it only considers one input source of the natural language tokens. It is still an open question to leverage various types of information under the BERT framework. Nonetheless, it is intuitively appealing to utilize other side information, such as item category or tag, for more comprehensive depictions and better recommendations. In our pilot experiments, we found naive approaches, which directly fuse types of side information into the item embeddings, usually bring very little or even negative effects. Therefore, in this paper, we propose the NOn-inVasive self-Attention mechanism (NOVA) to leverage side information effectively under the BERT framework. NOVA makes use of side information to generate better attention distribution, rather than directly altering the item embeddings, which may cause information overwhelming. We validate the NOVA-BERT model on both public and commercial datasets, and our method can stably outperform the state-of-the-art models with negligible computational overheads.
Chang Liu, Xiaoguang Li, Guohao Cai, Zhenhua Dong, Hong Zhu, Lifeng Shang
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2,021
aaai
Knowledge-Enhanced Top-K Recommendation in Poincaré Ball
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Personalized recommender systems are increasingly important as more content and services become available and users struggle to identify what might interest them. Thanks to the ability for providing rich information, knowledge graphs (KGs) are being incorporated to enhance the recommendation performance and interpretability. To effectively make use of the knowledge graph, we propose a recommendation model in the hyperbolic space, which facilitates the learning of the hierarchical structure of knowledge graphs. Furthermore, a hyperbolic attention network is employed to determine the relative importances of neighboring entities of a certain item. In addition, we propose an adaptive and fine-grained regularization mechanism to adaptively regularize items and their neighboring representations. Via a comparison using three real-world datasets with state-of-the-art methods, we show that the proposed model outperforms the best existing models by 2-16% in terms of NDCG@K on Top-K recommendation.
Chen Ma, Liheng Ma, Yingxue Zhang, Haolun Wu, Xue Liu, Mark Coates
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2,021
aaai
Visual Pivoting for (Unsupervised) Entity Alignment
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This work studies the use of visual semantic representations to align entities in heterogeneous knowledge graphs (KGs). Images are natural components of many existing KGs. By combining visual knowledge with other auxiliary information, we show that the proposed new approach, EVA, creates a holistic entity representation that provides strong signals for cross-graph entity alignment. Besides, previous entity alignment methods require human labelled seed alignment, restricting availability. EVA provides a completely unsupervised solution by leveraging the visual similarity of entities to create an initial seed dictionary (visual pivots). Experiments on benchmark data sets DBP15k and DWY15k show that EVA offers state-of-the-art performance on both monolingual and cross-lingual entity alignment tasks. Furthermore, we discover that images are particularly useful to align long-tail KG entities, which inherently lack the structural contexts necessary for capturing the correspondences. Code release: https://github.com/cambridgeltl/eva; project page: http://cogcomp.org/page/publication view/927.
Fangyu Liu, Muhao Chen, Dan Roth, Nigel Collier
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2,021
aaai
Cross-Oilfield Reservoir Classification via Multi-Scale Sensor Knowledge Transfer
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Reservoir classification is an essential step for the exploration and production process in the oil and gas industry. An appropriate automatic reservoir classification will not only reduce the manual workloads of experts, but also help petroleum companies to make optimal decisions efficiently, which in turn will dramatically reduce the costs. Existing methods mainly focused on generating reservoir classification in a single geological block but failed to work well on a new oilfield block. Indeed, how to transfer the subsurface characteristics and make accurate reservoir classification across the geological oilfields is a very important but challenging problem. To that end, in this paper, we present a focused study on the cross-oilfield reservoir classification task. Specifically, we first propose a Multi-scale Sensor Extraction (MSE) to extract the multi-scale feature representations of geological characteristics from multivariate well logs. Furthermore, we design an encoder-decoder module, Specific Feature Learning (SFL), to take advantage of specific information of both oilfields. Then, we develop a Knowledge-Attentive Transfer (KAT) module to learn the feature-invariant representation and transfer the geological knowledge from a source oilfield to a target oilfield. Finally, we evaluate our approaches by conducting extensive experiments with real-world industrial datasets. The experimental results clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approaches to transfer the geological knowledge and generate the cross-oilfield reservoir classifications.
Zhi Li, Zhefeng Wang, Zhicheng Wei, Xiangguang Zhou, Yijun Wang, Baoxing Huai, Qi Liu, Nicholas Jing Yuan, Renbin Gong, Enhong Chen
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2,021
aaai