Shengzhong Mao

Yuping Wu, Ching-Hsun Tseng, Jiayu Shang et al.

Extractive models usually formulate text summarization as extracting fixed top-$k$ salient sentences from the document as a summary. Few works exploited extracting finer-grained Elementary Discourse Unit (EDU) with little analysis and justification for the extractive unit selection. Further, the selection strategy of the fixed top-$k$ salient sentences fits the summarization need poorly, as the number of salient sentences in different documents varies and therefore a common or best $k$ does not exist in reality. To fill these gaps, this paper first conducts the comparison analysis of oracle summaries based on EDUs and sentences, which provides evidence from both theoretical and experimental perspectives to justify and quantify that EDUs make summaries with higher automatic evaluation scores than sentences. Then, considering this merit of EDUs, this paper further proposes an EDU-level extractive model with Varying summary Lengths and develops the corresponding learning algorithm. EDU-VL learns to encode and predict probabilities of EDUs in the document, generate multiple candidate summaries with varying lengths based on various $k$ values, and encode and score candidate summaries, in an end-to-end training manner. Finally, EDU-VL is experimented on single and multi-document benchmark datasets and shows improved performances on ROUGE scores in comparison with state-of-the-art extractive models, and further human evaluation suggests that EDU-constituent summaries maintain good grammaticality and readability.

Shengzhong Mao, Chaoli Zhang, Yichi Song et al.

Recent advancements in the collection and analysis of sequential educational data have brought time series analysis to a pivotal position in educational research, highlighting its essential role in facilitating data-driven decision-making. However, there is a lack of comprehensive summaries that consolidate these advancements. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first to provide a comprehensive review of time series analysis techniques specifically within the educational context. We begin by exploring the landscape of educational data analytics, categorizing various data sources and types relevant to education. We then review four prominent time series methods-forecasting, classification, clustering, and anomaly detection-illustrating their specific application points in educational settings. Subsequently, we present a range of educational scenarios and applications, focusing on how these methods are employed to address diverse educational tasks, which highlights the practical integration of multiple time series methods to solve complex educational problems. Finally, we conclude with a discussion on future directions, including personalized learning analytics, multimodal data fusion, and the role of large language models (LLMs) in educational time series. The contributions of this paper include a detailed taxonomy of educational data, a synthesis of time series techniques with specific educational applications, and a forward-looking perspective on emerging trends and future research opportunities in educational analysis. The related papers and resources are available and regularly updated at the project page.

Ching-Hsun Tseng, Shin-Jye Lee, Jia-Nan Feng et al.

Among image classification, skip and densely-connection-based networks have dominated most leaderboards. Recently, from the successful development of multi-head attention in natural language processing, it is sure that now is a time of either using a Transformer-like model or hybrid CNNs with attention. However, the former need a tremendous resource to train, and the latter is in the perfect balance in this direction. In this work, to make CNNs handle global and local information, we proposed UPANets, which equips channel-wise attention with a hybrid skip-densely-connection structure. Also, the extreme-connection structure makes UPANets robust with a smoother loss landscape. In experiments, UPANets surpassed most well-known and widely-used SOTAs with an accuracy of 96.47% in Cifar-10, 80.29% in Cifar-100, and 67.67% in Tiny Imagenet. Most importantly, these performances have high parameters efficiency and only trained in one customer-based GPU. We share implementing code of UPANets in https://github.com/hanktseng131415go/UPANets.