Xingchen Hu

Jiyuan Liu, Xinwang Liu, Siqi Wang et al.

Vertical federated learning is a natural and elegant approach to integrate multi-view data vertically partitioned across devices (clients) while preserving their privacies. Apart from the model training, existing methods requires the collaboration of all clients in the model inference. However, the model inference is probably maintained for service in a long time, while the collaboration, especially when the clients belong to different organizations, is unpredictable in real-world scenarios, such as concellation of contract, network unavailablity, etc., resulting in the failure of them. To address this issue, we, at the first attempt, propose a flexible Active-Passive Federated learning (APFed) framework. Specifically, the active client is the initiator of a learning task and responsible to build the complete model, while the passive clients only serve as assistants. Once the model built, the active client can make inference independently. In addition, we instance the APFed framework into two classification methods with employing the reconstruction loss and the contrastive loss on passive clients, respectively. Meanwhile, the two methods are tested in a set of experiments and achieves desired results, validating their effectiveness.

Meng Liu, Ke Liang, Siwei Wang et al.

Temporal Graph Clustering (TGC) is a new task with little attention, focusing on node clustering in temporal graphs. Compared with existing static graph clustering, it can find the balance between time requirement and space requirement (Time-Space Balance) through the interaction sequence-based batch-processing pattern. However, there are two major challenges that hinder the development of TGC, i.e., inapplicable clustering techniques and inapplicable datasets. To address these challenges, we propose a comprehensive benchmark, called BenchTGC. Specially, we design a BenchTGC Framework to illustrate the paradigm of temporal graph clustering and improve existing clustering techniques to fit temporal graphs. In addition, we also discuss problems with public temporal graph datasets and develop multiple datasets suitable for TGC task, called BenchTGC Datasets. According to extensive experiments, we not only verify the advantages of BenchTGC, but also demonstrate the necessity and importance of TGC task. We wish to point out that the dynamically changing and complex scenarios in real world are the foundation of temporal graph clustering. The code and data is available at: https://github.com/MGitHubL/BenchTGC.

Xiuyu Wu, Xinhao Wang, Xiubin Zhu et al.

Due to the arbitrary orientation of objects in aerial images, rotation equivariance is a critical property for aerial object detectors. However, recent studies on rotation-equivariant aerial object detection remain scarce. Most detectors rely on data augmentation to enable models to learn approximately rotation-equivariant features. A few detectors have constructed rotation-equivariant networks, but due to the breaking of strict rotation equivariance by typical downsampling processes, these networks only achieve approximately rotation-equivariant backbones. Whether strict rotation equivariance is necessary for aerial image object detection remains an open question. In this paper, we implement a strictly rotation-equivariant backbone and neck network with a more advanced network structure and compare it with approximately rotation-equivariant networks to quantitatively measure the impact of rotation equivariance on the performance of aerial image detectors. Additionally, leveraging the inherently grouped nature of rotation-equivariant features, we propose a multi-branch head network that reduces the parameter count while improving detection accuracy. Based on the aforementioned improvements, this study proposes the Multi-branch head rotation-equivariant single-stage Detector (MessDet), which achieves state-of-the-art performance on the challenging aerial image datasets DOTA-v1.0, DOTA-v1.5 and DIOR-R with an exceptionally low parameter count.

Qing Cheng, Zefan Zeng, Xingchen Hu et al.

Event Causality Identification (ECI) has become an essential task in Natural Language Processing (NLP), focused on automatically detecting causal relationships between events within texts. This comprehensive survey systematically investigates fundamental concepts and models, developing a systematic taxonomy and critically evaluating diverse models. We begin by defining core concepts, formalizing the ECI problem, and outlining standard evaluation protocols. Our classification framework divides ECI models into two primary tasks: Sentence-level Event Causality Identification (SECI) and Document-level Event Causality Identification (DECI). For SECI, we review models employing feature pattern-based matching, machine learning classifiers, deep semantic encoding, prompt-based fine-tuning, and causal knowledge pre-training, alongside data augmentation strategies. For DECI, we focus on approaches utilizing deep semantic encoding, event graph reasoning, and prompt-based fine-tuning. Special attention is given to recent advancements in multi-lingual and cross-lingual ECI, as well as zero-shot ECI leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs). We analyze the strengths, limitations, and unresolved challenges associated with each approach. Extensive quantitative evaluations are conducted on four benchmark datasets to rigorously assess the performance of various ECI models. We conclude by discussing future research directions and highlighting opportunities to advance the field further.

Zhenglai Li, Chang Tang, Xinwang Liu et al.

Change detection (CD) is essential for various real-world applications, such as urban management and disaster assessment. Numerous CD methods have been proposed, and considerable results have been achieved recently. However, detecting changes in hard regions, i.e., the change boundary and irrelevant pseudo changes caused by background clutters, remains difficult for these methods, since they pose equal attention for all regions in bi-temporal images. This paper proposes a novel change detection network, termed as HRANet, which provides accurate change maps via hard region mining. Specifically, an online hard region estimation branch is constructed to model the pixel-wise hard samples, supervised by the error between predicted change maps and corresponding ground truth during the training process. A cross-layer knowledge review module is introduced to distill temporal change information from low-level to high-level features, thereby enhancing the feature representation capabilities. Finally, the hard region aware features extracted from the online hard region estimation branch and multi-level temporal difference features are aggregated into a unified feature representation to improve the accuracy of CD. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets demonstrate the superior performance of HRANet in the CD task.