Zhibin Duan

Muyao Wang, Wenchao Chen, Zhibin Duan et al.

Forecasting Multivariate Time Series (MTS) involves significant challenges in various application domains. One immediate challenge is modeling temporal patterns with the finite length of the input. These temporal patterns usually involve periodic and sudden events that recur across different channels. To better capture temporal patterns, we get inspiration from humans' memory mechanisms and propose a channel-shared, brain-inspired memory module for MTS. Specifically, brain-inspired memory comprises semantic and episodic memory, where the former is used to capture general patterns, such as periodic events, and the latter is employed to capture special patterns, such as sudden events, respectively. Meanwhile, we design corresponding recall and update mechanisms to better utilize these patterns. Furthermore, acknowledging the capacity of diffusion models to leverage memory as a prior, we present a brain-inspired memory-augmented diffusion model. This innovative model retrieves relevant memories for different channels, utilizing them as distinct priors for MTS predictions. This incorporation significantly enhances the accuracy and robustness of predictions. Experimental results on eight datasets consistently validate the superiority of our approach in capturing and leveraging diverse recurrent temporal patterns across different channels.

Xinyue Hu, Zhibin Duan, Bo Chen et al.

Although deep neural networks have demonstrated significant success due to their powerful expressiveness, most models struggle to meet practical requirements for uncertainty estimation. Concurrently, the entangled nature of deep neural networks leads to a multifaceted problem, where various localized explanation techniques reveal that multiple unrelated features influence the decisions, thereby undermining interpretability. To address these challenges, we develop a Bayesian Non-negative Decision Layer (BNDL), which reformulates deep neural networks as a conditional Bayesian non-negative factor analysis. By leveraging stochastic latent variables, the BNDL can model complex dependencies and provide robust uncertainty estimation. Moreover, the sparsity and non-negativity of the latent variables encourage the model to learn disentangled representations and decision layers, thereby improving interpretability. We also offer theoretical guarantees that BNDL can achieve effective disentangled learning. In addition, we developed a corresponding variational inference method utilizing a Weibull variational inference network to approximate the posterior distribution of the latent variables. Our experimental results demonstrate that with enhanced disentanglement capabilities, BNDL not only improves the model's accuracy but also provides reliable uncertainty estimation and improved interpretability.

Zhibin Duan, Yishi Xu, Bo Chen et al.

Existing deep hierarchical topic models are able to extract semantically meaningful topics from a text corpus in an unsupervised manner and automatically organize them into a topic hierarchy. However, it is unclear how to incorporate prior beliefs such as knowledge graph to guide the learning of the topic hierarchy. To address this issue, we introduce TopicNet as a deep hierarchical topic model that can inject prior structural knowledge as an inductive bias to influence learning. TopicNet represents each topic as a Gaussian-distributed embedding vector, projects the topics of all layers into a shared embedding space, and explores both the symmetric and asymmetric similarities between Gaussian embedding vectors to incorporate prior semantic hierarchies. With an auto-encoding variational inference network, the model parameters are optimized by minimizing the evidence lower bound and a regularization term via stochastic gradient descent. Experiments on widely used benchmarks show that TopicNet outperforms related deep topic models on discovering deeper interpretable topics and mining better document~representations.

Zhibin Duan, Dongsheng Wang, Bo Chen et al.

Hierarchical topic models such as the gamma belief network (GBN) have delivered promising results in mining multi-layer document representations and discovering interpretable topic taxonomies. However, they often assume in the prior that the topics at each layer are independently drawn from the Dirichlet distribution, ignoring the dependencies between the topics both at the same layer and across different layers. To relax this assumption, we propose sawtooth factorial topic embedding guided GBN, a deep generative model of documents that captures the dependencies and semantic similarities between the topics in the embedding space. Specifically, both the words and topics are represented as embedding vectors of the same dimension. The topic matrix at a layer is factorized into the product of a factor loading matrix and a topic embedding matrix, the transpose of which is set as the factor loading matrix of the layer above. Repeating this particular type of factorization, which shares components between adjacent layers, leads to a structure referred to as sawtooth factorization. An auto-encoding variational inference network is constructed to optimize the model parameter via stochastic gradient descent. Experiments on big corpora show that our models outperform other neural topic models on extracting deeper interpretable topics and deriving better document representations.