Qiang Sun

Xianghong Fang, Litao Guo, Hengchao Chen et al.

The success of autoregressive models largely depends on the effectiveness of vector quantization, a technique that discretizes continuous features by mapping them to the nearest code vectors within a learnable codebook. Two critical issues in existing vector quantization methods are training instability and codebook collapse. Training instability arises from the gradient discrepancy introduced by the straight-through estimator, especially in the presence of significant quantization errors, while codebook collapse occurs when only a small subset of code vectors are utilized during training. A closer examination of these issues reveals that they are primarily driven by a mismatch between the distributions of the features and code vectors, leading to unrepresentative code vectors and significant data information loss during compression. To address this, we employ the Wasserstein distance to align these two distributions, achieving near 100\% codebook utilization and significantly reducing the quantization error. Both empirical and theoretical analyses validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Qiang Sun, Yuanyi Luo, Wenxiao Zhang et al.

Even for a conservative estimate, 80% of enterprise data reside in unstructured files, stored in data lakes that accommodate heterogeneous formats. Classical search engines can no longer meet information seeking needs, especially when the task is to browse and explore for insight formulation. In other words, there are no obvious search keywords to use. Knowledge graphs, due to their natural visual appeals that reduce the human cognitive load, become the winning candidate for heterogeneous data integration and knowledge representation. In this paper, we introduce Docs2KG, a novel framework designed to extract multimodal information from diverse and heterogeneous unstructured documents, including emails, web pages, PDF files, and Excel files. Dynamically generates a unified knowledge graph that represents the extracted key information, Docs2KG enables efficient querying and exploration of document data lakes. Unlike existing approaches that focus on domain-specific data sources or pre-designed schemas, Docs2KG offers a flexible and extensible solution that can adapt to various document structures and content types. The proposed framework unifies data processing supporting a multitude of downstream tasks with improved domain interpretability. Docs2KG is publicly accessible at https://docs2kg.ai4wa.com, and a demonstration video is available at https://docs2kg.ai4wa.com/Video.

Qiang Sun, Liting Wang, Maohui Li et al.

In the modern content-based image retrieval systems, there is an increasingly interest in constructing a computationally effective model to predict the interestingness of images since the measure of image interestingness could improve the human-centered search satisfaction and the user experience in different applications. In this paper, we propose a unified framework to predict the binary interestingness of images based on discriminant correlation analysis (DCA) and multiple kernel learning (MKL) techniques. More specially, on the one hand, to reduce feature redundancy in describing the interestingness cues of images, the DCA or multi-set discriminant correlation analysis (MDCA) technique is adopted to fuse multiple feature sets of the same type for individual cues by taking into account the class structure among the samples involved to describe the three classical interestingness cues, unusualness,aesthetics as well as general preferences, with three sets of compact and representative features; on the other hand, to make good use of the heterogeneity from the three sets of high-level features for describing the interestingness cues, the SimpleMKL method is employed to enhance the generalization ability of the built model for the task of the binary interestingness classification. Experimental results on the publicly-released interestingness prediction data set have demonstrated the rationality and effectiveness of the proposed framework in the binary prediction of image interestingness where we have conducted several groups of comparative studies across different interestingness feature combinations, different interestingness cues, as well as different feature types for the three interestingness cues.

Xiucai Ding, Qiang Sun

Multidimensional scaling is an important dimension reduction tool in statistics and machine learning. Yet few theoretical results characterizing its statistical performance exist, not to mention any in high dimensions. By considering a unified framework that includes low, moderate and high dimensions, we study multidimensional scaling in the setting of clustering noisy data. Our results suggest that, the classical multidimensional scaling can be modified to further improve the quality of embedded samples, especially when the noise level increases. To this end, we propose {\it modified multidimensional scaling} which applies a nonlinear transformation to the sample eigenvalues. The nonlinear transformation depends on the dimensionality, sample size and moment of noise. We show that modified multidimensional scaling followed by various clustering algorithms can achieve exact recovery, i.e., all the cluster labels can be recovered correctly with probability tending to one. Numerical simulations and two real data applications lend strong support to our proposed methodology.