Xiang Ao

Ao Xiang, Bingjie Huang, Xinyu Guo et al.

Recommendation systems have become an important solution to information search problems. This article proposes a neural matrix factorization recommendation system model based on the multimodal large language model called BoNMF. This model combines BoBERTa's powerful capabilities in natural language processing, ViT in computer in vision, and neural matrix decomposition technology. By capturing the potential characteristics of users and items, and after interacting with a low-dimensional matrix composed of user and item IDs, the neural network outputs the results. recommend. Cold start and ablation experimental results show that the BoNMF model exhibits excellent performance on large public data sets and significantly improves the accuracy of recommendations.

Yiran Qiao, Xiang Ao, Yang Liu et al.

Recent prevailing works on graph machine learning typically follow a similar methodology that involves designing advanced variants of graph neural networks (GNNs) to maintain the superior performance of GNNs on different graphs. In this paper, we aim to streamline the GNN design process and leverage the advantages of Large Language Models (LLMs) to improve the performance of GNNs on downstream tasks. We formulate a new paradigm, coined "LLMs-as-Consultants," which integrates LLMs with GNNs in an interactive manner. A framework named LOGIN (LLM Consulted GNN training) is instantiated, empowering the interactive utilization of LLMs within the GNN training process. First, we attentively craft concise prompts for spotted nodes, carrying comprehensive semantic and topological information, and serving as input to LLMs. Second, we refine GNNs by devising a complementary coping mechanism that utilizes the responses from LLMs, depending on their correctness. We empirically evaluate the effectiveness of LOGIN on node classification tasks across both homophilic and heterophilic graphs. The results illustrate that even basic GNN architectures, when employed within the proposed LLMs-as-Consultants paradigm, can achieve comparable performance to advanced GNNs with intricate designs. Our codes are available at https://github.com/QiaoYRan/LOGIN.

Kejin Liu, Junhong Lian, Xiang Ao et al.

Accurate personalized headline generation hinges on precisely capturing user interests from historical behaviors. However, existing methods neglect personalized-irrelevant click noise in entire historical clickstreams, which may lead to hallucinated headlines that deviate from genuine user preferences. In this paper, we reveal the detrimental impact of click noise on personalized generation quality through rigorous analysis in both user and news dimensions. Based on these insights, we propose a novel Personalized Headline Generation framework via Denoising Fake Interests from Implicit Feedback (PHG-DIF). PHG-DIF first employs dual-stage filtering to effectively remove clickstream noise, identified by short dwell times and abnormal click bursts, and then leverages multi-level temporal fusion to dynamically model users' evolving and multi-faceted interests for precise profiling. Moreover, we release DT-PENS, a new benchmark dataset comprising the click behavior of 1,000 carefully curated users and nearly 10,000 annotated personalized headlines with historical dwell time annotations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PHG-DIF substantially mitigates the adverse effects of click noise and significantly improves headline quality, achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) results on DT-PENS. Our framework implementation and dataset are available at https://github.com/liukejin-up/PHG-DIF.

Zijun Sun, Xiaoya Li, Xiaofei Sun et al.

Recent pretraining models in Chinese neglect two important aspects specific to the Chinese language: glyph and pinyin, which carry significant syntax and semantic information for language understanding. In this work, we propose ChineseBERT, which incorporates both the {\it glyph} and {\it pinyin} information of Chinese characters into language model pretraining. The glyph embedding is obtained based on different fonts of a Chinese character, being able to capture character semantics from the visual features, and the pinyin embedding characterizes the pronunciation of Chinese characters, which handles the highly prevalent heteronym phenomenon in Chinese (the same character has different pronunciations with different meanings). Pretrained on large-scale unlabeled Chinese corpus, the proposed ChineseBERT model yields significant performance boost over baseline models with fewer training steps. The porpsoed model achieves new SOTA performances on a wide range of Chinese NLP tasks, including machine reading comprehension, natural language inference, text classification, sentence pair matching, and competitive performances in named entity recognition. Code and pretrained models are publicly available at https://github.com/ShannonAI/ChineseBert.

Danqing Ma, Meng Wang, Ao Xiang et al.

This study proposes a multi-modal fusion framework Multitrans based on the Transformer architecture and self-attention mechanism. This architecture combines the study of non-contrast computed tomography (NCCT) images and discharge diagnosis reports of patients undergoing stroke treatment, using a variety of methods based on Transformer architecture approach to predicting functional outcomes of stroke treatment. The results show that the performance of single-modal text classification is significantly better than single-modal image classification, but the effect of multi-modal combination is better than any single modality. Although the Transformer model only performs worse on imaging data, when combined with clinical meta-diagnostic information, both can learn better complementary information and make good contributions to accurately predicting stroke treatment effects..

Zongqing Qi, Danqing Ma, Jingyu Xu et al.

In recent years, there have been frequent incidents of foreign objects intruding into railway and Airport runways. These objects can include pedestrians, vehicles, animals, and debris. This paper introduces an improved YOLOv5 architecture incorporating FasterNet and attention mechanisms to enhance the detection of foreign objects on railways and Airport runways. This study proposes a new dataset, AARFOD (Aero and Rail Foreign Object Detection), which combines two public datasets for detecting foreign objects in aviation and railway systems.The dataset aims to improve the recognition capabilities of foreign object targets. Experimental results on this large dataset have demonstrated significant performance improvements of the proposed model over the baseline YOLOv5 model, reducing computational requirements.Improved YOLO model shows a significant improvement in precision by 1.2%, recall rate by 1.0%, and mAP@.5 by 0.6%, while mAP@.5-.95 remained unchanged. The parameters were reduced by approximately 25.12%, and GFLOPs were reduced by about 10.63%. In the ablation experiment, it is found that the FasterNet module can significantly reduce the number of parameters of the model, and the reference of the attention mechanism can slow down the performance loss caused by lightweight.

Xiangtian Li, Xiaobo Wang, Zhen Qi et al.

Dynamic texture synthesis aims to generate sequences that are visually similar to a reference video texture and exhibit specific stationary properties in time. In this paper, we introduce a spatiotemporal generative adversarial network (DTSGAN) that can learn from a single dynamic texture by capturing its motion and content distribution. With the pipeline of DTSGAN, a new video sequence is generated from the coarsest scale to the finest one. To avoid mode collapse, we propose a novel strategy for data updates that helps improve the diversity of generated results. Qualitative and quantitative experiments show that our model is able to generate high quality dynamic textures and natural motion.

Haowei Yang, Qingyi Lu, Yang Wang et al.

With the widespread application of large language models (LLMs), user privacy protection has become a significant research topic. Existing privacy preference modeling methods often rely on large-scale user data, making effective privacy preference analysis challenging in data-limited environments. This study explores how LLMs can analyze user behavior related to privacy protection in scenarios with limited data and proposes a method that integrates Few-shot Learning and Privacy Computing to model user privacy preferences. The research utilizes anonymized user privacy settings data, survey responses, and simulated data, comparing the performance of traditional modeling approaches with LLM-based methods. Experimental results demonstrate that, even with limited data, LLMs significantly improve the accuracy of privacy preference modeling. Additionally, incorporating Differential Privacy and Federated Learning further reduces the risk of user data exposure. The findings provide new insights into the application of LLMs in privacy protection and offer theoretical support for advancing privacy computing and user behavior analysis.

Chaoyi Tan, Xiangtian Li, Xiaobo Wang et al.

Thispaperaimstoresearchandimplementa real-timevideotargettrackingalgorithmbasedon ConvolutionalNeuralNetworks(CNN),enhancingthe accuracyandrobustnessoftargettrackingincomplex scenarios.Addressingthelimitationsoftraditionaltracking algorithmsinhandlingissuessuchastargetocclusion,morphologicalchanges,andbackgroundinterference,our approachintegratestargetdetectionandtrackingstrategies.It continuouslyupdatesthetargetmodelthroughanonline learningmechanismtoadapttochangesinthetarget's appearance.Experimentalresultsdemonstratethat,when dealingwithsituationsinvolvingrapidmotion,partial occlusion,andcomplexbackgrounds,theproposedalgorithm exhibitshighertrackingsuccessratesandlowerfailurerates comparedtoseveralmainstreamtrackingalgorithms.This studysuccessfullyappliesCNNtoreal-timevideotarget tracking,improvingtheaccuracyandstabilityofthetracking algorithmwhilemaintaininghighprocessingspeeds,thus meetingthedemandsofreal-timeapplications.Thisalgorithm isexpectedtoprovidenewsolutionsfortargettrackingtasksin videosurveillanceandintelligenttransportationdomains.

Junhong Lian, Xiang Ao, Xinyu Liu et al.

Personalized news headline generation aims to provide users with attention-grabbing headlines that are tailored to their preferences. Prevailing methods focus on user-oriented content preferences, but most of them overlook the fact that diverse stylistic preferences are integral to users' panoramic interests, leading to suboptimal personalization. In view of this, we propose a novel Stylistic-Content Aware Personalized Headline Generation (SCAPE) framework. SCAPE extracts both content and stylistic features from headlines with the aid of large language model (LLM) collaboration. It further adaptively integrates users' long- and short-term interests through a contrastive learning-based hierarchical fusion network. By incorporating the panoramic interests into the headline generator, SCAPE reflects users' stylistic-content preferences during the generation process. Extensive experiments on the real-world dataset PENS demonstrate the superiority of SCAPE over baselines.

Zhao Yang, Junhong Lian, Xiang Ao

Personalized news headline generation, aiming at generating user-specific headlines based on readers' preferences, burgeons a recent flourishing research direction. Existing studies generally inject a user interest embedding into an encoderdecoder headline generator to make the output personalized, while the factual consistency of headlines is inadequate to be verified. In this paper, we propose a framework Fact-Preserved Personalized News Headline Generation (short for FPG), to prompt a tradeoff between personalization and consistency. In FPG, the similarity between the candidate news to be exposed and the historical clicked news is used to give different levels of attention to key facts in the candidate news, and the similarity scores help to learn a fact-aware global user embedding. Besides, an additional training procedure based on contrastive learning is devised to further enhance the factual consistency of generated headlines. Extensive experiments conducted on a real-world benchmark PENS validate the superiority of FPG, especially on the tradeoff between personalization and factual consistency.

Haowei Yang, Zhan Cheng, Zhaoyang Zhang et al.

As the complexity and dynamism of financial markets continue to grow, traditional financial risk prediction methods increasingly struggle to handle large datasets and intricate behavior patterns. This paper explores the feasibility and effectiveness of using deep learning and big data algorithms for financial risk behavior prediction. First, the application and advantages of deep learning and big data algorithms in the financial field are analyzed. Then, a deep learning-based big data risk prediction framework is designed and experimentally validated on actual financial datasets. The experimental results show that this method significantly improves the accuracy of financial risk behavior prediction and provides valuable support for risk management in financial institutions. Challenges in the application of deep learning are also discussed, along with potential directions for future research.

Shuo Yu, Hongyan Xue, Xiang Ao et al.

In the field of quantitative trading, it is common practice to transform raw historical stock data into indicative signals for the market trend. Such signals are called alpha factors. Alphas in formula forms are more interpretable and thus favored by practitioners concerned with risk. In practice, a set of formulaic alphas is often used together for better modeling precision, so we need to find synergistic formulaic alpha sets that work well together. However, most traditional alpha generators mine alphas one by one separately, overlooking the fact that the alphas would be combined later. In this paper, we propose a new alpha-mining framework that prioritizes mining a synergistic set of alphas, i.e., it directly uses the performance of the downstream combination model to optimize the alpha generator. Our framework also leverages the strong exploratory capabilities of reinforcement learning~(RL) to better explore the vast search space of formulaic alphas. The contribution to the combination models' performance is assigned to be the return used in the RL process, driving the alpha generator to find better alphas that improve upon the current set. Experimental evaluations on real-world stock market data demonstrate both the effectiveness and the efficiency of our framework for stock trend forecasting. The investment simulation results show that our framework is able to achieve higher returns compared to previous approaches.

Yuxian Meng, Xiang Ao, Qing He et al.

A long-standing issue with paraphrase generation is how to obtain reliable supervision signals. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised paradigm for paraphrase generation based on the assumption that the probabilities of generating two sentences with the same meaning given the same context should be the same. Inspired by this fundamental idea, we propose a pipelined system which consists of paraphrase candidate generation based on contextual language models, candidate filtering using scoring functions, and paraphrase model training based on the selected candidates. The proposed paradigm offers merits over existing paraphrase generation methods: (1) using the context regularizer on meanings, the model is able to generate massive amounts of high-quality paraphrase pairs; and (2) using human-interpretable scoring functions to select paraphrase pairs from candidates, the proposed framework provides a channel for developers to intervene with the data generation process, leading to a more controllable model. Experimental results across different tasks and datasets demonstrate that the effectiveness of the proposed model in both supervised and unsupervised setups.

Chun Fan, Jiwei Li, Xiang Ao et al.

The proposed pruning strategy offers merits over weight-based pruning techniques: (1) it avoids irregular memory access since representations and matrices can be squeezed into their smaller but dense counterparts, leading to greater speedup; (2) in a manner of top-down pruning, the proposed method operates from a more global perspective based on training signals in the top layer, and prunes each layer by propagating the effect of global signals through layers, leading to better performances at the same sparsity level. Extensive experiments show that at the same sparsity level, the proposed strategy offers both greater speedup and higher performances than weight-based pruning methods (e.g., magnitude pruning, movement pruning).

Haoming Li, Feiyang Pan, Xiang Ao et al.

The delayed feedback problem is one of the imperative challenges in online advertising, which is caused by the highly diversified feedback delay of a conversion varying from a few minutes to several days. It is hard to design an appropriate online learning system under these non-identical delay for different types of ads and users. In this paper, we propose to tackle the delayed feedback problem in online advertising by "Following the Prophet" (FTP for short). The key insight is that, if the feedback came instantly for all the logged samples, we could get a model without delayed feedback, namely the "prophet". Although the prophet cannot be obtained during online learning, we show that we could predict the prophet's predictions by an aggregation policy on top of a set of multi-task predictions, where each task captures the feedback patterns of different periods. We propose the objective and optimization approach for the policy, and use the logged data to imitate the prophet. Extensive experiments on three real-world advertising datasets show that our method outperforms the previous state-of-the-art baselines.

Xiaofei Sun, Xiaoya Li, Yuxian Meng et al.

The frustratingly fragile nature of neural network models make current natural language generation (NLG) systems prone to backdoor attacks and generate malicious sequences that could be sexist or offensive. Unfortunately, little effort has been invested to how backdoor attacks can affect current NLG models and how to defend against these attacks. In this work, by giving a formal definition of backdoor attack and defense, we investigate this problem on two important NLG tasks, machine translation and dialog generation. Tailored to the inherent nature of NLG models (e.g., producing a sequence of coherent words given contexts), we design defending strategies against attacks. We find that testing the backward probability of generating sources given targets yields effective defense performance against all different types of attacks, and is able to handle the {\it one-to-many} issue in many NLG tasks such as dialog generation. We hope that this work can raise the awareness of backdoor risks concealed in deep NLG systems and inspire more future work (both attack and defense) towards this direction.

Yuyang Nie, Yuanhe Tian, Yan Song et al.

Named entity recognition (NER) is highly sensitive to sentential syntactic and semantic properties where entities may be extracted according to how they are used and placed in the running text. To model such properties, one could rely on existing resources to providing helpful knowledge to the NER task; some existing studies proved the effectiveness of doing so, and yet are limited in appropriately leveraging the knowledge such as distinguishing the important ones for particular context. In this paper, we improve NER by leveraging different types of syntactic information through attentive ensemble, which functionalizes by the proposed key-value memory networks, syntax attention, and the gate mechanism for encoding, weighting and aggregating such syntactic information, respectively. Experimental results on six English and Chinese benchmark datasets suggest the effectiveness of the proposed model and show that it outperforms previous studies on all experiment datasets.

Jiawei Wu, Xiaoya Li, Xiang Ao et al.

Supervised neural networks, which first map an input $x$ to a single representation $z$, and then map $z$ to the output label $y$, have achieved remarkable success in a wide range of natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Despite their success, neural models lack for both robustness and generality: small perturbations to inputs can result in absolutely different outputs; the performance of a model trained on one domain drops drastically when tested on another domain. In this paper, we present methods to improve robustness and generality of NLP models from the standpoint of disentangled representation learning. Instead of mapping $x$ to a single representation $z$, the proposed strategy maps $x$ to a set of representations $\{z_1,z_2,...,z_K\}$ while forcing them to be disentangled. These representations are then mapped to different logits $l$s, the ensemble of which is used to make the final prediction $y$. We propose different methods to incorporate this idea into currently widely-used models, including adding an $L$2 regularizer on $z$s or adding Total Correlation (TC) under the framework of variational information bottleneck (VIB). We show that models trained with the proposed criteria provide better robustness and domain adaptation ability in a wide range of supervised learning tasks.

Chi Xu, Hao Feng, Guoxin Yu et al.

Most recent existing aspect-term level sentiment analysis (ATSA) approaches combined various neural network models with delicately carved attention mechanisms built upon given aspect and context to generate refined sentence representations for better predictions. In these methods, aspect terms are always provided in both training and testing process which may degrade aspect-level analysis into sentence-level prediction. However, the annotated aspect term might be unavailable in real-world scenarios which may challenge the applicability of the existing methods. In this paper, we aim to improve ATSA by discovering the potential aspect terms of the predicted sentiment polarity when the aspect terms of a test sentence are unknown. We access this goal by proposing a capsule network based model named CAPSAR. In CAPSAR, sentiment categories are denoted by capsules and aspect term information is injected into sentiment capsules through a sentiment-aspect reconstruction procedure during the training. As a result, coherent patterns between aspects and sentimental expressions are encapsulated by these sentiment capsules. Experiments on three widely used benchmarks demonstrate these patterns have potential in exploring aspect terms from test sentence when only feeding the sentence to the model. Meanwhile, the proposed CAPSAR can clearly outperform SOTA methods in standard ATSA tasks.

Feiyang Pan, Shuokai Li, Xiang Ao et al.

Click-through rate (CTR) prediction has been one of the most central problems in computational advertising. Lately, embedding techniques that produce low-dimensional representations of ad IDs drastically improve CTR prediction accuracies. However, such learning techniques are data demanding and work poorly on new ads with little logging data, which is known as the cold-start problem. In this paper, we aim to improve CTR predictions during both the cold-start phase and the warm-up phase when a new ad is added to the candidate pool. We propose Meta-Embedding, a meta-learning-based approach that learns to generate desirable initial embeddings for new ad IDs. The proposed method trains an embedding generator for new ad IDs by making use of previously learned ads through gradient-based meta-learning. In other words, our method learns how to learn better embeddings. When a new ad comes, the trained generator initializes the embedding of its ID by feeding its contents and attributes. Next, the generated embedding can speed up the model fitting during the warm-up phase when a few labeled examples are available, compared to the existing initialization methods. Experimental results on three real-world datasets showed that Meta-Embedding can significantly improve both the cold-start and warm-up performances for six existing CTR prediction models, ranging from lightweight models such as Factorization Machines to complicated deep models such as PNN and DeepFM. All of the above apply to conversion rate (CVR) predictions as well.

Ganbin Zhou, Rongyu Cao, Xiang Ao et al.

In this study, we focus on extracting knowledgeable snippets and annotating knowledgeable documents from Web corpus, consisting of the documents from social media and We-media. Informally, knowledgeable snippets refer to the text describing concepts, properties of entities, or relations among entities, while knowledgeable documents are the ones with enough knowledgeable snippets. These knowledgeable snippets and documents could be helpful in multiple applications, such as knowledge base construction and knowledge-oriented service. Previous studies extracted the knowledgeable snippets using the pattern-based method. Here, we propose the semantic-based method for this task. Specifically, a CNN based model is developed to extract knowledgeable snippets and annotate knowledgeable documents simultaneously. Additionally, a "low-level sharing, high-level splitting" structure of CNN is designed to handle the documents from different content domains. Compared with building multiple domain-specific CNNs, this joint model not only critically saves the training time, but also improves the prediction accuracy visibly. The superiority of the proposed method is demonstrated in a real dataset from Wechat public platform.

Xiang Ao, Yang Liu, Zhen Huang et al.

One of the drawbacks of frequent episode mining is that overwhelmingly many of the discovered patterns are redundant. Free-rider episode, as a typical example, consists of a real pattern doped with some additional noise events. Because of the possible high support of the inside noise events, such free-rider episodes may have abnormally high support that they cannot be filtered by frequency based framework. An effective technique for filtering free-rider episodes is using a partition model to divide an episode into two consecutive subepisodes and comparing the observed support of such episode with its expected support under the assumption that these two subepisodes occur independently. In this paper, we take more complex subepisodes into consideration and develop a novel partition model named EDP for free-rider episode filtering from a given set of episodes. It combines (1) a dual partition strategy which divides an episode to an underlying real pattern and potential noises; (2) a novel definition of the expected support of a free-rider episode based on the proposed partition strategy. We can deem the episode interesting if the observed support is substantially higher than the expected support estimated by our model. The experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate EDP can effectively filter free-rider episodes compared with existing state-of-the-arts.

Fuzhen Zhuang, Yingmin Zhou, Fuzheng Zhang et al.

Transfer learning has attracted a large amount of interest and research in last decades, and some efforts have been made to build more precise recommendation systems. Most previous transfer recommendation systems assume that the target domain shares the same/similar rating patterns with the auxiliary source domain, which is used to improve the recommendation performance. However, to the best of our knowledge, almost these works do not consider the characteristics of sequential data. In this paper, we study the new cross-domain recommendation scenario for mining novelty-seeking trait. Recent studies in psychology suggest that novelty-seeking trait is highly related to consumer behavior, which has a profound business impact on online recommendation. Previous work performing on only one single target domain may not fully characterize users' novelty-seeking trait well due to the data scarcity and sparsity, leading to the poor recommendation performance. Along this line, we proposed a new cross-domain novelty-seeking trait mining model (CDNST for short) to improve the sequential recommendation performance by transferring the knowledge from auxiliary source domain. We conduct systematic experiments on three domain data sets crawled from Douban (www.douban.com) to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model. Moreover, we analyze how the temporal property of sequential data affects the performance of CDNST, and conduct simulation experiments to validate our analysis.

Thapana Boonchoo, Xiang Ao, Qing He

DBSCAN is a typically used clustering algorithm due to its clustering ability for arbitrarily-shaped clusters and its robustness to outliers. Generally, the complexity of DBSCAN is O(n^2) in the worst case, and it practically becomes more severe in higher dimension. Grid-based DBSCAN is one of the recent improved algorithms aiming at facilitating efficiency. However, the performance of grid-based DBSCAN still suffers from two problems: neighbour explosion and redundancies in merging, which make the algorithms infeasible in high-dimensional space. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm named GDPAM attempting to extend Grid-based DBSCAN to higher data dimension. In GDPAM, a bitmap indexing is utilized to manage non-empty grids so that the neighbour grid queries can be performed efficiently. Furthermore, we adopt an efficient union-find algorithm to maintain the clustering information in order to reduce redundancies in the merging. The experimental results on both real-world and synthetic datasets demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art exact/approximate DBSCAN and suggests a good scalability.