Jian Wu

Rochana R. Obadage, Sarah M. Rajtmajer, Jian Wu

Sentiments about the reproducibility of cited papers in downstream literature offer community perspectives and have shown as a promising signal of the actual reproducibility of published findings. To train effective models to effectively predict reproducibility-oriented sentiments and further systematically study their correlation with reproducibility, we introduce the CC30k dataset, comprising a total of 30,734 citation contexts in machine learning papers. Each citation context is labeled with one of three reproducibility-oriented sentiment labels: Positive, Negative, or Neutral, reflecting the cited paper's perceived reproducibility or replicability. Of these, 25,829 are labeled through crowdsourcing, supplemented with negatives generated through a controlled pipeline to counter the scarcity of negative labels. Unlike traditional sentiment analysis datasets, CC30k focuses on reproducibility-oriented sentiments, addressing a research gap in resources for computational reproducibility studies. The dataset was created through a pipeline that includes robust data cleansing, careful crowd selection, and thorough validation. The resulting dataset achieves a labeling accuracy of 94%. We then demonstrated that the performance of three large language models significantly improves on the reproducibility-oriented sentiment classification after fine-tuning using our dataset. The dataset lays the foundation for large-scale assessments of the reproducibility of machine learning papers. The CC30k dataset and the Jupyter notebooks used to produce and analyze the dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/lamps-lab/CC30k .

Muntabir Hasan Choudhury, Lamia Salsabil, William A. Ingram et al.

Electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) have been proposed, advocated, and generated for more than 25 years. Although ETDs are hosted by commercial or institutional digital library repositories, they are still an understudied type of scholarly big data, partially because they are usually longer than conference proceedings and journals. Segmenting ETDs will allow researchers to study sectional content. Readers can navigate to particular pages of interest, discover, and explore the content buried in these long documents. Most existing frameworks on document page classification are designed for classifying general documents and perform poorly on ETDs. In this paper, we propose ETDPC. Its backbone is a two-stream multimodal model with a cross-attention network to classify ETD pages into 13 categories. To overcome the challenge of imbalanced labeled samples, we augmented data for minority categories and employed a hierarchical classifier. ETDPC outperforms the state-of-the-art models in all categories, achieving an F1 of 0.84 -- 0.96 for 9 out of 13 categories. We also demonstrated its data efficiency. The code and data can be found on GitHub (https://github.com/lamps-lab/ETDMiner/tree/master/etd_segmentation).

Kehinde Ajayi, Xin Wei, Martin Gryder et al.

Recent advances in computer vision (CV) and natural language processing have been driven by exploiting big data on practical applications. However, these research fields are still limited by the sheer volume, versatility, and diversity of the available datasets. CV tasks, such as image captioning, which has primarily been carried out on natural images, still struggle to produce accurate and meaningful captions on sketched images often included in scientific and technical documents. The advancement of other tasks such as 3D reconstruction from 2D images requires larger datasets with multiple viewpoints. We introduce DeepPatent2, a large-scale dataset, providing more than 2.7 million technical drawings with 132,890 object names and 22,394 viewpoints extracted from 14 years of US design patent documents. We demonstrate the usefulness of DeepPatent2 with conceptual captioning. We further provide the potential usefulness of our dataset to facilitate other research areas such as 3D image reconstruction and image retrieval.

Rochana R. Obadage, Sarah M. Rajtmajer, Jian Wu

The iterative character of work in machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) and reliance on comparisons against benchmark datasets emphasize the importance of reproducibility in that literature. Yet, resource constraints and inadequate documentation can make running replications particularly challenging. Our work explores the potential of using downstream citation contexts as a signal of reproducibility. We introduce a sentiment analysis framework applied to citation contexts from papers involved in Machine Learning Reproducibility Challenges in order to interpret the positive or negative outcomes of reproduction attempts. Our contributions include training classifiers for reproducibility-related contexts and sentiment analysis, and exploring correlations between citation context sentiment and reproducibility scores. Study data, software, and an artifact appendix are publicly available at https://github.com/lamps-lab/ccair-ai-reproducibility .

Chunlai Dong, Haochao Ying, Qibo Qiu et al.

Ordinal regression bridges regression and classification by assigning objects to ordered classes. While human experts rely on discriminative patch-level features for decisions, current approaches are limited by the availability of only image-level ordinal labels, overlooking fine-grained patch-level characteristics. In this paper, we propose a Dual-level Fuzzy Learning with Patch Guidance framework, named DFPG that learns precise feature-based grading boundaries from ambiguous ordinal labels, with patch-level supervision. Specifically, we propose patch-labeling and filtering strategies to enable the model to focus on patch-level features exclusively with only image-level ordinal labels available. We further design a dual-level fuzzy learning module, which leverages fuzzy logic to quantitatively capture and handle label ambiguity from both patch-wise and channel-wise perspectives. Extensive experiments on various image ordinal regression datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method, further confirming its ability in distinguishing samples from difficult-to-classify categories. The code is available at https://github.com/ZJUMAI/DFPG-ord.

Yiheng Zhu, Zhenqiu Ouyang, Ben Liao et al.

Molecular de novo design is a critical yet challenging task in scientific fields, aiming to design novel molecular structures with desired property profiles. Significant progress has been made by resorting to generative models for graphs. However, limited attention is paid to hierarchical generative models, which can exploit the inherent hierarchical structure (with rich semantic information) of the molecular graphs and generate complex molecules of larger size that we shall demonstrate to be difficult for most existing models. The primary challenge to hierarchical generation is the non-differentiable issue caused by the generation of intermediate discrete coarsened graph structures. To sidestep this issue, we cast the tricky hierarchical generation problem over discrete spaces as the reverse process of hierarchical representation learning and propose MolHF, a new hierarchical flow-based model that generates molecular graphs in a coarse-to-fine manner. Specifically, MolHF first generates bonds through a multi-scale architecture, then generates atoms based on the coarsened graph structure at each scale. We demonstrate that MolHF achieves state-of-the-art performance in random generation and property optimization, implying its high capacity to model data distribution. Furthermore, MolHF is the first flow-based model that can be applied to model larger molecules (polymer) with more than 100 heavy atoms. The code and models are available at https://github.com/violet-sto/MolHF.

Jian Wu, Rajal Nivargi, Sree Sai Teja Lanka et al.

In recent years, significant effort has been invested verifying the reproducibility and robustness of research claims in social and behavioral sciences (SBS), much of which has involved resource-intensive replication projects. In this paper, we investigate prediction of the reproducibility of SBS papers using machine learning methods based on a set of features. We propose a framework that extracts five types of features from scholarly work that can be used to support assessments of reproducibility of published research claims. Bibliometric features, venue features, and author features are collected from public APIs or extracted using open source machine learning libraries with customized parsers. Statistical features, such as p-values, are extracted by recognizing patterns in the body text. Semantic features, such as funding information, are obtained from public APIs or are extracted using natural language processing models. We analyze pairwise correlations between individual features and their importance for predicting a set of human-assessed ground truth labels. In doing so, we identify a subset of 9 top features that play relatively more important roles in predicting the reproducibility of SBS papers in our corpus. Results are verified by comparing performances of 10 supervised predictive classifiers trained on different sets of features.

Ivan Makohon, Mohamad Najafi, Jian Wu et al.

In the past decade a surge in the amount of electronic health record (EHR) data in the United States, attributed to a favorable policy environment created by the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act of 2009 and the 21st Century Cures Act of 2016. Clinical notes for patients' assessments, diagnoses, and treatments are captured in these EHRs in free-form text by physicians, who spend a considerable amount of time entering and editing them. Manually writing clinical notes takes a considerable amount of a doctor's valuable time, increasing the patient's waiting time and possibly delaying diagnoses. Large language models (LLMs) possess the ability to generate news articles that closely resemble human-written ones. We investigate the usage of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompt engineering to improve the LLM's response in clinical note generation. In our prompts, we use as input International Classification of Diseases (ICD) codes and basic patient information. We investigate a strategy that combines the traditional CoT with semantic search results to improve the quality of generated clinical notes. Additionally, we infuse a knowledge graph (KG) built from clinical ontology to further enrich the domain-specific knowledge of generated clinical notes. We test our prompting technique on six clinical cases from the CodiEsp test dataset using GPT-4 and our results show that it outperformed the clinical notes generated by standard one-shot prompts.

Guocong Li, Weize Liu, Yihang Wu et al.

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit excellent performance in natural language processing (NLP), but remain highly sensitive to the quality of input queries, especially when these queries contain misleading or inaccurate information. Existing methods focus on correcting the output, but they often overlook the potential of improving the ability of LLMs to detect and correct misleading content in the input itself. In this paper, we propose a novel three-stage fine-tuning method that enhances the ability of LLMs to detect and correct misleading information in the input, further improving response accuracy and reducing hallucinations. Specifically, the three stages include (1) training LLMs to identify misleading information, (2) training LLMs to correct the misleading information using built-in or external knowledge, and (3) training LLMs to generate accurate answers based on the corrected queries. To evaluate our method, we conducted experiments on three datasets for the hallucination detection task and the question answering~(QA) task, as well as two datasets containing misleading information that we constructed. The experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly improves the accuracy and factuality of LLM responses, while also enhancing the ability to detect hallucinations and reducing the generation of hallucinations in the output, particularly when the query contains misleading information.

Meng Ling, Jian Chen, Torsten Möller et al.

We present document domain randomization (DDR), the first successful transfer of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) trained only on graphically rendered pseudo-paper pages to real-world document segmentation. DDR renders pseudo-document pages by modeling randomized textual and non-textual contents of interest, with user-defined layout and font styles to support joint learning of fine-grained classes. We demonstrate competitive results using our DDR approach to extract nine document classes from the benchmark CS-150 and papers published in two domains, namely annual meetings of Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and IEEE Visualization (VIS). We compare DDR to conditions of style mismatch, fewer or more noisy samples that are more easily obtained in the real world. We show that high-fidelity semantic information is not necessary to label semantic classes but style mismatch between train and test can lower model accuracy. Using smaller training samples had a slightly detrimental effect. Finally, network models still achieved high test accuracy when correct labels are diluted towards confusing labels; this behavior hold across several classes.

Yasith Jayawardana, Alexander C. Nwala, Gavindya Jayawardena et al.

The vastness of the web imposes a prohibitive cost on building large-scale search engines with limited resources. Crawl frontiers thus need to be optimized to improve the coverage and freshness of crawled content. In this paper, we propose an approach for modeling the dynamics of change in the web using archived copies of webpages. To evaluate its utility, we conduct a preliminary study on the scholarly web using 19,977 seed URLs of authors' homepages obtained from their Google Scholar profiles. We first obtain archived copies of these webpages from the Internet Archive (IA), and estimate when their actual updates occurred. Next, we apply maximum likelihood to estimate their mean update frequency ($λ$) values. Our evaluation shows that $λ$ values derived from a short history of archived data provide a good estimate for the true update frequency in the short-term, and that our method provides better estimations of updates at a fraction of resources compared to the baseline models. Based on this, we demonstrate the utility of archived data to optimize the crawling strategy of web crawlers, and uncover important challenges that inspire future research directions.

Shaurya Rohatgi, Wei Zhong, Richard Zanibbi et al.

Query Auto Completion (QAC) is among the most appealing features of a web search engine. It helps users formulate queries quickly with less effort. Although there has been much effort in this area for text, to the best of our knowledge there is few work on mathematical formula auto completion. In this paper, we implement 5 existing QAC methods on mathematical formula and evaluate them on the NTCIR-12 MathIR task dataset. We report the efficiency of retrieved results using Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR) and Mean Average Precision(MAP). Our study indicates that the Finite State Transducer outperforms other QAC models with a MRR score of $0.642$.

Rujing Yao, Linlin Hou, Yingchun Ye et al.

Literature analysis facilitates researchers better understanding the development of science and technology. The conventional literature analysis focuses on the topics, authors, abstracts, keywords, references, etc., and rarely pays attention to the content of papers. In the field of machine learning, the involved methods (M) and datasets (D) are key information in papers. The extraction and mining of M and D are useful for discipline analysis and algorithm recommendation. In this paper, we propose a novel entity recognition model, called MDER, and constructe datasets from the papers of the PAKDD conferences (2009-2019). Some preliminary experiments are conducted to assess the extraction performance and the mining results are visualized.

Chen Xu, Quan Li, Junfeng Ge et al.

Features play an important role in the prediction tasks of e-commerce recommendations. To guarantee the consistency of off-line training and on-line serving, we usually utilize the same features that are both available. However, the consistency in turn neglects some discriminative features. For example, when estimating the conversion rate (CVR), i.e., the probability that a user would purchase the item if she clicked it, features like dwell time on the item detailed page are informative. However, CVR prediction should be conducted for on-line ranking before the click happens. Thus we cannot get such post-event features during serving. We define the features that are discriminative but only available during training as the privileged features. Inspired by the distillation techniques which bridge the gap between training and inference, in this work, we propose privileged features distillation (PFD). We train two models, i.e., a student model that is the same as the original one and a teacher model that additionally utilizes the privileged features. Knowledge distilled from the more accurate teacher is transferred to the student to improve its accuracy. During serving, only the student part is extracted and it relies on no privileged features. We conduct experiments on two fundamental prediction tasks at Taobao recommendations, i.e., click-through rate (CTR) at coarse-grained ranking and CVR at fine-grained ranking. By distilling the interacted features that are prohibited during serving for CTR and the post-event features for CVR, we achieve significant improvements over their strong baselines. During the on-line A/B tests, the click metric is improved by +5.0% in the CTR task. And the conversion metric is improved by +2.3% in the CVR task. Besides, by addressing several issues of training PFD, we obtain comparable training speed as the baselines without any distillation.

Changhua Pei, Yi Zhang, Yongfeng Zhang et al.

Ranking is a core task in recommender systems, which aims at providing an ordered list of items to users. Typically, a ranking function is learned from the labeled dataset to optimize the global performance, which produces a ranking score for each individual item. However, it may be sub-optimal because the scoring function applies to each item individually and does not explicitly consider the mutual influence between items, as well as the differences of users' preferences or intents. Therefore, we propose a personalized re-ranking model for recommender systems. The proposed re-ranking model can be easily deployed as a follow-up modular after any ranking algorithm, by directly using the existing ranking feature vectors. It directly optimizes the whole recommendation list by employing a transformer structure to efficiently encode the information of all items in the list. Specifically, the Transformer applies a self-attention mechanism that directly models the global relationships between any pair of items in the whole list. We confirm that the performance can be further improved by introducing pre-trained embedding to learn personalized encoding functions for different users. Experimental results on both offline benchmarks and real-world online e-commerce systems demonstrate the significant improvements of the proposed re-ranking model.

Fei Sun, Jun Liu, Jian Wu et al.

Modeling users' dynamic and evolving preferences from their historical behaviors is challenging and crucial for recommendation systems. Previous methods employ sequential neural networks (e.g., Recurrent Neural Network) to encode users' historical interactions from left to right into hidden representations for making recommendations. Although these methods achieve satisfactory results, they often assume a rigidly ordered sequence which is not always practical. We argue that such left-to-right unidirectional architectures restrict the power of the historical sequence representations. For this purpose, we introduce a Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers for sequential Recommendation (BERT4Rec). However, jointly conditioning on both left and right context in deep bidirectional model would make the training become trivial since each item can indirectly "see the target item". To address this problem, we train the bidirectional model using the Cloze task, predicting the masked items in the sequence by jointly conditioning on their left and right context. Comparing with predicting the next item at each position in a sequence, the Cloze task can produce more samples to train a more powerful bidirectional model. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets show that our model outperforms various state-of-the-art sequential models consistently.

Yao Wan, Wenqiang Yan, Jianwei Gao et al.

Dialogue Act (DA) classification is a challenging problem in dialogue interpretation, which aims to attach semantic labels to utterances and characterize the speaker's intention. Currently, many existing approaches formulate the DA classification problem ranging from multi-classification to structured prediction, which suffer from two limitations: a) these methods are either handcrafted feature-based or have limited memories. b) adversarial examples can't be correctly classified by traditional training methods. To address these issues, in this paper we first cast the problem into a question and answering problem and proposed an improved dynamic memory networks with hierarchical pyramidal utterance encoder. Moreover, we apply adversarial training to train our proposed model. We evaluate our model on two public datasets, i.e., Switchboard dialogue act corpus and the MapTask corpus. Extensive experiments show that our proposed model is not only robust, but also achieves better performance when compared with some state-of-the-art baselines.