Cong Li

Shengfang Zhai, Qingni Shen, Xiaoyi Chen et al.

At present, backdoor attacks attract attention as they do great harm to deep learning models. The adversary poisons the training data making the model being injected with a backdoor after being trained unconsciously by victims using the poisoned dataset. In the field of text, however, existing works do not provide sufficient defense against backdoor attacks. In this paper, we propose a Noise-augmented Contrastive Learning (NCL) framework to defend against textual backdoor attacks when training models with untrustworthy data. With the aim of mitigating the mapping between triggers and the target label, we add appropriate noise perturbing possible backdoor triggers, augment the training dataset, and then pull homology samples in the feature space utilizing contrastive learning objective. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in defending three types of textual backdoor attacks, outperforming the prior works.

Luyuan Xie, Cong Li, Xin Zhang et al. · pku

Representation learning frameworks in unlabeled time series have been proposed for medical signal processing. Despite the numerous excellent progresses have been made in previous works, we observe the representation extracted for the time series still does not generalize well. In this paper, we present a Time series (medical signal) Representation Learning framework via Spectrogram (TRLS) to get more informative representations. We transform the input time-domain medical signals into spectrograms and design a time-frequency encoder named Time Frequency RNN (TFRNN) to capture more robust multi-scale representations from the augmented spectrograms. Our TRLS takes spectrogram as input with two types of different data augmentations and maximizes the similarity between positive ones, which effectively circumvents the problem of designing negative samples. Our evaluation of four real-world medical signal datasets focusing on medical signal classification shows that TRLS is superior to the existing frameworks.

Jinsong Li, Jianhua Peng, Shuxin Liu et al.

The development of graph neural networks (GCN) makes it possible to learn structural features from evolving complex networks. Even though a wide range of realistic networks are directed ones, few existing works investigated the properties of directed and temporal networks. In this paper, we address the problem of temporal link prediction in directed networks and propose a deep learning model based on GCN and self-attention mechanism, namely TSAM. The proposed model adopts an autoencoder architecture, which utilizes graph attentional layers to capture the structural feature of neighborhood nodes, as well as a set of graph convolutional layers to capture motif features. A graph recurrent unit layer with self-attention is utilized to learn temporal variations in the snapshot sequence. We run comparative experiments on four realistic networks to validate the effectiveness of TSAM. Experimental results show that TSAM outperforms most benchmarks under two evaluation metrics.

Niloofar Yousefi, Cong Li, Mansooreh Mollaghasemi et al.

This paper introduces a new and effective algorithm for learning kernels in a Multi-Task Learning (MTL) setting. Although, we consider a MTL scenario here, our approach can be easily applied to standard single task learning, as well. As shown by our empirical results, our algorithm consistently outperforms the traditional kernel learning algorithms such as uniform combination solution, convex combinations of base kernels as well as some kernel alignment-based models, which have been proven to give promising results in the past. We present a Rademacher complexity bound based on which a new Multi-Task Multiple Kernel Learning (MT-MKL) model is derived. In particular, we propose a Support Vector Machine-regularized model in which, for each task, an optimal kernel is learned based on a neighborhood-defining kernel that is not restricted to be positive semi-definite. Comparative experimental results are showcased that underline the merits of our neighborhood-defining framework in both classification and regression problems.

Cong Li, Michael Georgiopoulos, Georgios C. Anagnostopoulos

This paper presents a RKHS, in general, of vector-valued functions intended to be used as hypothesis space for multi-task classification. It extends similar hypothesis spaces that have previously considered in the literature. Assuming this space, an improved Empirical Rademacher Complexity-based generalization bound is derived. The analysis is itself extended to an MKL setting. The connection between the proposed hypothesis space and a Group-Lasso type regularizer is discussed. Finally, experimental results, with some SVM-based Multi-Task Learning problems, underline the quality of the derived bounds and validate the paper's analysis.