Feng Chen

Fei Jie, Chunpai Wang, Feng Chen et al.

We propose a generalized framework for block-structured nonconvex optimization, which can be applied to structured subgraph detection in interdependent networks, such as multi-layer networks, temporal networks, networks of networks, and many others. Specifically, we design an effective, efficient, and parallelizable projection algorithm, namely Graph Block-structured Gradient Projection (GBGP), to optimize a general non-linear function subject to graph-structured constraints. We prove that our algorithm: 1) runs in nearly-linear time on the network size; 2) enjoys a theoretical approximation guarantee. Moreover, we demonstrate how our framework can be applied to two very practical applications and conduct comprehensive experiments to show the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed algorithm.

Aneesh Komanduri, Chen Zhao, Feng Chen et al.

Diffusion probabilistic models (DPMs) have become the state-of-the-art in high-quality image generation. However, DPMs have an arbitrary noisy latent space with no interpretable or controllable semantics. Although there has been significant research effort to improve image sample quality, there is little work on representation-controlled generation using diffusion models. Specifically, causal modeling and controllable counterfactual generation using DPMs is an underexplored area. In this work, we propose CausalDiffAE, a diffusion-based causal representation learning framework to enable counterfactual generation according to a specified causal model. Our key idea is to use an encoder to extract high-level semantically meaningful causal variables from high-dimensional data and model stochastic variation using reverse diffusion. We propose a causal encoding mechanism that maps high-dimensional data to causally related latent factors and parameterize the causal mechanisms among latent factors using neural networks. To enforce the disentanglement of causal variables, we formulate a variational objective and leverage auxiliary label information in a prior to regularize the latent space. We propose a DDIM-based counterfactual generation procedure subject to do-interventions. Finally, to address the limited label supervision scenario, we also study the application of CausalDiffAE when a part of the training data is unlabeled, which also enables granular control over the strength of interventions in generating counterfactuals during inference. We empirically show that CausalDiffAE learns a disentangled latent space and is capable of generating high-quality counterfactual images.

Lei Yuan, Feng Chen, Zhongzhang Zhang et al.

Communication can promote coordination in cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL). Nowadays, existing works mainly focus on improving the communication efficiency of agents, neglecting that real-world communication is much more challenging as there may exist noise or potential attackers. Thus the robustness of the communication-based policies becomes an emergent and severe issue that needs more exploration. In this paper, we posit that the ego system trained with auxiliary adversaries may handle this limitation and propose an adaptable method of Multi-Agent Auxiliary Adversaries Generation for robust Communication, dubbed MA3C, to obtain a robust communication-based policy. In specific, we introduce a novel message-attacking approach that models the learning of the auxiliary attacker as a cooperative problem under a shared goal to minimize the coordination ability of the ego system, with which every information channel may suffer from distinct message attacks. Furthermore, as naive adversarial training may impede the generalization ability of the ego system, we design an attacker population generation approach based on evolutionary learning. Finally, the ego system is paired with an attacker population and then alternatively trained against the continuously evolving attackers to improve its robustness, meaning that both the ego system and the attackers are adaptable. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks indicate that our proposed MA3C provides comparable or better robustness and generalization ability than other baselines.

Feng Chen

This paper briefly analyzes the advantages and problems of AI mainstream technology and puts forward: To achieve stronger Artificial Intelligence, the end-to-end function calculation must be changed and adopt the technology system centered on scene fitting. It also discusses the concrete scheme named Dynamic Cognitive Network model (DC Net). Discussions : The knowledge and data in the comprehensive domain are uniformly represented by using the rich connection heterogeneous Dynamic Cognitive Network constructed by conceptualized elements; A network structure of two dimensions and multi layers is designed to achieve unified implementation of AI core processing such as combination and generalization; This paper analyzes the implementation differences of computer systems in different scenes, such as open domain, closed domain, significant probability and non-significant probability, and points out that the implementation in open domain and significant probability scene is the key of AI, and a cognitive probability model combining bidirectional conditional probability, probability passing and superposition, probability col-lapse is designed; An omnidirectional network matching-growth algorithm system driven by target and probability is designed to realize the integration of parsing, generating, reasoning, querying, learning and so on; The principle of cognitive network optimization is proposed, and the basic framework of Cognitive Network Learning algorithm (CNL) is designed that structure learning is the primary method and parameter learning is the auxiliary. The logical similarity of implementation between DC Net model and human intelligence is analyzed in this paper.

Jun Yu, Donglin Zhang, Zhenqiu Shu et al.

Hashing plays an important role in information retrieval, due to its low storage and high speed of processing. Among the techniques available in the literature, multi-modal hashing, which can encode heterogeneous multi-modal features into compact hash codes, has received particular attention. Most of the existing multi-modal hashing methods adopt the fixed weighting factors to fuse multiple modalities for any query data, which cannot capture the variation of different queries. Besides, many methods introduce hyper-parameters to balance many regularization terms that make the optimization harder. Meanwhile, it is time-consuming and labor-intensive to set proper parameter values. The limitations may significantly hinder their promotion in real applications. In this paper, we propose a simple, yet effective method that is inspired by the Hadamard matrix. The proposed method captures the multi-modal feature information in an adaptive manner and preserves the discriminative semantic information in the hash codes. Our framework is flexible and involves a very few hyper-parameters. Extensive experimental results show the method is effective and achieves superior performance compared to state-of-the-art algorithms.

Baojian Zhou, Feng Chen, Yiming Ying

Stochastic optimization algorithms update models with cheap per-iteration costs sequentially, which makes them amenable for large-scale data analysis. Such algorithms have been widely studied for structured sparse models where the sparsity information is very specific, e.g., convex sparsity-inducing norms or $\ell^0$-norm. However, these norms cannot be directly applied to the problem of complex (non-convex) graph-structured sparsity models, which have important application in disease outbreak and social networks, etc. In this paper, we propose a stochastic gradient-based method for solving graph-structured sparsity constraint problems, not restricted to the least square loss. We prove that our algorithm enjoys a linear convergence up to a constant error, which is competitive with the counterparts in the batch learning setting. We conduct extensive experiments to show the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.

Hosam AlHakami, Feng Chen, Helge Janicke

Code cloning negatively affects industrial software and threatens intellectual property. This paper presents a novel approach to detecting cloned software by using a bijective matching technique. The proposed approach focuses on increasing the range of similarity measures and thus enhancing the precision of the detection. This is achieved by extending a well-known stable-marriage problem (SMP) and demonstrating how matches between code fragments of different files can be expressed. A prototype of the proposed approach is provided using a proper scenario, which shows a noticeable improvement in several features of clone detection such as scalability and accuracy.