Xing Tang

Jian Zhang, Yuanqing Zhang, Huan Fu et al. · stanford

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have emerged as a potent paradigm for representing scenes and synthesizing photo-realistic images. A main limitation of conventional NeRFs is that they often fail to produce high-quality renderings under novel viewpoints that are significantly different from the training viewpoints. In this paper, instead of exploiting few-shot image synthesis, we study the novel view extrapolation setting that (1) the training images can well describe an object, and (2) there is a notable discrepancy between the training and test viewpoints' distributions. We present RapNeRF (RAy Priors) as a solution. Our insight is that the inherent appearances of a 3D surface's arbitrary visible projections should be consistent. We thus propose a random ray casting policy that allows training unseen views using seen views. Furthermore, we show that a ray atlas pre-computed from the observed rays' viewing directions could further enhance the rendering quality for extrapolated views. A main limitation is that RapNeRF would remove the strong view-dependent effects because it leverages the multi-view consistency property.

Hong Zhu, Runpeng Yu, Xing Tang et al. · mit

Data in the real-world classification problems are always imbalanced or long-tailed, wherein the majority classes have the most of the samples that dominate the model training. In such setting, the naive model tends to have poor performance on the minority classes. Previously, a variety of loss modifications have been proposed to address the long-tailed leaning problem, while these methods either treat the samples in the same class indiscriminatingly or lack a theoretical guarantee. In this paper, we propose two novel approaches based on CVaR (Conditional Value at Risk) to improve the performance of long-tailed learning with a solid theoretical ground. Specifically, we firstly introduce a Label-Aware Bounded CVaR (LAB-CVaR) loss to overcome the pessimistic result of the original CVaR, and further design the optimal weight bounds for LAB-CVaR theoretically. Based on LAB-CVaR, we additionally propose a LAB-CVaR with logit adjustment (LAB-CVaR-logit) loss to stabilize the optimization process, where we also offer the theoretical support. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets with long-tailed label distributions verify the superiority of our proposed methods.

Dugang Liu, Pengxiang Cheng, Hong Zhu et al.

Tabular data is one of the most common data storage formats behind many real-world web applications such as retail, banking, and e-commerce. The success of these web applications largely depends on the ability of the employed machine learning model to accurately distinguish influential features from all the predetermined features in tabular data. Intuitively, in practical business scenarios, different instances should correspond to different sets of influential features, and the set of influential features of the same instance may vary in different scenarios. However, most existing methods focus on global feature selection assuming that all instances have the same set of influential features, and few methods considering instance-wise feature selection ignore the variability of influential features in different scenarios. In this paper, we first introduce a new perspective based on the influence function for instance-wise feature selection, and give some corresponding theoretical insights, the core of which is to use the influence function as an indicator to measure the importance of an instance-wise feature. We then propose a new solution for discovering instance-wise influential features in tabular data (DIWIFT), where a self-attention network is used as a feature selection model and the value of the corresponding influence function is used as an optimization objective to guide the model. Benefiting from the advantage of the influence function, i.e., its computation does not depend on a specific architecture and can also take into account the data distribution in different scenarios, our DIWIFT has better flexibility and robustness. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets to validate the effectiveness of our DIWIFT.

Ben Xue, Shenghui Ran, Quan Chen et al.

Image color harmonization algorithm aims to automatically match the color distribution of foreground and background images captured in different conditions. Previous deep learning based models neglect two issues that are critical for practical applications, namely high resolution (HR) image processing and model comprehensibility. In this paper, we propose a novel Deep Comprehensible Color Filter (DCCF) learning framework for high-resolution image harmonization. Specifically, DCCF first downsamples the original input image to its low-resolution (LR) counter-part, then learns four human comprehensible neural filters (i.e. hue, saturation, value and attentive rendering filters) in an end-to-end manner, finally applies these filters to the original input image to get the harmonized result. Benefiting from the comprehensible neural filters, we could provide a simple yet efficient handler for users to cooperate with deep model to get the desired results with very little effort when necessary. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of DCCF learning framework and it outperforms state-of-the-art post-processing method on iHarmony4 dataset on images' full-resolutions by achieving 7.63% and 1.69% relative improvements on MSE and PSNR respectively.

Yunpeng Weng, Xing Tang, Liang Chen et al.

Multi-task learning for various real-world applications usually involves tasks with logical sequential dependence. For example, in online marketing, the cascade behavior pattern of $impression \rightarrow click \rightarrow conversion$ is usually modeled as multiple tasks in a multi-task manner, where the sequential dependence between tasks is simply connected with an explicitly defined function or implicitly transferred information in current works. These methods alleviate the data sparsity problem for long-path sequential tasks as the positive feedback becomes sparser along with the task sequence. However, the error accumulation and negative transfer will be a severe problem for downstream tasks. Especially, at the beginning stage of training, the optimization for parameters of former tasks is not converged yet, and thus the information transferred to downstream tasks is negative. In this paper, we propose a prior information merged model (\textbf{PIMM}), which explicitly models the logical dependence among tasks with a novel prior information merged (\textbf{PIM}) module for multiple sequential dependence task learning in a curriculum manner. Specifically, the PIM randomly selects the true label information or the prior task prediction with a soft sampling strategy to transfer to the downstream task during the training. Following an easy-to-difficult curriculum paradigm, we dynamically adjust the sampling probability to ensure that the downstream task will get the effective information along with the training. The offline experimental results on both public and product datasets verify that PIMM outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Moreover, we deploy the PIMM in a large-scale FinTech platform, and the online experiments also demonstrate the effectiveness of PIMM.

Xing Tang, Ling Chen

Temporal Knowledge Graph (TKG) representation learning embeds entities and event types into a continuous low-dimensional vector space by integrating the temporal information, which is essential for downstream tasks, e.g., event prediction and question answering. Existing methods stack multiple graph convolution layers to model the influence of distant entities, leading to the over-smoothing problem. To alleviate the problem, recent studies infuse reinforcement learning to obtain paths that contribute to modeling the influence of distant entities. However, due to the limited number of hops, these studies fail to capture the correlation between entities that are far apart and even unreachable. To this end, we propose GTRL, an entity Group-aware Temporal knowledge graph Representation Learning method. GTRL is the first work that incorporates the entity group modeling to capture the correlation between entities by stacking only a finite number of layers. Specifically, the entity group mapper is proposed to generate entity groups from entities in a learning way. Based on entity groups, the implicit correlation encoder is introduced to capture implicit correlations between any pairwise entity groups. In addition, the hierarchical GCNs are exploited to accomplish the message aggregation and representation updating on the entity group graph and the entity graph. Finally, GRUs are employed to capture the temporal dependency in TKGs. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that GTRL achieves the state-of-the-art performances on the event prediction task, outperforming the best baseline by an average of 13.44%, 9.65%, 12.15%, and 15.12% in MRR, Hits@1, Hits@3, and Hits@10, respectively.

Rong Hu, Ling Chen, Shenghuan Miao et al.

In practice, Wearable Human Activity Recognition (WHAR) models usually face performance degradation on the new user due to user variance. Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) becomes the natural solution to cross-user WHAR under annotation scarcity. Existing UDA models usually align samples across domains without differentiation, which ignores the difference among samples. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised domain adaptation model with sample weight learning (SWL-Adapt) for cross-user WHAR. SWL-Adapt calculates sample weights according to the classification loss and domain discrimination loss of each sample with a parameterized network. We introduce the meta-optimization based update rule to learn this network end-to-end, which is guided by meta-classification loss on the selected pseudo-labeled target samples. Therefore, this network can fit a weighting function according to the cross-user WHAR task at hand, which is superior to existing sample differentiation rules fixed for special scenarios. Extensive experiments on three public WHAR datasets demonstrate that SWL-Adapt achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the cross-user WHAR task, outperforming the best baseline by an average of 3.1% and 5.3% in accuracy and macro F1 score, respectively.

Yunpeng Weng, Xing Tang, Zhenhao Xu et al.

Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV) prediction is a critical task in business applications. Accurately predicting CLTV is challenging in real-world business scenarios, as the distribution of CLTV is complex and mutable. Firstly, there is a large number of users without any consumption consisting of a long-tailed part that is too complex to fit. Secondly, the small set of high-value users spent orders of magnitude more than a typical user leading to a wide range of the CLTV distribution which is hard to capture in a single distribution. Existing approaches for CLTV estimation either assume a prior probability distribution and fit a single group of distribution-related parameters for all samples, or directly learn from the posterior distribution with manually predefined buckets in a heuristic manner. However, all these methods fail to handle complex and mutable distributions. In this paper, we propose a novel optimal distribution selection model OptDist for CLTV prediction, which utilizes an adaptive optimal sub-distribution selection mechanism to improve the accuracy of complex distribution modeling. Specifically, OptDist trains several candidate sub-distribution networks in the distribution learning module (DLM) for modeling the probability distribution of CLTV. Then, a distribution selection module (DSM) is proposed to select the sub-distribution for each sample, thus making the selection automatically and adaptively. Besides, we design an alignment mechanism that connects both modules, which effectively guides the optimization. We conduct extensive experiments on both two public and one private dataset to verify that OptDist outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Furthermore, OptDist has been deployed on a large-scale financial platform for customer acquisition marketing campaigns and the online experiments also demonstrate the effectiveness of OptDist.

Fuyuan Lyu, Xing Tang, Dugang Liu et al.

Deep sparse networks are widely investigated as a neural network architecture for prediction tasks with high-dimensional sparse features, with which feature interaction selection is a critical component. While previous methods primarily focus on how to search feature interaction in a coarse-grained space, less attention has been given to a finer granularity. In this work, we introduce a hybrid-grained feature interaction selection approach that targets both feature field and feature value for deep sparse networks. To explore such expansive space, we propose a decomposed space which is calculated on the fly. We then develop a selection algorithm called OptFeature, which efficiently selects the feature interaction from both the feature field and the feature value simultaneously. Results from experiments on three large real-world benchmark datasets demonstrate that OptFeature performs well in terms of accuracy and efficiency. Additional studies support the feasibility of our method.

Ziqiang Cui, Xing Tang, Yang Qiao et al.

Estimating the individual treatment effect (ITE) from observational data is a crucial research topic that holds significant value across multiple domains. How to identify hidden confounders poses a key challenge in ITE estimation. Recent studies have incorporated the structural information of social networks to tackle this challenge, achieving notable advancements. However, these methods utilize graph neural networks to learn the representation of hidden confounders in Euclidean space, disregarding two critical issues: (1) the social networks often exhibit a scalefree structure, while Euclidean embeddings suffer from high distortion when used to embed such graphs, and (2) each ego-centric network within a social network manifests a treatment-related characteristic, implying significant patterns of hidden confounders. To address these issues, we propose a novel method called Treatment-Aware Hyperbolic Representation Learning (TAHyper). Firstly, TAHyper employs the hyperbolic space to encode the social networks, thereby effectively reducing the distortion of confounder representation caused by Euclidean embeddings. Secondly, we design a treatment-aware relationship identification module that enhances the representation of hidden confounders by identifying whether an individual and her neighbors receive the same treatment. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets are conducted to demonstrate the superiority of our method.

Ling Chen, Jun Cui, Xing Tang et al.

Although the state-of-the-art traditional representation learning (TRL) models show competitive performance on knowledge graph completion, there is no parameter sharing between the embeddings of entities, and the connections between entities are weak. Therefore, neighbor aggregation-based representation learning (NARL) models are proposed, which encode the information in the neighbors of an entity into its embeddings. However, existing NARL models either only utilize one-hop neighbors, ignoring the information in multi-hop neighbors, or utilize multi-hop neighbors by hierarchical neighbor aggregation, destroying the completeness of multi-hop neighbors. In this paper, we propose a NARL model named RMNA, which obtains and filters horn rules through a rule mining algorithm, and uses selected horn rules to transform valuable multi-hop neighbors into one-hop neighbors, therefore, the information in valuable multi-hop neighbors can be completely utilized by aggregating these one-hop neighbors. In experiments, we compare RMNA with the state-of-the-art TRL models and NARL models. The results show that RMNA has a competitive performance.

Ling Chen, Da Wang, Dandan Lyu et al.

Evolving temporal networks serve as the abstractions of many real-life dynamic systems, e.g., social network and e-commerce. The purpose of temporal network embedding is to map each node to a time-evolving low-dimension vector for downstream tasks, e.g., link prediction and node classification. The difficulty of temporal network embedding lies in how to utilize the topology and time information jointly to capture the evolution of a temporal network. In response to this challenge, we propose a temporal motif-preserving network embedding method with bicomponent neighbor aggregation, named TME-BNA. Considering that temporal motifs are essential to the understanding of topology laws and functional properties of a temporal network, TME-BNA constructs additional edge features based on temporal motifs to explicitly utilize complex topology with time information. In order to capture the topology dynamics of nodes, TME-BNA utilizes Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to aggregate the historical and current neighbors respectively according to the timestamps of connected edges. Experiments are conducted on three public temporal network datasets, and the results show the effectiveness of TME-BNA.