Jun Feng

Jun Feng, Xueyi Liu, Jiamin Lu et al.

Accurate flood prediction is crucial for disaster prevention and mitigation. Hydrological data exhibit highly nonlinear temporal patterns and encompass complex spatial relationships between rainfall and flow. Existing flood prediction models struggle to capture these intricate temporal features and spatial dependencies. This paper presents an adaptive periodic and spatial self-attention method based on LSTM (APS-LSTM) to address these challenges. The APS-LSTM learns temporal features from a multi-periodicity perspective and captures diverse spatial dependencies from different period divisions. The APS-LSTM consists of three main stages, (i) Multi-Period Division, that utilizes Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) to divide various periodic patterns; (ii) Spatio-Temporal Information Extraction, that performs periodic and spatial self-attention focusing on intra- and inter-periodic temporal patterns and spatial dependencies; (iii) Adaptive Aggregation, that relies on amplitude strength to aggregate the computational results from each periodic division. The abundant experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of APS-LSTM. The code is available: https://github.com/oopcmd/APS-LSTM.

Youchuan Hu, Le Yan, Tingting Hang et al.

Stream-flow forecasting for small rivers has always been of great importance, yet comparatively challenging due to the special features of rivers with smaller volume. Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods have been employed in this area for long, but improvement of forecast quality is still on the way. In this paper, we tried to provide a new method to do the forecast using the Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM) deep learning model, which aims in the field of time-series data. Utilizing LSTM, we collected the stream flow data from one hydrologic station in Tunxi, China, and precipitation data from 11 rainfall stations around to forecast the stream flow data from that hydrologic station 6 hours in the future. We evaluated the prediction results using three criteria: root mean square error (RMSE), mean absolute error (MAE), and coefficient of determination (R^2). By comparing LSTM's prediction with predictions of Support Vector Regression (SVR) and Multilayer Perceptions (MLP) models, we showed that LSTM has better performance, achieving RMSE of 82.007, MAE of 27.752, and R^2 of 0.970. We also did extended experiments on LSTM model, discussing influence factors of its performance.

Ryuichi Takanobu, Tao Zhuang, Minlie Huang et al.

In this paper, we investigate the task of aggregating search results from heterogeneous sources in an E-commerce environment. First, unlike traditional aggregated web search that merely presents multi-sourced results in the first page, this new task may present aggregated results in all pages and has to dynamically decide which source should be presented in the current page. Second, as pointed out by many existing studies, it is not trivial to rank items from heterogeneous sources because the relevance scores from different source systems are not directly comparable. To address these two issues, we decompose the task into two subtasks in a hierarchical structure: a high-level task for source selection where we model the sequential patterns of user behaviors onto aggregated results in different pages so as to understand user intents and select the relevant sources properly; and a low-level task for item presentation where we formulate a slot filling process to sequentially present the items instead of giving each item a relevance score when deciding the presentation order of heterogeneous items. Since both subtasks can be naturally formulated as sequential decision problems and learn from the future user feedback on search results, we build our model with hierarchical reinforcement learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model obtains remarkable improvements in search performance metrics, and achieves a higher user satisfaction.

Jun Feng, Minlie Huang, Yijie Zhang et al.

In this paper we address a task of relation mention extraction from noisy data: extracting representative phrases for a particular relation from noisy sentences that are collected via distant supervision. Despite its significance and value in many downstream applications, this task is less studied on noisy data. The major challenges exists in 1) the lack of annotation on mention phrases, and more severely, 2) handling noisy sentences which do not express a relation at all. To address the two challenges, we formulate the task as a semi-Markov decision process and propose a novel hierarchical reinforcement learning model. Our model consists of a top-level sentence selector to remove noisy sentences, a low-level mention extractor to extract relation mentions, and a reward estimator to provide signals to guide data denoising and mention extraction without explicit annotations. Experimental results show that our model is effective to extract relation mentions from noisy data.

Jun Feng, Heng Li, Minlie Huang et al.

Ranking is a fundamental and widely studied problem in scenarios such as search, advertising, and recommendation. However, joint optimization for multi-scenario ranking, which aims to improve the overall performance of several ranking strategies in different scenarios, is rather untouched. Separately optimizing each individual strategy has two limitations. The first one is lack of collaboration between scenarios meaning that each strategy maximizes its own objective but ignores the goals of other strategies, leading to a sub-optimal overall performance. The second limitation is the inability of modeling the correlation between scenarios meaning that independent optimization in one scenario only uses its own user data but ignores the context in other scenarios. In this paper, we formulate multi-scenario ranking as a fully cooperative, partially observable, multi-agent sequential decision problem. We propose a novel model named Multi-Agent Recurrent Deterministic Policy Gradient (MA-RDPG) which has a communication component for passing messages, several private actors (agents) for making actions for ranking, and a centralized critic for evaluating the overall performance of the co-working actors. Each scenario is treated as an agent (actor). Agents collaborate with each other by sharing a global action-value function (the critic) and passing messages that encodes historical information across scenarios. The model is evaluated with online settings on a large E-commerce platform. Results show that the proposed model exhibits significant improvements against baselines in terms of the overall performance.

Jun Feng, Mantong Zhou, Yu Hao et al.

Knowledge graph embedding refers to projecting entities and relations in knowledge graph into continuous vector spaces. State-of-the-art methods, such as TransE, TransH, and TransR build embeddings by treating relation as translation from head entity to tail entity. However, previous models can not deal with reflexive/one-to-many/many-to-one/many-to-many relations properly, or lack of scalability and efficiency. Thus, we propose a novel method, flexible translation, named TransF, to address the above issues. TransF regards relation as translation between head entity vector and tail entity vector with flexible magnitude. To evaluate the proposed model, we conduct link prediction and triple classification on benchmark datasets. Experimental results show that our method remarkably improve the performance compared with several state-of-the-art baselines.