Hao Liu

Hao Liu, Bin Chen, Bo Wang et al.

Recently, many semi-supervised object detection (SSOD) methods adopt teacher-student framework and have achieved state-of-the-art results. However, the teacher network is tightly coupled with the student network since the teacher is an exponential moving average (EMA) of the student, which causes a performance bottleneck. To address the coupling problem, we propose a Cycle Self-Training (CST) framework for SSOD, which consists of two teachers T1 and T2, two students S1 and S2. Based on these networks, a cycle self-training mechanism is built, i.e., S1${\rightarrow}$T1${\rightarrow}$S2${\rightarrow}$T2${\rightarrow}$S1. For S${\rightarrow}$T, we also utilize the EMA weights of the students to update the teachers. For T${\rightarrow}$S, instead of providing supervision for its own student S1(S2) directly, the teacher T1(T2) generates pseudo-labels for the student S2(S1), which looses the coupling effect. Moreover, owing to the property of EMA, the teacher is most likely to accumulate the biases from the student and make the mistakes irreversible. To mitigate the problem, we also propose a distribution consistency reweighting strategy, where pseudo-labels are reweighted based on distribution consistency across the teachers T1 and T2. With the strategy, the two students S2 and S1 can be trained robustly with noisy pseudo labels to avoid confirmation biases. Extensive experiments prove the superiority of CST by consistently improving the AP over the baseline and outperforming state-of-the-art methods by 2.1% absolute AP improvements with scarce labeled data.

Hao Liu, Jinrui Gan, Xiaoxuan Fan et al.

Self-supervised learning has been actively studied in time series domain recently, especially for masked reconstruction. Most of these methods follow the "Pre-training + Fine-tuning" paradigm in which a new decoder replaces the pre-trained decoder to fit for a specific downstream task, leading to inconsistency of upstream and downstream tasks. In this paper, we first point out that the unification of task objectives and adaptation for task difficulty are critical for bridging the gap between time series masked reconstruction and forecasting. By reserving the pre-trained mask token during fine-tuning stage, the forecasting task can be taken as a special case of masked reconstruction, where the future values are masked and reconstructed based on history values. It guarantees the consistency of task objectives but there is still a gap in task difficulty. Because masked reconstruction can utilize contextual information while forecasting can only use historical information to reconstruct. To further mitigate the existed gap, we propose a simple yet effective prompt token tuning (PT-Tuning) paradigm, in which all pre-trained parameters are frozen and only a few trainable prompt tokens are added to extended mask tokens in element-wise manner. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed paradigm with state-of-the-art performance compared to representation learning and end-to-end supervised forecasting methods.

Siqi Lai, Zhao Xu, Weijia Zhang et al.

Traffic Signal Control (TSC) is a crucial component in urban traffic management, aiming to optimize road network efficiency and reduce congestion. Traditional TSC methods, primarily based on transportation engineering and reinforcement learning (RL), often struggle with generalization abilities across varied traffic scenarios and lack interpretability. This paper presents LLMLight, a novel framework employing Large Language Models (LLMs) as decision-making agents for TSC. Specifically, the framework begins by instructing the LLM with a knowledgeable prompt detailing real-time traffic conditions. Leveraging the advanced generalization capabilities of LLMs, LLMLight engages a reasoning and decision-making process akin to human intuition for effective traffic control. Moreover, we build LightGPT, a specialized backbone LLM tailored for TSC tasks. By learning nuanced traffic patterns and control strategies, LightGPT enhances the LLMLight framework cost-effectively. Extensive experiments conducted on ten real-world and synthetic datasets, along with evaluations by fifteen human experts, demonstrate the exceptional effectiveness, generalization ability, and interpretability of LLMLight with LightGPT, outperforming nine baseline methods and ten advanced LLMs.

Hao Liu, Ying Li, Yanjie Fu et al.

Public transportation plays a critical role in people's daily life. It has been proven that public transportation is more environmentally sustainable, efficient, and economical than any other forms of travel. However, due to the increasing expansion of transportation networks and more complex travel situations, people are having difficulties in efficiently finding the most preferred route from one place to another through public transportation systems. To this end, in this paper, we present Polestar, a data-driven engine for intelligent and efficient public transportation routing. Specifically, we first propose a novel Public Transportation Graph (PTG) to model public transportation system in terms of various travel costs, such as time or distance. Then, we introduce a general route search algorithm coupled with an efficient station binding method for efficient route candidate generation. After that, we propose a two-pass route candidate ranking module to capture user preferences under dynamic travel situations. Finally, experiments on two real-world data sets demonstrate the advantages of Polestar in terms of both efficiency and effectiveness. Indeed, in early 2019, Polestar has been deployed on Baidu Maps, one of the world's largest map services. To date, Polestar is servicing over 330 cities, answers over a hundred millions of queries each day, and achieves substantial improvement of user click ratio.