Hao Liu

Tengfei Lyu, Weijia Zhang, Jinliang Deng et al.

Spatio-temporal forecasting is a critical component of various smart city applications, such as transportation optimization, energy management, and socio-economic analysis. Recently, several automated spatio-temporal forecasting methods have been proposed to automatically search the optimal neural network architecture for capturing complex spatio-temporal dependencies. However, the existing automated approaches suffer from expensive neural architecture search overhead, which hinders their practical use and the further exploration of diverse spatio-temporal operators in a finer granularity. In this paper, we propose AutoSTF, a decoupled automatic neural architecture search framework for cost-effective automated spatio-temporal forecasting. From the efficiency perspective, we first decouple the mixed search space into temporal space and spatial space and respectively devise representation compression and parameter-sharing schemes to mitigate the parameter explosion. The decoupled spatio-temporal search not only expedites the model optimization process but also leaves new room for more effective spatio-temporal dependency modeling. From the effectiveness perspective, we propose a multi-patch transfer module to jointly capture multi-granularity temporal dependencies and extend the spatial search space to enable finer-grained layer-wise spatial dependency search. Extensive experiments on eight datasets demonstrate the superiority of AutoSTF in terms of both accuracy and efficiency. Specifically, our proposed method achieves up to 13.48x speed-up compared to state-of-the-art automatic spatio-temporal forecasting methods while maintaining the best forecasting accuracy.

Weijia Zhang, Chenlong Yin, Hao Liu et al.

Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs), such as ChatGPT, have significantly advanced the field of natural language processing. This progress has inspired a series of innovative studies that explore the adaptation of PLMs to time series analysis, intending to create a unified foundation model that addresses various time series analytical tasks. However, these efforts predominantly focus on Regularly Sampled Time Series (RSTS), neglecting the unique challenges posed by Irregularly Sampled Time Series (ISTS), which are characterized by uneven sampling intervals and prevalent missing data. To bridge this gap, this work takes the first step in exploring the potential of PLMs for ISTS analysis. We begin by investigating the effect of various methods for representing ISTS, aiming to maximize the efficacy of PLMs in the analysis. Furthermore, we propose a unified PLM-based framework, named ISTS-PLM, to address diverse ISTS analytical tasks. It integrates novel time-aware and variable-aware PLMs tailored to tackle the intractable intra- and inter-time series modeling in ISTS. Finally, extensive experiments on a comprehensive benchmark demonstrate that the ISTS-PLM, utilizing a structured and effective series-based representation for ISTS, consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance across various analytical tasks, such as classification, interpolation, extrapolation, few-shot and zero-shot learning scenarios, spanning scientific domains like healthcare, biomechanics, and climate science.

Tianrui Song, Wenshuo Chao, Hao Liu

Implicit feedback, often used to build recommender systems, unavoidably confronts noise due to factors such as misclicks and position bias. Previous studies have attempted to alleviate this by identifying noisy samples based on their diverged patterns, such as higher loss values, and mitigating the noise through sample dropping or reweighting. Despite the progress, we observe existing approaches struggle to distinguish hard samples and noise samples, as they often exhibit similar patterns, thereby limiting their effectiveness in denoising recommendations. To address this challenge, we propose a Large Language Model Enhanced Hard Sample Denoising (LLMHD) framework. Specifically, we construct an LLM-based scorer to evaluate the semantic consistency of items with the user preference, which is quantified based on summarized historical user interactions. The resulting scores are used to assess the hardness of samples for the pointwise or pairwise training objectives. To ensure efficiency, we introduce a variance-based sample pruning strategy to filter potential hard samples before scoring. Besides, we propose an iterative preference update module designed to continuously refine summarized user preference, which may be biased due to false-positive user-item interactions. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets and four backbone recommenders demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

Zhuo Li, Mingshuang Luo, Ruibing Hou et al.

Human motion generation has been widely studied due to its crucial role in areas such as digital humans and humanoid robot control. However, many current motion generation approaches disregard physics constraints, frequently resulting in physically implausible motions with pronounced artifacts such as floating and foot sliding. Meanwhile, training an effective motion physics optimizer with noisy motion data remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we propose \textbf{Morph}, a \textbf{Mo}tion-F\textbf{r}ee \textbf{ph}ysics optimization framework, consisting of a Motion Generator and a Motion Physics Refinement module, for enhancing physical plausibility without relying on expensive real-world motion data. Specifically, the motion generator is responsible for providing large-scale synthetic, noisy motion data, while the motion physics refinement module utilizes these synthetic data to learn a motion imitator within a physics simulator, enforcing physical constraints to project the noisy motions into a physically-plausible space. Additionally, we introduce a prior reward module to enhance the stability of the physics optimization process and generate smoother and more stable motions. These physically refined motions are then used to fine-tune the motion generator, further enhancing its capability. This collaborative training paradigm enables mutual enhancement between the motion generator and the motion physics refinement module, significantly improving practicality and robustness in real-world applications. Experiments on both text-to-motion and music-to-dance generation tasks demonstrate that our framework achieves state-of-the-art motion quality while improving physical plausibility drastically.