Jianguo Jia

Wen Liang, Youzhi Liang, Jianguo Jia

Despite substantial progress in the field of deep learning, overfitting persists as a critical challenge, and data augmentation has emerged as a particularly promising approach due to its capacity to enhance model generalization in various computer vision tasks. While various strategies have been proposed, Mixed Sample Data Augmentation (MSDA) has shown great potential for enhancing model performance and generalization. We introduce a novel mixup method called MiAMix, which stands for Multi-stage Augmented Mixup. MiAMix integrates image augmentation into the mixup framework, utilizes multiple diversified mixing methods concurrently, and improves the mixing method by randomly selecting mixing mask augmentation methods. Recent methods utilize saliency information and the MiAMix is designed for computational efficiency as well, reducing additional overhead and offering easy integration into existing training pipelines. We comprehensively evaluate MiaMix using four image benchmarks and pitting it against current state-of-the-art mixed sample data augmentation techniques to demonstrate that MIAMix improves performance without heavy computational overhead.

Youzhi Liang, Wen Liang, Jianguo Jia

Vibration signals have been increasingly utilized in various engineering fields for analysis and monitoring purposes, including structural health monitoring, fault diagnosis and damage detection, where vibration signals can provide valuable information about the condition and integrity of structures. In recent years, there has been a growing trend towards the use of vibration signals in the field of bioengineering. Activity-induced structural vibrations, particularly footstep-induced signals, are useful for analyzing the movement of biological systems such as the human body and animals, providing valuable information regarding an individual's gait, body mass, and posture, making them an attractive tool for health monitoring, security, and human-computer interaction. However, the presence of various types of noise can compromise the accuracy of footstep-induced signal analysis. In this paper, we propose a novel ensemble model that leverages both the ensemble of multiple signals and of recurrent and convolutional neural network predictions. The proposed model consists of three stages: preprocessing, hybrid modeling, and ensemble. In the preprocessing stage, features are extracted using the Fast Fourier Transform and wavelet transform to capture the underlying physics-governed dynamics of the system and extract spatial and temporal features. In the hybrid modeling stage, a bi-directional LSTM is used to denoise the noisy signal concatenated with FFT results, and a CNN is used to obtain a condensed feature representation of the signal. In the ensemble stage, three layers of a fully-connected neural network are used to produce the final denoised signal. The proposed model addresses the challenges associated with structural vibration signals, which outperforms the prevailing algorithms for a wide range of noise levels, evaluated using PSNR, SNR, and WMAPE.

Wen Liang, Zeng Fan, Youzhi Liang et al.

Over the past few years, deep learning has firmly established its prowess across various domains, including computer vision, speech recognition, and natural language processing. Motivated by its outstanding success, researchers have been directing their efforts towards applying deep learning techniques to recommender systems. Neural collaborative filtering (NCF) and Neural Matrix Factorization (NeuMF) refreshes the traditional inner product in matrix factorization with a neural architecture capable of learning complex and data-driven functions. While these models effectively capture user-item interactions, they overlook the specific attributes of both users and items. This can lead to robustness issues, especially for items and users that belong to the "long tail". Such challenges are commonly recognized in recommender systems as a part of the cold-start problem. A direct and intuitive approach to address this issue is by leveraging the features and attributes of the items and users themselves. In this paper, we introduce a refined NeuMF model that considers not only the interaction between users and items, but also acrossing associated attributes. Moreover, our proposed architecture features a shared user embedding, seamlessly integrating with user embeddings to imporve the robustness and effectively address the cold-start problem. Rigorous experiments on both the Movielens and Pinterest datasets demonstrate the superiority of our Cross-Attribute Matrix Factorization model, particularly in scenarios characterized by higher dataset sparsity.

Jianguo Jia, Wen Liang, Youzhi Liang

This review presents a comprehensive exploration of hybrid and ensemble deep learning models within Natural Language Processing (NLP), shedding light on their transformative potential across diverse tasks such as Sentiment Analysis, Named Entity Recognition, Machine Translation, Question Answering, Text Classification, Generation, Speech Recognition, Summarization, and Language Modeling. The paper systematically introduces each task, delineates key architectures from Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) to Transformer-based models like BERT, and evaluates their performance, challenges, and computational demands. The adaptability of ensemble techniques is emphasized, highlighting their capacity to enhance various NLP applications. Challenges in implementation, including computational overhead, overfitting, and model interpretation complexities, are addressed alongside the trade-off between interpretability and performance. Serving as a concise yet invaluable guide, this review synthesizes insights into tasks, architectures, and challenges, offering a holistic perspective for researchers and practitioners aiming to advance language-driven applications through ensemble deep learning in NLP.

Xiaoyu Wu, Zeyu Bai, Jianguo Jia et al.

In this paper, we propose a novel multi-variate algorithm using a triple-regression methodology to predict the airborne-pollen allergy season that can be customized for each patient in the long term. To improve the prediction accuracy, we first perform a pre-processing to integrate the historical data of pollen concentration and various inferential signals from other covariates such as the meteorological data. We then propose a novel algorithm which encompasses three-stage regressions: in Stage 1, a regression model to predict the start/end date of a airborne-pollen allergy season is trained from a feature matrix extracted from 12 time series of the covariates with a rolling window; in Stage 2, a regression model to predict the corresponding uncertainty is trained based on the feature matrix and the prediction result from Stage 1; in Stage 3, a weighted linear regression model is built upon prediction results from Stage 1 and 2. It is observed and proved that Stage 3 contributes to the improved forecasting accuracy and the reduced uncertainty of the multi-variate triple-regression algorithm. Based on different allergy sensitivity level, the triggering concentration of the pollen - the definition of the allergy season can be customized individually. In our backtesting, a mean absolute error (MAE) of 4.7 days was achieved using the algorithm. We conclude that this algorithm could be applicable in both generic and long-term forecasting problems.