Yuanyuan Yao

Yuhan Shi, Yuanyuan Yao, Lu Chen et al.

Multivariate time series (MTS) are frequently affected by co-occurring quality issues, such as missing values, outliers, and constraint violations, which significantly undermine downstream analytics. Existing cleaning approaches fix only a limited set of such issues, making them ill-suited for scenarios where multiple quality problems arise simultaneously. Furthermore, these methods commonly depend on the availability of ground truth data or domain-specific rules, both of which are rarely accessible in real-world applications. In this paper, we introduce \sys, an agent system with reinforcement learning designed to clean multiple data quality issues in MTS. We cast the cleaning process as a joint optimization problem that simultaneously handles quality issue order and cleaning model selection, allowing efficient navigation of the large space of possible cleaning pipelines. Our framework relies on a hierarchical agent architecture, where a high-level agent determines the order in which data quality issues should be processed, while a low-level agent identifies the most suitable cleaning method for each issue. To guide the agent toward an optimal cleaning pipeline, we propose a dual-stage reward mechanism that couples upstream (cleaning) and downstream performance, enabling effective optimization without relying on ground truth. Our experimental results show that \sys consistently outperforms existing methods, achieving up to 96\% improvement in data cleaning quality and 27\% improvement in downstream performance.

Jiawen Liu, Yuanyuan Yao, Pengcheng An et al.

In children's collaborative learning, effective peer conversations can significantly enhance the quality of children's collaborative interactions. The integration of Large Language Model (LLM) agents into this setting explores their novel role as peers, assessing impacts as team moderators and participants. We invited two groups of participants to engage in a collaborative learning workshop, where they discussed and proposed conceptual solutions to a design problem. The peer conversation transcripts were analyzed using thematic analysis. We discovered that peer agents, while managing discussions effectively as team moderators, sometimes have their instructions disregarded. As participants, they foster children's creative thinking but may not consistently provide timely feedback. These findings highlight potential design improvements and considerations for peer agents in both roles.

Yuanyuan Yao, Yuhan Shi, Lu Chen et al.

Multivariate time series (MTS) anomaly detection identifies abnormal patterns where each timestamp contains multiple variables. Existing MTS anomaly detection methods fall into three categories: reconstruction-based, prediction-based, and classifier-based methods. However, these methods face two key challenges: (1) Unsupervised learning methods, such as reconstruction-based and prediction-based methods, rely on error thresholds, which can lead to inaccuracies; (2) Semi-supervised methods mainly model normal data and often underuse anomaly labels, limiting detection of subtle anomalies;(3) Supervised learning methods, such as classifier-based approaches, often fail to capture local relationships, incur high computational costs, and are constrained by the scarcity of labeled data. To address these limitations, we propose Moon, a supervised modality conversion-based multivariate time series anomaly detection framework. Moon enhances the efficiency and accuracy of anomaly detection while providing detailed anomaly analysis reports. First, Moon introduces a novel multivariate Markov Transition Field (MV-MTF) technique to convert numeric time series data into image representations, capturing relationships across variables and timestamps. Since numeric data retains unique patterns that cannot be fully captured by image conversion alone, Moon employs a Multimodal-CNN to integrate numeric and image data through a feature fusion model with parameter sharing, enhancing training efficiency. Finally, a SHAP-based anomaly explainer identifies key variables contributing to anomalies, improving interpretability. Extensive experiments on six real-world MTS datasets demonstrate that Moon outperforms six state-of-the-art methods by up to 93% in efficiency, 4% in accuracy and, 10.8% in interpretation performance.

Shuo Chang, YiFan Zhang, Sai Huang et al.

Visual tracking plays an important role in perception system, which is a crucial part of intelligent transportation. Recently, Siamese network is a hot topic for visual tracking to estimate moving targets' trajectory, due to its superior accuracy and simple framework. In general, Siamese tracking algorithms, supervised by logistic loss and triplet loss, increase the value of inner product between exemplar template and positive sample while reduce the value of inner product with background sample. However, the distractors from different exemplars are not considered by mentioned loss functions, which limit the feature models' discrimination. In this paper, a new exemplar loss integrated with logistic loss is proposed to enhance the feature model's discrimination by reducing inner products among exemplars. Without the bells and whistles, the proposed algorithm outperforms the methods supervised by logistic loss or triplet loss. Numerical results suggest that the newly developed algorithm achieves comparable performance in public benchmarks.