Graph Collaborative Filtering (GCF), one of the most widely adopted recommendation system methods, effectively captures intricate relationships between user and item interactions. Graph Contrastive Learning (GCL) based GCF has gained significant attention as it leverages self-supervised techniques to extract valuable signals from real-world scenarios. However, many methods usually learn the instances of discrimination tasks that involve the construction of contrastive pairs through random sampling. GCL approaches suffer from sampling bias issues, where the negatives might have a semantic structure similar to that of the positives, thus leading to a loss of effective feature representation. To address these problems, we present the \underline{Proto}typical contrastive learning through \underline{A}lignment and \underline{U}niformity for recommendation, which is called \textbf{ProtoAU}. Specifically, we first propose prototypes (cluster centroids) as a latent space to ensure consistency across different augmentations from the origin graph, aiming to eliminate the need for random sampling of contrastive pairs. Furthermore, the absence of explicit negatives means that directly optimizing the consistency loss between instance and prototype could easily result in dimensional collapse issues. Therefore, we propose aligning and maintaining uniformity in the prototypes of users and items as optimization objectives to prevent falling into trivial solutions. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on four datasets and evaluate their performance on the task of link prediction. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed ProtoAU outperforms other representative methods. The source codes of our proposed ProtoAU are available at \url{//github.com/oceanlvr/ProtoAU}.
We present a comparative study between cross-encoder and LLMs rerankers in the context of re-ranking effective SPLADE retrievers. We conduct a large evaluation on TREC Deep Learning datasets and out-of-domain datasets such as BEIR and LoTTE. In the first set of experiments, we show how cross-encoder rerankers are hard to distinguish when it comes to re-rerank SPLADE on MS MARCO. Observations shift in the out-of-domain scenario, where both the type of model and the number of documents to re-rank have an impact on effectiveness. Then, we focus on listwise rerankers based on Large Language Models -- especially GPT-4. While GPT-4 demonstrates impressive (zero-shot) performance, we show that traditional cross-encoders remain very competitive. Overall, our findings aim to to provide a more nuanced perspective on the recent excitement surrounding LLM-based re-rankers -- by positioning them as another factor to consider in balancing effectiveness and efficiency in search systems.
Website reliability labels underpin almost all research in misinformation detection. However, misinformation sources often exhibit transient behavior, which makes many such labeled lists obsolete over time. We demonstrate that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) attributes provide strong signals for predicting news site reliability. We introduce a novel attributed webgraph dataset with labeled news domains and their connections to outlinking and backlinking domains. We demonstrate the success of graph neural networks in detecting news site reliability using these attributed webgraphs, and show that our baseline news site reliability classifier outperforms current SoTA methods on the PoliticalNews dataset, achieving an F1 score of 0.96. Finally, we introduce and evaluate a novel graph-based algorithm for discovering previously unknown misinformation news sources.
We study dual number symmetric matrices, dual complex Hermitian matrices and dual quaternion Hermitian matrices in a unified frame of dual Hermitian matrices. Suppose we have a ring, which can be the real field, the complex field, or the quaternion ring. Then an $n \times n$ dual Hermitian matrix has $n$ dual number eigenvalues. We define supplement matrices for a dual Hermitian matrix. Supplement matrices are Hermitian matrices in the original ring. The standard parts of the eigenvalues of that dual Hermitian matrix are the eigenvalues of the standard part Hermitian matrix in the original ring, while the dual parts of the eigenvalues of that dual Hermitian matrix are the eigenvalues of those {supplement} matrices. Hence, by apply any practical method for computing eigenvalues of Hermitian matrices in the original ring, we have a practical method for computing eigenvalues of a dual Hermitian matrix. We call this method the supplement matrix method. Applications to low rank approximation and generalized inverses of dual matrices, dual least squares problem and formation control are discussed. Numerical experiments are reported.
We propose EmoDistill, a novel speech emotion recognition (SER) framework that leverages cross-modal knowledge distillation during training to learn strong linguistic and prosodic representations of emotion from speech. During inference, our method only uses a stream of speech signals to perform unimodal SER thus reducing computation overhead and avoiding run-time transcription and prosodic feature extraction errors. During training, our method distills information at both embedding and logit levels from a pair of pre-trained Prosodic and Linguistic teachers that are fine-tuned for SER. Experiments on the IEMOCAP benchmark demonstrate that our method outperforms other unimodal and multimodal techniques by a considerable margin, and achieves state-of-the-art performance of 77.49% unweighted accuracy and 78.91% weighted accuracy. Detailed ablation studies demonstrate the impact of each component of our method.
Foundation models, such as Large language Models (LLMs), have attracted significant amount of interest due to their large number of applications. Existing works show that appropriate prompt design, such as Chain-of-Thoughts, can unlock LLM's powerful capacity in diverse areas. However, when handling tasks involving repetitive sub-tasks and/or deceptive contents, such as arithmetic calculation and article-level fake news detection, existing prompting strategies either suffers from insufficient expressive power or intermediate errors triggered by hallucination. To make LLM more discerning to such intermediate errors, we propose to guide LLM with a Divide-and-Conquer program that simultaneously ensures superior expressive power and disentangles task decomposition, sub-task resolution, and resolution assembly process. Theoretic analysis reveals that our strategy can guide LLM to extend the expressive power of fixed-depth Transformer. Experiments indicate that our proposed method can achieve better performance than typical prompting strategies in tasks bothered by intermediate errors and deceptive contents, such as large integer multiplication, hallucination detection and misinformation detection.
The Skolem problem is a long-standing open problem in linear dynamical systems: can a linear recurrence sequence (LRS) ever reach 0 from a given initial configuration? Similarly, the positivity problem asks whether the LRS stays positive from an initial configuration. Deciding Skolem (or positivity) has been open for half a century: the best known decidability results are for LRS with special properties (e.g., low order recurrences). But these problems are easier for "uninitialized" variants, where the initial configuration is not fixed but can vary arbitrarily: checking if there is an initial configuration from which the LRS stays positive can be decided in polynomial time (Tiwari in 2004, Braverman in 2006). In this paper, we consider problems that lie between the initialized and uninitialized variants. More precisely, we ask if 0 (resp. negative numbers) can be avoided from every initial configuration in a neighborhood of a given initial configuration. This can be considered as a robust variant of the Skolem (resp. positivity) problem. We show that these problems lie at the frontier of decidability: if the neighbourhood is given as part of the input, then robust Skolem and robust positivity are Diophantine hard, i.e., solving either would entail major breakthroughs in Diophantine approximations, as happens for (non-robust) positivity. However, if one asks whether such a neighbourhood exists, then the problems turn out to be decidable with PSPACE complexity. Our techniques also allow us to tackle robustness for ultimate positivity, which asks whether there is a bound on the number of steps after which the LRS remains positive. There are two variants depending on whether we ask for a "uniform" bound on this number of steps. For the non-uniform variant, when the neighbourhood is open, the problem turns out to be tractable, even when the neighbourhood is given as input.
The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) transcends traditional medical boundaries, enabling a transition from reactive treatment to proactive prevention. This innovative method revolutionizes healthcare by facilitating early disease detection and tailored care, particularly in chronic disease management, where IoMT automates treatments based on real-time health data collection. Nonetheless, its benefits are countered by significant security challenges that endanger the lives of its users due to the sensitivity and value of the processed data, thereby attracting malicious interests. Moreover, the utilization of wireless communication for data transmission exposes medical data to interception and tampering by cybercriminals. Additionally, anomalies may arise due to human errors, network interference, or hardware malfunctions. In this context, anomaly detection based on Machine Learning (ML) is an interesting solution, but it comes up against obstacles in terms of explicability and protection of privacy. To address these challenges, a new framework for Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) is introduced, leveraging Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) for intrusion detection while utilizing Federated Learning (FL) for privacy preservation. Additionally, eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) methods are incorporated to enhance model explanation and interpretation. The efficacy of the proposed framework is evaluated and compared with centralized approaches using multiple datasets containing network and medical data, simulating various attack types impacting the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of medical and physiological data. The results obtained offer compelling evidence that the FL method performs comparably to the centralized method, demonstrating high performance. Additionally, it affords the dual advantage of safeguarding privacy and providing model explanation.
Recent contrastive representation learning methods rely on estimating mutual information (MI) between multiple views of an underlying context. E.g., we can derive multiple views of a given image by applying data augmentation, or we can split a sequence into views comprising the past and future of some step in the sequence. Contrastive lower bounds on MI are easy to optimize, but have a strong underestimation bias when estimating large amounts of MI. We propose decomposing the full MI estimation problem into a sum of smaller estimation problems by splitting one of the views into progressively more informed subviews and by applying the chain rule on MI between the decomposed views. This expression contains a sum of unconditional and conditional MI terms, each measuring modest chunks of the total MI, which facilitates approximation via contrastive bounds. To maximize the sum, we formulate a contrastive lower bound on the conditional MI which can be approximated efficiently. We refer to our general approach as Decomposed Estimation of Mutual Information (DEMI). We show that DEMI can capture a larger amount of MI than standard non-decomposed contrastive bounds in a synthetic setting, and learns better representations in a vision domain and for dialogue generation.
In this paper, we propose a novel Feature Decomposition and Reconstruction Learning (FDRL) method for effective facial expression recognition. We view the expression information as the combination of the shared information (expression similarities) across different expressions and the unique information (expression-specific variations) for each expression. More specifically, FDRL mainly consists of two crucial networks: a Feature Decomposition Network (FDN) and a Feature Reconstruction Network (FRN). In particular, FDN first decomposes the basic features extracted from a backbone network into a set of facial action-aware latent features to model expression similarities. Then, FRN captures the intra-feature and inter-feature relationships for latent features to characterize expression-specific variations, and reconstructs the expression feature. To this end, two modules including an intra-feature relation modeling module and an inter-feature relation modeling module are developed in FRN. Experimental results on both the in-the-lab databases (including CK+, MMI, and Oulu-CASIA) and the in-the-wild databases (including RAF-DB and SFEW) show that the proposed FDRL method consistently achieves higher recognition accuracy than several state-of-the-art methods. This clearly highlights the benefit of feature decomposition and reconstruction for classifying expressions.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have received considerable attention on graph-structured data learning for a wide variety of tasks. The well-designed propagation mechanism which has been demonstrated effective is the most fundamental part of GNNs. Although most of GNNs basically follow a message passing manner, litter effort has been made to discover and analyze their essential relations. In this paper, we establish a surprising connection between different propagation mechanisms with a unified optimization problem, showing that despite the proliferation of various GNNs, in fact, their proposed propagation mechanisms are the optimal solution optimizing a feature fitting function over a wide class of graph kernels with a graph regularization term. Our proposed unified optimization framework, summarizing the commonalities between several of the most representative GNNs, not only provides a macroscopic view on surveying the relations between different GNNs, but also further opens up new opportunities for flexibly designing new GNNs. With the proposed framework, we discover that existing works usually utilize naive graph convolutional kernels for feature fitting function, and we further develop two novel objective functions considering adjustable graph kernels showing low-pass or high-pass filtering capabilities respectively. Moreover, we provide the convergence proofs and expressive power comparisons for the proposed models. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets clearly show that the proposed GNNs not only outperform the state-of-the-art methods but also have good ability to alleviate over-smoothing, and further verify the feasibility for designing GNNs with our unified optimization framework.