Persistent homology (PH) provides topological descriptors for geometric data, such as weighted graphs, which are interpretable, stable to perturbations, and invariant under, e.g., relabeling. Most applications of PH focus on the one-parameter case -- where the descriptors summarize the changes in topology of data as it is filtered by a single quantity of interest -- and there is now a wide array of methods enabling the use of one-parameter PH descriptors in data science, which rely on the stable vectorization of these descriptors as elements of a Hilbert space. Although the multiparameter PH (MPH) of data that is filtered by several quantities of interest encodes much richer information than its one-parameter counterpart, the scarceness of stability results for MPH descriptors has so far limited the available options for the stable vectorization of MPH. In this paper, we aim to bring together the best of both worlds by showing how the interpretation of signed barcodes -- a recent family of MPH descriptors -- as signed measures leads to natural extensions of vectorization strategies from one parameter to multiple parameters. The resulting feature vectors are easy to define and to compute, and provably stable. While, as a proof of concept, we focus on simple choices of signed barcodes and vectorizations, we already see notable performance improvements when comparing our feature vectors to state-of-the-art topology-based methods on various types of data.
In this paper, we propose a method for estimating model parameters using Small-Angle Scattering (SAS) data based on the Bayesian inference. Conventional SAS data analyses involve processes of manual parameter adjustment by analysts or optimization using gradient methods. These analysis processes tend to involve heuristic approaches and may lead to local solutions.Furthermore, it is difficult to evaluate the reliability of the results obtained by conventional analysis methods. Our method solves these problems by estimating model parameters as probability distributions from SAS data using the framework of the Bayesian inference. We evaluate the performance of our method through numerical experiments using artificial data of representative measurement target models.From the results of the numerical experiments, we show that our method provides not only high accuracy and reliability of estimation, but also perspectives on the transition point of estimability with respect to the measurement time and the lower bound of the angular domain of the measured data.
This study compares the performance of a causal and a predictive model in modeling travel mode choice in three neighborhoods in Chicago. A causal discovery algorithm and a causal inference technique were used to extract the causal relationships in the mode choice decision making process and to estimate the quantitative causal effects between the variables both directly from observational data. The model results reveal that trip distance and vehicle ownership are the direct causes of mode choice in the three neighborhoods. Artificial neural network models were estimated to predict mode choice. Their accuracy was over 70%, and the SHAP values obtained measure the importance of each variable. We find that both the causal and predictive modeling approaches are useful for the purpose they serve. We also note that the study of mode choice behavior through causal modeling is mostly unexplored, yet it could transform our understanding of the mode choice behavior. Further research is needed to realize the full potential of these techniques in modeling mode choice.
Existing error-bounded lossy compression techniques control the pointwise error during compression to guarantee the integrity of the decompressed data. However, they typically do not explicitly preserve the topological features in data. When performing post hoc analysis with decompressed data using topological methods, preserving topology in the compression process to obtain topologically consistent and correct scientific insights is desirable. In this paper, we introduce TopoSZ, an error-bounded lossy compression method that preserves the topological features in 2D and 3D scalar fields. Specifically, we aim to preserve the types and locations of local extrema as well as the level set relations among critical points captured by contour trees in the decompressed data. The main idea is to derive topological constraints from contour-tree-induced segmentation from the data domain, and incorporate such constraints with a customized error-controlled quantization strategy from the classic SZ compressor.Our method allows users to control the pointwise error and the loss of topological features during the compression process with a global error bound and a persistence threshold.
We present TransNormerLLM, the first linear attention-based Large Language Model (LLM) that outperforms conventional softmax attention-based models in terms of both accuracy and efficiency. TransNormerLLM evolves from the previous linear attention architecture TransNormer by making advanced modifications that include positional embedding, linear attention acceleration, gating mechanism, tensor normalization, inference acceleration and stabilization. Specifically, we use LRPE together with an exponential decay to avoid attention dilution issues while allowing the model to retain global interactions between tokens. Additionally, we propose Lightning Attention, a cutting-edge technique that accelerates linear attention by more than twice in runtime and reduces memory usage by a remarkable four times. To further enhance the performance of TransNormer, we leverage a gating mechanism to smooth training and a new tensor normalization scheme to accelerate the model, resulting in an impressive acceleration of over 20%. Furthermore, we have developed a robust inference algorithm that ensures numerical stability and consistent inference speed, regardless of the sequence length, showcasing superior efficiency during both training and inference stages. Scalability is at the heart of our model's design, enabling seamless deployment on large-scale clusters and facilitating expansion to even more extensive models, all while maintaining outstanding performance metrics. Rigorous validation of our model design is achieved through a series of comprehensive experiments on our self-collected corpus, boasting a size exceeding 6TB and containing over 2 trillion tokens. To ensure data quality and relevance, we implement a new self-cleaning strategy to filter our collected data. Our pre-trained models will be released to foster community advancements in efficient LLMs.
Gait, the manner of walking, has been proven to be a reliable biometric with uses in surveillance, marketing and security. A promising new direction for the field is training gait recognition systems without explicit human annotations, through self-supervised learning approaches. Such methods are heavily reliant on strong augmentations for the same walking sequence to induce more data variability and to simulate additional walking variations. Current data augmentation schemes are heuristic and cannot provide the necessary data variation as they are only able to provide simple temporal and spatial distortions. In this work, we propose GaitMorph, a novel method to modify the walking variation for an input gait sequence. Our method entails the training of a high-compression model for gait skeleton sequences that leverages unlabelled data to construct a discrete and interpretable latent space, which preserves identity-related features. Furthermore, we propose a method based on optimal transport theory to learn latent transport maps on the discrete codebook that morph gait sequences between variations. We perform extensive experiments and show that our method is suitable to synthesize additional views for an input sequence.
Understanding how and why certain communities bear a disproportionate burden of disease is challenging due to the scarcity of data on these communities. Surveys provide a useful avenue for accessing hard-to-reach populations, as many surveys specifically oversample understudied and vulnerable populations. When survey data is used for analysis, it is important to account for the complex survey design that gave rise to the data, in order to avoid biased conclusions. The field of Bayesian survey statistics aims to account for such survey design while leveraging the advantages of Bayesian models, which can flexibly handle sparsity through borrowing of information and provide a coherent inferential framework to easily obtain variances for complex models and data types. For these reasons, Bayesian survey methods seem uniquely well-poised for health disparities research, where heterogeneity and sparsity are frequent considerations. This review discusses three main approaches found in the Bayesian survey methodology literature: 1) multilevel regression and post-stratification, 2) weighted pseudolikelihood-based methods, and 3) synthetic population generation. We discuss advantages and disadvantages of each approach, examine recent applications and extensions, and consider how these approaches may be leveraged to improve research in population health equity.
With the extremely rapid advances in remote sensing (RS) technology, a great quantity of Earth observation (EO) data featuring considerable and complicated heterogeneity is readily available nowadays, which renders researchers an opportunity to tackle current geoscience applications in a fresh way. With the joint utilization of EO data, much research on multimodal RS data fusion has made tremendous progress in recent years, yet these developed traditional algorithms inevitably meet the performance bottleneck due to the lack of the ability to comprehensively analyse and interpret these strongly heterogeneous data. Hence, this non-negligible limitation further arouses an intense demand for an alternative tool with powerful processing competence. Deep learning (DL), as a cutting-edge technology, has witnessed remarkable breakthroughs in numerous computer vision tasks owing to its impressive ability in data representation and reconstruction. Naturally, it has been successfully applied to the field of multimodal RS data fusion, yielding great improvement compared with traditional methods. This survey aims to present a systematic overview in DL-based multimodal RS data fusion. More specifically, some essential knowledge about this topic is first given. Subsequently, a literature survey is conducted to analyse the trends of this field. Some prevalent sub-fields in the multimodal RS data fusion are then reviewed in terms of the to-be-fused data modalities, i.e., spatiospectral, spatiotemporal, light detection and ranging-optical, synthetic aperture radar-optical, and RS-Geospatial Big Data fusion. Furthermore, We collect and summarize some valuable resources for the sake of the development in multimodal RS data fusion. Finally, the remaining challenges and potential future directions are highlighted.
Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have been widely applied in various fields due to their significant power on processing graph-structured data. Typical GCN and its variants work under a homophily assumption (i.e., nodes with same class are prone to connect to each other), while ignoring the heterophily which exists in many real-world networks (i.e., nodes with different classes tend to form edges). Existing methods deal with heterophily by mainly aggregating higher-order neighborhoods or combing the immediate representations, which leads to noise and irrelevant information in the result. But these methods did not change the propagation mechanism which works under homophily assumption (that is a fundamental part of GCNs). This makes it difficult to distinguish the representation of nodes from different classes. To address this problem, in this paper we design a novel propagation mechanism, which can automatically change the propagation and aggregation process according to homophily or heterophily between node pairs. To adaptively learn the propagation process, we introduce two measurements of homophily degree between node pairs, which is learned based on topological and attribute information, respectively. Then we incorporate the learnable homophily degree into the graph convolution framework, which is trained in an end-to-end schema, enabling it to go beyond the assumption of homophily. More importantly, we theoretically prove that our model can constrain the similarity of representations between nodes according to their homophily degree. Experiments on seven real-world datasets demonstrate that this new approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods under heterophily or low homophily, and gains competitive performance under homophily.
Large-scale pre-trained models (PTMs) such as BERT and GPT have recently achieved great success and become a milestone in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). Owing to sophisticated pre-training objectives and huge model parameters, large-scale PTMs can effectively capture knowledge from massive labeled and unlabeled data. By storing knowledge into huge parameters and fine-tuning on specific tasks, the rich knowledge implicitly encoded in huge parameters can benefit a variety of downstream tasks, which has been extensively demonstrated via experimental verification and empirical analysis. It is now the consensus of the AI community to adopt PTMs as backbone for downstream tasks rather than learning models from scratch. In this paper, we take a deep look into the history of pre-training, especially its special relation with transfer learning and self-supervised learning, to reveal the crucial position of PTMs in the AI development spectrum. Further, we comprehensively review the latest breakthroughs of PTMs. These breakthroughs are driven by the surge of computational power and the increasing availability of data, towards four important directions: designing effective architectures, utilizing rich contexts, improving computational efficiency, and conducting interpretation and theoretical analysis. Finally, we discuss a series of open problems and research directions of PTMs, and hope our view can inspire and advance the future study of PTMs.
We present CoDEx, a set of knowledge graph completion datasets extracted from Wikidata and Wikipedia that improve upon existing knowledge graph completion benchmarks in scope and level of difficulty. In terms of scope, CoDEx comprises three knowledge graphs varying in size and structure, multilingual descriptions of entities and relations, and tens of thousands of hard negative triples that are plausible but verified to be false. To characterize CoDEx, we contribute thorough empirical analyses and benchmarking experiments. First, we analyze each CoDEx dataset in terms of logical relation patterns. Next, we report baseline link prediction and triple classification results on CoDEx for five extensively tuned embedding models. Finally, we differentiate CoDEx from the popular FB15K-237 knowledge graph completion dataset by showing that CoDEx covers more diverse and interpretable content, and is a more difficult link prediction benchmark. Data, code, and pretrained models are available at //bit.ly/2EPbrJs.