Predicting where a person is looking is a complex task, requiring to understand not only the person's gaze and scene content, but also the 3D scene structure and the person's situation (are they manipulating? interacting or observing others? attentive?) to detect obstructions in the line of sight or apply attention priors that humans typically have when observing others. In this paper, we hypothesize that identifying and leveraging such priors can be better achieved through the exploitation of explicitly derived multimodal cues such as depth and pose. We thus propose a modular multimodal architecture allowing to combine these cues using an attention mechanism. The architecture can naturally be exploited in privacy-sensitive situations such as surveillance and health, where personally identifiable information cannot be released. We perform extensive experiments on the GazeFollow and VideoAttentionTarget public datasets, obtaining state-of-the-art performance and demonstrating very competitive results in the privacy setting case.
Nowadays, research into personalization has been focusing on explainability and fairness. Several approaches proposed in recent works are able to explain individual recommendations in a post-hoc manner or by explanation paths. However, explainability techniques applied to unfairness in recommendation have been limited to finding user/item features mostly related to biased recommendations. In this paper, we devised a novel algorithm that leverages counterfactuality methods to discover user unfairness explanations in the form of user-item interactions. In our counterfactual framework, interactions are represented as edges in a bipartite graph, with users and items as nodes. Our Bipartite Graph Explainer perturbs the topological structure to find an altered version (counterfactual explanation) that minimizes the disparity in utility between the protected and unprotected demographic groups. Experiments on four real-world graphs coming from various domains showed that our method can systematically explain user unfairness on three state-of-the-art GNN-based recommendation models. Moreover, an empirical evaluation of the perturbed network uncovered relevant patterns that justify the nature of the unfairness discovered by the generated explanations. The source code and the preprocessed data sets are available at //github.com/jackmedda/RS-BGExplainer.
Pneumonia remains a significant cause of child mortality, particularly in developing countries where resources and expertise are limited. The automated detection of Pneumonia can greatly assist in addressing this challenge. In this research, an XOR based Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is proposed to select deep features from the second last layer of a RegNet model, aiming to improve the accuracy of the CNN model on Pneumonia detection. The proposed XOR PSO algorithm offers simplicity by incorporating just one hyperparameter for initialization, and each iteration requires minimal computation time. Moreover, it achieves a balance between exploration and exploitation, leading to convergence on a suitable solution. By extracting 163 features, an impressive accuracy level of 98% was attained which demonstrates comparable accuracy to previous PSO-based methods. The source code of the proposed method is available in the GitHub repository.
Digital twins for intelligent transportation systems are currently attracting great interests, in which generating realistic, diverse, and human-like traffic flow in simulations is a formidable challenge. Current approaches often hinge on predefined driver models, objective optimization, or reliance on pre-recorded driving datasets, imposing limitations on their scalability, versatility, and adaptability. In this paper, we introduce TrafficMCTS, an innovative framework that harnesses the synergy of groupbased Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) and Social Value Orientation (SVO) to engender a multifaceted traffic flow replete with varying driving styles and cooperative tendencies. Anchored by a closed-loop architecture, our framework enables vehicles to dynamically adapt to their environment in real time, and ensure feasible collision-free trajectories. Through comprehensive comparisons with state-of-the-art methods, we illuminate the advantages of our approach in terms of computational efficiency, planning success rate, intent completion time, and diversity metrics. Besides, we simulate highway and roundabout scenarios to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework and highlight its ability to induce diverse social behaviors within the traffic flow. Finally, we validate the scalability of TrafficMCTS by showcasing its prowess in simultaneously mass vehicles within a sprawling road network, cultivating a landscape of traffic flow that mirrors the intricacies of human behavior.
The protection of Industrial Control Systems (ICS) that are employed in public critical infrastructures is of utmost importance due to catastrophic physical damages cyberattacks may cause. The research community requires testbeds for validation and comparing various intrusion detection algorithms to protect ICS. However, there exist high barriers to entry for research and education in the ICS cybersecurity domain due to expensive hardware, software, and inherent dangers of manipulating real-world systems. To close the gap, built upon recently developed 3D high-fidelity simulators, we further showcase our integrated framework to automatically launch cyberattacks, collect data, train machine learning models, and evaluate for practical chemical and manufacturing processes. On our testbed, we validate our proposed intrusion detection model called Minimal Threshold and Window SVM (MinTWin SVM) that utilizes unsupervised machine learning via a one-class SVM in combination with a sliding window and classification threshold. Results show that MinTWin SVM minimizes false positives and is responsive to physical process anomalies. Furthermore, we incorporate our framework with ICS cybersecurity education by using our dataset in an undergraduate machine learning course where students gain hands-on experience in practicing machine learning theory with a practical ICS dataset. All of our implementations have been open-sourced.
Images can convey rich semantics and induce various emotions in viewers. Recently, with the rapid advancement of emotional intelligence and the explosive growth of visual data, extensive research efforts have been dedicated to affective image content analysis (AICA). In this survey, we will comprehensively review the development of AICA in the recent two decades, especially focusing on the state-of-the-art methods with respect to three main challenges -- the affective gap, perception subjectivity, and label noise and absence. We begin with an introduction to the key emotion representation models that have been widely employed in AICA and description of available datasets for performing evaluation with quantitative comparison of label noise and dataset bias. We then summarize and compare the representative approaches on (1) emotion feature extraction, including both handcrafted and deep features, (2) learning methods on dominant emotion recognition, personalized emotion prediction, emotion distribution learning, and learning from noisy data or few labels, and (3) AICA based applications. Finally, we discuss some challenges and promising research directions in the future, such as image content and context understanding, group emotion clustering, and viewer-image interaction.
Few-shot Knowledge Graph (KG) completion is a focus of current research, where each task aims at querying unseen facts of a relation given its few-shot reference entity pairs. Recent attempts solve this problem by learning static representations of entities and references, ignoring their dynamic properties, i.e., entities may exhibit diverse roles within task relations, and references may make different contributions to queries. This work proposes an adaptive attentional network for few-shot KG completion by learning adaptive entity and reference representations. Specifically, entities are modeled by an adaptive neighbor encoder to discern their task-oriented roles, while references are modeled by an adaptive query-aware aggregator to differentiate their contributions. Through the attention mechanism, both entities and references can capture their fine-grained semantic meanings, and thus render more expressive representations. This will be more predictive for knowledge acquisition in the few-shot scenario. Evaluation in link prediction on two public datasets shows that our approach achieves new state-of-the-art results with different few-shot sizes.
Answering questions that require reading texts in an image is challenging for current models. One key difficulty of this task is that rare, polysemous, and ambiguous words frequently appear in images, e.g., names of places, products, and sports teams. To overcome this difficulty, only resorting to pre-trained word embedding models is far from enough. A desired model should utilize the rich information in multiple modalities of the image to help understand the meaning of scene texts, e.g., the prominent text on a bottle is most likely to be the brand. Following this idea, we propose a novel VQA approach, Multi-Modal Graph Neural Network (MM-GNN). It first represents an image as a graph consisting of three sub-graphs, depicting visual, semantic, and numeric modalities respectively. Then, we introduce three aggregators which guide the message passing from one graph to another to utilize the contexts in various modalities, so as to refine the features of nodes. The updated nodes have better features for the downstream question answering module. Experimental evaluations show that our MM-GNN represents the scene texts better and obviously facilitates the performances on two VQA tasks that require reading scene texts.
Knowledge graphs are important resources for many artificial intelligence tasks but often suffer from incompleteness. In this work, we propose to use pre-trained language models for knowledge graph completion. We treat triples in knowledge graphs as textual sequences and propose a novel framework named Knowledge Graph Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformer (KG-BERT) to model these triples. Our method takes entity and relation descriptions of a triple as input and computes scoring function of the triple with the KG-BERT language model. Experimental results on multiple benchmark knowledge graphs show that our method can achieve state-of-the-art performance in triple classification, link prediction and relation prediction tasks.
Distant supervision can effectively label data for relation extraction, but suffers from the noise labeling problem. Recent works mainly perform soft bag-level noise reduction strategies to find the relatively better samples in a sentence bag, which is suboptimal compared with making a hard decision of false positive samples in sentence level. In this paper, we introduce an adversarial learning framework, which we named DSGAN, to learn a sentence-level true-positive generator. Inspired by Generative Adversarial Networks, we regard the positive samples generated by the generator as the negative samples to train the discriminator. The optimal generator is obtained until the discrimination ability of the discriminator has the greatest decline. We adopt the generator to filter distant supervision training dataset and redistribute the false positive instances into the negative set, in which way to provide a cleaned dataset for relation classification. The experimental results show that the proposed strategy significantly improves the performance of distant supervision relation extraction comparing to state-of-the-art systems.
We investigate the problem of automatically determining what type of shoe left an impression found at a crime scene. This recognition problem is made difficult by the variability in types of crime scene evidence (ranging from traces of dust or oil on hard surfaces to impressions made in soil) and the lack of comprehensive databases of shoe outsole tread patterns. We find that mid-level features extracted by pre-trained convolutional neural nets are surprisingly effective descriptors for this specialized domains. However, the choice of similarity measure for matching exemplars to a query image is essential to good performance. For matching multi-channel deep features, we propose the use of multi-channel normalized cross-correlation and analyze its effectiveness. Our proposed metric significantly improves performance in matching crime scene shoeprints to laboratory test impressions. We also show its effectiveness in other cross-domain image retrieval problems: matching facade images to segmentation labels and aerial photos to map images. Finally, we introduce a discriminatively trained variant and fine-tune our system through our proposed metric, obtaining state-of-the-art performance.