This paper proposes a stochastic block model with dynamics where the population grows using preferential attachment. Nodes with higher weighted degree are more likely to recruit new nodes, and nodes always recruit nodes from their own community. This model can capture how communities grow or shrink based on their collaborations with other nodes in the network, where an edge represents collaboration on a project. Focusing on the case of two communities, we derive a deterministic approximation to the dynamics and characterize the phase transitions for diversity, i.e. the parameter regimes in which either one of the communities dies out or the two communities reach parity over time. In particular, we find that the minority may vanish when the probability of cross-community edges is low, even when cross-community projects are more valuable than projects with collaborators from the same community.
We report on a study that employs an in-house developed simulation infrastructure to accomplish zero shot policy transferability for a control policy associated with a scale autonomous vehicle. We focus on implementing policies that require no real world data to be trained (Zero-Shot Transfer), and are developed in-house as opposed to being validated by previous works. We do this by implementing a Neural Network (NN) controller that is trained only on a family of circular reference trajectories. The sensors used are RTK-GPS and IMU, the latter for providing heading. The NN controller is trained using either a human driver (via human in the loop simulation), or a Model Predictive Control (MPC) strategy. We demonstrate these two approaches in conjunction with two operation scenarios: the vehicle follows a waypoint-defined trajectory at constant speed; and the vehicle follows a speed profile that changes along the vehicle's waypoint-defined trajectory. The primary contribution of this work is the demonstration of Zero-Shot Transfer in conjunction with a novel feed-forward NN controller trained using a general purpose, in-house developed simulation platform.
Clustering of urban traffic patterns is an essential task in many different areas of traffic management and planning. In this paper, two significant applications in the clustering of urban traffic patterns are described. The first application estimates the missing speed values using the speed of road segments with similar traffic patterns to colorify map tiles. The second one is the estimation of essential road segments for generating addresses for a local point on the map, using the similarity patterns of different road segments. The speed time series extracts the traffic pattern in different road segments. In this paper, we proposed the time series clustering algorithm based on K-Means and Dynamic Time Warping. The case study of our proposed algorithm is based on the Snapp application's driver speed time series data. The results of the two applications illustrate that the proposed method can extract similar urban traffic patterns.
Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) methods facilitate the transfer of models to target domains without labels. However, these methods necessitate a labeled target validation set for hyper-parameter tuning and model selection. In this paper, we aim to find an evaluation metric capable of assessing the quality of a transferred model without access to target validation labels. We begin with the metric based on mutual information of the model prediction. Through empirical analysis, we identify three prevalent issues with this metric: 1) It does not account for the source structure. 2) It can be easily attacked. 3) It fails to detect negative transfer caused by the over-alignment of source and target features. To address the first two issues, we incorporate source accuracy into the metric and employ a new MLP classifier that is held out during training, significantly improving the result. To tackle the final issue, we integrate this enhanced metric with data augmentation, resulting in a novel unsupervised UDA metric called the Augmentation Consistency Metric (ACM). Additionally, we empirically demonstrate the shortcomings of previous experiment settings and conduct large-scale experiments to validate the effectiveness of our proposed metric. Furthermore, we employ our metric to automatically search for the optimal hyper-parameter set, achieving superior performance compared to manually tuned sets across four common benchmarks. Codes will be available soon.
Nowadays many research articles are prefaced with research highlights to summarize the main findings of the paper. Highlights not only help researchers precisely and quickly identify the contributions of a paper, they also enhance the discoverability of the article via search engines. We aim to automatically construct research highlights given certain segments of a research paper. We use a pointer-generator network with coverage mechanism and a contextual embedding layer at the input that encodes the input tokens into SciBERT embeddings. We test our model on a benchmark dataset, CSPubSum, and also present MixSub, a new multi-disciplinary corpus of papers for automatic research highlight generation. For both CSPubSum and MixSub, we have observed that the proposed model achieves the best performance compared to related variants and other models proposed in the literature. On the CSPubSum dataset, our model achieves the best performance when the input is only the abstract of a paper as opposed to other segments of the paper. It produces ROUGE-1, ROUGE-2 and ROUGE-L F1-scores of 38.26, 14.26 and 35.51, respectively, METEOR score of 32.62, and BERTScore F1 of 86.65 which outperform all other baselines. On the new MixSub dataset, where only the abstract is the input, our proposed model (when trained on the whole training corpus without distinguishing between the subject categories) achieves ROUGE-1, ROUGE-2 and ROUGE-L F1-scores of 31.78, 9.76 and 29.3, respectively, METEOR score of 24.00, and BERTScore F1 of 85.25.
This paper delves into the impact of natural disasters on affected populations and underscores the imperative of reducing disaster-related fatalities through proactive strategies. On average, approximately 45,000 individuals succumb annually to natural disasters amid a surge in economic losses. The paper explores catastrophe models for loss projection, emphasizes the necessity of evaluating volatility in disaster risk, and introduces an innovative model that integrates historical data, addresses data skewness, and accommodates temporal dependencies to forecast shifts in mortality. To this end, we introduce a time-varying skew Brownian motion model, for which we provide proof of the solution's existence and uniqueness. In this model, parameters change over time, and past occurrences are integrated via volatility.
Large language models are quickly gaining momentum, yet are found to demonstrate gender bias in their responses. In this paper, we conducted a content analysis of social media discussions to gauge public perceptions of gender bias in LLMs which are trained in different cultural contexts, i.e., ChatGPT, a US-based LLM, or Ernie, a China-based LLM. People shared both observations of gender bias in their personal use and scientific findings about gender bias in LLMs. A difference between the two LLMs was seen -- ChatGPT was more often found to carry implicit gender bias, e.g., associating men and women with different profession titles, while explicit gender bias was found in Ernie's responses, e.g., overly promoting women's pursuit of marriage over career. Based on the findings, we reflect on the impact of culture on gender bias and propose governance recommendations to regulate gender bias in LLMs.
When using ecological momentary assessment data (EMA), missing data is pervasive as participant attrition is a common issue. Thus, any EMA study must have a missing data plan. In this paper, we discuss missingness in time series analysis and the appropriate way to handle missing data when the data is modeled as a discrete time continuous measure state-space model. We found that Missing Completely At Random, Missing At Random, and Time-dependent Missing At Random data have less bias and variability than Autoregressive Time-dependent Missing At Random and Missing Not At Random. The Kalman filter excelled at handling missing data. Contrary to the literature, we found that, with either default package settings or a lag-1 imputation model, multiple imputation struggled to recover the parameters.
In pace with developments in the research field of artificial intelligence, knowledge graphs (KGs) have attracted a surge of interest from both academia and industry. As a representation of semantic relations between entities, KGs have proven to be particularly relevant for natural language processing (NLP), experiencing a rapid spread and wide adoption within recent years. Given the increasing amount of research work in this area, several KG-related approaches have been surveyed in the NLP research community. However, a comprehensive study that categorizes established topics and reviews the maturity of individual research streams remains absent to this day. Contributing to closing this gap, we systematically analyzed 507 papers from the literature on KGs in NLP. Our survey encompasses a multifaceted review of tasks, research types, and contributions. As a result, we present a structured overview of the research landscape, provide a taxonomy of tasks, summarize our findings, and highlight directions for future work.
Learning on big data brings success for artificial intelligence (AI), but the annotation and training costs are expensive. In future, learning on small data is one of the ultimate purposes of AI, which requires machines to recognize objectives and scenarios relying on small data as humans. A series of machine learning models is going on this way such as active learning, few-shot learning, deep clustering. However, there are few theoretical guarantees for their generalization performance. Moreover, most of their settings are passive, that is, the label distribution is explicitly controlled by one specified sampling scenario. This survey follows the agnostic active sampling under a PAC (Probably Approximately Correct) framework to analyze the generalization error and label complexity of learning on small data using a supervised and unsupervised fashion. With these theoretical analyses, we categorize the small data learning models from two geometric perspectives: the Euclidean and non-Euclidean (hyperbolic) mean representation, where their optimization solutions are also presented and discussed. Later, some potential learning scenarios that may benefit from small data learning are then summarized, and their potential learning scenarios are also analyzed. Finally, some challenging applications such as computer vision, natural language processing that may benefit from learning on small data are also surveyed.
Analyzing observational data from multiple sources can be useful for increasing statistical power to detect a treatment effect; however, practical constraints such as privacy considerations may restrict individual-level information sharing across data sets. This paper develops federated methods that only utilize summary-level information from heterogeneous data sets. Our federated methods provide doubly-robust point estimates of treatment effects as well as variance estimates. We derive the asymptotic distributions of our federated estimators, which are shown to be asymptotically equivalent to the corresponding estimators from the combined, individual-level data. We show that to achieve these properties, federated methods should be adjusted based on conditions such as whether models are correctly specified and stable across heterogeneous data sets.