We introduce a new regression method that relates the mean of an outcome variable to covariates, given the "adverse condition" that a distress variable falls in its tail. This allows to tailor classical mean regressions to adverse economic scenarios, which receive increasing interest in managing macroeconomic and financial risks, among many others. In the terminology of the systemic risk literature, our method can be interpreted as a regression for the Marginal Expected Shortfall. We propose a two-step procedure to estimate the new models, show consistency and asymptotic normality of the estimator, and propose feasible inference under weak conditions allowing for cross-sectional and time series applications. The accuracy of the asymptotic approximations of the two-step estimator is verified in simulations. Two empirical applications show that our regressions under adverse conditions are valuable in such diverse fields as the study of the relation between systemic risk and asset price bubbles, and dissecting macroeconomic growth vulnerabilities into individual components.
The retail sector presents several open and challenging problems that could benefit from advanced pattern recognition and computer vision techniques. One such critical challenge is planogram compliance control. In this study, we propose a complete embedded system to tackle this issue. Our system consists of four key components as image acquisition and transfer via stand-alone embedded camera module, object detection via computer vision and deep learning methods working on single board computers, planogram compliance control method again working on single board computers, and energy harvesting and power management block to accompany the embedded camera modules. The image acquisition and transfer block is implemented on the ESP-EYE camera module. The object detection block is based on YOLOv5 as the deep learning method and local feature extraction. We implement these methods on Raspberry Pi 4, NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano, and NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin as single board computers. The planogram compliance control block utilizes sequence alignment through a modified Needleman-Wunsch algorithm. This block is also working along with the object detection block on the same single board computers. The energy harvesting and power management block consists of solar and RF energy harvesting modules with suitable battery pack for operation. We tested the proposed embedded planogram compliance control system on two different datasets to provide valuable insights on its strengths and weaknesses. The results show that our method achieves F1 scores of 0.997 and 1.0 in object detection and planogram compliance control blocks, respectively. Furthermore, we calculated that the complete embedded system can work in stand-alone form up to two years based on battery. This duration can be further extended with the integration of the proposed solar and RF energy harvesting options.
We study universal deepfake detection. Our goal is to detect synthetic images from a range of generative AI approaches, particularly from emerging ones which are unseen during training of the deepfake detector. Universal deepfake detection requires outstanding generalization capability. Motivated by recently proposed masked image modeling which has demonstrated excellent generalization in self-supervised pre-training, we make the first attempt to explore masked image modeling for universal deepfake detection. We study spatial and frequency domain masking in training deepfake detectors. Based on empirical analysis, we propose a novel deepfake detector via frequency masking. Our focus on frequency domain is different from the majority, which primarily target spatial domain detection. Our comparative analyses reveal substantial performance gains over existing methods. Code and models are publicly available.
Aspect sentiment quad prediction (ASQP) aims to predict the quad sentiment elements for a given sentence, which is a critical task in the field of aspect-based sentiment analysis. However, the data imbalance issue has not received sufficient attention in ASQP task. In this paper, we divide the issue into two-folds, quad-pattern imbalance and aspect-category imbalance, and propose an Adaptive Data Augmentation (ADA) framework to tackle the imbalance issue. Specifically, a data augmentation process with a condition function adaptively enhances the tail quad patterns and aspect categories, alleviating the data imbalance in ASQP. Following previous studies, we also further explore the generative framework for extracting complete quads by introducing the category prior knowledge and syntax-guided decoding target. Experimental results demonstrate that data augmentation for imbalance in ASQP task can improve the performance, and the proposed ADA method is superior to naive data oversampling.
We propose a hierarchical correlation clustering method that extends the well-known correlation clustering to produce hierarchical clusters applicable to both positive and negative pairwise dissimilarities. Then, in the following, we study unsupervised representation learning with such hierarchical correlation clustering. For this purpose, we first investigate embedding the respective hierarchy to be used for tree-preserving embedding and feature extraction. Thereafter, we study the extension of minimax distance measures to correlation clustering, as another representation learning paradigm. Finally, we demonstrate the performance of our methods on several datasets.
This book is the result of a seminar in which we reviewed multimodal approaches and attempted to create a solid overview of the field, starting with the current state-of-the-art approaches in the two subfields of Deep Learning individually. Further, modeling frameworks are discussed where one modality is transformed into the other, as well as models in which one modality is utilized to enhance representation learning for the other. To conclude the second part, architectures with a focus on handling both modalities simultaneously are introduced. Finally, we also cover other modalities as well as general-purpose multi-modal models, which are able to handle different tasks on different modalities within one unified architecture. One interesting application (Generative Art) eventually caps off this booklet.
Humans perceive the world by concurrently processing and fusing high-dimensional inputs from multiple modalities such as vision and audio. Machine perception models, in stark contrast, are typically modality-specific and optimised for unimodal benchmarks, and hence late-stage fusion of final representations or predictions from each modality (`late-fusion') is still a dominant paradigm for multimodal video classification. Instead, we introduce a novel transformer based architecture that uses `fusion bottlenecks' for modality fusion at multiple layers. Compared to traditional pairwise self-attention, our model forces information between different modalities to pass through a small number of bottleneck latents, requiring the model to collate and condense the most relevant information in each modality and only share what is necessary. We find that such a strategy improves fusion performance, at the same time reducing computational cost. We conduct thorough ablation studies, and achieve state-of-the-art results on multiple audio-visual classification benchmarks including Audioset, Epic-Kitchens and VGGSound. All code and models will be released.
Recently, a considerable literature has grown up around the theme of Graph Convolutional Network (GCN). How to effectively leverage the rich structural information in complex graphs, such as knowledge graphs with heterogeneous types of entities and relations, is a primary open challenge in the field. Most GCN methods are either restricted to graphs with a homogeneous type of edges (e.g., citation links only), or focusing on representation learning for nodes only instead of jointly propagating and updating the embeddings of both nodes and edges for target-driven objectives. This paper addresses these limitations by proposing a novel framework, namely the Knowledge Embedding based Graph Convolutional Network (KE-GCN), which combines the power of GCNs in graph-based belief propagation and the strengths of advanced knowledge embedding (a.k.a. knowledge graph embedding) methods, and goes beyond. Our theoretical analysis shows that KE-GCN offers an elegant unification of several well-known GCN methods as specific cases, with a new perspective of graph convolution. Experimental results on benchmark datasets show the advantageous performance of KE-GCN over strong baseline methods in the tasks of knowledge graph alignment and entity classification.
Graphical causal inference as pioneered by Judea Pearl arose from research on artificial intelligence (AI), and for a long time had little connection to the field of machine learning. This article discusses where links have been and should be established, introducing key concepts along the way. It argues that the hard open problems of machine learning and AI are intrinsically related to causality, and explains how the field is beginning to understand them.
Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) and their variants have experienced significant attention and have become the de facto methods for learning graph representations. GCNs derive inspiration primarily from recent deep learning approaches, and as a result, may inherit unnecessary complexity and redundant computation. In this paper, we reduce this excess complexity through successively removing nonlinearities and collapsing weight matrices between consecutive layers. We theoretically analyze the resulting linear model and show that it corresponds to a fixed low-pass filter followed by a linear classifier. Notably, our experimental evaluation demonstrates that these simplifications do not negatively impact accuracy in many downstream applications. Moreover, the resulting model scales to larger datasets, is naturally interpretable, and yields up to two orders of magnitude speedup over FastGCN.
We study the problem of textual relation embedding with distant supervision. To combat the wrong labeling problem of distant supervision, we propose to embed textual relations with global statistics of relations, i.e., the co-occurrence statistics of textual and knowledge base relations collected from the entire corpus. This approach turns out to be more robust to the training noise introduced by distant supervision. On a popular relation extraction dataset, we show that the learned textual relation embedding can be used to augment existing relation extraction models and significantly improve their performance. Most remarkably, for the top 1,000 relational facts discovered by the best existing model, the precision can be improved from 83.9% to 89.3%.