Machine learning approaches often require training and evaluation datasets with a clear separation between positive and negative examples. This risks simplifying and even obscuring the inherent subjectivity present in many tasks. Preserving such variance in content and diversity in datasets is often expensive and laborious. This is especially troubling when building safety datasets for conversational AI systems, as safety is both socially and culturally situated. To demonstrate this crucial aspect of conversational AI safety, and to facilitate in-depth model performance analyses, we introduce the DICES (Diversity In Conversational AI Evaluation for Safety) dataset that contains fine-grained demographic information about raters, high replication of ratings per item to ensure statistical power for analyses, and encodes rater votes as distributions across different demographics to allow for in-depth explorations of different aggregation strategies. In short, the DICES dataset enables the observation and measurement of variance, ambiguity, and diversity in the context of conversational AI safety. We also illustrate how the dataset offers a basis for establishing metrics to show how raters' ratings can intersects with demographic categories such as racial/ethnic groups, age groups, and genders. The goal of DICES is to be used as a shared resource and benchmark that respects diverse perspectives during safety evaluation of conversational AI systems.
Existing approaches for information cascade prediction fall into three main categories: feature-driven methods, point process-based methods, and deep learning-based methods. Among them, deep learning-based methods, characterized by its superior learning and representation capabilities, mitigates the shortcomings inherent of the other methods. However, current deep learning methods still face several persistent challenges. In particular, accurate representation of user attributes remains problematic due to factors such as fake followers and complex network configurations. Previous algorithms that focus on the sequential order of user activations often neglect the rich insights offered by activation timing. Furthermore, these techniques often fail to holistically integrate temporal and structural aspects, thus missing the nuanced propagation trends inherent in information cascades.To address these issues, we propose the Cross-Domain Information Fusion Framework (CasCIFF), which is tailored for information cascade prediction. This framework exploits multi-hop neighborhood information to make user embeddings robust. When embedding cascades, the framework intentionally incorporates timestamps, endowing it with the ability to capture evolving patterns of information diffusion. In particular, the CasCIFF seamlessly integrates the tasks of user classification and cascade prediction into a consolidated framework, thereby allowing the extraction of common features that prove useful for all tasks, a strategy anchored in the principles of multi-task learning.
Deep learning-based algorithms have seen a massive popularity in different areas of remote sensing image analysis over the past decade. Recently, transformers-based architectures, originally introduced in natural language processing, have pervaded computer vision field where the self-attention mechanism has been utilized as a replacement to the popular convolution operator for capturing long-range dependencies. Inspired by recent advances in computer vision, remote sensing community has also witnessed an increased exploration of vision transformers for a diverse set of tasks. Although a number of surveys have focused on transformers in computer vision in general, to the best of our knowledge we are the first to present a systematic review of recent advances based on transformers in remote sensing. Our survey covers more than 60 recent transformers-based methods for different remote sensing problems in sub-areas of remote sensing: very high-resolution (VHR), hyperspectral (HSI) and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery. We conclude the survey by discussing different challenges and open issues of transformers in remote sensing. Additionally, we intend to frequently update and maintain the latest transformers in remote sensing papers with their respective code at: //github.com/VIROBO-15/Transformer-in-Remote-Sensing
The existence of representative datasets is a prerequisite of many successful artificial intelligence and machine learning models. However, the subsequent application of these models often involves scenarios that are inadequately represented in the data used for training. The reasons for this are manifold and range from time and cost constraints to ethical considerations. As a consequence, the reliable use of these models, especially in safety-critical applications, is a huge challenge. Leveraging additional, already existing sources of knowledge is key to overcome the limitations of purely data-driven approaches, and eventually to increase the generalization capability of these models. Furthermore, predictions that conform with knowledge are crucial for making trustworthy and safe decisions even in underrepresented scenarios. This work provides an overview of existing techniques and methods in the literature that combine data-based models with existing knowledge. The identified approaches are structured according to the categories integration, extraction and conformity. Special attention is given to applications in the field of autonomous driving.
There recently has been a surge of interest in developing a new class of deep learning (DL) architectures that integrate an explicit time dimension as a fundamental building block of learning and representation mechanisms. In turn, many recent results show that topological descriptors of the observed data, encoding information on the shape of the dataset in a topological space at different scales, that is, persistent homology of the data, may contain important complementary information, improving both performance and robustness of DL. As convergence of these two emerging ideas, we propose to enhance DL architectures with the most salient time-conditioned topological information of the data and introduce the concept of zigzag persistence into time-aware graph convolutional networks (GCNs). Zigzag persistence provides a systematic and mathematically rigorous framework to track the most important topological features of the observed data that tend to manifest themselves over time. To integrate the extracted time-conditioned topological descriptors into DL, we develop a new topological summary, zigzag persistence image, and derive its theoretical stability guarantees. We validate the new GCNs with a time-aware zigzag topological layer (Z-GCNETs), in application to traffic forecasting and Ethereum blockchain price prediction. Our results indicate that Z-GCNET outperforms 13 state-of-the-art methods on 4 time series datasets.
Semi-supervised learning on class-imbalanced data, although a realistic problem, has been under studied. While existing semi-supervised learning (SSL) methods are known to perform poorly on minority classes, we find that they still generate high precision pseudo-labels on minority classes. By exploiting this property, in this work, we propose Class-Rebalancing Self-Training (CReST), a simple yet effective framework to improve existing SSL methods on class-imbalanced data. CReST iteratively retrains a baseline SSL model with a labeled set expanded by adding pseudo-labeled samples from an unlabeled set, where pseudo-labeled samples from minority classes are selected more frequently according to an estimated class distribution. We also propose a progressive distribution alignment to adaptively adjust the rebalancing strength dubbed CReST+. We show that CReST and CReST+ improve state-of-the-art SSL algorithms on various class-imbalanced datasets and consistently outperform other popular rebalancing methods.
Traffic forecasting is an important factor for the success of intelligent transportation systems. Deep learning models including convolution neural networks and recurrent neural networks have been applied in traffic forecasting problems to model the spatial and temporal dependencies. In recent years, to model the graph structures in the transportation systems as well as the contextual information, graph neural networks (GNNs) are introduced as new tools and have achieved the state-of-the-art performance in a series of traffic forecasting problems. In this survey, we review the rapidly growing body of recent research using different GNNs, e.g., graph convolutional and graph attention networks, in various traffic forecasting problems, e.g., road traffic flow and speed forecasting, passenger flow forecasting in urban rail transit systems, demand forecasting in ride-hailing platforms, etc. We also present a collection of open data and source resources for each problem, as well as future research directions. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first comprehensive survey that explores the application of graph neural networks for traffic forecasting problems. We have also created a public Github repository to update the latest papers, open data and source resources.
Deep learning methods are achieving ever-increasing performance on many artificial intelligence tasks. A major limitation of deep models is that they are not amenable to interpretability. This limitation can be circumvented by developing post hoc techniques to explain the predictions, giving rise to the area of explainability. Recently, explainability of deep models on images and texts has achieved significant progress. In the area of graph data, graph neural networks (GNNs) and their explainability are experiencing rapid developments. However, there is neither a unified treatment of GNN explainability methods, nor a standard benchmark and testbed for evaluations. In this survey, we provide a unified and taxonomic view of current GNN explainability methods. Our unified and taxonomic treatments of this subject shed lights on the commonalities and differences of existing methods and set the stage for further methodological developments. To facilitate evaluations, we generate a set of benchmark graph datasets specifically for GNN explainability. We summarize current datasets and metrics for evaluating GNN explainability. Altogether, this work provides a unified methodological treatment of GNN explainability and a standardized testbed for evaluations.
Existing few-shot learning (FSL) methods assume that there exist sufficient training samples from source classes for knowledge transfer to target classes with few training samples. However, this assumption is often invalid, especially when it comes to fine-grained recognition. In this work, we define a new FSL setting termed few-shot fewshot learning (FSFSL), under which both the source and target classes have limited training samples. To overcome the source class data scarcity problem, a natural option is to crawl images from the web with class names as search keywords. However, the crawled images are inevitably corrupted by large amount of noise (irrelevant images) and thus may harm the performance. To address this problem, we propose a graph convolutional network (GCN)-based label denoising (LDN) method to remove the irrelevant images. Further, with the cleaned web images as well as the original clean training images, we propose a GCN-based FSL method. For both the LDN and FSL tasks, a novel adaptive aggregation GCN (AdarGCN) model is proposed, which differs from existing GCN models in that adaptive aggregation is performed based on a multi-head multi-level aggregation module. With AdarGCN, how much and how far information carried by each graph node is propagated in the graph structure can be determined automatically, therefore alleviating the effects of both noisy and outlying training samples. Extensive experiments show the superior performance of our AdarGCN under both the new FSFSL and the conventional FSL settings.
Language model pre-training, such as BERT, has significantly improved the performances of many natural language processing tasks. However, pre-trained language models are usually computationally expensive and memory intensive, so it is difficult to effectively execute them on some resource-restricted devices. To accelerate inference and reduce model size while maintaining accuracy, we firstly propose a novel transformer distillation method that is a specially designed knowledge distillation (KD) method for transformer-based models. By leveraging this new KD method, the plenty of knowledge encoded in a large teacher BERT can be well transferred to a small student TinyBERT. Moreover, we introduce a new two-stage learning framework for TinyBERT, which performs transformer distillation at both the pre-training and task-specific learning stages. This framework ensures that TinyBERT can capture both the general-domain and task-specific knowledge of the teacher BERT. TinyBERT is empirically effective and achieves comparable results with BERT in GLUE datasets, while being 7.5x smaller and 9.4x faster on inference. TinyBERT is also significantly better than state-of-the-art baselines, even with only about 28% parameters and 31% inference time of baselines.
Graph-based semi-supervised learning (SSL) is an important learning problem where the goal is to assign labels to initially unlabeled nodes in a graph. Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have recently been shown to be effective for graph-based SSL problems. GCNs inherently assume existence of pairwise relationships in the graph-structured data. However, in many real-world problems, relationships go beyond pairwise connections and hence are more complex. Hypergraphs provide a natural modeling tool to capture such complex relationships. In this work, we explore the use of GCNs for hypergraph-based SSL. In particular, we propose HyperGCN, an SSL method which uses a layer-wise propagation rule for convolutional neural networks operating directly on hypergraphs. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first principled adaptation of GCNs to hypergraphs. HyperGCN is able to encode both the hypergraph structure and hypernode features in an effective manner. Through detailed experimentation, we demonstrate HyperGCN's effectiveness at hypergraph-based SSL.