We investigate explainability via short Boolean formulas in the data model based on unary relations. As an explanation of length k, we take a Boolean formula of length k that minimizes the error with respect to the target attribute to be explained. We first provide novel quantitative bounds for the expected error in this scenario. We then also demonstrate how the setting works in practice by studying three concrete data sets. In each case, we calculate explanation formulas of different lengths using an encoding in Answer Set Programming. The most accurate formulas we obtain achieve errors similar to other methods on the same data sets. However, due to overfitting, these formulas are not necessarily ideal explanations, so we use cross validation to identify a suitable length for explanations. By limiting to shorter formulas, we obtain explanations that avoid overfitting but are still reasonably accurate and also, importantly, human interpretable.
Ensemble methods are commonly used in classification due to their remarkable performance. Achieving high accuracy in a data stream environment is a challenging task considering disruptive changes in the data distribution, also known as concept drift. A greater diversity of ensemble components is known to enhance prediction accuracy in such settings. Despite the diversity of components within an ensemble, not all contribute as expected to its overall performance. This necessitates a method for selecting components that exhibit high performance and diversity. We present a novel ensemble construction and maintenance approach based on MMR (Maximal Marginal Relevance) that dynamically combines the diversity and prediction accuracy of components during the process of structuring an ensemble. The experimental results on both four real and 11 synthetic datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach (DynED) provides a higher average mean accuracy compared to the five state-of-the-art baselines.
Multimodal emotion recognition (MER) aims to detect the emotional status of a given expression by combining the speech and text information. Intuitively, label information should be capable of helping the model locate the salient tokens/frames relevant to the specific emotion, which finally facilitates the MER task. Inspired by this, we propose a novel approach for MER by leveraging label information. Specifically, we first obtain the representative label embeddings for both text and speech modalities, then learn the label-enhanced text/speech representations for each utterance via label-token and label-frame interactions. Finally, we devise a novel label-guided attentive fusion module to fuse the label-aware text and speech representations for emotion classification. Extensive experiments were conducted on the public IEMOCAP dataset, and experimental results demonstrate that our proposed approach outperforms existing baselines and achieves new state-of-the-art performance.
Wireless communication systems to date primarily rely on the orthogonality of resources to facilitate the design and implementation, from user access to data transmission. Emerging applications and scenarios in the sixth generation (6G) wireless systems will require massive connectivity and transmission of a deluge of data, which calls for more flexibility in the design concept that goes beyond orthogonality. Furthermore, recent advances in signal processing and learning have attracted considerable attention, as they provide promising approaches to various complex and previously intractable problems of signal processing in many fields. This article provides an overview of research efforts to date in the field of signal processing and learning for next-generation multiple access, with an emphasis on massive random access and non-orthogonal multiple access. The promising interplay with new technologies and the challenges in learning-based NGMA are discussed.
The task of object segmentation in videos is usually accomplished by processing appearance and motion information separately using standard 2D convolutional networks, followed by a learned fusion of the two sources of information. On the other hand, 3D convolutional networks have been successfully applied for video classification tasks, but have not been leveraged as effectively to problems involving dense per-pixel interpretation of videos compared to their 2D convolutional counterparts and lag behind the aforementioned networks in terms of performance. In this work, we show that 3D CNNs can be effectively applied to dense video prediction tasks such as salient object segmentation. We propose a simple yet effective encoder-decoder network architecture consisting entirely of 3D convolutions that can be trained end-to-end using a standard cross-entropy loss. To this end, we leverage an efficient 3D encoder, and propose a 3D decoder architecture, that comprises novel 3D Global Convolution layers and 3D Refinement modules. Our approach outperforms existing state-of-the-arts by a large margin on the DAVIS'16 Unsupervised, FBMS and ViSal dataset benchmarks in addition to being faster, thus showing that our architecture can efficiently learn expressive spatio-temporal features and produce high quality video segmentation masks. We have made our code and trained models publicly available at //github.com/sabarim/3DC-Seg.
We present a new, efficient procedure to establish Markov equivalence between directed graphs that may or may not contain cycles under the \textit{d}-separation criterion. It is based on the Cyclic Equivalence Theorem (CET) in the seminal works on cyclic models by Thomas Richardson in the mid '90s, but now rephrased from an ancestral perspective. The resulting characterization leads to a procedure for establishing Markov equivalence between graphs that no longer requires tests for d-separation, leading to a significantly reduced algorithmic complexity. The conceptually simplified characterization may help to reinvigorate theoretical research towards sound and complete cyclic discovery in the presence of latent confounders. This version includes a correction to rule (iv) in Theorem 1, and the subsequent adjustment in part 2 of Algorithm 2.
Emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) aims to detect the emotion label for each utterance. Motivated by recent studies which have proven that feeding training examples in a meaningful order rather than considering them randomly can boost the performance of models, we propose an ERC-oriented hybrid curriculum learning framework. Our framework consists of two curricula: (1) conversation-level curriculum (CC); and (2) utterance-level curriculum (UC). In CC, we construct a difficulty measurer based on "emotion shift" frequency within a conversation, then the conversations are scheduled in an "easy to hard" schema according to the difficulty score returned by the difficulty measurer. For UC, it is implemented from an emotion-similarity perspective, which progressively strengthens the model's ability in identifying the confusing emotions. With the proposed model-agnostic hybrid curriculum learning strategy, we observe significant performance boosts over a wide range of existing ERC models and we are able to achieve new state-of-the-art results on four public ERC datasets.
The rapid changes in the finance industry due to the increasing amount of data have revolutionized the techniques on data processing and data analysis and brought new theoretical and computational challenges. In contrast to classical stochastic control theory and other analytical approaches for solving financial decision-making problems that heavily reply on model assumptions, new developments from reinforcement learning (RL) are able to make full use of the large amount of financial data with fewer model assumptions and to improve decisions in complex financial environments. This survey paper aims to review the recent developments and use of RL approaches in finance. We give an introduction to Markov decision processes, which is the setting for many of the commonly used RL approaches. Various algorithms are then introduced with a focus on value and policy based methods that do not require any model assumptions. Connections are made with neural networks to extend the framework to encompass deep RL algorithms. Our survey concludes by discussing the application of these RL algorithms in a variety of decision-making problems in finance, including optimal execution, portfolio optimization, option pricing and hedging, market making, smart order routing, and robo-advising.
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.
With the capability of modeling bidirectional contexts, denoising autoencoding based pretraining like BERT achieves better performance than pretraining approaches based on autoregressive language modeling. However, relying on corrupting the input with masks, BERT neglects dependency between the masked positions and suffers from a pretrain-finetune discrepancy. In light of these pros and cons, we propose XLNet, a generalized autoregressive pretraining method that (1) enables learning bidirectional contexts by maximizing the expected likelihood over all permutations of the factorization order and (2) overcomes the limitations of BERT thanks to its autoregressive formulation. Furthermore, XLNet integrates ideas from Transformer-XL, the state-of-the-art autoregressive model, into pretraining. Empirically, XLNet outperforms BERT on 20 tasks, often by a large margin, and achieves state-of-the-art results on 18 tasks including question answering, natural language inference, sentiment analysis, and document ranking.
To provide more accurate, diverse, and explainable recommendation, it is compulsory to go beyond modeling user-item interactions and take side information into account. Traditional methods like factorization machine (FM) cast it as a supervised learning problem, which assumes each interaction as an independent instance with side information encoded. Due to the overlook of the relations among instances or items (e.g., the director of a movie is also an actor of another movie), these methods are insufficient to distill the collaborative signal from the collective behaviors of users. In this work, we investigate the utility of knowledge graph (KG), which breaks down the independent interaction assumption by linking items with their attributes. We argue that in such a hybrid structure of KG and user-item graph, high-order relations --- which connect two items with one or multiple linked attributes --- are an essential factor for successful recommendation. We propose a new method named Knowledge Graph Attention Network (KGAT) which explicitly models the high-order connectivities in KG in an end-to-end fashion. It recursively propagates the embeddings from a node's neighbors (which can be users, items, or attributes) to refine the node's embedding, and employs an attention mechanism to discriminate the importance of the neighbors. Our KGAT is conceptually advantageous to existing KG-based recommendation methods, which either exploit high-order relations by extracting paths or implicitly modeling them with regularization. Empirical results on three public benchmarks show that KGAT significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods like Neural FM and RippleNet. Further studies verify the efficacy of embedding propagation for high-order relation modeling and the interpretability benefits brought by the attention mechanism.