Among the existing modalities for 3D action recognition, 3D flow has been poorly examined, although conveying rich motion information cues for human actions. Presumably, its susceptibility to noise renders it intractable, thus challenging the learning process within deep models. This work demonstrates the use of 3D flow sequence by a deep spatiotemporal model and further proposes an incremental two-level spatial attention mechanism, guided from skeleton domain, for emphasizing motion features close to the body joint areas and according to their informativeness. Towards this end, an extended deep skeleton model is also introduced to learn the most discriminant action motion dynamics, so as to estimate an informativeness score for each joint. Subsequently, a late fusion scheme is adopted between the two models for learning the high level cross-modal correlations. Experimental results on the currently largest and most challenging dataset NTU RGB+D, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, achieving state-of-the-art results.
A new discrete-time shot noise Cox process for spatiotemporal data is proposed. The random intensity is driven by a dependent sequence of latent gamma random measures. Some properties of the latent process are derived, such as an autoregressive representation and the Laplace functional. Moreover, these results are used to derive the moment, predictive, and pair correlation measures of the proposed shot noise Cox process. The model is flexible but still tractable and allows for capturing persistence, global trends, and latent spatial and temporal factors. A Bayesian inference approach is adopted, and an efficient Markov Chain Monte Carlo procedure based on conditional Sequential Monte Carlo is proposed. An application to georeferenced wildfire data illustrates the properties of the model and inference.
Deterministic model predictive control (MPC), while powerful, is often insufficient for effectively controlling autonomous systems in the real-world. Factors such as environmental noise and model error can cause deviations from the expected nominal performance. Robust MPC algorithms aim to bridge this gap between deterministic and uncertain control. However, these methods are often excessively difficult to tune for robustness due to the nonlinear and non-intuitive effects that controller parameters have on performance. To address this challenge, a unifying perspective on differentiable optimization for control is presented, which enables derivation of a general, differentiable tube-based MPC algorithm. The proposed approach facilitates the automatic and real-time tuning of robust controllers in the presence of large uncertainties and disturbances.
We propose a combinatorial optimisation model called Limited Query Graph Connectivity Test. We consider a graph whose edges have two possible states (On/Off). The edges' states are hidden initially. We could query an edge to reveal its state. Given a source s and a destination t, we aim to test s-t connectivity by identifying either a path (consisting of only On edges) or a cut (consisting of only Off edges). We are limited to B queries, after which we stop regardless of whether graph connectivity is established. We aim to design a query policy that minimizes the expected number of queries. Our model is mainly motivated by a cyber security use case where we need to establish whether an attack path exists in a network, between a source and a destination. Edge query is resolved by manual effort from the IT admin, which is the motivation behind query minimization. Our model is highly related to monotone Stochastic Boolean Function Evaluation (SBFE). There are two existing exact algorithms for SBFE that are prohibitively expensive. We propose a significantly more scalable exact algorithm. While previous exact algorithms only scale for trivial graphs (i.e., past works experimented on at most 20 edges), we empirically demonstrate that our algorithm is scalable for a wide range of much larger practical graphs (i.e., Windows domain network graphs with tens of thousands of edges). We propose three heuristics. Our best-performing heuristic is via reducing the search horizon of the exact algorithm. The other two are via reinforcement learning (RL) and Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS). We also derive an anytime algorithm for computing the performance lower bound. Experimentally, we show that all our heuristics are near optimal. The exact algorithm based heuristic outperforms all, surpassing RL, MCTS and 8 existing heuristics ported from SBFE and related literature.
Sequential transfer optimization (STO), which aims to improve the optimization performance on a task at hand by exploiting the knowledge captured from several previously-solved optimization tasks stored in a database, has been gaining increasing research attention over the years. However, despite remarkable advances in algorithm design, the development of a systematic benchmark suite for comprehensive comparisons of STO algorithms received far less attention. Existing test problems are either simply generated by assembling other benchmark functions or extended from specific practical problems with limited variations. The relationships between the optimal solutions of the source and target tasks in these problems are always manually configured, limiting their ability to model different relationships presented in real-world problems. Consequently, the good performance achieved by an algorithm on these problems might be biased and could not be generalized to other problems. In light of the above, in this study, we first introduce four rudimentary concepts for characterizing STO problems (STOPs) and present an important problem feature, namely similarity distribution, which quantitatively delineates the relationship between the optima of the source and target tasks. Then, we propose the general design guidelines and a problem generator with superior scalability. Specifically, the similarity distribution of an STOP can be easily customized, enabling a continuous spectrum of representation of the diverse similarity relationships of real-world problems. Lastly, a benchmark suite with 12 STOPs featured by a variety of customized similarity relationships is developed using the proposed generator, which would serve as an arena for STO algorithms and provide more comprehensive evaluation results. The source code of the problem generator is available at //github.com/XmingHsueh/STOP-G.
Machine unlearning, the ability for a machine learning model to forget, is becoming increasingly important to comply with data privacy regulations, as well as to remove harmful, manipulated, or outdated information. The key challenge lies in forgetting specific information while protecting model performance on the remaining data. While current state-of-the-art methods perform well, they typically require some level of retraining over the retained data, in order to protect or restore model performance. This adds computational overhead and mandates that the training data remain available and accessible, which may not be feasible. In contrast, other methods employ a retrain-free paradigm, however, these approaches are prohibitively computationally expensive and do not perform on par with their retrain-based counterparts. We present Selective Synaptic Dampening (SSD), a novel two-step, post hoc, retrain-free approach to machine unlearning which is fast, performant, and does not require long-term storage of the training data. First, SSD uses the Fisher information matrix of the training and forgetting data to select parameters that are disproportionately important to the forget set. Second, SSD induces forgetting by dampening these parameters proportional to their relative importance to the forget set with respect to the wider training data. We evaluate our method against several existing unlearning methods in a range of experiments using ResNet18 and Vision Transformer. Results show that the performance of SSD is competitive with retrain-based post hoc methods, demonstrating the viability of retrain-free post hoc unlearning approaches.
2D-based Industrial Anomaly Detection has been widely discussed, however, multimodal industrial anomaly detection based on 3D point clouds and RGB images still has many untouched fields. Existing multimodal industrial anomaly detection methods directly concatenate the multimodal features, which leads to a strong disturbance between features and harms the detection performance. In this paper, we propose Multi-3D-Memory (M3DM), a novel multimodal anomaly detection method with hybrid fusion scheme: firstly, we design an unsupervised feature fusion with patch-wise contrastive learning to encourage the interaction of different modal features; secondly, we use a decision layer fusion with multiple memory banks to avoid loss of information and additional novelty classifiers to make the final decision. We further propose a point feature alignment operation to better align the point cloud and RGB features. Extensive experiments show that our multimodal industrial anomaly detection model outperforms the state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods on both detection and segmentation precision on MVTec-3D AD dataset. Code is available at //github.com/nomewang/M3DM.
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.
This paper presents a new approach for assembling graph neural networks based on framelet transforms. The latter provides a multi-scale representation for graph-structured data. With the framelet system, we can decompose the graph feature into low-pass and high-pass frequencies as extracted features for network training, which then defines a framelet-based graph convolution. The framelet decomposition naturally induces a graph pooling strategy by aggregating the graph feature into low-pass and high-pass spectra, which considers both the feature values and geometry of the graph data and conserves the total information. The graph neural networks with the proposed framelet convolution and pooling achieve state-of-the-art performance in many types of node and graph prediction tasks. Moreover, we propose shrinkage as a new activation for the framelet convolution, which thresholds the high-frequency information at different scales. Compared to ReLU, shrinkage in framelet convolution improves the graph neural network model in terms of denoising and signal compression: noises in both node and structure can be significantly reduced by accurately cutting off the high-pass coefficients from framelet decomposition, and the signal can be compressed to less than half its original size with the prediction performance well preserved.
Embedding models for deterministic Knowledge Graphs (KG) have been extensively studied, with the purpose of capturing latent semantic relations between entities and incorporating the structured knowledge into machine learning. However, there are many KGs that model uncertain knowledge, which typically model the inherent uncertainty of relations facts with a confidence score, and embedding such uncertain knowledge represents an unresolved challenge. The capturing of uncertain knowledge will benefit many knowledge-driven applications such as question answering and semantic search by providing more natural characterization of the knowledge. In this paper, we propose a novel uncertain KG embedding model UKGE, which aims to preserve both structural and uncertainty information of relation facts in the embedding space. Unlike previous models that characterize relation facts with binary classification techniques, UKGE learns embeddings according to the confidence scores of uncertain relation facts. To further enhance the precision of UKGE, we also introduce probabilistic soft logic to infer confidence scores for unseen relation facts during training. We propose and evaluate two variants of UKGE based on different learning objectives. Experiments are conducted on three real-world uncertain KGs via three tasks, i.e. confidence prediction, relation fact ranking, and relation fact classification. UKGE shows effectiveness in capturing uncertain knowledge by achieving promising results on these tasks, and consistently outperforms baselines on these tasks.
We investigate a lattice-structured LSTM model for Chinese NER, which encodes a sequence of input characters as well as all potential words that match a lexicon. Compared with character-based methods, our model explicitly leverages word and word sequence information. Compared with word-based methods, lattice LSTM does not suffer from segmentation errors. Gated recurrent cells allow our model to choose the most relevant characters and words from a sentence for better NER results. Experiments on various datasets show that lattice LSTM outperforms both word-based and character-based LSTM baselines, achieving the best results.