Training a convolutional neural network (CNN) to detect infrared small targets in a fully supervised manner has gained remarkable research interests in recent years, but is highly labor expensive since a large number of per-pixel annotations are required. To handle this problem, in this paper, we make the first attempt to achieve infrared small target detection with point-level supervision. Interestingly, during the training phase supervised by point labels, we discover that CNNs first learn to segment a cluster of pixels near the targets, and then gradually converge to predict groundtruth point labels. Motivated by this "mapping degeneration" phenomenon, we propose a label evolution framework named label evolution with single point supervision (LESPS) to progressively expand the point label by leveraging the intermediate predictions of CNNs. In this way, the network predictions can finally approximate the updated pseudo labels, and a pixel-level target mask can be obtained to train CNNs in an end-to-end manner. We conduct extensive experiments with insightful visualizations to validate the effectiveness of our method. Experimental results show that CNNs equipped with LESPS can well recover the target masks from corresponding point labels, {and can achieve over 70% and 95% of their fully supervised performance in terms of pixel-level intersection over union (IoU) and object-level probability of detection (Pd), respectively. Code is available at //github.com/XinyiYing/LESPS.
Associative memory models, such as Hopfield networks and their modern variants, have garnered renewed interest due to advancements in memory capacity and connections with self-attention in transformers. In this work, we introduce a unified framework-Hopfield-Fenchel-Young networks-which generalizes these models to a broader family of energy functions. Our energies are formulated as the difference between two Fenchel-Young losses: one, parameterized by a generalized entropy, defines the Hopfield scoring mechanism, while the other applies a post-transformation to the Hopfield output. By utilizing Tsallis and norm entropies, we derive end-to-end differentiable update rules that enable sparse transformations, uncovering new connections between loss margins, sparsity, and exact retrieval of single memory patterns. We further extend this framework to structured Hopfield networks using the SparseMAP transformation, allowing the retrieval of pattern associations rather than a single pattern. Our framework unifies and extends traditional and modern Hopfield networks and provides an energy minimization perspective for widely used post-transformations like $\ell_2$-normalization and layer normalization-all through suitable choices of Fenchel-Young losses and by using convex analysis as a building block. Finally, we validate our Hopfield-Fenchel-Young networks on diverse memory recall tasks, including free and sequential recall. Experiments on simulated data, image retrieval, multiple instance learning, and text rationalization demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.
Link prediction is crucial for understanding complex networks but traditional Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) often rely on random negative sampling, leading to suboptimal performance. This paper introduces Fuzzy Graph Attention Networks (FGAT), a novel approach integrating fuzzy rough sets for dynamic negative sampling and enhanced node feature aggregation. Fuzzy Negative Sampling (FNS) systematically selects high-quality negative edges based on fuzzy similarities, improving training efficiency. FGAT layer incorporates fuzzy rough set principles, enabling robust and discriminative node representations. Experiments on two research collaboration networks demonstrate FGAT's superior link prediction accuracy, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines by leveraging the power of fuzzy rough sets for effective negative sampling and node feature learning.
With the rapid growth of digital information, personalized recommendation systems have become an indispensable part of Internet services, especially in the fields of e-commerce, social media, and online entertainment. However, traditional collaborative filtering and content-based recommendation methods have limitations in dealing with data sparsity and cold start problems, especially in the face of largescale heterogeneous data, which makes it difficult to meet user expectations. This paper proposes a new label recommendation algorithm based on metric learning, which aims to overcome the challenges of traditional recommendation systems by learning effective distance or similarity metrics to capture the subtle differences between user preferences and item features. Experimental results show that the algorithm outperforms baseline methods including local response metric learning (LRML), collaborative metric learning (CML), and adaptive tensor factorization (ATF) based on adversarial learning on multiple evaluation metrics. In particular, it performs particularly well in the accuracy of the first few recommended items, while maintaining high robustness and maintaining high recommendation accuracy.
We investigate the entity alignment (EA) problem with unlabeled dangling cases, meaning that partial entities have no counterparts in the other knowledge graph (KG), and this type of entity remains unlabeled. To address this challenge, we propose the framework \textit{Lambda} for dangling detection and then entity alignment. Lambda features a GNN-based encoder called KEESA with spectral contrastive learning for EA and a positive-unlabeled learning algorithm for dangling detection called iPULE. iPULE offers theoretical guarantees of unbiasedness, uniform deviation bounds, and convergence. Experimental results demonstrate that each component contributes to overall performances that are superior to baselines, even when baselines additionally exploit 30\% of dangling entities labeled for training.
Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have great potential to help address societal challenges that are both collective in nature and present at national or trans-national scale. Pressing challenges in healthcare, finance, infrastructure and sustainability, for instance, might all be productively addressed by leveraging and amplifying AI for national-scale collective intelligence. The development and deployment of this kind of AI faces distinctive challenges, both technical and socio-technical. Here, a research strategy for mobilising inter-disciplinary research to address these challenges is detailed and some of the key issues that must be faced are outlined.
As the interest in large language models grows, the importance of accuracy in automatic speech recognition has become more pronounced. This is especially true for lectures that include specialized terminology. In such cases, the success rate of traditional ASR models tends to be low, presenting a significant challenge. A method using the word frequency difference approach has been proposed to improve ASR performance for specialized terminology. We investigated this proposal through experiments and data analysis to determine if it effectively addresses the issue. In addition, we introduced the power law as the theoretical foundation for the relative frequency methodology mentioned in this approach.
Face recognition technology has advanced significantly in recent years due largely to the availability of large and increasingly complex training datasets for use in deep learning models. These datasets, however, typically comprise images scraped from news sites or social media platforms and, therefore, have limited utility in more advanced security, forensics, and military applications. These applications require lower resolution, longer ranges, and elevated viewpoints. To meet these critical needs, we collected and curated the first and second subsets of a large multi-modal biometric dataset designed for use in the research and development (R&D) of biometric recognition technologies under extremely challenging conditions. Thus far, the dataset includes more than 350,000 still images and over 1,300 hours of video footage of approximately 1,000 subjects. To collect this data, we used Nikon DSLR cameras, a variety of commercial surveillance cameras, specialized long-rage R&D cameras, and Group 1 and Group 2 UAV platforms. The goal is to support the development of algorithms capable of accurately recognizing people at ranges up to 1,000 m and from high angles of elevation. These advances will include improvements to the state of the art in face recognition and will support new research in the area of whole-body recognition using methods based on gait and anthropometry. This paper describes methods used to collect and curate the dataset, and the dataset's characteristics at the current stage.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) have emerged as a powerful paradigm for embedding-based entity alignment due to their capability of identifying isomorphic subgraphs. However, in real knowledge graphs (KGs), the counterpart entities usually have non-isomorphic neighborhood structures, which easily causes GNNs to yield different representations for them. To tackle this problem, we propose a new KG alignment network, namely AliNet, aiming at mitigating the non-isomorphism of neighborhood structures in an end-to-end manner. As the direct neighbors of counterpart entities are usually dissimilar due to the schema heterogeneity, AliNet introduces distant neighbors to expand the overlap between their neighborhood structures. It employs an attention mechanism to highlight helpful distant neighbors and reduce noises. Then, it controls the aggregation of both direct and distant neighborhood information using a gating mechanism. We further propose a relation loss to refine entity representations. We perform thorough experiments with detailed ablation studies and analyses on five entity alignment datasets, demonstrating the effectiveness of AliNet.
Graph convolutional networks (GCNs) have recently become one of the most powerful tools for graph analytics tasks in numerous applications, ranging from social networks and natural language processing to bioinformatics and chemoinformatics, thanks to their ability to capture the complex relationships between concepts. At present, the vast majority of GCNs use a neighborhood aggregation framework to learn a continuous and compact vector, then performing a pooling operation to generalize graph embedding for the classification task. These approaches have two disadvantages in the graph classification task: (1)when only the largest sub-graph structure ($k$-hop neighbor) is used for neighborhood aggregation, a large amount of early-stage information is lost during the graph convolution step; (2) simple average/sum pooling or max pooling utilized, which loses the characteristics of each node and the topology between nodes. In this paper, we propose a novel framework called, dual attention graph convolutional networks (DAGCN) to address these problems. DAGCN automatically learns the importance of neighbors at different hops using a novel attention graph convolution layer, and then employs a second attention component, a self-attention pooling layer, to generalize the graph representation from the various aspects of a matrix graph embedding. The dual attention network is trained in an end-to-end manner for the graph classification task. We compare our model with state-of-the-art graph kernels and other deep learning methods. The experimental results show that our framework not only outperforms other baselines but also achieves a better rate of convergence.
Image segmentation is still an open problem especially when intensities of the interested objects are overlapped due to the presence of intensity inhomogeneity (also known as bias field). To segment images with intensity inhomogeneities, a bias correction embedded level set model is proposed where Inhomogeneities are Estimated by Orthogonal Primary Functions (IEOPF). In the proposed model, the smoothly varying bias is estimated by a linear combination of a given set of orthogonal primary functions. An inhomogeneous intensity clustering energy is then defined and membership functions of the clusters described by the level set function are introduced to rewrite the energy as a data term of the proposed model. Similar to popular level set methods, a regularization term and an arc length term are also included to regularize and smooth the level set function, respectively. The proposed model is then extended to multichannel and multiphase patterns to segment colourful images and images with multiple objects, respectively. It has been extensively tested on both synthetic and real images that are widely used in the literature and public BrainWeb and IBSR datasets. Experimental results and comparison with state-of-the-art methods demonstrate that advantages of the proposed model in terms of bias correction and segmentation accuracy.