The recommendation of appropriate development pathways, also known as ecological civilization patterns for achieving Sustainable Development Goals (namely, sustainable development patterns), are of utmost importance for promoting ecological, economic, social, and resource sustainability in a specific region. To achieve this, the recommendation process must carefully consider the region's natural, environmental, resource, and economic characteristics. However, current recommendation algorithms in the field of computer science fall short in adequately addressing the spatial heterogeneity related to environment and sparsity of regional historical interaction data, which limits their effectiveness in recommending sustainable development patterns. To overcome these challenges, this paper proposes a method called User Graph after Pruning and Intent Graph (UGPIG). Firstly, we utilize the high-density linking capability of the pruned User Graph to address the issue of spatial heterogeneity neglect in recommendation algorithms. Secondly, we construct an Intent Graph by incorporating the intent network, which captures the preferences for attributes including environmental elements of target regions. This approach effectively alleviates the problem of sparse historical interaction data in the region. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that UGPIG outperforms state-of-the-art recommendation algorithms like KGCN, KGAT, and KGIN in sustainable development pattern recommendations, with a maximum improvement of 9.61% in Top-3 recommendation performance.
We present an efficient framework for solving constrained global non-convex polynomial optimization problems. We prove the existence of an equivalent nonlinear reformulation of such problems that possesses essentially no spurious local minima. We show through numerical experiments that polynomial scaling in dimension and degree is achievable for computing the optimal value and location of previously intractable global constrained polynomial optimization problems in high dimension.
Current methods based on Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) significantly lack the capacity to quantify uncertainty in their predictions, particularly on the unseen space including the occluded and outside scene content. This limitation hinders their extensive applications in robotics, where the reliability of model predictions has to be considered for tasks such as robotic exploration and planning in unknown environments. To address this, we propose a novel approach to estimate a 3D Uncertainty Field based on the learned incomplete scene geometry, which explicitly identifies these unseen regions. By considering the accumulated transmittance along each camera ray, our Uncertainty Field infers 2D pixel-wise uncertainty, exhibiting high values for rays directly casting towards occluded or outside the scene content. To quantify the uncertainty on the learned surface, we model a stochastic radiance field. Our experiments demonstrate that our approach is the only one that can explicitly reason about high uncertainty both on 3D unseen regions and its involved 2D rendered pixels, compared with recent methods. Furthermore, we illustrate that our designed uncertainty field is ideally suited for real-world robotics tasks, such as next-best-view selection.
Power line maintenance and inspection are essential to avoid power supply interruptions, reducing its high social and financial impacts yearly. Automating power line visual inspections remains a relevant open problem for the industry due to the lack of public real-world datasets of power line components and their various defects to foster new research. This paper introduces InsPLAD, a Power Line Asset Inspection Dataset and Benchmark containing 10,607 high-resolution Unmanned Aerial Vehicles colour images. The dataset contains seventeen unique power line assets captured from real-world operating power lines. Additionally, five of those assets present six defects: four of which are corrosion, one is a broken component, and one is a bird's nest presence. All assets were labelled according to their condition, whether normal or the defect name found on an image level. We thoroughly evaluate state-of-the-art and popular methods for three image-level computer vision tasks covered by InsPLAD: object detection, through the AP metric; defect classification, through Balanced Accuracy; and anomaly detection, through the AUROC metric. InsPLAD offers various vision challenges from uncontrolled environments, such as multi-scale objects, multi-size class instances, multiple objects per image, intra-class variation, cluttered background, distinct point-of-views, perspective distortion, occlusion, and varied lighting conditions. To the best of our knowledge, InsPLAD is the first large real-world dataset and benchmark for power line asset inspection with multiple components and defects for various computer vision tasks, with a potential impact to improve state-of-the-art methods in the field. It will be publicly available in its integrity on a repository with a thorough description. It can be found at //github.com/andreluizbvs/InsPLAD.
Critical infrastructure constitutes the foundation of every society. While traditionally solely relying on dedicated cable-based communication, this infrastructure rapidly transforms to highly digitized and interconnected systems which increasingly rely on wireless communication. Besides providing tremendous benefits, especially affording the easy, cheap, and flexible interconnection of a large number of assets spread over larger geographic areas, wireless communication in critical infrastructure also raises unique security challenges. Most importantly, the shift from dedicated private wired networks to heterogeneous wireless communication over public and shared networks requires significantly more involved security measures. In this paper, we identify the most relevant challenges resulting from the use of wireless communication in critical infrastructure and use those to identify a comprehensive set of promising opportunities to preserve the high security standards of critical infrastructure even when switching from wired to wireless communication.
To support the stringent requirements of the future intelligent and interactive applications, intelligence needs to become an essential part of the resource management in the edge environment. Developing intelligent orchestration solutions is a challenging and arduous task, where the evaluation and comparison of the proposed solution is a focal point. Simulation is commonly used to evaluate and compare proposed solutions. However, the currently existing, openly available simulators are lacking in terms of supporting the research on intelligent edge orchestration methods. To address this need, this article presents a simulation platform called Edge Intelligence Simulator (EISim), the purpose of which is to facilitate the research on intelligent edge orchestration solutions. EISim is extended from an existing fog simulator called PureEdgeSim. In its current form, EISim supports simulating deep reinforcement learning based solutions and different orchestration control topologies in scenarios related to task offloading and resource pricing on edge. The platform also includes additional tools for creating simulation environments, running simulations for agent training and evaluation, and plotting results.
Fairness is an emerging and challenging topic in recommender systems. In recent years, various ways of evaluating and therefore improving fairness have emerged. In this study, we examine existing evaluation measures of fairness in recommender systems. Specifically, we focus solely on exposure-based fairness measures of individual items that aim to quantify the disparity in how individual items are recommended to users, separate from item relevance to users. We gather all such measures and we critically analyse their theoretical properties. We identify a series of limitations in each of them, which collectively may render the affected measures hard or impossible to interpret, to compute, or to use for comparing recommendations. We resolve these limitations by redefining or correcting the affected measures, or we argue why certain limitations cannot be resolved. We further perform a comprehensive empirical analysis of both the original and our corrected versions of these fairness measures, using real-world and synthetic datasets. Our analysis provides novel insights into the relationship between measures based on different fairness concepts, and different levels of measure sensitivity and strictness. We conclude with practical suggestions of which fairness measures should be used and when. Our code is publicly available. To our knowledge, this is the first critical comparison of individual item fairness measures in recommender systems.
This article presents the affordances that Generative Artificial Intelligence can have in disinformation context, one of the major threats to our digitalized society. We present a research framework to generate customized agent-based social networks for disinformation simulations that would enable understanding and evaluation of the phenomena whilst discussing open challenges.
Deep neural models in recent years have been successful in almost every field, including extremely complex problem statements. However, these models are huge in size, with millions (and even billions) of parameters, thus demanding more heavy computation power and failing to be deployed on edge devices. Besides, the performance boost is highly dependent on redundant labeled data. To achieve faster speeds and to handle the problems caused by the lack of data, knowledge distillation (KD) has been proposed to transfer information learned from one model to another. KD is often characterized by the so-called `Student-Teacher' (S-T) learning framework and has been broadly applied in model compression and knowledge transfer. This paper is about KD and S-T learning, which are being actively studied in recent years. First, we aim to provide explanations of what KD is and how/why it works. Then, we provide a comprehensive survey on the recent progress of KD methods together with S-T frameworks typically for vision tasks. In general, we consider some fundamental questions that have been driving this research area and thoroughly generalize the research progress and technical details. Additionally, we systematically analyze the research status of KD in vision applications. Finally, we discuss the potentials and open challenges of existing methods and prospect the future directions of KD and S-T learning.
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.
In order to answer natural language questions over knowledge graphs, most processing pipelines involve entity and relation linking. Traditionally, entity linking and relation linking has been performed either as dependent sequential tasks or independent parallel tasks. In this paper, we propose a framework called "EARL", which performs entity linking and relation linking as a joint single task. EARL uses a graph connection based solution to the problem. We model the linking task as an instance of the Generalised Travelling Salesman Problem (GTSP) and use GTSP approximate algorithm solutions. We later develop EARL which uses a pair-wise graph-distance based solution to the problem.The system determines the best semantic connection between all keywords of the question by referring to a knowledge graph. This is achieved by exploiting the "connection density" between entity candidates and relation candidates. The "connection density" based solution performs at par with the approximate GTSP solution.We have empirically evaluated the framework on a dataset with 5000 questions. Our system surpasses state-of-the-art scores for entity linking task by reporting an accuracy of 0.65 to 0.40 from the next best entity linker.