The recognition of human activities based on WiFi Channel State Information (CSI) enables contactless and visual privacy-preserving sensing in indoor environments. However, poor model generalization, due to varying environmental conditions and sensing hardware, is a well-known problem in this space. To address this issue, in this work, data augmentation techniques commonly used in image-based learning are applied to WiFi CSI to investigate their effects on model generalization performance in cross-scenario and cross-system settings. In particular, we focus on the generalization between line-of-sight (LOS) and non-line-of-sight (NLOS) through-wall scenarios, as well as on the generalization between different antenna systems, which remains under-explored. We collect and make publicly available a dataset of CSI amplitude spectrograms of human activities. Utilizing this data, an ablation study is conducted in which activity recognition models based on the EfficientNetV2 architecture are trained, allowing us to assess the effects of each augmentation on model generalization performance. The gathered results show that specific combinations of simple data augmentation techniques applied to CSI amplitude data can significantly improve cross-scenario and cross-system generalization.
We present a novel prompt-based personalized federated learning (pFL) method to address data heterogeneity and privacy concerns in traditional medical visual question answering (VQA) methods. Specifically, we regard medical datasets from different organs as clients and use pFL to train personalized transformer-based VQA models for each client. To address the high computational complexity of client-to-client communication in previous pFL methods, we propose a succinct information sharing system by introducing prompts that are small learnable parameters. In addition, the proposed method introduces a reliability parameter to prevent the negative effects of low performance and irrelevant clients. Finally, extensive evaluations on various heterogeneous medical datasets attest to the effectiveness of our proposed method.
Sixth-generation (6G) wireless communication systems, as stated in the European 6G flagship project Hexa-X, are anticipated to feature the integration of intelligence, communication, sensing, positioning, and computation. An important aspect of this integration is integrated sensing and communication (ISAC), in which the same waveform is used for both systems both sensing and communication, to address the challenge of spectrum scarcity. Recently, the orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS) waveform has been proposed to address OFDM's limitations due to the high Doppler spread in some future wireless communication systems. In this paper, we review existing OTFS waveforms for ISAC systems and provide some insights into future research. Firstly, we introduce the basic principles and a system model of OTFS and provide a foundational understanding of this innovative technology's core concepts and architecture. Subsequently, we present an overview of OTFS-based ISAC system frameworks. We provide a comprehensive review of recent research developments and the current state of the art in the field of OTFS-assisted ISAC systems to gain a thorough understanding of the current landscape and advancements. Furthermore, we perform a thorough comparison between OTFS-enabled ISAC operations and traditional OFDM, highlighting the distinctive advantages of OTFS, especially in high Doppler spread scenarios. Subsequently, we address the primary challenges facing OTFS-based ISAC systems, identifying potential limitations and drawbacks. Then, finally, we suggest future research directions, aiming to inspire further innovation in the 6G wireless communication landscape.
Medical imaging is nowadays a pillar in diagnostics and therapeutic follow-up. Current research tries to integrate established - but ionizing - tomographic techniques with technologies offering reduced radiation exposure. Diffuse Optical Tomography (DOT) uses non-ionizing light in the Near-Infrared (NIR) window to reconstruct optical coefficients in living beings, providing functional indications about the composition of the investigated organ/tissue. Due to predominant light scattering at NIR wavelengths, DOT reconstruction is, however, a severely ill-conditioned inverse problem. Conventional reconstruction approaches show severe weaknesses when dealing also with mildly complex cases and/or are computationally very intensive. In this work we explore deep learning techniques for DOT inversion. Namely, we propose a fully data-driven approach based on a modularity concept: first data and originating signal are separately processed via autoencoders, then the corresponding low-dimensional latent spaces are connected via a bridging network which acts at the same time as a learned regularizer.
Spear-phishing attacks present a significant security challenge, with large language models (LLMs) escalating the threat by generating convincing emails and facilitating target reconnaissance. To address this, we propose a detection approach based on a novel document vectorization method that utilizes an ensemble of LLMs to create representation vectors. By prompting LLMs to reason and respond to human-crafted questions, we quantify the presence of common persuasion principles in the email's content, producing prompted contextual document vectors for a downstream supervised machine learning model. We evaluate our method using a unique dataset generated by a proprietary system that automates target reconnaissance and spear-phishing email creation. Our method achieves a 91% F1 score in identifying LLM-generated spear-phishing emails, with the training set comprising only traditional phishing and benign emails. Key contributions include an innovative document vectorization method utilizing LLM reasoning, a publicly available dataset of high-quality spear-phishing emails, and the demonstrated effectiveness of our method in detecting such emails. This methodology can be utilized for various document classification tasks, particularly in adversarial problem domains.
Existing knowledge graph (KG) embedding models have primarily focused on static KGs. However, real-world KGs do not remain static, but rather evolve and grow in tandem with the development of KG applications. Consequently, new facts and previously unseen entities and relations continually emerge, necessitating an embedding model that can quickly learn and transfer new knowledge through growth. Motivated by this, we delve into an expanding field of KG embedding in this paper, i.e., lifelong KG embedding. We consider knowledge transfer and retention of the learning on growing snapshots of a KG without having to learn embeddings from scratch. The proposed model includes a masked KG autoencoder for embedding learning and update, with an embedding transfer strategy to inject the learned knowledge into the new entity and relation embeddings, and an embedding regularization method to avoid catastrophic forgetting. To investigate the impacts of different aspects of KG growth, we construct four datasets to evaluate the performance of lifelong KG embedding. Experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art inductive and lifelong embedding baselines.
With the rise of powerful pre-trained vision-language models like CLIP, it becomes essential to investigate ways to adapt these models to downstream datasets. A recently proposed method named Context Optimization (CoOp) introduces the concept of prompt learning -- a recent trend in NLP -- to the vision domain for adapting pre-trained vision-language models. Specifically, CoOp turns context words in a prompt into a set of learnable vectors and, with only a few labeled images for learning, can achieve huge improvements over intensively-tuned manual prompts. In our study we identify a critical problem of CoOp: the learned context is not generalizable to wider unseen classes within the same dataset, suggesting that CoOp overfits base classes observed during training. To address the problem, we propose Conditional Context Optimization (CoCoOp), which extends CoOp by further learning a lightweight neural network to generate for each image an input-conditional token (vector). Compared to CoOp's static prompts, our dynamic prompts adapt to each instance and are thus less sensitive to class shift. Extensive experiments show that CoCoOp generalizes much better than CoOp to unseen classes, even showing promising transferability beyond a single dataset; and yields stronger domain generalization performance as well. Code is available at //github.com/KaiyangZhou/CoOp.
Vast amount of data generated from networks of sensors, wearables, and the Internet of Things (IoT) devices underscores the need for advanced modeling techniques that leverage the spatio-temporal structure of decentralized data due to the need for edge computation and licensing (data access) issues. While federated learning (FL) has emerged as a framework for model training without requiring direct data sharing and exchange, effectively modeling the complex spatio-temporal dependencies to improve forecasting capabilities still remains an open problem. On the other hand, state-of-the-art spatio-temporal forecasting models assume unfettered access to the data, neglecting constraints on data sharing. To bridge this gap, we propose a federated spatio-temporal model -- Cross-Node Federated Graph Neural Network (CNFGNN) -- which explicitly encodes the underlying graph structure using graph neural network (GNN)-based architecture under the constraint of cross-node federated learning, which requires that data in a network of nodes is generated locally on each node and remains decentralized. CNFGNN operates by disentangling the temporal dynamics modeling on devices and spatial dynamics on the server, utilizing alternating optimization to reduce the communication cost, facilitating computations on the edge devices. Experiments on the traffic flow forecasting task show that CNFGNN achieves the best forecasting performance in both transductive and inductive learning settings with no extra computation cost on edge devices, while incurring modest communication cost.
The recent proliferation of knowledge graphs (KGs) coupled with incomplete or partial information, in the form of missing relations (links) between entities, has fueled a lot of research on knowledge base completion (also known as relation prediction). Several recent works suggest that convolutional neural network (CNN) based models generate richer and more expressive feature embeddings and hence also perform well on relation prediction. However, we observe that these KG embeddings treat triples independently and thus fail to cover the complex and hidden information that is inherently implicit in the local neighborhood surrounding a triple. To this effect, our paper proposes a novel attention based feature embedding that captures both entity and relation features in any given entity's neighborhood. Additionally, we also encapsulate relation clusters and multihop relations in our model. Our empirical study offers insights into the efficacy of our attention based model and we show marked performance gains in comparison to state of the art methods on all datasets.
Recent advancements in deep neural networks for graph-structured data have led to state-of-the-art performance on recommender system benchmarks. However, making these methods practical and scalable to web-scale recommendation tasks with billions of items and hundreds of millions of users remains a challenge. Here we describe a large-scale deep recommendation engine that we developed and deployed at Pinterest. We develop a data-efficient Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) algorithm PinSage, which combines efficient random walks and graph convolutions to generate embeddings of nodes (i.e., items) that incorporate both graph structure as well as node feature information. Compared to prior GCN approaches, we develop a novel method based on highly efficient random walks to structure the convolutions and design a novel training strategy that relies on harder-and-harder training examples to improve robustness and convergence of the model. We also develop an efficient MapReduce model inference algorithm to generate embeddings using a trained model. We deploy PinSage at Pinterest and train it on 7.5 billion examples on a graph with 3 billion nodes representing pins and boards, and 18 billion edges. According to offline metrics, user studies and A/B tests, PinSage generates higher-quality recommendations than comparable deep learning and graph-based alternatives. To our knowledge, this is the largest application of deep graph embeddings to date and paves the way for a new generation of web-scale recommender systems based on graph convolutional architectures.
Recommender systems play a crucial role in mitigating the problem of information overload by suggesting users' personalized items or services. The vast majority of traditional recommender systems consider the recommendation procedure as a static process and make recommendations following a fixed strategy. In this paper, we propose a novel recommender system with the capability of continuously improving its strategies during the interactions with users. We model the sequential interactions between users and a recommender system as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and leverage Reinforcement Learning (RL) to automatically learn the optimal strategies via recommending trial-and-error items and receiving reinforcements of these items from users' feedbacks. In particular, we introduce an online user-agent interacting environment simulator, which can pre-train and evaluate model parameters offline before applying the model online. Moreover, we validate the importance of list-wise recommendations during the interactions between users and agent, and develop a novel approach to incorporate them into the proposed framework LIRD for list-wide recommendations. The experimental results based on a real-world e-commerce dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.