Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) has been recognized as a powerful technology for boosting communication performance. To reduce manufacturing and control costs, it is preferable to consider discrete phase shifts (DPSs) for IRS, which are set by default as uniformly distributed in the range of $[ - \pi,\pi )$ in the literature. Such setting, however, cannot achieve a desirable performance over the general Rician fading where the channel phase concentrates in a narrow range with a higher probability. Motivated by this drawback, we in this paper design optimal non-uniform DPSs for IRS to achieve a desirable performance level. The fundamental challenge is the \textit{possible offset in phase distribution across different cascaded source-element-destination channels}, if adopting conventional IRS where the position of each element is fixed. Such phenomenon leads to different patterns of optimal non-uniform DPSs for each IRS element and thus causes huge manufacturing costs especially when the number of IRS elements is large. Driven by the recently emerging fluid antenna system (or movable antenna technology), we demonstrate that if the position of each IRS element can be flexibly adjusted, the above phase distribution offset can be surprisingly eliminated, leading to the same pattern of DPSs for each IRS element. Armed with this, we then determine the form of unified non-uniform DPSs based on a low-complexity iterative algorithm. Simulations show that our proposed design significantly improves the system performance compared to competitive benchmarks.
Vision Transformers (ViTs) have achieved state-of-the-art results on various computer vision tasks, including 3D object detection. However, their end-to-end implementation also makes ViTs less explainable, which can be a challenge for deploying them in safety-critical applications, such as autonomous driving, where it is important for authorities, developers, and users to understand the model's reasoning behind its predictions. In this paper, we propose a novel method for generating saliency maps for a DetR-like ViT with multiple camera inputs used for 3D object detection. Our method is based on the raw attention and is more efficient than gradient-based methods. We evaluate the proposed method on the nuScenes dataset using extensive perturbation tests and show that it outperforms other explainability methods in terms of visual quality and quantitative metrics. We also demonstrate the importance of aggregating attention across different layers of the transformer. Our work contributes to the development of explainable AI for ViTs, which can help increase trust in AI applications by establishing more transparency regarding the inner workings of AI models.
Gait recognition is a biometric technology that has received extensive attention. Most existing gait recognition algorithms are unimodal, and a few multimodal gait recognition algorithms perform multimodal fusion only once. None of these algorithms may fully exploit the complementary advantages of the multiple modalities. In this paper, by considering the temporal and spatial characteristics of gait data, we propose a multi-stage feature fusion strategy (MSFFS), which performs multimodal fusions at different stages in the feature extraction process. Also, we propose an adaptive feature fusion module (AFFM) that considers the semantic association between silhouettes and skeletons. The fusion process fuses different silhouette areas with their more related skeleton joints. Since visual appearance changes and time passage co-occur in a gait period, we propose a multiscale spatial-temporal feature extractor (MSSTFE) to learn the spatial-temporal linkage features thoroughly. Specifically, MSSTFE extracts and aggregates spatial-temporal linkages information at different spatial scales. Combining the strategy and modules mentioned above, we propose a multi-stage adaptive feature fusion (MSAFF) neural network, which shows state-of-the-art performance in many experiments on three datasets. Besides, MSAFF is equipped with feature dimensional pooling (FD Pooling), which can significantly reduce the dimension of the gait representations without hindering the accuracy. //github.com/ShinanZou/MSAFF
Recent artificial intelligence (AI) systems have reached milestones in "grand challenges" ranging from Go to protein-folding. The capability to retrieve medical knowledge, reason over it, and answer medical questions comparably to physicians has long been viewed as one such grand challenge. Large language models (LLMs) have catalyzed significant progress in medical question answering; Med-PaLM was the first model to exceed a "passing" score in US Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) style questions with a score of 67.2% on the MedQA dataset. However, this and other prior work suggested significant room for improvement, especially when models' answers were compared to clinicians' answers. Here we present Med-PaLM 2, which bridges these gaps by leveraging a combination of base LLM improvements (PaLM 2), medical domain finetuning, and prompting strategies including a novel ensemble refinement approach. Med-PaLM 2 scored up to 86.5% on the MedQA dataset, improving upon Med-PaLM by over 19% and setting a new state-of-the-art. We also observed performance approaching or exceeding state-of-the-art across MedMCQA, PubMedQA, and MMLU clinical topics datasets. We performed detailed human evaluations on long-form questions along multiple axes relevant to clinical applications. In pairwise comparative ranking of 1066 consumer medical questions, physicians preferred Med-PaLM 2 answers to those produced by physicians on eight of nine axes pertaining to clinical utility (p < 0.001). We also observed significant improvements compared to Med-PaLM on every evaluation axis (p < 0.001) on newly introduced datasets of 240 long-form "adversarial" questions to probe LLM limitations. While further studies are necessary to validate the efficacy of these models in real-world settings, these results highlight rapid progress towards physician-level performance in medical question answering.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown promising results on a broad spectrum of applications. Most empirical studies of GNNs directly take the observed graph as input, assuming the observed structure perfectly depicts the accurate and complete relations between nodes. However, graphs in the real world are inevitably noisy or incomplete, which could even exacerbate the quality of graph representations. In this work, we propose a novel Variational Information Bottleneck guided Graph Structure Learning framework, namely VIB-GSL, in the perspective of information theory. VIB-GSL advances the Information Bottleneck (IB) principle for graph structure learning, providing a more elegant and universal framework for mining underlying task-relevant relations. VIB-GSL learns an informative and compressive graph structure to distill the actionable information for specific downstream tasks. VIB-GSL deduces a variational approximation for irregular graph data to form a tractable IB objective function, which facilitates training stability. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the superior effectiveness and robustness of VIB-GSL.
The development of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has been gaining momentum in recent years owing to technological advances and a significant reduction in their cost. UAV technology can be used in a wide range of domains, including communication, agriculture, security, and transportation. It may be useful to group the UAVs into clusters/flocks in certain domains, and various challenges associated with UAV usage can be alleviated by clustering. Several computational challenges arise in UAV flock management, which can be solved by using machine learning (ML) methods. In this survey, we describe the basic terms relating to UAVS and modern ML methods, and we provide an overview of related tutorials and surveys. We subsequently consider the different challenges that appear in UAV flocks. For each issue, we survey several machine learning-based methods that have been suggested in the literature to handle the associated challenges. Thereafter, we describe various open issues in which ML can be applied to solve the different challenges of flocks, and we suggest means of using ML methods for this purpose. This comprehensive review may be useful for both researchers and developers in providing a wide view of various aspects of state-of-the-art ML technologies that are applicable to flock management.
Recently, contrastive learning (CL) has emerged as a successful method for unsupervised graph representation learning. Most graph CL methods first perform stochastic augmentation on the input graph to obtain two graph views and maximize the agreement of representations in the two views. Despite the prosperous development of graph CL methods, the design of graph augmentation schemes -- a crucial component in CL -- remains rarely explored. We argue that the data augmentation schemes should preserve intrinsic structures and attributes of graphs, which will force the model to learn representations that are insensitive to perturbation on unimportant nodes and edges. However, most existing methods adopt uniform data augmentation schemes, like uniformly dropping edges and uniformly shuffling features, leading to suboptimal performance. In this paper, we propose a novel graph contrastive representation learning method with adaptive augmentation that incorporates various priors for topological and semantic aspects of the graph. Specifically, on the topology level, we design augmentation schemes based on node centrality measures to highlight important connective structures. On the node attribute level, we corrupt node features by adding more noise to unimportant node features, to enforce the model to recognize underlying semantic information. We perform extensive experiments of node classification on a variety of real-world datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art baselines and even surpasses some supervised counterparts, which validates the effectiveness of the proposed contrastive framework with adaptive augmentation.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have proven to be useful for many different practical applications. However, many existing GNN models have implicitly assumed homophily among the nodes connected in the graph, and therefore have largely overlooked the important setting of heterophily, where most connected nodes are from different classes. In this work, we propose a novel framework called CPGNN that generalizes GNNs for graphs with either homophily or heterophily. The proposed framework incorporates an interpretable compatibility matrix for modeling the heterophily or homophily level in the graph, which can be learned in an end-to-end fashion, enabling it to go beyond the assumption of strong homophily. Theoretically, we show that replacing the compatibility matrix in our framework with the identity (which represents pure homophily) reduces to GCN. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in more realistic and challenging experimental settings with significantly less training data compared to previous works: CPGNN variants achieve state-of-the-art results in heterophily settings with or without contextual node features, while maintaining comparable performance in homophily settings.
Graph Neural Networks (GNN) has demonstrated the superior performance in many challenging applications, including the few-shot learning tasks. Despite its powerful capacity to learn and generalize from few samples, GNN usually suffers from severe over-fitting and over-smoothing as the model becomes deep, which limit the model scalability. In this work, we propose a novel Attentive GNN to tackle these challenges, by incorporating a triple-attention mechanism, \ie node self-attention, neighborhood attention, and layer memory attention. We explain why the proposed attentive modules can improve GNN for few-shot learning with theoretical analysis and illustrations. Extensive experiments show that the proposed Attentive GNN outperforms the state-of-the-art GNN-based methods for few-shot learning over the mini-ImageNet and Tiered-ImageNet datasets, with both inductive and transductive settings.
Spectral clustering (SC) is a popular clustering technique to find strongly connected communities on a graph. SC can be used in Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to implement pooling operations that aggregate nodes belonging to the same cluster. However, the eigendecomposition of the Laplacian is expensive and, since clustering results are graph-specific, pooling methods based on SC must perform a new optimization for each new sample. In this paper, we propose a graph clustering approach that addresses these limitations of SC. We formulate a continuous relaxation of the normalized minCUT problem and train a GNN to compute cluster assignments that minimize this objective. Our GNN-based implementation is differentiable, does not require to compute the spectral decomposition, and learns a clustering function that can be quickly evaluated on out-of-sample graphs. From the proposed clustering method, we design a graph pooling operator that overcomes some important limitations of state-of-the-art graph pooling techniques and achieves the best performance in several supervised and unsupervised tasks.
Aspect level sentiment classification aims to identify the sentiment expressed towards an aspect given a context sentence. Previous neural network based methods largely ignore the syntax structure in one sentence. In this paper, we propose a novel target-dependent graph attention network (TD-GAT) for aspect level sentiment classification, which explicitly utilizes the dependency relationship among words. Using the dependency graph, it propagates sentiment features directly from the syntactic context of an aspect target. In our experiments, we show our method outperforms multiple baselines with GloVe embeddings. We also demonstrate that using BERT representations further substantially boosts the performance.