We introduce a novel modeling approach for time series imputation and forecasting, tailored to address the challenges often encountered in real-world data, such as irregular samples, missing data, or unaligned measurements from multiple sensors. Our method relies on a continuous-time-dependent model of the series' evolution dynamics. It leverages adaptations of conditional, implicit neural representations for sequential data. A modulation mechanism, driven by a meta-learning algorithm, allows adaptation to unseen samples and extrapolation beyond observed time-windows for long-term predictions. The model provides a highly flexible and unified framework for imputation and forecasting tasks across a wide range of challenging scenarios. It achieves state-of-the-art performance on classical benchmarks and outperforms alternative time-continuous models.
It is a known problem that deep-learning-based end-to-end (E2E) channel coding systems depend on a known and differentiable channel model, due to the learning process and based on the gradient-descent optimization methods. This places the challenge to approximate or generate the channel or its derivative from samples generated by pilot signaling in real-world scenarios. Currently, there are two prevalent methods to solve this problem. One is to generate the channel via a generative adversarial network (GAN), and the other is to, in essence, approximate the gradient via reinforcement learning methods. Other methods include using score-based methods, variational autoencoders, or mutual-information-based methods. In this paper, we focus on generative models and, in particular, on a new promising method called diffusion models, which have shown a higher quality of generation in image-based tasks. We will show that diffusion models can be used in wireless E2E scenarios and that they work as good as Wasserstein GANs while having a more stable training procedure and a better generalization ability in testing.
We present a novel hybrid (model- and learning-based) architecture for fusing the most significant features from conventional aerial images and integral aerial images that result from synthetic aperture sensing for removing occlusion caused by dense vegetation. It combines the environment's spatial references with features of unoccluded targets. Our method out-beats the state-of-the-art, does not require manually tuned parameters, can be extended to an arbitrary number and combinations of spectral channels, and is reconfigurable to address different use-cases.
Modern time series forecasting methods, such as Transformer and its variants, have shown strong ability in sequential data modeling. To achieve high performance, they usually rely on redundant or unexplainable structures to model complex relations between variables and tune the parameters with large-scale data. Many real-world data mining tasks, however, lack sufficient variables for relation reasoning, and therefore these methods may not properly handle such forecasting problems. With insufficient data, time series appear to be affected by many exogenous variables, and thus, the modeling becomes unstable and unpredictable. To tackle this critical issue, in this paper, we develop a novel algorithmic framework for inferring the intrinsic latent factors implied by the observable time series. The inferred factors are used to form multiple independent and predictable signal components that enable not only sparse relation reasoning for long-term efficiency but also reconstructing the future temporal data for accurate prediction. To achieve this, we introduce three characteristics, i.e., predictability, sufficiency, and identifiability, and model these characteristics via the powerful deep latent dynamics models to infer the predictable signal components. Empirical results on multiple real datasets show the efficiency of our method for different kinds of time series forecasting. The statistical analysis validates the predictability of the learned latent factors.
We propose a robust transceiver design for a covert integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) system with imperfect channel state information (CSI). Considering both bounded and probabilistic CSI error models, we formulate worst-case and outage-constrained robust optimization problems of joint trasceiver beamforming and radar waveform design to balance the radar performance of multiple targets while ensuring communications performance and covertness of the system. The optimization problems are challenging due to the non-convexity arising from the semi-infinite constraints (SICs) and the coupled transceiver variables. In an effort to tackle the former difficulty, S-procedure and Bernstein-type inequality are introduced for converting the SICs into finite convex linear matrix inequalities (LMIs) and second-order cone constraints. A robust alternating optimization framework referred to alternating double-checking is developed for decoupling the transceiver design problem into feasibility-checking transmitter- and receiver-side subproblems, transforming the rank-one constraints into a set of LMIs, and verifying the feasibility of beamforming by invoking the matrix-lifting scheme. Numerical results are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed algorithm in improving the performance of covert ISAC systems.
We investigate the role of various demonstration components in the in-context learning (ICL) performance of large language models (LLMs). Specifically, we explore the impacts of ground-truth labels, input distribution, and complementary explanations, particularly when these are altered or perturbed. We build on previous work, which offers mixed findings on how these elements influence ICL. To probe these questions, we employ explainable NLP (XNLP) methods and utilize saliency maps of contrastive demonstrations for both qualitative and quantitative analysis. Our findings reveal that flipping ground-truth labels significantly affects the saliency, though it's more noticeable in larger LLMs. Our analysis of the input distribution at a granular level reveals that changing sentiment-indicative terms in a sentiment analysis task to neutral ones does not have as substantial an impact as altering ground-truth labels. Finally, we find that the effectiveness of complementary explanations in boosting ICL performance is task-dependent, with limited benefits seen in sentiment analysis tasks compared to symbolic reasoning tasks. These insights are critical for understanding the functionality of LLMs and guiding the development of effective demonstrations, which is increasingly relevant in light of the growing use of LLMs in applications such as ChatGPT. Our research code is publicly available at //github.com/paihengxu/XICL.
Structural discovery amongst a set of variables is of interest in both static and dynamic settings. In the presence of lead-lag dependencies in the data, the dynamics of the system can be represented through a structural equation model (SEM) that simultaneously captures the contemporaneous and temporal relationships amongst the variables, with the former encoded through a directed acyclic graph (DAG) for model identification. In many real applications, a partial ordering amongst the nodes of the DAG is available, which makes it either beneficial or imperative to incorporate it as a constraint in the problem formulation. This paper develops an algorithm that can seamlessly incorporate a priori partial ordering information for solving a linear SEM (also known as Structural Vector Autoregression) under a high-dimensional setting. The proposed algorithm is provably convergent to a stationary point, and exhibits competitive performance on both synthetic and real data sets.
The integration of experimental data into mathematical and computational models is crucial for enhancing their predictive power in real-world scenarios. However, the performance of data assimilation algorithms can be significantly degraded when measurements are corrupted by biased noise, altering the signal magnitude, or when the system dynamics lack smoothness, such as in the presence of fast oscillations or discontinuities. This paper focuses on variational state estimation using the so-called Parameterized Background Data Weak method, which relies on a parameterized background by a set of constraints, enabling state estimation by solving a minimization problem on a reduced-order background model, subject to constraints imposed by the input measurements. To address biased noise in observations, a modified formulation is proposed, incorporating a correction mechanism to handle rapid oscillations by treating them as slow-decaying modes based on a two-scale splitting of the classical reconstruction algorithm. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithms is demonstrated through various examples, including discontinuous signals and simulated Doppler ultrasound data.
Task-oriented conversational datasets often lack topic variability and linguistic diversity. However, with the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) pretrained on extensive, multilingual and diverse text data, these limitations seem overcome. Nevertheless, their generalisability to different languages and domains in dialogue applications remains uncertain without benchmarking datasets. This paper presents a holistic annotation approach for emotion and conversational quality in the context of bilingual customer support conversations. By performing annotations that take into consideration the complete instances that compose a conversation, one can form a broader perspective of the dialogue as a whole. Furthermore, it provides a unique and valuable resource for the development of text classification models. To this end, we present benchmarks for Emotion Recognition and Dialogue Quality Estimation and show that further research is needed to leverage these models in a production setting.
To address the challenge of identifying and understanding hidden dangers in substations from unstructured text data, a novel dynamic analysis method is proposed. This approach begins by analyzing and extracting data from the unstructured text related to hidden dangers. It then leverages a flexible, distributed data search engine built on Elastic-Search to handle this information. Following this, the hidden Markov model is employed to train the data within the engine. The Viterbi algorithm is integrated to decipher the hidden state sequences, facilitating the segmentation and labeling of entities related to hidden dangers. The final step involves using the Neo4j graph database to dynamically create a knowledge map that visualizes hidden dangers in the substation. This method's effectiveness is demonstrated through an example analysis using data from a specific substation's hidden dangers.
We introduce a multi-task setup of identifying and classifying entities, relations, and coreference clusters in scientific articles. We create SciERC, a dataset that includes annotations for all three tasks and develop a unified framework called Scientific Information Extractor (SciIE) for with shared span representations. The multi-task setup reduces cascading errors between tasks and leverages cross-sentence relations through coreference links. Experiments show that our multi-task model outperforms previous models in scientific information extraction without using any domain-specific features. We further show that the framework supports construction of a scientific knowledge graph, which we use to analyze information in scientific literature.