What User Behaviors Make the Differences During the Process of Visual Analytics?

The understanding of visual analytics process can benefit visualization researchers from multiple aspects, including improving visual designs and developing advanced interaction functions. However, the log files of user behaviors are still hard to analyze due to the complexity of sensemaking and our lack of knowledge on the related user behaviors. This work presents a study on a comprehensive data collection of user behaviors, and our analysis approach with time-series classification methods. We have chosen a classical visualization application, Covid-19 data analysis, with common analysis tasks covering geo-spatial, time-series and multi-attributes. Our user study collects user behaviors on a diverse set of visualization tasks with two comparable systems, desktop and immersive visualizations. We summarize the classification results with three time-series machine learning algorithms at two scales, and explore the influences of behavior features. Our results reveal that user behaviors can be distinguished during the process of visual analytics and there is a potentially strong association between the physical behaviors of users and the visualization tasks they perform. We also demonstrate the usage of our models by interpreting open sessions of visual analytics, which provides an automatic way to study sensemaking without tedious manual annotations.

Part Aware Contrastive Learning for Self-Supervised Action Recognition

In recent years, remarkable results have been achieved in self-supervised action recognition using skeleton sequences with contrastive learning. It has been observed that the semantic distinction of human action features is often represented by local body parts, such as legs or hands, which are advantageous for skeleton-based action recognition. This paper proposes an attention-based contrastive learning framework for skeleton representation learning, called SkeAttnCLR, which integrates local similarity and global features for skeleton-based action representations. To achieve this, a multi-head attention mask module is employed to learn the soft attention mask features from the skeletons, suppressing non-salient local features while accentuating local salient features, thereby bringing similar local features closer in the feature space. Additionally, ample contrastive pairs are generated by expanding contrastive pairs based on salient and non-salient features with global features, which guide the network to learn the semantic representations of the entire skeleton. Therefore, with the attention mask mechanism, SkeAttnCLR learns local features under different data augmentation views. The experiment results demonstrate that the inclusion of local feature similarity significantly enhances skeleton-based action representation. Our proposed SkeAttnCLR outperforms state-of-the-art methods on NTURGB+D, NTU120-RGB+D, and PKU-MMD datasets.

SkeletonMAE: Spatial-Temporal Masked Autoencoders for Self-supervised Skeleton Action Recognition

Fully supervised skeleton-based action recognition has achieved great progress with the blooming of deep learning techniques. However, these methods require sufficient labeled data which is not easy to obtain. In contrast, self-supervised skeleton-based action recognition has attracted more attention. With utilizing the unlabeled data, more generalizable features can be learned to alleviate the overfitting problem and reduce the demand of massive labeled training data. Inspired by the MAE, we propose a spatial-temporal masked autoencoder framework for self-supervised 3D skeleton-based action recognition (SkeletonMAE). Following MAE's masking and reconstruction pipeline, we utilize a skeleton based encoder-decoder transformer architecture to reconstruct the masked skeleton sequences. A novel masking strategy, named Spatial-Temporal Masking, is introduced in terms of both joint-level and frame-level for the skeleton sequence. This pre-training strategy makes the encoder output generalizable skeleton features with spatial and temporal dependencies. Given the unmasked skeleton sequence, the encoder is fine-tuned for the action recognition task. Extensive experiments show that our SkeletonMAE achieves remarkable performance and outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on both NTU RGB+D and NTU RGB+D 120 datasets.

A Lightweight Graph Transformer Network for Human Mesh Reconstruction from 2D Human Pose

Existing deep learning-based human mesh reconstruction approaches have a tendency to build larger networks in order to achieve higher accuracy. Computational complexity and model size are often neglected, despite being key characteristics for practical use of human mesh reconstruction models (e.g. virtual try-on systems). In this paper, we present GTRS, a lightweight pose-based method that can reconstruct human mesh from 2D human pose. We propose a pose analysis module that uses graph transformers to exploit structured and implicit joint correlations, and a mesh regression module that combines the extracted pose feature with the mesh template to reconstruct the final human mesh. We demonstrate the efficiency and generalization of GTRS by extensive evaluations on the Human3.6M and 3DPW datasets. In particular, GTRS achieves better accuracy than the SOTA pose-based method Pose2Mesh while only using 10.2% of the parameters (Params) and 2.5% of the FLOPs on the challenging in-the-wild 3DPW dataset. Code will be publicly available.

Poisoning Attacks on Fair Machine Learning

Both fair machine learning and adversarial learning have been extensively studied. However, attacking fair machine learning models has received less attention. In this paper, we present a framework that seeks to effectively generate poisoning samples to attack both model accuracy and algorithmic fairness. Our attacking framework can target fair machine learning models trained with a variety of group based fairness notions such as demographic parity and equalized odds. We develop three online attacks, adversarial sampling , adversarial labeling, and adversarial feature modification. All three attacks effectively and efficiently produce poisoning samples via sampling, labeling, or modifying a fraction of training data in order to reduce the test accuracy. Our framework enables attackers to flexibly adjust the attack's focus on prediction accuracy or fairness and accurately quantify the impact of each candidate point to both accuracy loss and fairness violation, thus producing effective poisoning samples. Experiments on two real datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our framework.

One-Class Adversarial Nets for Fraud Detection

Many online applications, such as online social networks or knowledge bases, are often attacked by malicious users who commit different types of actions such as vandalism on Wikipedia or fraudulent reviews on eBay. Currently, most of the fraud detection approaches require a training dataset that contains records of both benign and malicious users. However, in practice, there are often no or very few records of malicious users. In this paper, we develop one-class adversarial nets (OCAN) for fraud detection using training data with only benign users. OCAN first uses LSTM-Autoencoder to learn the representations of benign users from their sequences of online activities. It then detects malicious users by training a discriminator with a complementary GAN model that is different from the regular GAN model. Experimental results show that our OCAN outperforms the state-of-the-art one-class classification models and achieves comparable performance with the latest multi-source LSTM model that requires both benign and malicious users in the training phase.

Spectrum-based deep neural networks for fraud detection

In this paper, we focus on fraud detection on a signed graph with only a small set of labeled training data. We propose a novel framework that combines deep neural networks and spectral graph analysis. In particular, we use the node projection (called as spectral coordinate) in the low dimensional spectral space of the graph's adjacency matrix as input of deep neural networks. Spectral coordinates in the spectral space capture the most useful topology information of the network. Due to the small dimension of spectral coordinates (compared with the dimension of the adjacency matrix derived from a graph), training deep neural networks becomes feasible. We develop and evaluate two neural networks, deep autoencoder and convolutional neural network, in our fraud detection framework. Experimental results on a real signed graph show that our spectrum based deep neural networks are effective in fraud detection.

On Spectral Analysis of Directed Signed Graphs

It has been shown that the adjacency eigenspace of a network contains key information of its underlying structure. However, there has been no study on spectral analysis of the adjacency matrices of directed signed graphs. In this paper, we derive theoretical approximations of spectral projections from such directed signed networks using matrix perturbation theory. We use the derived theoretical results to study the influences of negative intra cluster and inter cluster directed edges on node spectral projections. We then develop a spectral clustering based graph partition algorithm, SC-DSG, and conduct evaluations on both synthetic and real datasets. Both theoretical analysis and empirical evaluation demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.