CERES: Pretraining of Graph-Conditioned Transformer for Semi-Structured Session Data

User sessions empower many search and recommendation tasks on a daily basis. Such session data are semi-structured, which encode heterogeneous relations between queries and products, and each item is described by the unstructured text. Despite recent advances in self-supervised learning for text or graphs, there lack of self-supervised learning models that can effectively capture both intra-item semantics and inter-item interactions for semi-structured sessions. To fill this gap, we propose CERES, a graph-based transformer model for semi-structured session data. CERES learns representations that capture both inter- and intra-item semantics with (1) a graph-conditioned masked language pretraining task that jointly learns from item text and item-item relations; and (2) a graph-conditioned transformer architecture that propagates inter-item contexts to item-level representations. We pretrained CERES using ~468 million Amazon sessions and find that CERES outperforms strong pretraining baselines by up to 9% in three session search and entity linking tasks.

FlowFormer: A Transformer Architecture for Optical Flow

We introduce Optical Flow TransFormer (FlowFormer), a transformer-based neural network architecture for learning optical flow. FlowFormer tokenizes the 4D cost volume built from an image pair, encodes the cost tokens into a cost memory with alternate-group transformer (AGT) layers in a novel latent space, and decodes the cost memory via a recurrent transformer decoder with dynamic positional cost queries. On the Sintel benchmark clean pass, FlowFormer achieves 1.178 average end-ponit-error (AEPE), a 15.1% error reduction from the best published result (1.388). Besides, FlowFormer also achieves strong generalization performance. Without being trained on Sintel, FlowFormer achieves 1.00 AEPE on the Sintel training set clean pass, outperforming the best published result (1.29) by 22.4%.

Learning a Structured Latent Space for Unsupervised Point Cloud Completion

Unsupervised point cloud completion aims at estimating the corresponding complete point cloud of a partial point cloud in an unpaired manner. It is a crucial but challenging problem since there is no paired partial-complete supervision that can be exploited directly. In this work, we propose a novel framework, which learns a unified and structured latent space that encoding both partial and complete point clouds. Specifically, we map a series of related partial point clouds into multiple complete shape and occlusion code pairs and fuse the codes to obtain their representations in the unified latent space. To enforce the learning of such a structured latent space, the proposed method adopts a series of constraints including structured ranking regularization, latent code swapping constraint, and distribution supervision on the related partial point clouds. By establishing such a unified and structured latent space, better partial-complete geometry consistency and shape completion accuracy can be achieved. Extensive experiments show that our proposed method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art unsupervised methods on both synthetic ShapeNet and real-world KITTI, ScanNet, and Matterport3D datasets.

Abandoning the Bayer-Filter to See in the Dark

Low-light image enhancement - a pervasive but challenging problem, plays a central role in enhancing the visibility of an image captured in a poor illumination environment. Due to the fact that not all photons can pass the Bayer-Filter on the sensor of the color camera, in this work, we first present a De-Bayer-Filter simulator based on deep neural networks to generate a monochrome raw image from the colored raw image. Next, a fully convolutional network is proposed to achieve the low-light image enhancement by fusing colored raw data with synthesized monochrome raw data. Channel-wise attention is also introduced to the fusion process to establish a complementary interaction between features from colored and monochrome raw images. To train the convolutional networks, we propose a dataset with monochrome and color raw pairs named Mono-Colored Raw paired dataset (MCR) collected by using a monochrome camera without Bayer-Filter and a color camera with Bayer-Filter. The proposed pipeline take advantages of the fusion of the virtual monochrome and the color raw images and our extensive experiments indicate that significant improvement can be achieved by leveraging raw sensor data and data-driven learning.

FORCE: A Framework of Rule-Based Conversational Recommender System

The conversational recommender systems (CRSs) have received extensive attention in recent years. However, most of the existing works focus on various deep learning models, which are largely limited by the requirement of large-scale human-annotated datasets. Such methods are not able to deal with the cold-start scenarios in industrial products. To alleviate the problem, we propose FORCE, a Framework Of Rule-based Conversational Recommender system that helps developers to quickly build CRS bots by simple configuration. We conduct experiments on two datasets in different languages and domains to verify its effectiveness and usability.

PRBoost: Prompt-Based Rule Discovery and Boosting for Interactive Weakly-Supervised Learning

Weakly-supervised learning (WSL) has shown promising results in addressing label scarcity on many NLP tasks, but manually designing a comprehensive, high-quality labeling rule set is tedious and difficult. We study interactive weakly-supervised learning -- the problem of iteratively and automatically discovering novel labeling rules from data to improve the WSL model. Our proposed model, named PRBoost, achieves this goal via iterative prompt-based rule discovery and model boosting. It uses boosting to identify large-error instances and then discovers candidate rules from them by prompting pre-trained LMs with rule templates. The candidate rules are judged by human experts, and the accepted rules are used to generate complementary weak labels and strengthen the current model. Experiments on four tasks show PRBoost outperforms state-of-the-art WSL baselines up to 7.1% and bridges the gaps with fully supervised models. Our Implementation is available at \url{https://github.com/rz-zhang/PRBoost}.

Estimating the Uncertainty in Emotion Class Labels with Utterance-Specific Dirichlet Priors

Emotion recognition is a key attribute for artificial intelligence systems that need to naturally interact with humans. However, the task definition is still an open problem due to inherent ambiguity of emotions. In this paper, a novel Bayesian training loss based on per-utterance Dirichlet prior distributions is proposed for verbal emotion recognition, which models the uncertainty in one-hot labels created when human annotators assign the same utterance to different emotion classes. An additional metric is used to evaluate the performance by detecting test utterances with high labelling uncertainty. This removes a major limitation that emotion classification systems only consider utterances with majority labels.Furthermore, a frequentist approach is studied to leverage the continuous-valued "soft" labels obtained by averaging the one-hot labels. We propose a two-branch model structure for emotion classification on a per-utterance basis. Experiments with the widely used IEMOCAP dataset demonstrate that the two-branch structure achieves state-of-the-art classification results with all common IEMOCAP test setups. Based on this, uncertainty estimation experiments were performed. The best performance in terms of the area under the precision-recall curve when detecting utterances with high uncertainty was achieved by interpolating the Bayesian training loss with the Kullback-Leibler divergence training loss for the soft labels.

Learning to Erase the Bayer-Filter to See in the Dark

Low-light image enhancement - a pervasive but challenging problem, plays a central role in enhancing the visibility of an image captured in a poor illumination environment. Due to the fact that not all photons can pass the Bayer-Filter on the sensor of the color camera, in this work, we first present a De-Bayer-Filter simulator based on deep neural networks to generate a monochrome raw image from the colored raw image. Next, a fully convolutional network is proposed to achieve the low-light image enhancement by fusing colored raw data with synthesized monochrome raw data. Channel-wise attention is also introduced to the fusion process to establish a complementary interaction between features from colored and monochrome raw images. To train the convolutional networks, we propose a dataset with monochrome and color raw pairs named Mono-Colored Raw paired dataset (MCR) collected by using a monochrome camera without Bayer-Filter and a color camera with Bayer-Filter. The proposed pipeline take advantages of the fusion of the virtual monochrome and the color raw images and our extensive experiments indicate that significant improvement can be achieved by leveraging raw sensor data and data-driven learning.

Shift-Robust Node Classification via Graph Adversarial Clustering

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are de facto node classification models in graph structured data. However, during testing-time, these algorithms assume no data shift, i.e., $\Pr_\text{train}(X,Y) = \Pr_\text{test}(X,Y)$. Domain adaption methods can be adopted for data shift, yet most of them are designed to only encourage similar feature distribution between source and target data. Conditional shift on classes can still affect such adaption. Fortunately, graph yields graph homophily across different data distributions. In response, we propose Shift-Robust Node Classification (SRNC) to address these limitations. We introduce an unsupervised cluster GNN on target graph to group the similar nodes by graph homophily. An adversarial loss with label information on source graph is used upon clustering objective. Then a shift-robust classifier is optimized on training graph and adversarial samples on target graph, which are generated by cluster GNN. We conduct experiments on both open-set shift and representation-shift, which demonstrates the superior accuracy of SRNC on generalizing to test graph with data shift. SRNC is consistently better than previous SoTA domain adaption algorithm on graph that progressively use model predictions on target graph for training.

UA-FedRec: Untargeted Attack on Federated News Recommendation

News recommendation is critical for personalized news distribution. Federated news recommendation enables collaborative model learning from many clients without sharing their raw data. It is promising for privacy-preserving news recommendation. However, the security of federated news recommendation is still unclear. In this paper, we study this problem by proposing an untargeted attack called UA-FedRec. By exploiting the prior knowledge of news recommendation and federated learning, UA-FedRec can effectively degrade the model performance with a small percentage of malicious clients. First, the effectiveness of news recommendation highly depends on user modeling and news modeling. We design a news similarity perturbation method to make representations of similar news farther and those of dissimilar news closer to interrupt news modeling, and propose a user model perturbation method to make malicious user updates in opposite directions of benign updates to interrupt user modeling. Second, updates from different clients are typically aggregated by weighted-averaging based on their sample sizes. We propose a quantity perturbation method to enlarge sample sizes of malicious clients in a reasonable range to amplify the impact of malicious updates. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets show that UA-FedRec can effectively degrade the accuracy of existing federated news recommendation methods, even when defense is applied. Our study reveals a critical security issue in existing federated news recommendation systems and calls for research efforts to address the issue.