Learning Robust Precipitation Forecaster by Temporal Frame Interpolation

Recent advances in deep learning have significantly elevated weather prediction models. However, these models often falter in real-world scenarios due to their sensitivity to spatial-temporal shifts. This issue is particularly acute in weather forecasting, where models are prone to overfit to local and temporal variations, especially when tasked with fine-grained predictions. In this paper, we address these challenges by developing a robust precipitation forecasting model that demonstrates resilience against such spatial-temporal discrepancies. We introduce Temporal Frame Interpolation (TFI), a novel technique that enhances the training dataset by generating synthetic samples through interpolating adjacent frames from satellite imagery and ground radar data, thus improving the model's robustness against frame noise. Moreover, we incorporate a unique Multi-Level Dice (ML-Dice) loss function, leveraging the ordinal nature of rainfall intensities to improve the model's performance. Our approach has led to significant improvements in forecasting precision, culminating in our model securing \textit{1st place} in the transfer learning leaderboard of the \textit{Weather4cast'23} competition. This achievement not only underscores the effectiveness of our methodologies but also establishes a new standard for deep learning applications in weather forecasting. Our code and weights have been public on \url{https://github.com/Secilia-Cxy/UNetTFI}.

Training-Free Generalization on Heterogeneous Tabular Data via Meta-Representation

Tabular data is prevalent across various machine learning domains. Yet, the inherent heterogeneities in attribute and class spaces across different tabular datasets hinder the effective sharing of knowledge, limiting a tabular model to benefit from other datasets. In this paper, we propose Tabular data Pre-Training via Meta-representation (TabPTM), which allows one tabular model pre-training on a set of heterogeneous datasets. Then, this pre-trained model can be directly applied to unseen datasets that have diverse attributes and classes without additional training. Specifically, TabPTM represents an instance through its distance to a fixed number of prototypes, thereby standardizing heterogeneous tabular datasets. A deep neural network is then trained to associate these meta-representations with dataset-specific classification confidences, endowing TabPTM with the ability of training-free generalization. Experiments validate that TabPTM achieves promising performance in new datasets, even under few-shot scenarios.

Unlocking the Transferability of Tokens in Deep Models for Tabular Data

Fine-tuning a pre-trained deep neural network has become a successful paradigm in various machine learning tasks. However, such a paradigm becomes particularly challenging with tabular data when there are discrepancies between the feature sets of pre-trained models and the target tasks. In this paper, we propose TabToken, a method aims at enhancing the quality of feature tokens (i.e., embeddings of tabular features). TabToken allows for the utilization of pre-trained models when the upstream and downstream tasks share overlapping features, facilitating model fine-tuning even with limited training examples. Specifically, we introduce a contrastive objective that regularizes the tokens, capturing the semantics within and across features. During the pre-training stage, the tokens are learned jointly with top-layer deep models such as transformer. In the downstream task, tokens of the shared features are kept fixed while TabToken efficiently fine-tunes the remaining parts of the model. TabToken not only enables knowledge transfer from a pre-trained model to tasks with heterogeneous features, but also enhances the discriminative ability of deep tabular models in standard classification and regression tasks.

REFORM: Removing False Correlation in Multi-level Interaction for CTR Prediction

Click-through rate (CTR) prediction is a critical task in online advertising and recommendation systems, as accurate predictions are essential for user targeting and personalized recommendations. Most recent cutting-edge methods primarily focus on investigating complex implicit and explicit feature interactions. However, these methods neglect the issue of false correlations caused by confounding factors or selection bias. This problem is further magnified by the complexity and redundancy of these interactions. We propose a CTR prediction framework that removes false correlation in multi-level feature interaction, termed REFORM. The proposed REFORM framework exploits a wide range of multi-level high-order feature representations via a two-stream stacked recurrent structure while eliminating false correlations. The framework has two key components: I. The multi-level stacked recurrent (MSR) structure enables the model to efficiently capture diverse nonlinear interactions from feature spaces of different levels, and the richer representations lead to enhanced CTR prediction accuracy. II. The false correlation elimination (FCE) module further leverages Laplacian kernel mapping and sample reweighting methods to eliminate false correlations concealed within the multi-level features, allowing the model to focus on the true causal effects. Extensive experiments based on four challenging CTR datasets and our production dataset demonstrate that the proposed REFORM model achieves state-of-the-art performance. Codes, models and our dataset will be released at https://github.com/yansuoyuli/REFORM.

PILOT: A Pre-Trained Model-Based Continual Learning Toolbox

While traditional machine learning can effectively tackle a wide range of problems, it primarily operates within a closed-world setting, which presents limitations when dealing with streaming data. As a solution, incremental learning emerges to address real-world scenarios involving new data's arrival. Recently, pre-training has made significant advancements and garnered the attention of numerous researchers. The strong performance of these pre-trained models (PTMs) presents a promising avenue for developing continual learning algorithms that can effectively adapt to real-world scenarios. Consequently, exploring the utilization of PTMs in incremental learning has become essential. This paper introduces a pre-trained model-based continual learning toolbox known as PILOT. On the one hand, PILOT implements some state-of-the-art class-incremental learning algorithms based on pre-trained models, such as L2P, DualPrompt, and CODA-Prompt. On the other hand, PILOT also fits typical class-incremental learning algorithms (e.g., DER, FOSTER, and MEMO) within the context of pre-trained models to evaluate their effectiveness.

ZhiJian: A Unifying and Rapidly Deployable Toolbox for Pre-trained Model Reuse

The rapid expansion of foundation pre-trained models and their fine-tuned counterparts has significantly contributed to the advancement of machine learning. Leveraging pre-trained models to extract knowledge and expedite learning in real-world tasks, known as "Model Reuse", has become crucial in various applications. Previous research focuses on reusing models within a certain aspect, including reusing model weights, structures, and hypothesis spaces. This paper introduces ZhiJian, a comprehensive and user-friendly toolbox for model reuse, utilizing the PyTorch backend. ZhiJian presents a novel paradigm that unifies diverse perspectives on model reuse, encompassing target architecture construction with PTM, tuning target model with PTM, and PTM-based inference. This empowers deep learning practitioners to explore downstream tasks and identify the complementary advantages among different methods. ZhiJian is readily accessible at https://github.com/zhangyikaii/lamda-zhijian facilitating seamless utilization of pre-trained models and streamlining the model reuse process for researchers and developers.

Streaming CTR Prediction: Rethinking Recommendation Task for Real-World Streaming Data

The Click-Through Rate (CTR) prediction task is critical in industrial recommender systems, where models are usually deployed on dynamic streaming data in practical applications. Such streaming data in real-world recommender systems face many challenges, such as distribution shift, temporal non-stationarity, and systematic biases, which bring difficulties to the training and utilizing of recommendation models. However, most existing studies approach the CTR prediction as a classification task on static datasets, assuming that the train and test sets are independent and identically distributed (a.k.a, i.i.d. assumption). To bridge this gap, we formulate the CTR prediction problem in streaming scenarios as a Streaming CTR Prediction task. Accordingly, we propose dedicated benchmark settings and metrics to evaluate and analyze the performance of the models in streaming data. To better understand the differences compared to traditional CTR prediction tasks, we delve into the factors that may affect the model performance, such as parameter scale, normalization, regularization, etc. The results reveal the existence of the ''streaming learning dilemma'', whereby the same factor may have different effects on model performance in the static and streaming scenarios. Based on the findings, we propose two simple but inspiring methods (i.e., tuning key parameters and exemplar replay) that significantly improve the effectiveness of the CTR models in the new streaming scenario. We hope our work will inspire further research on streaming CTR prediction and help improve the robustness and adaptability of recommender systems.

SeMAIL: Eliminating Distractors in Visual Imitation via Separated Models

Model-based imitation learning (MBIL) is a popular reinforcement learning method that improves sample efficiency on high-dimension input sources, such as images and videos. Following the convention of MBIL research, existing algorithms are highly deceptive by task-irrelevant information, especially moving distractors in videos. To tackle this problem, we propose a new algorithm - named Separated Model-based Adversarial Imitation Learning (SeMAIL) - decoupling the environment dynamics into two parts by task-relevant dependency, which is determined by agent actions, and training separately. In this way, the agent can imagine its trajectories and imitate the expert behavior efficiently in task-relevant state space. Our method achieves near-expert performance on various visual control tasks with complex observations and the more challenging tasks with different backgrounds from expert observations.

COURIER: Contrastive User Intention Reconstruction for Large-Scale Pre-Train of Image Features

With the development of the multi-media internet, visual characteristics have become an important factor affecting user interests. Thus, incorporating visual features is a promising direction for further performance improvements in click-through rate (CTR) prediction. However, we found that simply injecting the image embeddings trained with established pre-training methods only has marginal improvements. We attribute the failure to two reasons: First, The pre-training methods are designed for well-defined computer vision tasks concentrating on semantic features, and they cannot learn personalized interest in recommendations. Secondly, pre-trained image embeddings only containing semantic information have little information gain, considering we already have semantic features such as categories and item titles as inputs in the CTR prediction task. We argue that a pre-training method tailored for recommendation is necessary for further improvements. To this end, we propose a recommendation-aware image pre-training method that can learn visual features from user click histories. Specifically, we propose a user interest reconstruction module to mine visual features related to user interests from behavior histories. We further propose a contrastive training method to avoid collapsing of embedding vectors. We conduct extensive experiments to verify that our method can learn users' visual interests, and our method achieves $0.46\%$ improvement in offline AUC and $0.88\%$ improvement in Taobao online GMV with p-value$<0.01$.