Modeling Relevance Ranking under the Pre-training and Fine-tuning Paradigm

Recently, pre-trained language models such as BERT have been applied to document ranking for information retrieval, which first pre-train a general language model on an unlabeled large corpus and then conduct ranking-specific fine-tuning on expert-labeled relevance datasets. Ideally, an IR system would model relevance from a user-system dualism: the user's view and the system's view. User's view judges the relevance based on the activities of "real users" while the system's view focuses on the relevance signals from the system side, e.g., from the experts or algorithms, etc. Inspired by the user-system relevance views and the success of pre-trained language models, in this paper we propose a novel ranking framework called Pre-Rank that takes both user's view and system's view into consideration, under the pre-training and fine-tuning paradigm. Specifically, to model the user's view of relevance, Pre-Rank pre-trains the initial query-document representations based on large-scale user activities data such as the click log. To model the system's view of relevance, Pre-Rank further fine-tunes the model on expert-labeled relevance data. More importantly, the pre-trained representations, are fine-tuned together with handcrafted learning-to-rank features under a wide and deep network architecture. In this way, Pre-Rank can model the relevance by incorporating the relevant knowledge and signals from both real search users and the IR experts. To verify the effectiveness of Pre-Rank, we showed two implementations by using BERT and SetRank as the underlying ranking model, respectively. Experimental results base on three publicly available benchmarks showed that in both of the implementations, Pre-Rank can respectively outperform the underlying ranking models and achieved state-of-the-art performances.

SA-MATD3:Self-attention-based multi-agent continuous control method in cooperative environments

Cooperative problems under continuous control have always been the focus of multi-agent reinforcement learning. Existing algorithms suffer from the problem of uneven learning degree with the increase of the number of agents. In this paper, a new structure for a multi-agent actor critic is proposed, and the self-attention mechanism is applied in the critic network and the value decomposition method used to solve the uneven problem. The proposed algorithm makes full use of the samples in the replay memory buffer to learn the behavior of a class of agents. First, a new update method is proposed for policy networks that promotes learning efficiency. Second, the utilization of samples is improved, at the same time reflecting the ability of perspective-taking among groups. Finally, the "deceptive signal" in training is eliminated and the learning degree among agents is more uniform than in the existing methods. Multiple experiments were conducted in two typical scenarios of a multi-agent particle environment. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can perform better than the state-of-the-art ones, and that it exhibits higher learning efficiency with an increasing number of agents.

Resonant Beam Communications with Echo Interference Elimination

Resonant beam communications (RBCom) is capable of providing wide bandwidth when using light as the carrier. Besides, the RBCom system possesses the characteristics of mobility, high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and multiplexing. Nevertheless, the channel of the RBCom system is distinct from other light communication technologies due to the echo interference issue. In this paper, we reveal the mechanism of the echo interference and propose the method to eliminate the interference. Moreover, we present an exemplary design based on frequency shifting and optical filtering, along with its mathematic model and performance analysis. The numerical evaluation shows that the channel capacity is greater than 15 bit/s/Hz.

Partial Maximum Correntropy Regression for Robust Trajectory Decoding from Noisy Epidural Electrocorticographic Signals

The Partial Least Square Regression (PLSR) algorithm exhibits exceptional competence for predicting continuous variables from inter-correlated brain recordings in brain-computer interfaces, which achieved successful prediction from epidural electrocorticography of macaques to three-dimensional continuous hand trajectories recently. Nevertheless, PLSR is in essence formulated based on the least square criterion, thus, being non-robust with respect to complicated noises consequently. The aim of the present study is to propose a robust version of PLSR. To this end, the maximum correntropy criterion is adopted to structure a new robust variant of PLSR, namely Partial Maximum Correntropy Regression (PMCR). Half-quadratic optimization technique is utilized to calculate the robust latent variables. We assess the proposed PMCR on a synthetic example and the public Neurotycho dataset. Compared with the conventional PLSR and the state-of-the-art variant, PMCR realized superior prediction competence on three different performance indicators with contaminated training set. The proposed PMCR was demonstrated as an effective approach for robust decoding from noisy brain measurements, which could reduce the performance degradation resulting from adverse noises, thus, improving the decoding robustness of brain-computer interfaces.

A Logical Neural Network Structure With More Direct Mapping From Logical Relations

Logical relations widely exist in human activities. Human use them for making judgement and decision according to various conditions, which are embodied in the form of \emph{if-then} rules. As an important kind of cognitive intelligence, it is prerequisite of representing and storing logical relations rightly into computer systems so as to make automatic judgement and decision, especially for high-risk domains like medical diagnosis. However, current numeric ANN (Artificial Neural Network) models are good at perceptual intelligence such as image recognition while they are not good at cognitive intelligence such as logical representation, blocking the further application of ANN. To solve it, researchers have tried to design logical ANN models to represent and store logical relations. Although there are some advances in this research area, recent works still have disadvantages because the structures of these logical ANN models still don't map more directly with logical relations which will cause the corresponding logical relations cannot be read out from their network structures. Therefore, in order to represent logical relations more clearly by the neural network structure and to read out logical relations from it, this paper proposes a novel logical ANN model by designing the new logical neurons and links in demand of logical representation. Compared with the recent works on logical ANN models, this logical ANN model has more clear corresponding with logical relations using the more direct mapping method herein, thus logical relations can be read out following the connection patterns of the network structure. Additionally, less neurons are used.

SSMD: Semi-Supervised Medical Image Detection with Adaptive Consistency and Heterogeneous Perturbation

Semi-Supervised classification and segmentation methods have been widely investigated in medical image analysis. Both approaches can improve the performance of fully-supervised methods with additional unlabeled data. However, as a fundamental task, semi-supervised object detection has not gained enough attention in the field of medical image analysis. In this paper, we propose a novel Semi-Supervised Medical image Detector (SSMD). The motivation behind SSMD is to provide free yet effective supervision for unlabeled data, by regularizing the predictions at each position to be consistent. To achieve the above idea, we develop a novel adaptive consistency cost function to regularize different components in the predictions. Moreover, we introduce heterogeneous perturbation strategies that work in both feature space and image space, so that the proposed detector is promising to produce powerful image representations and robust predictions. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed SSMD achieves the state-of-the-art performance at a wide range of settings. We also demonstrate the strength of each proposed module with comprehensive ablation studies.

Thermal Infrared Image Colorization for Nighttime Driving Scenes with Top-Down Guided Attention

Benefitting from insensitivity to light and high penetration of foggy environments, infrared cameras are widely used for sensing in nighttime traffic scenes. However, the low contrast and lack of chromaticity of thermal infrared (TIR) images hinder the human interpretation and portability of high-level computer vision algorithms. Colorization to translate a nighttime TIR image into a daytime color (NTIR2DC) image may be a promising way to facilitate nighttime scene perception. Despite recent impressive advances in image translation, semantic encoding entanglement and geometric distortion in the NTIR2DC task remain under-addressed. Hence, we propose a toP-down attEntion And gRadient aLignment based GAN, referred to as PearlGAN. A top-down guided attention module and an elaborate attentional loss are first designed to reduce the semantic encoding ambiguity during translation. Then, a structured gradient alignment loss is introduced to encourage edge consistency between the translated and input images. In addition, pixel-level annotation is carried out on a subset of FLIR and KAIST datasets to evaluate the semantic preservation performance of multiple translation methods. Furthermore, a new metric is devised to evaluate the geometric consistency in the translation process. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of the proposed PearlGAN over other image translation methods for the NTIR2DC task. The source code and labeled segmentation masks will be available at \url{https://github.com/FuyaLuo/PearlGAN/}.

SceneRec: Scene-Based Graph Neural Networks for Recommender Systems

Collaborative filtering has been largely used to advance modern recommender systems to predict user preference. A key component in collaborative filtering is representation learning, which aims to project users and items into a low dimensional space to capture collaborative signals. However, the scene information, which has effectively guided many recommendation tasks, is rarely considered in existing collaborative filtering methods. To bridge this gap, we focus on scene-based collaborative recommendation and propose a novel representation model SceneRec. SceneRec formally defines a scene as a set of pre-defined item categories that occur simultaneously in real-life situations and creatively designs an item-category-scene hierarchical structure to build a scene-based graph. In the scene-based graph, we adopt graph neural networks to learn scene-specific representation on each item node, which is further aggregated with latent representation learned from collaborative interactions to make recommendations. We perform extensive experiments on real-world E-commerce datasets and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Human Action Recognition from Various Data Modalities: A Review

Human Action Recognition (HAR) aims to understand human behavior and assign a label to each action. It has a wide range of applications, and therefore has been attracting increasing attention in the field of computer vision. Human actions can be represented using various data modalities, such as RGB, skeleton, depth, infrared, point cloud, event stream, audio, acceleration, radar, and WiFi signal, which encode different sources of useful yet distinct information and have various advantages depending on the application scenarios. Consequently, lots of existing works have attempted to investigate different types of approaches for HAR using various modalities. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of recent progress in deep learning methods for HAR based on the type of input data modality. Specifically, we review the current mainstream deep learning methods for single data modalities and multiple data modalities, including the fusion-based and the co-learning-based frameworks. We also present comparative results on several benchmark datasets for HAR, together with insightful observations and inspiring future research directions.