Understanding and Guiding Weakly Supervised Entity Alignment with Potential Isomorphism Propagation

Weakly Supervised Entity Alignment (EA) is the task of identifying equivalent entities across diverse knowledge graphs (KGs) using only a limited number of seed alignments. Despite substantial advances in aggregation-based weakly supervised EA, the underlying mechanisms in this setting remain unexplored. In this paper, we present a propagation perspective to analyze weakly supervised EA and explain the existing aggregation-based EA models. Our theoretical analysis reveals that these models essentially seek propagation operators for pairwise entity similarities. We further prove that, despite the structural heterogeneity of different KGs, the potentially aligned entities within aggregation-based EA models have isomorphic subgraphs, which is the core premise of EA but has not been investigated. Leveraging this insight, we introduce a potential isomorphism propagation operator to enhance the propagation of neighborhood information across KGs. We develop a general EA framework, PipEA, incorporating this operator to improve the accuracy of every type of aggregation-based model without altering the learning process. Extensive experiments substantiate our theoretical findings and demonstrate PipEA's significant performance gains over state-of-the-art weakly supervised EA methods. Our work not only advances the field but also enhances our comprehension of aggregation-based weakly supervised EA.

Towards Semantic Consistency: Dirichlet Energy Driven Robust Multi-Modal Entity Alignment

In Multi-Modal Knowledge Graphs (MMKGs), Multi-Modal Entity Alignment (MMEA) is crucial for identifying identical entities across diverse modal attributes. However, semantic inconsistency, mainly due to missing modal attributes, poses a significant challenge. Traditional approaches rely on attribute interpolation, but this often introduces modality noise, distorting the original semantics. Moreover, the lack of a universal theoretical framework limits advancements in achieving semantic consistency. This study introduces a novel approach, DESAlign, which addresses these issues by applying a theoretical framework based on Dirichlet energy to ensure semantic consistency. We discover that semantic inconsistency leads to model overfitting to modality noise, causing performance fluctuations, particularly when modalities are missing. DESAlign innovatively combats over-smoothing and interpolates absent semantics using existing modalities. Our approach includes a multi-modal knowledge graph learning strategy and a propagation technique that employs existing semantic features to compensate for missing ones, providing explicit Euler solutions. Comprehensive evaluations across 18 benchmarks, including monolingual and bilingual scenarios, demonstrate that DESAlign surpasses existing methods, setting a new standard in performance. Further testing on 42 benchmarks with high rates of missing modalities confirms its robustness, offering an effective solution to semantic inconsistency in real-world MMKGs.

Gradient Flow of Energy: A General and Efficient Approach for Entity Alignment Decoding

Entity alignment (EA), a pivotal process in integrating multi-source Knowledge Graphs (KGs), seeks to identify equivalent entity pairs across these graphs. Most existing approaches regard EA as a graph representation learning task, concentrating on enhancing graph encoders. However, the decoding process in EA - essential for effective operation and alignment accuracy - has received limited attention and remains tailored to specific datasets and model architectures, necessitating both entity and additional explicit relation embeddings. This specificity limits its applicability, particularly in GNN-based models. To address this gap, we introduce a novel, generalized, and efficient decoding approach for EA, relying solely on entity embeddings. Our method optimizes the decoding process by minimizing Dirichlet energy, leading to the gradient flow within the graph, to promote graph homophily. The discretization of the gradient flow produces a fast and scalable approach, termed Triple Feature Propagation (TFP). TFP innovatively channels gradient flow through three views: entity-to-entity, entity-to-relation, and relation-to-entity. This generalized gradient flow enables TFP to harness the multi-view structural information of KGs. Rigorous experimentation on diverse real-world datasets demonstrates that our approach significantly enhances various EA methods. Notably, the approach achieves these advancements with less than 6 seconds of additional computational time, establishing a new benchmark in efficiency and adaptability for future EA methods.

An Empirical Study of NetOps Capability of Pre-Trained Large Language Models

Nowadays, the versatile capabilities of Pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) have attracted much attention from the industry. However, some vertical domains are more interested in the in-domain capabilities of LLMs. For the Networks domain, we present NetEval, an evaluation set for measuring the comprehensive capabilities of LLMs in Network Operations (NetOps). NetEval is designed for evaluating the commonsense knowledge and inference ability in NetOps in a multi-lingual context. NetEval consists of 5,732 questions about NetOps, covering five different sub-domains of NetOps. With NetEval, we systematically evaluate the NetOps capability of 26 publicly available LLMs. The results show that only GPT-4 can achieve a performance competitive to humans. However, some open models like LLaMA 2 demonstrate significant potential.

How Does Diffusion Influence Pretrained Language Models on Out-of-Distribution Data?

Transformer-based pretrained language models (PLMs) have achieved great success in modern NLP. An important advantage of PLMs is good out-of-distribution (OOD) robustness. Recently, diffusion models have attracted a lot of work to apply diffusion to PLMs. It remains under-explored how diffusion influences PLMs on OOD data. The core of diffusion models is a forward diffusion process which gradually applies Gaussian noise to inputs, and a reverse denoising process which removes noise. The noised input reconstruction is a fundamental ability of diffusion models. We directly analyze OOD robustness by measuring the reconstruction loss, including testing the abilities to reconstruct OOD data, and to detect OOD samples. Experiments are conducted by analyzing different training parameters and data statistical features on eight datasets. It shows that finetuning PLMs with diffusion degrades the reconstruction ability on OOD data. The comparison also shows that diffusion models can effectively detect OOD samples, achieving state-of-the-art performance in most of the datasets with an absolute accuracy improvement up to 18%. These results indicate that diffusion reduces OOD robustness of PLMs.

Adaptive DNN Surgery for Selfish Inference Acceleration with On-demand Edge Resource

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have significantly improved the accuracy of intelligent applications on mobile devices. DNN surgery, which partitions DNN processing between mobile devices and multi-access edge computing (MEC) servers, can enable real-time inference despite the computational limitations of mobile devices. However, DNN surgery faces a critical challenge: determining the optimal computing resource demand from the server and the corresponding partition strategy, while considering both inference latency and MEC server usage costs. This problem is compounded by two factors: (1) the finite computing capacity of the MEC server, which is shared among multiple devices, leading to inter-dependent demands, and (2) the shift in modern DNN architecture from chains to directed acyclic graphs (DAGs), which complicates potential solutions. In this paper, we introduce a novel Decentralized DNN Surgery (DDS) framework. We formulate the partition strategy as a min-cut and propose a resource allocation game to adaptively schedule the demands of mobile devices in an MEC environment. We prove the existence of a Nash Equilibrium (NE), and develop an iterative algorithm to efficiently reach the NE for each device. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that DDS can effectively handle varying MEC scenarios, achieving up to 1.25$\times$ acceleration compared to the state-of-the-art algorithm.

See You Soon: Decoupled Iterative Refinement Framework for Interacting Hands Reconstruction from a Single RGB Image

Reconstructing interacting hands from a single RGB image is a very challenging task. On the one hand, severe mutual occlusion and similar local appearance between two hands confuse the extraction of visual features, resulting in the misalignment of estimated hand meshes and the image. On the other hand, there are complex interaction patterns between interacting hands, which significantly increases the solution space of hand poses and increases the difficulty of network learning. In this paper, we propose a decoupled iterative refinement framework to achieve pixel-alignment hand reconstruction while efficiently modeling the spatial relationship between hands. Specifically, we define two feature spaces with different characteristics, namely 2D visual feature space and 3D joint feature space. First, we obtain joint-wise features from the visual feature map and utilize a graph convolution network and a transformer to perform intra- and inter-hand information interaction in the 3D joint feature space, respectively. Then, we project the joint features with global information back into the 2D visual feature space in an obfuscation-free manner and utilize the 2D convolution for pixel-wise enhancement. By performing multiple alternate enhancements in the two feature spaces, our method can achieve an accurate and robust reconstruction of interacting hands. Our method outperforms all existing two-hand reconstruction methods by a large margin on the InterHand2.6M dataset. Meanwhile, our method shows a strong generalization ability for in-the-wild images.

Can Shuffling Video Benefit Temporal Bias Problem: A Novel Training Framework for Temporal Grounding

Temporal grounding aims to locate a target video moment that semantically corresponds to the given sentence query in an untrimmed video. However, recent works find that existing methods suffer a severe temporal bias problem. These methods do not reason the target moment locations based on the visual-textual semantic alignment but over-rely on the temporal biases of queries in training sets. To this end, this paper proposes a novel training framework for grounding models to use shuffled videos to address temporal bias problem without losing grounding accuracy. Our framework introduces two auxiliary tasks, cross-modal matching and temporal order discrimination, to promote the grounding model training. The cross-modal matching task leverages the content consistency between shuffled and original videos to force the grounding model to mine visual contents to semantically match queries. The temporal order discrimination task leverages the difference in temporal order to strengthen the understanding of long-term temporal contexts. Extensive experiments on Charades-STA and ActivityNet Captions demonstrate the effectiveness of our method for mitigating the reliance on temporal biases and strengthening the model's generalization ability against the different temporal distributions. Code is available at https://github.com/haojc/ShufflingVideosForTSG.

AWR: Adaptive Weighting Regression for 3D Hand Pose Estimation

In this paper, we propose an adaptive weighting regression (AWR) method to leverage the advantages of both detection-based and regression-based methods. Hand joint coordinates are estimated as discrete integration of all pixels in dense representation, guided by adaptive weight maps. This learnable aggregation process introduces both dense and joint supervision that allows end-to-end training and brings adaptability to weight maps, making the network more accurate and robust. Comprehensive exploration experiments are conducted to validate the effectiveness and generality of AWR under various experimental settings, especially its usefulness for different types of dense representation and input modality. Our method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods on four publicly available datasets, including NYU, ICVL, MSRA and HANDS 2017 dataset.