Atmospheric turbulence removal using convolutional neural network

This paper describes a novel deep learning-based method for mitigating the effects of atmospheric distortion. We have built an end-to-end supervised convolutional neural network (CNN) to reconstruct turbulence-corrupted video sequence. Our framework has been developed on the residual learning concept, where the spatio-temporal distortions are learnt and predicted. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed method can deblur, remove ripple effect and enhance contrast of the video sequences simultaneously. Our model was trained and tested with both simulated and real distortions. Experimental results of the real distortions show that our method outperforms the existing ones by up to 3.8% in term of the quality of restored images, and it achieves faster speed than the state-of-the-art methods by up to 23 times with GPU implementation.

Towards Data Poisoning Attack against Knowledge Graph Embedding

Knowledge graph embedding (KGE) is a technique for learning continuous embeddings for entities and relations in the knowledge graph.Due to its benefit to a variety of downstream tasks such as knowledge graph completion, question answering and recommendation, KGE has gained significant attention recently. Despite its effectiveness in a benign environment, KGE' robustness to adversarial attacks is not well-studied. Existing attack methods on graph data cannot be directly applied to attack the embeddings of knowledge graph due to its heterogeneity. To fill this gap, we propose a collection of data poisoning attack strategies, which can effectively manipulate the plausibility of arbitrary targeted facts in a knowledge graph by adding or deleting facts on the graph. The effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed attack strategies are verified by extensive evaluations on two widely-used benchmarks.

Finding Similar Medical Questions from Question Answering Websites

The past few years have witnessed the flourishing of crowdsourced medical question answering (Q&A) websites. Patients who have medical information demands tend to post questions about their health conditions on these crowdsourced Q&A websites and get answers from other users. However, we observe that a large portion of new medical questions cannot be answered in time or receive only few answers from these websites. On the other hand, we notice that solved questions have great potential to solve this challenge. Motivated by these, we propose an end-to-end system that can automatically find similar questions for unsolved medical questions. By learning the vector presentation of unsolved questions and their candidate similar questions, the proposed system outputs similar questions according to the similarity between vector representations. Through the vector representation, the similar questions are found at the question level, and the diversity of medical questions expression issue can be addressed. Further, we handle two more important issues, i.e., training data generation issue and efficiency issue, associated with the LSTM training procedure and the retrieval of candidate similar questions. The effectiveness of the proposed system is validated on a large-scale real-world dataset collected from a crowdsourced maternal-infant Q&A website.

Towards Differentially Private Truth Discovery for Crowd Sensing Systems

Nowadays, crowd sensing becomes increasingly more popular due to the ubiquitous usage of mobile devices. However, the quality of such human-generated sensory data varies significantly among different users. To better utilize sensory data, the problem of truth discovery, whose goal is to estimate user quality and infer reliable aggregated results through quality-aware data aggregation, has emerged as a hot topic. Although the existing truth discovery approaches can provide reliable aggregated results, they fail to protect the private information of individual users. Moreover, crowd sensing systems typically involve a large number of participants, making encryption or secure multi-party computation based solutions difficult to deploy. To address these challenges, in this paper, we propose an efficient privacy-preserving truth discovery mechanism with theoretical guarantees of both utility and privacy. The key idea of the proposed mechanism is to perturb data from each user independently and then conduct weighted aggregation among users' perturbed data. The proposed approach is able to assign user weights based on information quality, and thus the aggregated results will not deviate much from the true results even when large noise is added. We adapt local differential privacy definition to this privacy-preserving task and demonstrate the proposed mechanism can satisfy local differential privacy while preserving high aggregation accuracy. We formally quantify utility and privacy trade-off and further verify the claim by experiments on both synthetic data and a real-world crowd sensing system.

Long-Term Memory Networks for Question Answering

Question answering is an important and difficult task in the natural language processing domain, because many basic natural language processing tasks can be cast into a question answering task. Several deep neural network architectures have been developed recently, which employ memory and inference components to memorize and reason over text information, and generate answers to questions. However, a major drawback of many such models is that they are capable of only generating single-word answers. In addition, they require large amount of training data to generate accurate answers. In this paper, we introduce the Long-Term Memory Network (LTMN), which incorporates both an external memory module and a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) module to comprehend the input data and generate multi-word answers. The LTMN model can be trained end-to-end using back-propagation and requires minimal supervision. We test our model on two synthetic data sets (based on Facebook's bAbI data set) and the real-world Stanford question answering data set, and show that it can achieve state-of-the-art performance.

Dipole: Diagnosis Prediction in Healthcare via Attention-based Bidirectional Recurrent Neural Networks

Predicting the future health information of patients from the historical Electronic Health Records (EHR) is a core research task in the development of personalized healthcare. Patient EHR data consist of sequences of visits over time, where each visit contains multiple medical codes, including diagnosis, medication, and procedure codes. The most important challenges for this task are to model the temporality and high dimensionality of sequential EHR data and to interpret the prediction results. Existing work solves this problem by employing recurrent neural networks (RNNs) to model EHR data and utilizing simple attention mechanism to interpret the results. However, RNN-based approaches suffer from the problem that the performance of RNNs drops when the length of sequences is large, and the relationships between subsequent visits are ignored by current RNN-based approaches. To address these issues, we propose {\sf Dipole}, an end-to-end, simple and robust model for predicting patients' future health information. Dipole employs bidirectional recurrent neural networks to remember all the information of both the past visits and the future visits, and it introduces three attention mechanisms to measure the relationships of different visits for the prediction. With the attention mechanisms, Dipole can interpret the prediction results effectively. Dipole also allows us to interpret the learned medical code representations which are confirmed positively by medical experts. Experimental results on two real world EHR datasets show that the proposed Dipole can significantly improve the prediction accuracy compared with the state-of-the-art diagnosis prediction approaches and provide clinically meaningful interpretation.

Multi-source Hierarchical Prediction Consolidation

In big data applications such as healthcare data mining, due to privacy concerns, it is necessary to collect predictions from multiple information sources for the same instance, with raw features being discarded or withheld when aggregating multiple predictions. Besides, crowd-sourced labels need to be aggregated to estimate the ground truth of the data. Because of the imperfect predictive models or human crowdsourcing workers, noisy and conflicting information is ubiquitous and inevitable. Although state-of-the-art aggregation methods have been proposed to handle label spaces with flat structures, as the label space is becoming more and more complicated, aggregation under a label hierarchical structure becomes necessary but has been largely ignored. These label hierarchies can be quite informative as they are usually created by domain experts to make sense of highly complex label correlations for many real-world cases like protein functionality interactions or disease relationships. We propose a novel multi-source hierarchical prediction consolidation method to effectively exploits the complicated hierarchical label structures to resolve the noisy and conflicting information that inherently originates from multiple imperfect sources. We formulate the problem as an optimization problem with a closed-form solution. The proposed method captures the smoothness overall information sources as well as penalizing any consolidation result that violates the constraints derived from the label hierarchy. The hierarchical instance similarity, as well as the consolidation result, are inferred in a totally unsupervised, iterative fashion. Experimental results on both synthetic and real-world datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed method over existing alternatives.

Multilabel Consensus Classification

In the era of big data, a large amount of noisy and incomplete data can be collected from multiple sources for prediction tasks. Combining multiple models or data sources helps to counteract the effects of low data quality and the bias of any single model or data source, and thus can improve the robustness and the performance of predictive models. Out of privacy, storage and bandwidth considerations, in certain circumstances one has to combine the predictions from multiple models or data sources to obtain the final predictions without accessing the raw data. Consensus-based prediction combination algorithms are effective for such situations. However, current research on prediction combination focuses on the single label setting, where an instance can have one and only one label. Nonetheless, data nowadays are usually multilabeled, such that more than one label have to be predicted at the same time. Direct applications of existing prediction combination methods to multilabel settings can lead to degenerated performance. In this paper, we address the challenges of combining predictions from multiple multilabel classifiers and propose two novel algorithms, MLCM-r (MultiLabel Consensus Maximization for ranking) and MLCM-a (MLCM for microAUC). These algorithms can capture label correlations that are common in multilabel classifications, and optimize corresponding performance metrics. Experimental results on popular multilabel classification tasks verify the theoretical analysis and effectiveness of the proposed methods.