Navigating Beyond Dropout: An Intriguing Solution Towards Generalizable Image Super Resolution

Deep learning has led to a dramatic leap on Single Image Super-Resolution (SISR) performances in recent years. %Despite the substantial advancement% While most existing work assumes a simple and fixed degradation model (e.g., bicubic downsampling), the research of Blind SR seeks to improve model generalization ability with unknown degradation. Recently, Kong et al pioneer the investigation of a more suitable training strategy for Blind SR using Dropout. Although such method indeed brings substantial generalization improvements via mitigating overfitting, we argue that Dropout simultaneously introduces undesirable side-effect that compromises model's capacity to faithfully reconstruct fine details. We show both the theoretical and experimental analyses in our paper, and furthermore, we present another easy yet effective training strategy that enhances the generalization ability of the model by simply modulating its first and second-order features statistics. Experimental results have shown that our method could serve as a model-agnostic regularization and outperforms Dropout on seven benchmark datasets including both synthetic and real-world scenarios.

Causal-Based Supervision of Attention in Graph Neural Network: A Better and Simpler Choice towards Powerful Attention

In recent years, attention mechanisms have demonstrated significant potential in the field of graph representation learning. However, while variants of attention-based GNNs are setting new benchmarks for numerous real-world datasets, recent works have pointed out that their induced attentions are less robust and generalizable against noisy graphs due to the lack of direct supervision. In this paper, we present a new framework that utilizes the tool of causality to provide a powerful supervision signal for the learning process of attention functions. Specifically, we estimate the direct causal effect of attention on the final prediction and then maximize such effect to guide attention to attend to more meaningful neighbors. Our method can serve as a plug-and-play module for any canonical attention-based GNNs in an end-to-end fashion. Extensive experiments on a wide range of benchmark datasets illustrated that, by directly supervising attention with our method, the model is able to converge faster with a clearer decision boundary, and thus yields better performances.

Multitask Weakly Supervised Learning for Origin Destination Travel Time Estimation

Travel time estimation from GPS trips is of great importance to order duration, ridesharing, taxi dispatching, etc. However, the dense trajectory is not always available due to the limitation of data privacy and acquisition, while the origin destination (OD) type of data, such as NYC taxi data, NYC bike data, and Capital Bikeshare data, is more accessible. To address this issue, this paper starts to estimate the OD trips travel time combined with the road network. Subsequently, a Multitask Weakly Supervised Learning Framework for Travel Time Estimation (MWSL TTE) has been proposed to infer transition probability between roads segments, and the travel time on road segments and intersection simultaneously. Technically, given an OD pair, the transition probability intends to recover the most possible route. And then, the output of travel time is equal to the summation of all segments' and intersections' travel time in this route. A novel route recovery function has been proposed to iteratively maximize the current route's co occurrence probability, and minimize the discrepancy between routes' probability distribution and the inverse distribution of routes' estimation loss. Moreover, the expected log likelihood function based on a weakly supervised framework has been deployed in optimizing the travel time from road segments and intersections concurrently. We conduct experiments on a wide range of real world taxi datasets in Xi'an and Chengdu and demonstrate our method's effectiveness on route recovery and travel time estimation.

Easy Begun is Half Done: Spatial-Temporal Graph Modeling with ST-Curriculum Dropout

Spatial-temporal (ST) graph modeling, such as traffic speed forecasting and taxi demand prediction, is an important task in deep learning area. However, for the nodes in graph, their ST patterns can vary greatly in difficulties for modeling, owning to the heterogeneous nature of ST data. We argue that unveiling the nodes to the model in a meaningful order, from easy to complex, can provide performance improvements over traditional training procedure. The idea has its root in Curriculum Learning which suggests in the early stage of training models can be sensitive to noise and difficult samples. In this paper, we propose ST-Curriculum Dropout, a novel and easy-to-implement strategy for spatial-temporal graph modeling. Specifically, we evaluate the learning difficulty of each node in high-level feature space and drop those difficult ones out to ensure the model only needs to handle fundamental ST relations at the beginning, before gradually moving to hard ones. Our strategy can be applied to any canonical deep learning architecture without extra trainable parameters, and extensive experiments on a wide range of datasets are conducted to illustrate that, by controlling the difficulty level of ST relations as the training progresses, the model is able to capture better representation of the data and thus yields better generalization.

GOF-TTE: Generative Online Federated Learning Framework for Travel Time Estimation

Estimating the travel time of a path is an essential topic for intelligent transportation systems. It serves as the foundation for real-world applications, such as traffic monitoring, route planning, and taxi dispatching. However, building a model for such a data-driven task requires a large amount of users' travel information, which directly relates to their privacy and thus is less likely to be shared. The non-Independent and Identically Distributed (non-IID) trajectory data across data owners also make a predictive model extremely challenging to be personalized if we directly apply federated learning. Finally, previous work on travel time estimation does not consider the real-time traffic state of roads, which we argue can significantly influence the prediction. To address the above challenges, we introduce GOF-TTE for the mobile user group, Generative Online Federated Learning Framework for Travel Time Estimation, which I) utilizes the federated learning approach, allowing private data to be kept on client devices while training, and designs the global model as an online generative model shared by all clients to infer the real-time road traffic state. II) apart from sharing a base model at the server, adapts a fine-tuned personalized model for every client to study their personal driving habits, making up for the residual error made by localized global model prediction. % III) designs the global model as an online generative model shared by all clients to infer the real-time road traffic state. We also employ a simple privacy attack to our framework and implement the differential privacy mechanism to further guarantee privacy safety. Finally, we conduct experiments on two real-world public taxi datasets of DiDi Chengdu and Xi'an. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework.

Route to Time and Time to Route: Travel Time Estimation from Sparse Trajectories

Due to the rapid development of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, many online web apps (e.g., Google Map and Uber) estimate the travel time of trajectory data collected by mobile devices. However, in reality, complex factors, such as network communication and energy constraints, make multiple trajectories collected at a low sampling rate. In this case, this paper aims to resolve the problem of travel time estimation (TTE) and route recovery in sparse scenarios, which often leads to the uncertain label of travel time and route between continuously sampled GPS points. We formulate this problem as an inexact supervision problem in which the training data has coarsely grained labels and jointly solve the tasks of TTE and route recovery. And we argue that both two tasks are complementary to each other in the model-learning procedure and hold such a relation: more precise travel time can lead to better inference for routes, in turn, resulting in a more accurate time estimation). Based on this assumption, we propose an EM algorithm to alternatively estimate the travel time of inferred route through weak supervision in E step and retrieve the route based on estimated travel time in M step for sparse trajectories. We conducted experiments on three real-world trajectory datasets and demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method.

ST-ExpertNet: A Deep Expert Framework for Traffic Prediction

Recently, forecasting the crowd flows has become an important research topic, and plentiful technologies have achieved good performances. As we all know, the flow at a citywide level is in a mixed state with several basic patterns (e.g., commuting, working, and commercial) caused by the city area functional distributions (e.g., developed commercial areas, educational areas and parks). However, existing technologies have been criticized for their lack of considering the differences in the flow patterns among regions since they want to build only one comprehensive model to learn the mixed flow tensors. Recognizing this limitation, we present a new perspective on flow prediction and propose an explainable framework named ST-ExpertNet, which can adopt every spatial-temporal model and train a set of functional experts devoted to specific flow patterns. Technically, we train a bunch of experts based on the Mixture of Experts (MoE), which guides each expert to specialize in different kinds of flow patterns in sample spaces by using the gating network. We define several criteria, including comprehensiveness, sparsity, and preciseness, to construct the experts for better interpretability and performances. We conduct experiments on a wide range of real-world taxi and bike datasets in Beijing and NYC. The visualizations of the expert's intermediate results demonstrate that our ST-ExpertNet successfully disentangles the city's mixed flow tensors along with the city layout, e.g., the urban ring road structure. Different network architectures, such as ST-ResNet, ConvLSTM, and CNN, have been adopted into our ST-ExpertNet framework for experiments and the results demonstrates the superiority of our framework in both interpretability and performances.