Offline Imitation of Badminton Player Behavior via Experiential Contexts and Brownian Motion

In the dynamic and rapid tactic involvements of turn-based sports, badminton stands out as an intrinsic paradigm that requires alter-dependent decision-making of players. While the advancement of learning from offline expert data in sequential decision-making has been witnessed in various domains, how to rally-wise imitate the behaviors of human players from offline badminton matches has remained underexplored. Replicating opponents' behavior benefits players by allowing them to undergo strategic development with direction before matches. However, directly applying existing methods suffers from the inherent hierarchy of the match and the compounding effect due to the turn-based nature of players alternatively taking actions. In this paper, we propose RallyNet, a novel hierarchical offline imitation learning model for badminton player behaviors: (i) RallyNet captures players' decision dependencies by modeling decision-making processes as a contextual Markov decision process. (ii) RallyNet leverages the experience to generate context as the agent's intent in the rally. (iii) To generate more realistic behavior, RallyNet leverages Geometric Brownian Motion (GBM) to model the interactions between players by introducing a valuable inductive bias for learning player behaviors. In this manner, RallyNet links player intents with interaction models with GBM, providing an understanding of interactions for sports analytics. We extensively validate RallyNet with the largest available real-world badminton dataset consisting of men's and women's singles, demonstrating its ability to imitate player behaviors. Results reveal RallyNet's superiority over offline imitation learning methods and state-of-the-art turn-based approaches, outperforming them by at least 16% in mean rule-based agent normalization score. Furthermore, we discuss various practical use cases to highlight RallyNet's applicability.

Root Cause Analysis In Microservice Using Neural Granger Causal Discovery

In recent years, microservices have gained widespread adoption in IT operations due to their scalability, maintenance, and flexibility. However, it becomes challenging for site reliability engineers (SREs) to pinpoint the root cause due to the complex relationships in microservices when facing system malfunctions. Previous research employed structured learning methods (e.g., PC-algorithm) to establish causal relationships and derive root causes from causal graphs. Nevertheless, they ignored the temporal order of time series data and failed to leverage the rich information inherent in the temporal relationships. For instance, in cases where there is a sudden spike in CPU utilization, it can lead to an increase in latency for other microservices. However, in this scenario, the anomaly in CPU utilization occurs before the latency increase, rather than simultaneously. As a result, the PC-algorithm fails to capture such characteristics. To address these challenges, we propose RUN, a novel approach for root cause analysis using neural Granger causal discovery with contrastive learning. RUN enhances the backbone encoder by integrating contextual information from time series, and leverages a time series forecasting model to conduct neural Granger causal discovery. In addition, RUN incorporates Pagerank with a personalization vector to efficiently recommend the top-k root causes. Extensive experiments conducted on the synthetic and real-world microservice-based datasets demonstrate that RUN noticeably outperforms the state-of-the-art root cause analysis methods. Moreover, we provide an analysis scenario for the sock-shop case to showcase the practicality and efficacy of RUN in microservice-based applications. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/zmlin1998/RUN.

NYCU-TWO at Memotion 3: Good Foundation, Good Teacher, then you have Good Meme Analysis

This paper presents a robust solution to the Memotion 3.0 Shared Task. The goal of this task is to classify the emotion and the corresponding intensity expressed by memes, which are usually in the form of images with short captions on social media. Understanding the multi-modal features of the given memes will be the key to solving the task. In this work, we use CLIP to extract aligned image-text features and propose a novel meme sentiment analysis framework, consisting of a Cooperative Teaching Model (CTM) for Task A and a Cascaded Emotion Classifier (CEC) for Tasks B&C. CTM is based on the idea of knowledge distillation, and can better predict the sentiment of a given meme in Task A; CEC can leverage the emotion intensity suggestion from the prediction of Task C to classify the emotion more precisely in Task B. Experiments show that we achieved the 2nd place ranking for both Task A and Task B and the 4th place ranking for Task C, with weighted F1-scores of 0.342, 0.784, and 0.535 respectively. The results show the robustness and effectiveness of our framework. Our code is released at github.

A Reinforcement Learning Badminton Environment for Simulating Player Tactics (Student Abstract)

Recent techniques for analyzing sports precisely has stimulated various approaches to improve player performance and fan engagement. However, existing approaches are only able to evaluate offline performance since testing in real-time matches requires exhaustive costs and cannot be replicated. To test in a safe and reproducible simulator, we focus on turn-based sports and introduce a badminton environment by simulating rallies with different angles of view and designing the states, actions, and training procedures. This benefits not only coaches and players by simulating past matches for tactic investigation, but also researchers from rapidly evaluating their novel algorithms.