Recent studies have shown remarkable success in universal style transfer which transfers arbitrary visual styles to content images. However, existing approaches suffer from the aesthetic-unrealistic problem that introduces disharmonious patterns and evident artifacts, making the results easy to spot from real paintings. To address this limitation, we propose AesUST, a novel Aesthetic-enhanced Universal Style Transfer approach that can generate aesthetically more realistic and pleasing results for arbitrary styles. Specifically, our approach introduces an aesthetic discriminator to learn the universal human-delightful aesthetic features from a large corpus of artist-created paintings. Then, the aesthetic features are incorporated to enhance the style transfer process via a novel Aesthetic-aware Style-Attention (AesSA) module. Such an AesSA module enables our AesUST to efficiently and flexibly integrate the style patterns according to the global aesthetic channel distribution of the style image and the local semantic spatial distribution of the content image. Moreover, we also develop a new two-stage transfer training strategy with two aesthetic regularizations to train our model more effectively, further improving stylization performance. Extensive experiments and user studies demonstrate that our approach synthesizes aesthetically more harmonious and realistic results than state of the art, greatly narrowing the disparity with real artist-created paintings. Our code is available at https://github.com/EndyWon/AesUST.
Contrastive learning with Transformer-based sequence encoder has gained predominance for sequential recommendation. It maximizes the agreements between paired sequence augmentations that share similar semantics. However, existing contrastive learning approaches in sequential recommendation mainly center upon left-to-right unidirectional Transformers as base encoders, which are suboptimal for sequential recommendation because user behaviors may not be a rigid left-to-right sequence. To tackle that, we propose a novel framework named \textbf{C}ontrastive learning with \textbf{Bi}directional \textbf{T}ransformers for sequential recommendation (\textbf{CBiT}). Specifically, we first apply the slide window technique for long user sequences in bidirectional Transformers, which allows for a more fine-grained division of user sequences. Then we combine the cloze task mask and the dropout mask to generate high-quality positive samples and perform multi-pair contrastive learning, which demonstrates better performance and adaptability compared with the normal one-pair contrastive learning. Moreover, we introduce a novel dynamic loss reweighting strategy to balance between the cloze task loss and the contrastive loss. Experiment results on three public benchmark datasets show that our model outperforms state-of-the-art models for sequential recommendation.
Grounding dialogue system with external knowledge is a promising way to improve the quality of responses. Most existing works adopt knowledge graphs (KGs) as the external resources, paying attention to the contribution of entities in the last utterance of the dialogue for context understanding and response generation. Nevertheless, the correlations between knowledge implied in the multi-turn context and the transition regularities between relations in KGs are under-explored. To this end, we propose a Relation Transition aware Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue Generation model (RT-KGD). Specifically, inspired by the latent logic of human conversation, our model integrates dialogue-level relation transition regularities with turn-level entity semantic information. In this manner, the interaction between knowledge is considered to produce abundant clues for predicting the appropriate knowledge and generating coherent responses. The experimental results on both automatic evaluation and manual evaluation indicate that our model outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.
Nonsmooth optimization finds wide applications in many engineering fields. In this work, we propose to utilize the {Randomized Coordinate Subgradient Method} (RCS) for solving both nonsmooth convex and nonsmooth nonconvex (nonsmooth weakly convex) optimization problems. At each iteration, RCS randomly selects one block coordinate rather than all the coordinates to update. Motivated by practical applications, we consider the {linearly bounded subgradients assumption} for the objective function, which is much more general than the Lipschitz continuity assumption. Under such a general assumption, we conduct thorough convergence analysis for RCS in both convex and nonconvex cases and establish both expected convergence rate and almost sure asymptotic convergence results. In order to derive these convergence results, we establish a convergence lemma and the relationship between the global metric subregularity properties of a weakly convex function and its Moreau envelope, which are fundamental and of independent interests. Finally, we conduct several experiments to show the possible superiority of RCS over the subgradient method.
Sequential Recommendation aims to predict the next item based on user behaviour. Recently, Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) has been proposed to improve recommendation performance. However, most of existing SSL methods use a uniform data augmentation scheme, which loses the sequence correlation of an original sequence. To this end, in this paper, we propose a Learnable Model Augmentation self-supervised learning for sequential Recommendation (LMA4Rec). Specifically, LMA4Rec first takes model augmentation as a supplementary method for data augmentation to generate views. Then, LMA4Rec uses learnable Bernoulli dropout to implement model augmentation learnable operations. Next, self-supervised learning is used between the contrastive views to extract self-supervised signals from an original sequence. Finally, experiments on three public datasets show that the LMA4Rec method effectively improves sequential recommendation performance compared with baseline methods.
Story ending generation is an interesting and challenging task, which aims to generate a coherent and reasonable ending given a story context. The key challenges of the task lie in how to comprehend the story context sufficiently and handle the implicit knowledge behind story clues effectively, which are still under-explored by previous work. In this paper, we propose a Story Heterogeneous Graph Network (SHGN) to explicitly model both the information of story context at different granularity levels and the multi-grained interactive relations among them. In detail, we consider commonsense knowledge, words and sentences as three types of nodes. To aggregate non-local information, a global node is also introduced. Given this heterogeneous graph network, the node representations are updated through graph propagation, which adequately utilizes commonsense knowledge to facilitate story comprehension. Moreover, we design two auxiliary tasks to implicitly capture the sentiment trend and key events lie in the context. The auxiliary tasks are jointly optimized with the primary story ending generation task in a multi-task learning strategy. Extensive experiments on the ROCStories Corpus show that the developed model achieves new state-of-the-art performances. Human study further demonstrates that our model generates more reasonable story endings.
In this paper, we present the texture reformer, a fast and universal neural-based framework for interactive texture transfer with user-specified guidance. The challenges lie in three aspects: 1) the diversity of tasks, 2) the simplicity of guidance maps, and 3) the execution efficiency. To address these challenges, our key idea is to use a novel feed-forward multi-view and multi-stage synthesis procedure consisting of I) a global view structure alignment stage, II) a local view texture refinement stage, and III) a holistic effect enhancement stage to synthesize high-quality results with coherent structures and fine texture details in a coarse-to-fine fashion. In addition, we also introduce a novel learning-free view-specific texture reformation (VSTR) operation with a new semantic map guidance strategy to achieve more accurate semantic-guided and structure-preserved texture transfer. The experimental results on a variety of application scenarios demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our framework. And compared with the state-of-the-art interactive texture transfer algorithms, it not only achieves higher quality results but, more remarkably, also is 2-5 orders of magnitude faster. Code is available at https://github.com/EndyWon/Texture-Reformer.
With the development of Internet technology, the phenomenon of information overload is becoming more and more obvious. It takes a lot of time for users to obtain the information they need. However, keyphrases that summarize document information highly are helpful for users to quickly obtain and understand documents. For academic resources, most existing studies extract keyphrases through the title and abstract of papers. We find that title information in references also contains author-assigned keyphrases. Therefore, this article uses reference information and applies two typical methods of unsupervised extraction methods (TF*IDF and TextRank), two representative traditional supervised learning algorithms (Na\"ive Bayes and Conditional Random Field) and a supervised deep learning model (BiLSTM-CRF), to analyze the specific performance of reference information on keyphrase extraction. It is expected to improve the quality of keyphrase recognition from the perspective of expanding the source text. The experimental results show that reference information can increase precision, recall, and F1 of automatic keyphrase extraction to a certain extent. This indicates the usefulness of reference information on keyphrase extraction of academic papers and provides a new idea for the following research on automatic keyphrase extraction.
Sports game summarization aims at generating sports news from live commentaries. However, existing datasets are all constructed through automated collection and cleaning processes, resulting in a lot of noise. Besides, current works neglect the knowledge gap between live commentaries and sports news, which limits the performance of sports game summarization. In this paper, we introduce K-SportsSum, a new dataset with two characteristics: (1) K-SportsSum collects a large amount of data from massive games. It has 7,854 commentary-news pairs. To improve the quality, K-SportsSum employs a manual cleaning process; (2) Different from existing datasets, to narrow the knowledge gap, K-SportsSum further provides a large-scale knowledge corpus that contains the information of 523 sports teams and 14,724 sports players. Additionally, we also introduce a knowledge-enhanced summarizer that utilizes both live commentaries and the knowledge to generate sports news. Extensive experiments on K-SportsSum and SportsSum datasets show that our model achieves new state-of-the-art performances. Qualitative analysis and human study further verify that our model generates more informative sports news.