Multi-spatial Multi-temporal Air Quality Forecasting with Integrated Monitoring and Reanalysis Data

Accurate air quality forecasting is crucial for public health, environmental monitoring and protection, and urban planning. However, existing methods fail to effectively utilize multi-scale information, both spatially and temporally. Spatially, there is a lack of integration between individual monitoring stations and city-wide scales. Temporally, the periodic nature of air quality variations is often overlooked or inadequately considered. To address these limitations, we present a novel Multi-spatial Multi-temporal air quality forecasting method based on Graph Convolutional Networks and Gated Recurrent Units (M2G2), bridging the gap in air quality forecasting across spatial and temporal scales. The proposed framework consists of two modules: Multi-scale Spatial GCN (MS-GCN) for spatial information fusion and Multi-scale Temporal GRU(MT-GRU) for temporal information integration. In the spatial dimension, the MS-GCN module employs a bidirectional learnable structure and a residual structure, enabling comprehensive information exchange between individual monitoring stations and the city-scale graph. Regarding the temporal dimension, the MT-GRU module adaptively combines information from different temporal scales through parallel hidden states. Leveraging meteorological indicators and four air quality indicators, we present comprehensive comparative analyses and ablation experiments, showcasing the higher accuracy of M2G2 in comparison to nine currently available advanced approaches across all aspects. The improvements of M2G2 over the second-best method on RMSE of the 24h/48h/72h are as follows: PM2.5: (7.72%, 6.67%, 10.45%); PM10: (6.43%, 5.68%, 7.73%); NO2: (5.07%, 7.76%, 16.60%); O3: (6.46%, 6.86%, 9.79%). Furthermore, we demonstrate the effectiveness of each module of M2G2 by ablation study.

An Adaptive Framework of Geographical Group-Specific Network on O2O Recommendation

Online to offline recommendation strongly correlates with the user and service's spatiotemporal information, therefore calling for a higher degree of model personalization. The traditional methodology is based on a uniform model structure trained by collected centralized data, which is unlikely to capture all user patterns over different geographical areas or time periods. To tackle this challenge, we propose a geographical group-specific modeling method called GeoGrouse, which simultaneously studies the common knowledge as well as group-specific knowledge of user preferences. An automatic grouping paradigm is employed and verified based on users' geographical grouping indicators. Offline and online experiments are conducted to verify the effectiveness of our approach, and substantial business improvement is achieved.

Collapse-Oriented Adversarial Training with Triplet Decoupling for Robust Image Retrieval

Adversarial training has achieved substantial performance in defending image retrieval systems against adversarial examples. However, existing studies still suffer from two major limitations: model collapse and weak adversary. This paper addresses these two limitations by proposing collapse-oriented (COLO) adversarial training with triplet decoupling (TRIDE). Specifically, COLO prevents model collapse by temporally orienting the perturbation update direction with a new collapse metric, while TRIDE yields a strong adversary by spatially decoupling the update targets of perturbation into the anchor and the two candidates of a triplet. Experimental results demonstrate that our COLO-TRIDE outperforms the current state of the art by 7% on average over 10 robustness metrics and across 3 popular datasets. In addition, we identify the fairness limitations of commonly used robustness metrics in image retrieval and propose a new metric for more meaningful robustness evaluation. Codes will be made publicly available on GitHub.

Focus on Hiders: Exploring Hidden Threats for Enhancing Adversarial Training

Adversarial training is often formulated as a min-max problem, however, concentrating only on the worst adversarial examples causes alternating repetitive confusion of the model, i.e., previously defended or correctly classified samples are not defensible or accurately classifiable in subsequent adversarial training. We characterize such non-ignorable samples as "hiders", which reveal the hidden high-risk regions within the secure area obtained through adversarial training and prevent the model from finding the real worst cases. We demand the model to prevent hiders when defending against adversarial examples for improving accuracy and robustness simultaneously. By rethinking and redefining the min-max optimization problem for adversarial training, we propose a generalized adversarial training algorithm called Hider-Focused Adversarial Training (HFAT). HFAT introduces the iterative evolution optimization strategy to simplify the optimization problem and employs an auxiliary model to reveal hiders, effectively combining the optimization directions of standard adversarial training and prevention hiders. Furthermore, we introduce an adaptive weighting mechanism that facilitates the model in adaptively adjusting its focus between adversarial examples and hiders during different training periods. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method based on extensive experiments, and ensure that HFAT can provide higher robustness and accuracy.

Long-term Dependency for 3D Reconstruction of Freehand Ultrasound Without External Tracker

Objective: Reconstructing freehand ultrasound in 3D without any external tracker has been a long-standing challenge in ultrasound-assisted procedures. We aim to define new ways of parameterising long-term dependencies, and evaluate the performance. Methods: First, long-term dependency is encoded by transformation positions within a frame sequence. This is achieved by combining a sequence model with a multi-transformation prediction. Second, two dependency factors are proposed, anatomical image content and scanning protocol, for contributing towards accurate reconstruction. Each factor is quantified experimentally by reducing respective training variances. Results: 1) The added long-term dependency up to 400 frames at 20 frames per second (fps) indeed improved reconstruction, with an up to 82.4% lowered accumulated error, compared with the baseline performance. The improvement was found to be dependent on sequence length, transformation interval and scanning protocol and, unexpectedly, not on the use of recurrent networks with long-short term modules; 2) Decreasing either anatomical or protocol variance in training led to poorer reconstruction accuracy. Interestingly, greater performance was gained from representative protocol patterns, than from representative anatomical features. Conclusion: The proposed algorithm uses hyperparameter tuning to effectively utilise long-term dependency. The proposed dependency factors are of practical significance in collecting diverse training data, regulating scanning protocols and developing efficient networks. Significance: The proposed new methodology with publicly available volunteer data and code for parametersing the long-term dependency, experimentally shown to be valid sources of performance improvement, which could potentially lead to better model development and practical optimisation of the reconstruction application.

Towards Deep Learning Models Resistant to Transfer-based Adversarial Attacks via Data-centric Robust Learning

Transfer-based adversarial attacks raise a severe threat to real-world deep learning systems since they do not require access to target models. Adversarial training (AT), which is recognized as the strongest defense against white-box attacks, has also guaranteed high robustness to (black-box) transfer-based attacks. However, AT suffers from heavy computational overhead since it optimizes the adversarial examples during the whole training process. In this paper, we demonstrate that such heavy optimization is not necessary for AT against transfer-based attacks. Instead, a one-shot adversarial augmentation prior to training is sufficient, and we name this new defense paradigm Data-centric Robust Learning (DRL). Our experimental results show that DRL outperforms widely-used AT techniques (e.g., PGD-AT, TRADES, EAT, and FAT) in terms of black-box robustness and even surpasses the top-1 defense on RobustBench when combined with diverse data augmentations and loss regularizations. We also identify other benefits of DRL, for instance, the model generalization capability and robust fairness.

Multi-Modal Knowledge Graph Transformer Framework for Multi-Modal Entity Alignment

Multi-Modal Entity Alignment (MMEA) is a critical task that aims to identify equivalent entity pairs across multi-modal knowledge graphs (MMKGs). However, this task faces challenges due to the presence of different types of information, including neighboring entities, multi-modal attributes, and entity types. Directly incorporating the above information (e.g., concatenation or attention) can lead to an unaligned information space. To address these challenges, we propose a novel MMEA transformer, called MoAlign, that hierarchically introduces neighbor features, multi-modal attributes, and entity types to enhance the alignment task. Taking advantage of the transformer's ability to better integrate multiple information, we design a hierarchical modifiable self-attention block in a transformer encoder to preserve the unique semantics of different information. Furthermore, we design two entity-type prefix injection methods to integrate entity-type information using type prefixes, which help to restrict the global information of entities not present in the MMKGs. Our extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms strong competitors and achieves excellent entity alignment performance.

Exploiting Facial Relationships and Feature Aggregation for Multi-Face Forgery Detection

Face forgery techniques have emerged as a forefront concern, and numerous detection approaches have been proposed to address this challenge. However, existing methods predominantly concentrate on single-face manipulation detection, leaving the more intricate and realistic realm of multi-face forgeries relatively unexplored. This paper proposes a novel framework explicitly tailored for multi-face forgery detection,filling a critical gap in the current research. The framework mainly involves two modules:(i) a facial relationships learning module, which generates distinguishable local features for each face within images,(ii) a global feature aggregation module that leverages the mutual constraints between global and local information to enhance forgery detection accuracy.Our experimental results on two publicly available multi-face forgery datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in multi-face forgery detection scenarios.

Incorporating Neuro-Inspired Adaptability for Continual Learning in Artificial Intelligence

Continual learning aims to empower artificial intelligence (AI) with strong adaptability to the real world. For this purpose, a desirable solution should properly balance memory stability with learning plasticity, and acquire sufficient compatibility to capture the observed distributions. Existing advances mainly focus on preserving memory stability to overcome catastrophic forgetting, but remain difficult to flexibly accommodate incremental changes as biological intelligence (BI) does. By modeling a robust Drosophila learning system that actively regulates forgetting with multiple learning modules, here we propose a generic approach that appropriately attenuates old memories in parameter distributions to improve learning plasticity, and accordingly coordinates a multi-learner architecture to ensure solution compatibility. Through extensive theoretical and empirical validation, our approach not only clearly enhances the performance of continual learning, especially over synaptic regularization methods in task-incremental settings, but also potentially advances the understanding of neurological adaptive mechanisms, serving as a novel paradigm to progress AI and BI together.

Privileged Anatomical and Protocol Discrimination in Trackerless 3D Ultrasound Reconstruction

Three-dimensional (3D) freehand ultrasound (US) reconstruction without using any additional external tracking device has seen recent advances with deep neural networks (DNNs). In this paper, we first investigated two identified contributing factors of the learned inter-frame correlation that enable the DNN-based reconstruction: anatomy and protocol. We propose to incorporate the ability to represent these two factors - readily available during training - as the privileged information to improve existing DNN-based methods. This is implemented in a new multi-task method, where the anatomical and protocol discrimination are used as auxiliary tasks. We further develop a differentiable network architecture to optimise the branching location of these auxiliary tasks, which controls the ratio between shared and task-specific network parameters, for maximising the benefits from the two auxiliary tasks. Experimental results, on a dataset with 38 forearms of 19 volunteers acquired with 6 different scanning protocols, show that 1) both anatomical and protocol variances are enabling factors for DNN-based US reconstruction; 2) learning how to discriminate different subjects (anatomical variance) and predefined types of scanning paths (protocol variance) both significantly improve frame prediction accuracy, volume reconstruction overlap, accumulated tracking error and final drift, using the proposed algorithm.