Feature selection is a crucial step in data mining to enhance model performance by reducing data dimensionality. However, the increasing dimensionality of collected data exacerbates the challenge known as the "curse of dimensionality", where computation grows exponentially with the number of dimensions. To tackle this issue, evolutionary computational (EC) approaches have gained popularity due to their simplicity and applicability. Unfortunately, the diverse designs of EC methods result in varying abilities to handle different data, often underutilizing and not sharing information effectively. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called PSO-based Multi-task Evolutionary Learning (MEL) that leverages multi-task learning to address these challenges. By incorporating information sharing between different feature selection tasks, MEL achieves enhanced learning ability and efficiency. We evaluate the effectiveness of MEL through extensive experiments on 22 high-dimensional datasets. Comparing against 24 EC approaches, our method exhibits strong competitiveness. Additionally, we have open-sourced our code on GitHub at https://github.com/wangxb96/MEL.
Terahertz communication networks and intelligent reflecting surfaces exhibit significant potential in advancing wireless networks, particularly within the domain of aerial-based multi-access edge computing systems. These technologies enable efficient offloading of computational tasks from user electronic devices to Unmanned Aerial Vehicles or local execution. For the generation of high-quality task-offloading allocations, conventional numerical optimization methods often struggle to solve challenging combinatorial optimization problems within the limited channel coherence time, thereby failing to respond quickly to dynamic changes in system conditions. To address this challenge, we propose a deep learning-based optimization framework called Iterative Order-Preserving policy Optimization (IOPO), which enables the generation of energy-efficient task-offloading decisions within milliseconds. Unlike exhaustive search methods, IOPO provides continuous updates to the offloading decisions without resorting to exhaustive search, resulting in accelerated convergence and reduced computational complexity, particularly when dealing with complex problems characterized by extensive solution spaces. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework can generate energy-efficient task-offloading decisions within a very short time period, outperforming other benchmark methods.
Multi-Intent Spoken Language Understanding (SLU), a novel and more complex scenario of SLU, is attracting increasing attention. Unlike traditional SLU, each intent in this scenario has its specific scope. Semantic information outside the scope even hinders the prediction, which tremendously increases the difficulty of intent detection. More seriously, guiding slot filling with these inaccurate intent labels suffers error propagation problems, resulting in unsatisfied overall performance. To solve these challenges, in this paper, we propose a novel Scope-Sensitive Result Attention Network (SSRAN) based on Transformer, which contains a Scope Recognizer (SR) and a Result Attention Network (RAN). Scope Recognizer assignments scope information to each token, reducing the distraction of out-of-scope tokens. Result Attention Network effectively utilizes the bidirectional interaction between results of slot filling and intent detection, mitigating the error propagation problem. Experiments on two public datasets indicate that our model significantly improves SLU performance (5.4\% and 2.1\% on Overall accuracy) over the state-of-the-art baseline.
Federated Learning (FL) is a new decentralized learning used for training machine learning algorithms where a global model iteratively gathers the parameters of local models but does not access their local data. A key challenge in FL is to handle the heterogeneity of local data distribution, resulting in a drifted global model, which is hard to converge. To cope with this challenge, current methods adopt different strategies like knowledge distillation, weighted model aggregation, and multi-task learning, as regulation. We refer to these approaches as asynchronous FL since they align user models in either a local or post-hoc manner where model drift has already happened or has been underestimated. In this paper, we propose an active and synchronous correlation approach to solve the challenge of user heterogeneity in FL. Specifically, we aim to approximate FL as the standard deep learning by actively and synchronously scheduling user learning pace in each round with a dynamic multi-phase curriculum. A global curriculum ensembles all user curriculum on its server by the auto-regressive auto-encoder. Then the global curriculum is divided into multiple phases and broadcast to users to measure and align the domain-agnostic learning pace. Empirical studies demonstrate that our approach equips FL with state-of-the-art generalization performance over existing asynchronous approaches, even facing severe user heterogeneity.
The Stackelberg security game is played between a defender and an attacker, where the defender needs to allocate a limited amount of resources to multiple targets in order to minimize the loss due to adversarial attack by the attacker. While allowing targets to have different values, classic settings often assume uniform requirements to defend the targets. This enables existing results that study mixed strategies (randomized allocation algorithms) to adopt a compact representation of the mixed strategies. In this work, we initiate the study of mixed strategies for the security games in which the targets can have different defending requirements. In contrast to the case of uniform defending requirement, for which an optimal mixed strategy can be computed efficiently, we show that computing the optimal mixed strategy is NP-hard for the general defending requirements setting. However, we show that strong upper and lower bounds for the optimal mixed strategy defending result can be derived. We propose an efficient close-to-optimal Patching algorithm that computes mixed strategies that use only few pure strategies. We also study the setting when the game is played on a network and resource sharing is enabled between neighboring targets. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm in several large real-world datasets.
Spoken Language Understanding (SLU), a core component of the task-oriented dialogue system, expects a shorter inference latency due to the impatience of humans. Non-autoregressive SLU models clearly increase the inference speed but suffer uncoordinated-slot problems caused by the lack of sequential dependency information among each slot chunk. To gap this shortcoming, in this paper, we propose a novel non-autoregressive SLU model named Layered-Refine Transformer, which contains a Slot Label Generation (SLG) task and a Layered Refine Mechanism (LRM). SLG is defined as generating the next slot label with the token sequence and generated slot labels. With SLG, the non-autoregressive model can efficiently obtain dependency information during training and spend no extra time in inference. LRM predicts the preliminary SLU results from Transformer's middle states and utilizes them to guide the final prediction. Experiments on two public datasets indicate that our model significantly improves SLU performance (1.5\% on Overall accuracy) while substantially speed up (more than 10 times) the inference process over the state-of-the-art baseline.
Deepfakes is a branch of malicious techniques that transplant a target face to the original one in videos, resulting in serious problems such as infringement of copyright, confusion of information, or even public panic. Previous efforts for Deepfakes videos detection mainly focused on appearance features, which have a risk of being bypassed by sophisticated manipulation, also resulting in high model complexity and sensitiveness to noise. Besides, how to mine the temporal features of manipulated videos and exploit them is still an open question. We propose an efficient and robust framework named LRNet for detecting Deepfakes videos through temporal modeling on precise geometric features. A novel calibration module is devised to enhance the precision of geometric features, making it more discriminative, and a two-stream Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) is constructed for sufficient exploitation of temporal features. Compared to previous methods, our proposed method is lighter-weighted and easier to train. Moreover, our method has shown robustness in detecting highly compressed or noise corrupted videos. Our model achieved 0.999 AUC on FaceForensics++ dataset. Meanwhile, it has a graceful decline in performance (-0.042 AUC) when faced with highly compressed videos.
Spoken language understanding (SLU), which is a core component of the task-oriented dialogue system, has made substantial progress in the research of single-turn dialogue. However, the performance in multi-turn dialogue is still not satisfactory in the sense that the existing multi-turn SLU methods have low portability and compatibility for other single-turn SLU models. Further, existing multi-turn SLU methods do not exploit the historical predicted results when predicting the current utterance, which wastes helpful information. To gap those shortcomings, in this paper, we propose a novel Result-based Portable Framework for SLU (RPFSLU). RPFSLU allows most existing single-turn SLU models to obtain the contextual information from multi-turn dialogues and takes full advantage of predicted results in the dialogue history during the current prediction. Experimental results on the public dataset KVRET have shown that all SLU models in baselines acquire enhancement by RPFSLU on multi-turn SLU tasks.
Distantly supervised relation extraction has been widely applied in knowledge base construction due to its less requirement of human efforts. However, the automatically established training datasets in distant supervision contain low-quality instances with noisy words and overlapped relations, introducing great challenges to the accurate extraction of relations. To address this problem, we propose a novel Regularized Attentive Capsule Network (RA-CapNet) to better identify highly overlapped relations in each informal sentence. To discover multiple relation features in an instance, we embed multi-head attention into the capsule network as the low-level capsules, where the subtraction of two entities acts as a new form of relation query to select salient features regardless of their positions. To further discriminate overlapped relation features, we devise disagreement regularization to explicitly encourage the diversity among both multiple attention heads and low-level capsules. Extensive experiments conducted on widely used datasets show that our model achieves significant improvements in relation extraction.
Liquify is a common technique for image editing, which can be used for image distortion. Due to the uncertainty in the distortion variation, restoring distorted images caused by liquify filter is a challenging task. To edit images in an efficient way, distorted images are expected to be restored automatically. This paper aims at the distorted image restoration, which is characterized by seeking the appropriate warping and completion of a distorted image. Existing methods focus on the hardware assistance or the geometric principle to solve the specific regular deformation caused by natural phenomena, but they cannot handle the irregularity and uncertainty of artificial distortion in this task. To address this issue, we propose a novel generative and discriminative learning method based on deep neural networks, which can learn various reconstruction mappings and represent complex and high-dimensional data. This method decomposes the task into a rectification stage and a refinement stage. The first stage generative network predicts the mapping from the distorted images to the rectified ones. The second stage generative network then further optimizes the perceptual quality. Since there is no available dataset or benchmark to explore this task, we create a Distorted Face Dataset (DFD) by forward distortion mapping based on CelebA dataset. Extensive experimental evaluation on the proposed benchmark and the application demonstrates that our method is an effective way for distorted image restoration.