Clustering in dynamic environments is of increasing importance, with broad applications ranging from real-time data analysis and online unsupervised learning to dynamic facility location problems. While meta-heuristics have shown promising effectiveness in static clustering tasks, their application for tracking optimal clustering solutions or robust clustering over time in dynamic environments remains largely underexplored. This is partly due to a lack of dynamic datasets with diverse, controllable, and realistic dynamic characteristics, hindering systematic performance evaluations of clustering algorithms in various dynamic scenarios. This deficiency leads to a gap in our understanding and capability to effectively design algorithms for clustering in dynamic environments. To bridge this gap, this paper introduces the Dynamic Dataset Generator (DDG). DDG features multiple dynamic Gaussian components integrated with a range of heterogeneous, local, and global changes. These changes vary in spatial and temporal severity, patterns, and domain of influence, providing a comprehensive tool for simulating a wide range of dynamic scenarios.
Tracking multiple targets in dynamic environments using distributed sensor networks is a challenging problem that has received significant attention in recent years. In such scenarios, the network of sensors must coordinate their actions to estimate the locations and trajectories of multiple targets accurately. Multi-sensor control methods can improve the performance of these networks by enabling efficient utilization of resources and enhancing the accuracy of the estimated target states. This paper proposes two novel multi-sensor control methods that utilize the Random Finite Set (RFS) framework to address this problem. Our methods improve computational tractability and enable fully distributed control, making them suitable for real-time applications.
Cross-domain recommendation (CDR) has been proven as a promising way to tackle the user cold-start problem, which aims to make recommendations for users in the target domain by transferring the user preference derived from the source domain. Traditional CDR studies follow the embedding and mapping (EMCDR) paradigm, which transfers user representations from the source to target domain by learning a user-shared mapping function, neglecting the user-specific preference. Recent CDR studies attempt to learn user-specific mapping functions in meta-learning paradigm, which regards each user's CDR as an individual task, but neglects the preference correlations among users, limiting the beneficial information for user representations. Moreover, both of the paradigms neglect the explicit user-item interactions from both domains during the mapping process. To address the above issues, this paper proposes a novel CDR framework with neural process (NP), termed as CDRNP. Particularly, it develops the meta-learning paradigm to leverage user-specific preference, and further introduces a stochastic process by NP to capture the preference correlations among the overlapping and cold-start users, thus generating more powerful mapping functions by mapping the user-specific preference and common preference correlations to a predictive probability distribution. In addition, we also introduce a preference remainer to enhance the common preference from the overlapping users, and finally devises an adaptive conditional decoder with preference modulation to make prediction for cold-start users with items in the target domain. Experimental results demonstrate that CDRNP outperforms previous SOTA methods in three real-world CDR scenarios.
The rapid development of blockchain has led to more and more funding pouring into the cryptocurrency market, which also attracted cybercriminals' interest in recent years. The Ponzi scheme, an old-fashioned fraud, is now popular on the blockchain, causing considerable financial losses to many crypto-investors. A few Ponzi detection methods have been proposed in the literature, most of which detect a Ponzi scheme based on its smart contract source code or opcode. The contract-code-based approach, while achieving very high accuracy, is not robust: first, the source codes of a majority of contracts on Ethereum are not available, and second, a Ponzi developer can fool a contract-code-based detection model by obfuscating the opcode or inventing a new profit distribution logic that cannot be detected (since these models were trained on existing Ponzi logics only). A transaction-based approach could improve the robustness of detection because transactions, unlike smart contracts, are harder to be manipulated. However, the current transaction-based detection models achieve fairly low accuracy. We address this gap in the literature by developing new detection models that rely only on the transactions, hence guaranteeing the robustness, and moreover, achieve considerably higher Accuracy, Precision, Recall, and F1-score than existing transaction-based models. This is made possible thanks to the introduction of novel time-dependent features that capture Ponzi behaviours characteristics derived from our comprehensive data analyses on Ponzi and non-Ponzi data from the XBlock-ETH repository
Most reinforcement learning algorithms are based on a key assumption that Markov decision processes (MDPs) are stationary. However, non-stationary MDPs with dynamic action space are omnipresent in real-world scenarios. Yet problems of dynamic action space reinforcement learning have been studied by many previous works, how to choose valuable actions from new and unseen actions to improve learning efficiency remains unaddressed. To tackle this problem, we propose an intelligent Action Pick-up (AP) algorithm to autonomously choose valuable actions that are most likely to boost performance from a set of new actions. In this paper, we first theoretically analyze and find that a prior optimal policy plays an important role in action pick-up by providing useful knowledge and experience. Then, we design two different AP methods: frequency-based global method and state clustering-based local method, based on the prior optimal policy. Finally, we evaluate the AP on two simulated but challenging environments where action spaces vary over time. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed AP has advantages over baselines in learning efficiency.
Utilities of knowledge graphs (KGs) depend on their qualities. A KG that is of poor quality not only has little applicability but also leads to some unexpected errors. Therefore, quality evaluation for KGs is crucial and indispensable. Existing methods design many quality dimensions and calculate metrics in the corresponding dimensions based on details (i.e., raw data and graph structures) of KGs for evaluation. However, there are two major issues. On one hand, they consider the details as public information, which exposes the raw data and graph structures. These details are strictly confidential because they involve commercial privacy or others in practice. On the other hand, the existing methods focus on how much knowledge KGs have rather than KGs' practicability. To address the above problems, we propose a knowledge graph quality evaluation framework under incomplete information (QEII). The quality evaluation problem is transformed into an adversarial game, and the relative quality is evaluated according to the winner and loser. Participants of the game are KGs, and the adversarial gameplay is to question and answer (Q&A). In the QEII, we generate and train a question model and an answer model for each KG. The question model of a KG first asks a certain number of questions to the other KG. Then it evaluates the answers returned by the answer model of the other KG and outputs a percentage score. The relative quality is evaluated by the scores, which measures the ability to apply knowledge. Q&A messages are the only information that KGs exchange, without exposing any raw data and graph structure. Experimental results on two pairs of KGs demonstrate that, comparing with baselines, the QEII realizes a reasonable quality evaluation from the perspective of third-party evaluators under incomplete information.
Despite the promising performance of existing frame-wise all-neural beamformers in the speech enhancement field, it remains unclear what the underlying mechanism exists. In this paper, we revisit the beamforming behavior from the beam-space dictionary perspective and formulate it into the learning and mixing of different beam-space components. Based on that, we propose an all-neural beamformer called TaylorBM to simulate Taylor's series expansion operation in which the 0th-order term serves as a spatial filter to conduct the beam mixing, and several high-order terms are tasked with residual noise cancellation for post-processing. The whole system is devised to work in an end-to-end manner. Experiments are conducted on the spatialized LibriSpeech corpus and results show that the proposed approach outperforms existing advanced baselines in terms of evaluation metrics.
While deep neural networks greatly facilitate the proliferation of the speech enhancement field, most of the existing methods are developed following either heuristic or blind optimization criteria, which severely hampers interpretability and transparency. Inspired by Taylor's theorem, we propose a general unfolding framework for both single- and multi-channel speech enhancement tasks. Concretely, we formulate the complex spectrum recovery into the spectral magnitude mapping in the neighboring space of the noisy mixture, in which the sparse prior is introduced for phase modification in advance. Based on that, the mapping function is decomposed into the superimposition of the 0th-order and high-order polynomials in Taylor's series, where the former coarsely removes the interference in the magnitude domain and the latter progressively complements the remaining spectral detail in the complex spectrum domain. In addition, we study the relation between adjacent order term and reveal that each high-order term can be recursively estimated with its lower-order term, and each high-order term is then proposed to evaluate using a surrogate function with trainable weights, so that the whole system can be trained in an end-to-end manner. Extensive experiments are conducted on WSJ0-SI84, DNS-Challenge, Voicebank+Demand, and spatialized Librispeech datasets. Quantitative results show that the proposed approach not only yields competitive performance over existing top-performed approaches, but also enjoys decent internal transparency and flexibility.
Constraint programming (CP) is an effective technique for solving constraint satisfaction and optimization problems. CP solvers typically use a variable ordering strategy to select which variable to explore first in the solving process, which has a large impact on the efficacy of the solvers. In this paper, we propose a novel variable ordering strategy based on supervised learning to solve job shop scheduling problems. We develop a classification model and a regression model to predict the optimal solution of a problem instance, and use the predicted solution to order variables for CP solvers. We show that training machine learning models is very efficient and can achieve a high accuracy. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that the learned variable ordering methods perform competitively compared to four existing methods. Finally, we show that hybridising the machine learning-based variable ordering methods with traditional domain-based methods is beneficial.
Transporting ore from mines to ports is of significant interest in mining supply chains. These operations are commonly associated with growing costs and a lack of resources. Large mining companies are interested in optimally allocating their resources to reduce operational costs. This problem has been previously investigated in the literature as resource constrained job scheduling (RCJS). While a number of optimisation methods have been proposed to tackle the deterministic problem, the uncertainty associated with resource availability, an inevitable challenge in mining operations, has received less attention. RCJS with uncertainty is a hard combinatorial optimisation problem that cannot be solved efficiently with existing optimisation methods. This study proposes an adaptive population-based simulated annealing algorithm that can overcome the limitations of existing methods for RCJS with uncertainty including the premature convergence, the excessive number of hyper-parameters, and the inefficiency in coping with different uncertainty levels. This new algorithm is designed to effectively balance exploration and exploitation, by using a population, modifying the cooling schedule in the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm, and using an adaptive mechanism to select perturbation operators. The results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms existing methods across a wide range of benchmark RCJS instances and uncertainty levels. Moreover, new best known solutions are discovered for all but one problem instance across all uncertainty levels.