Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are powerful tools for graph representation learning. Despite their rapid development, GNNs also faces some challenges, such as over-fitting, over-smoothing, and non-robustness. Previous works indicate that these problems can be alleviated by random dropping methods, which integrate noises into models by randomly masking parts of the input. However, some open-ended problems of random dropping on GNNs remain to solve. First, it is challenging to find a universal method that are suitable for all cases considering the divergence of different datasets and models. Second, random noises introduced to GNNs cause the incomplete coverage of parameters and unstable training process. In this paper, we propose a novel random dropping method called DropMessage, which performs dropping operations directly on the message matrix and can be applied to any message-passing GNNs. Furthermore, we elaborate the superiority of DropMessage: it stabilizes the training process by reducing sample variance; it keeps information diversity from the perspective of information theory, which makes it a theoretical upper bound of other methods. Also, we unify existing random dropping methods into our framework and analyze their effects on GNNs. To evaluate our proposed method, we conduct experiments that aims for multiple tasks on five public datasets and two industrial datasets with various backbone models. The experimental results show that DropMessage has both advantages of effectiveness and generalization.
Task-oriented communication is a new paradigm that aims at providing efficient connectivity for accomplishing intelligent tasks rather than the reception of every transmitted bit. In this paper, a deep learning-based task-oriented communication architecture is proposed where the user extracts, compresses and transmits semantics in an end-to-end (E2E) manner. Furthermore, an approach is proposed to compress the semantics according to their importance relevant to the task, namely, adaptable semantic compression (ASC). Assuming a delay-intolerant system, supporting multiple users indicates a problem that executing with the higher compression ratio requires fewer channel resources but leads to the distortion of semantics, while executing with the lower compression ratio requires more channel resources and thus may lead to a transmission failure due to delay constraint. To solve the problem, both compression ratio and resource allocation are optimized for the task-oriented communication system to maximize the success probability of tasks. Specifically, due to the nonconvexity of the problem, we propose a compression ratio and resource allocation (CRRA) algorithm by separating the problem into two subproblems and solving iteratively to obtain the convergent solution. Furthermore, considering the scenarios where users have various service levels, a compression ratio, resource allocation, and user selection (CRRAUS) algorithm is proposed to deal with the problem. In CRRAUS, users are adaptively selected to complete the corresponding intelligent tasks based on branch and bound method at the expense of higher algorithm complexity compared with CRRA. Simulation results show that the proposed CRRA and CRRAUS algorithms can obtain at least 15% and 10% success gains over baseline algorithms, respectively.
Face privacy-preserving is one of the hotspots that arises dramatic interests of research. However, the existing face privacy-preserving methods aim at causing the missing of semantic information of face and cannot preserve the reusability of original facial information. To achieve the naturalness of the processed face and the recoverability of the original protected face, this paper proposes face privacy-preserving method based on Invertible "Mask" Network (IMN). In IMN, we introduce a Mask-net to generate "Mask" face firstly. Then, put the "Mask" face onto the protected face and generate the masked face, in which the masked face is indistinguishable from "Mask" face. Finally, "Mask" face can be put off from the masked face and obtain the recovered face to the authorized users, in which the recovered face is visually indistinguishable from the protected face. The experimental results show that the proposed method can not only effectively protect the privacy of the protected face, but also almost perfectly recover the protected face from the masked face.
Recently, retrieval models based on dense representations are dominant in passage retrieval tasks, due to their outstanding ability in terms of capturing semantics of input text compared to the traditional sparse vector space models. A common practice of dense retrieval models is to exploit a dual-encoder architecture to represent a query and a passage independently. Though efficient, such a structure loses interaction between the query-passage pair, resulting in inferior accuracy. To enhance the performance of dense retrieval models without loss of efficiency, we propose a GNN-encoder model in which query (passage) information is fused into passage (query) representations via graph neural networks that are constructed by queries and their top retrieved passages. By this means, we maintain a dual-encoder structure, and retain some interaction information between query-passage pairs in their representations, which enables us to achieve both efficiency and efficacy in passage retrieval. Evaluation results indicate that our method significantly outperforms the existing models on MSMARCO, Natural Questions and TriviaQA datasets, and achieves the new state-of-the-art on these datasets.
Visible light positioning (VLP) is an accurate indoor positioning technology that uses luminaires as transmitters. In particular, circular luminaires are a common source type for VLP, that are typically treated only as point sources for positioning, while ignoring their geometry characteristics. In this paper, the arc feature of the circular luminaire and the coordinate information obtained via visible light communication (VLC) are jointly used for VLC-enabled indoor positioning, and a novel perspective arcs approach is proposed. The proposed approach does not rely on any inertial measurement unit, and has no tilted angle limitations at the user. First, a VLC assisted perspective circle and arc algorithm (V-PCA) is proposed for a scenario in which a complete luminaire and an incomplete one can be captured by the user. Considering the cases in which parts of VLC links are blocked, an anti-occlusion VLC assisted perspective arcs algorithm (OA-V-PA) is proposed. Simulation results show that the proposed indoor positioning algorithm can achieve a 95th percentile positioning accuracy of around 10 cm. Moreover, an experimental prototype based on mobile phone is implemented, in which, a fused image processing method is proposed. Experimental results show that the average positioning accuracy is less than 5 cm.
Underwater visual perception is essentially important for underwater exploration, archeology, ecosystem and so on. The low illumination, light reflections, scattering, absorption and suspended particles inevitably lead to the critically degraded underwater image quality, which causes great challenges on recognizing the objects from the underwater images. The existing underwater enhancement methods that aim to promote the underwater visibility, heavily suffer from the poor image restoration performance and generalization ability. To reduce the difficulty of underwater image enhancement, we introduce the media transmission map as guidance to assist in image enhancement. We formulate the interaction between the underwater visual images and the transmission map to obtain better enhancement results. Even with simple and lightweight network configuration, the proposed method can achieve advanced results of 22.6 dB on the challenging Test-R90 with an impressive 30 times faster than the existing models. Comprehensive experimental results have demonstrated the superiority and potential on underwater perception. Paper's code is offered on: https://github.com/GroupG-yk/MTUR-Net.
The conversational recommender systems (CRSs) have received extensive attention in recent years. However, most of the existing works focus on various deep learning models, which are largely limited by the requirement of large-scale human-annotated datasets. Such methods are not able to deal with the cold-start scenarios in industrial products. To alleviate the problem, we propose FORCE, a Framework Of Rule-based Conversational Recommender system that helps developers to quickly build CRS bots by simple configuration. We conduct experiments on two datasets in different languages and domains to verify its effectiveness and usability.
Most existing point cloud completion methods are only applicable to partial point clouds without any noises and outliers, which does not always hold in practice. We propose in this paper an end-to-end network, named CS-Net, to complete the point clouds contaminated by noises or containing outliers. In our CS-Net, the completion and segmentation modules work collaboratively to promote each other, benefited from our specifically designed cascaded structure. With the help of segmentation, more clean point cloud is fed into the completion module. We design a novel completion decoder which harnesses the labels obtained by segmentation together with FPS to purify the point cloud and leverages KNN-grouping for better generation. The completion and segmentation modules work alternately share the useful information from each other to gradually improve the quality of prediction. To train our network, we build a dataset to simulate the real case where incomplete point clouds contain outliers. Our comprehensive experiments and comparisons against state-of-the-art completion methods demonstrate our superiority. We also compare with the scheme of segmentation followed by completion and their end-to-end fusion, which also proves our efficacy.
Interactive robotic grasping using natural language is one of the most fundamental tasks in human-robot interaction. However, language can be a source of ambiguity, particularly when there are ambiguous visual or linguistic contents. This paper investigates the use of object attributes in disambiguation and develops an interactive grasping system capable of effectively resolving ambiguities via dialogues. Our approach first predicts target scores and attribute scores through vision-and-language grounding. To handle ambiguous objects and commands, we propose an attribute-guided formulation of the partially observable Markov decision process (Attr-POMDP) for disambiguation. The Attr-POMDP utilizes target and attribute scores as the observation model to calculate the expected return of an attribute-based (e.g., "what is the color of the target, red or green?") or a pointing-based (e.g., "do you mean this one?") question. Our disambiguation module runs in real time on a real robot, and the interactive grasping system achieves a 91.43\% selection accuracy in the real-robot experiments, outperforming several baselines by large margins.
Joint source channel coding (JSCC) has attracted increasing attentions due to its robustness and high efficiency. However, the existing research on JSCC mainly focuses on minimizing the distortion between the transmitted and received information, while limiting the required data rate. Therefore, even though the transmitted information is well recovered, the transmitted bits may be far more than the minimal threshold according to the rate-distortion (RD) theory. In this paper, we propose an adaptive Information Bottleneck (IB) guided JSCC (AIB-JSCC), which aims at achieving the theoretically maximal compression ratio for a given reconstruction quality. In particular, we first derive a mathematically tractable form of loss function for AIB-JSCC. To keep a better tradeoff between compression and reconstruction quality, we further propose an adaptive algorithm that adjusts hyperparameter beta of the proposed loss function dynamically according to the distortion during training. Experiment results show that AIB-JSCC can significantly reduce the required amount of the transmitted data and improve the reconstruction quality and downstream artificial-intelligent task performance.