Quantifying the Echo Chamber Effect: An Embedding Distance-based Approach

The rise of social media platforms has facilitated the formation of echo chambers, which are online spaces where users predominantly encounter viewpoints that reinforce their existing beliefs while excluding dissenting perspectives. This phenomenon significantly hinders information dissemination across communities and fuels societal polarization. Therefore, it is crucial to develop methods for quantifying echo chambers. In this paper, we present the Echo Chamber Score (ECS), a novel metric that assesses the cohesion and separation of user communities by measuring distances between users in the embedding space. In contrast to existing approaches, ECS is able to function without labels for user ideologies and makes no assumptions about the structure of the interaction graph. To facilitate measuring distances between users, we propose EchoGAE, a self-supervised graph autoencoder-based user embedding model that leverages users' posts and the interaction graph to embed them in a manner that reflects their ideological similarity. To assess the effectiveness of ECS, we use a Twitter dataset consisting of four topics - two polarizing and two non-polarizing. Our results showcase ECS's effectiveness as a tool for quantifying echo chambers and shedding light on the dynamics of online discourse.

Neural 3D Scene Reconstruction from Multi-view Images without 3D Supervision

Neural scene reconstruction methods have achieved impressive performance in reconstructing complex geometry and low-textured regions in large scenes. However, these methods heavily rely on 3D supervised information which is costly and time-consuming to obtain in the real world. In this paper, we propose a novel neural reconstruction method that reconstructs scenes without 3D supervision. We perform differentiable volume rendering for scene reconstruction by using accessible 2D images as supervision. We impose geometry to improve the reconstruction quality of complex geometry regions in the scenes, and impose plane constraints to improve the reconstruction quality of low-textured regions in the scenes. Specifically, we introduce a signed distance function (SDF) field, a color field, and a probability field to represent the scene, and optimize the fields under the differentiable ray marching to reconstruct the scene. Besides, we impose geometric constraints that project 3D points on the surface to similar-looking regions with similar features in different views. We also impose plane constraints to make large planes keep parallel or vertical to the wall or floor. These two constraints help to reconstruct accurate and smooth geometry structures of the scene. Without 3D supervision information, our method achieves competitive reconstruction compared with some existing methods that use 3D information as supervision on the ScanNet dataset.

DBFed: Debiasing Federated Learning Framework based on Domain-Independent

As digital transformation continues, enterprises are generating, managing, and storing vast amounts of data, while artificial intelligence technology is rapidly advancing. However, it brings challenges in information security and data security. Data security refers to the protection of digital information from unauthorized access, damage, theft, etc. throughout its entire life cycle. With the promulgation and implementation of data security laws and the emphasis on data security and data privacy by organizations and users, Privacy-preserving technology represented by federated learning has a wide range of application scenarios. Federated learning is a distributed machine learning computing framework that allows multiple subjects to train joint models without sharing data to protect data privacy and solve the problem of data islands. However, the data among multiple subjects are independent of each other, and the data differences in quality may cause fairness issues in federated learning modeling, such as data bias among multiple subjects, resulting in biased and discriminatory models. Therefore, we propose DBFed, a debiasing federated learning framework based on domain-independent, which mitigates model bias by explicitly encoding sensitive attributes during client-side training. This paper conducts experiments on three real datasets and uses five evaluation metrics of accuracy and fairness to quantify the effect of the model. Most metrics of DBFed exceed those of the other three comparative methods, fully demonstrating the debiasing effect of DBFed.

Distributed fusion filter over lossy wireless sensor networks with the presence of non-Gaussian noise

The information transmission between nodes in a wireless sensor networks (WSNs) often causes packet loss due to denial-of-service (DoS) attack, energy limitations, and environmental factors, and the information that is successfully transmitted can also be contaminated by non-Gaussian noise. The presence of these two factors poses a challenge for distributed state estimation (DSE) over WSNs. In this paper, a generalized packet drop model is proposed to describe the packet loss phenomenon caused by DoS attacks and other factors. Moreover, a modified maximum correntropy Kalman filter is given, and it is extended to distributed form (DM-MCKF). In addition, a distributed modified maximum correntropy Kalman filter incorporating the generalized data packet drop (DM-MCKF-DPD) algorithm is provided to implement DSE with the presence of both non-Gaussian noise pollution and packet drop. A sufficient condition to ensure the convergence of the fixed-point iterative process of the DM-MCKF-DPD algorithm is presented and the computational complexity of the DM-MCKF-DPD algorithm is analyzed. Finally, the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed algorithms are verified by simulations.

Improving Factuality of Abstractive Summarization via Contrastive Reward Learning

Modern abstractive summarization models often generate summaries that contain hallucinated or contradictory information. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective contrastive learning framework that incorporates recent developments in reward learning and factuality metrics. Empirical studies demonstrate that the proposed framework enables summarization models to learn from feedback of factuality metrics using contrastive reward learning, leading to more factual summaries by human evaluations. This suggests that further advances in learning and evaluation algorithms can feed directly into providing more factual summaries.

The Role of Transparency in Repeated First-Price Auctions with Unknown Valuations

We study the problem of regret minimization for a single bidder in a sequence of first-price auctions where the bidder knows the item's value only if the auction is won. Our main contribution is a complete characterization, up to logarithmic factors, of the minimax regret in terms of the auction's transparency, which regulates the amount of information on competing bids disclosed by the auctioneer at the end of each auction. Our results hold under different assumptions (stochastic, adversarial, and their smoothed variants) on the environment generating the bidder's valuations and competing bids. These minimax rates reveal how the interplay between transparency and the nature of the environment affects how fast one can learn to bid optimally in first-price auctions.

Similarity-based Memory Enhanced Joint Entity and Relation Extraction

Document-level joint entity and relation extraction is a challenging information extraction problem that requires a unified approach where a single neural network performs four sub-tasks: mention detection, coreference resolution, entity classification, and relation extraction. Existing methods often utilize a sequential multi-task learning approach, in which the arbitral decomposition causes the current task to depend only on the previous one, missing the possible existence of the more complex relationships between them. In this paper, we present a multi-task learning framework with bidirectional memory-like dependency between tasks to address those drawbacks and perform the joint problem more accurately. Our empirical studies show that the proposed approach outperforms the existing methods and achieves state-of-the-art results on the BioCreative V CDR corpus.

A First Order Meta Stackelberg Method for Robust Federated Learning

Previous research has shown that federated learning (FL) systems are exposed to an array of security risks. Despite the proposal of several defensive strategies, they tend to be non-adaptive and specific to certain types of attacks, rendering them ineffective against unpredictable or adaptive threats. This work models adversarial federated learning as a Bayesian Stackelberg Markov game (BSMG) to capture the defender's incomplete information of various attack types. We propose meta-Stackelberg learning (meta-SL), a provably efficient meta-learning algorithm, to solve the equilibrium strategy in BSMG, leading to an adaptable FL defense. We demonstrate that meta-SL converges to the first-order $\varepsilon$-equilibrium point in $O(\varepsilon^{-2})$ gradient iterations, with $O(\varepsilon^{-4})$ samples needed per iteration, matching the state of the art. Empirical evidence indicates that our meta-Stackelberg framework performs exceptionally well against potent model poisoning and backdoor attacks of an uncertain nature.

For One-Shot Decoding: Unsupervised Deep Learning-Based Polar Decoder

We propose an unsupervised deep learning-based decoding scheme that enables one-shot decoding of polar codes. In the proposed scheme, rather than using the information bit vectors as labels for training the neural network (NN) through supervised learning as the conventional scheme did, the NN is trained to function as a bounded distance decoder by leveraging the generator matrix of polar codes through self-supervised learning. This approach eliminates the reliance on predefined labels, empowering the potential to train directly on the actual data within communication systems and thereby enhancing the applicability. Furthermore, computer simulations demonstrate that (i) the bit error rate (BER) and block error rate (BLER) performances of the proposed scheme can approach those of the maximum a posteriori (MAP) decoder for very short packets and (ii) the proposed NN decoder exhibits much superior generalization ability compared to the conventional one.

MoTIF: Learning Motion Trajectories with Local Implicit Neural Functions for Continuous Space-Time Video Super-Resolution

This work addresses continuous space-time video super-resolution (C-STVSR) that aims to up-scale an input video both spatially and temporally by any scaling factors. One key challenge of C-STVSR is to propagate information temporally among the input video frames. To this end, we introduce a space-time local implicit neural function. It has the striking feature of learning forward motion for a continuum of pixels. We motivate the use of forward motion from the perspective of learning individual motion trajectories, as opposed to learning a mixture of motion trajectories with backward motion. To ease motion interpolation, we encode sparsely sampled forward motion extracted from the input video as the contextual input. Along with a reliability-aware splatting and decoding scheme, our framework, termed MoTIF, achieves the state-of-the-art performance on C-STVSR. The source code of MoTIF is available at https://github.com/sichun233746/MoTIF.