The pre-training paradigm fine-tunes the models trained on large-scale datasets to downstream tasks with enhanced performance. It transfers all knowledge to downstream tasks without discriminating which part is necessary or unnecessary, which may lead to negative transfer. In comparison, knowledge transfer in nature is much more efficient. When passing genetic information to descendants, ancestors encode only the essential knowledge into genes, which act as the medium. Inspired by that, we adopt a recent concept called ``learngene'' and refine its structures by mimicking the structures of natural genes. We propose the Genetic Transfer Learning (GTL) -- a framework to copy the evolutionary process of organisms into neural networks. GTL trains a population of networks, selects superior learngenes by tournaments, performs learngene mutations, and passes the learngenes to next generations. Finally, we successfully extract the learngenes of VGG11 and ResNet12. We show that the learngenes bring the descendant networks instincts and strong learning ability: with 20% parameters, the learngenes bring 12% and 16% improvements of accuracy on CIFAR-FS and miniImageNet. Besides, the learngenes have the scalability and adaptability on the downstream structure of networks and datasets. Overall, we offer a novel insight that transferring core knowledge via learngenes may be sufficient and efficient for neural networks.
Predicting the future location of mobile objects reinforces location-aware services with proactive intelligence and helps businesses and decision-makers with better planning and near real-time scheduling in different applications such as traffic congestion control, location-aware advertisements, and monitoring public health and well-being. The recent developments in the smartphone and location sensors technology and the prevalence of using location-based social networks alongside the improvements in artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques provide an excellent opportunity to exploit massive amounts of historical and real-time contextual information to recognise mobility patterns and achieve more accurate and intelligent predictions. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of the next useful location prediction problem with context-awareness. First, we explain the concepts of context and context-awareness and define the next location prediction problem. Then we analyse nearly thirty studies in this field concerning the prediction method, the challenges addressed, the datasets and metrics used for training and evaluating the model, and the types of context incorporated. Finally, we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of different approaches, focusing on the usefulness of the predicted location and identifying the open challenges and future work on this subject by introducing two potential use cases of next location prediction in the automotive industry.
A large amount of User Generated Content (UGC) is uploaded to the Internet daily and displayed to people world-widely through the client side (e.g., mobile and PC). This requires the cropping algorithms to produce the aesthetic thumbnail within a specific aspect ratio on different devices. However, existing image cropping works mainly focus on landmark or landscape images, which fail to model the relations among the multi-objects with the complex background in UGC. Besides, previous methods merely consider the aesthetics of the cropped images while ignoring the content integrity, which is crucial for UGC cropping. In this paper, we propose a Spatial-Semantic Collaborative cropping network (S2CNet) for arbitrary user generated content accompanied by a new cropping benchmark. Specifically, we first mine the visual genes of the potential objects. Then, the suggested adaptive attention graph recasts this task as a procedure of information association over visual nodes. The underlying spatial and semantic relations are ultimately centralized to the crop candidate through differentiable message passing, which helps our network efficiently to preserve both the aesthetics and the content integrity. Extensive experiments on the proposed UGCrop5K and other public datasets demonstrate the superiority of our approach over state-of-the-art counterparts. Our project is available at https://github.com/suyukun666/S2CNet.
Audio-visual learning has demonstrated promising results in many classical speech tasks (e.g., speech separation, automatic speech recognition, wake-word spotting). We believe that introducing visual modality will also benefit speaker diarization. To date, target-speaker voice activity detection (TS-VAD) plays an essential role in highly accurate speaker diarization. However, previous TS-VAD models take audio features and utilize the speaker's acoustic footprint to distinguish his or her personal speech activities, which is susceptible to overlapped speaking in multi-speaker scenarios. Although visual information naturally tolerates overlapped speech, it easily suffers from spatial occlusion. The potential modality-missing problem blocks TS-VAD towards an audio-visual approach. This paper proposes a multi-input multi-output target-speaker voice activity detection (MIMO-TSVAD) framework for speaker diarization. The proposed method can take audio-visual input and leverage the speaker's acoustic footprint or lip track to flexibly conduct audio-based, video-based, and audio-visual speaker diarization in a unified sequence-to-sequence architecture. Experimental results show that the MIMO-TSVAD framework demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on the VoxConverse, DIHARD-III, and MISP 2022 datasets under corresponding evaluation metrics, obtaining the diarization error rates (DERs) of 4.18%, 10.10%, and 8.15%, respectively. In addition, it can perform robustly in heavy lip-missing scenarios.
Predictive risk models in the public sector are commonly developed using administrative data that is more complete for subpopulations that more greatly rely on public services. In the United States, for instance, information on health care utilization is routinely available to government agencies for individuals supported by Medicaid and Medicare, but not for the privately insured. Critiques of public sector algorithms have identified such differential feature under-reporting as a driver of disparities in algorithmic decision-making. Yet this form of data bias remains understudied from a technical viewpoint. While prior work has examined the fairness impacts of additive feature noise and features that are clearly marked as missing, the setting of data missingness absent indicators (i.e. differential feature under-reporting) has been lacking in research attention. In this work, we present an analytically tractable model of differential feature under-reporting which we then use to characterize the impact of this kind of data bias on algorithmic fairness. We demonstrate how standard missing data methods typically fail to mitigate bias in this setting, and propose a new set of methods specifically tailored to differential feature under-reporting. Our results show that, in real world data settings, under-reporting typically leads to increasing disparities. The proposed solution methods show success in mitigating increases in unfairness.
In recent years, finding an effective and efficient strategy for exploiting spatial and temporal information has been a hot research topic in video saliency prediction (VSP). With the emergence of spatio-temporal transformers, the weakness of the prior strategies, e.g., 3D convolutional networks and LSTM-based networks, for capturing long-range dependencies has been effectively compensated. While VSP has drawn benefits from spatio-temporal transformers, finding the most effective way for aggregating temporal features is still challenging. To address this concern, we propose a transformer-based video saliency prediction approach with high temporal dimension decoding network (THTD-Net). This strategy accounts for the lack of complex hierarchical interactions between features that are extracted from the transformer-based spatio-temporal encoder: in particular, it does not require multiple decoders and aims at gradually reducing temporal features' dimensions in the decoder. This decoder-based architecture yields comparable performance to multi-branch and over-complicated models on common benchmarks such as DHF1K, UCF-sports and Hollywood-2.
Despeckling is a crucial noise reduction task in improving the quality of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. Directly obtaining noise-free SAR images is a challenging task that has hindered the development of accurate despeckling algorithms. The advent of deep learning has facilitated the study of denoising models that learn from only noisy SAR images. However, existing methods deal solely with single-polarization images and cannot handle the multi-polarization images captured by modern satellites. In this work, we present an extension of the existing model for generating single-polarization SAR images to handle multi-polarization SAR images. Specifically, we propose a novel self-supervised despeckling approach called channel masking, which exploits the relationship between polarizations. Additionally, we utilize a spatial masking method that addresses pixel-to-pixel correlations to further enhance the performance of our approach. By effectively incorporating multiple polarization information, our method surpasses current state-of-the-art methods in quantitative evaluation in both synthetic and real-world scenarios.
Patients derive numerous benefits from reading their clinical notes, including an increased sense of control over their health and improved understanding of their care plan. However, complex medical concepts and jargon within clinical notes hinder patient comprehension and may lead to anxiety. We developed a patient-facing tool to make clinical notes more readable, leveraging large language models (LLMs) to simplify, extract information from, and add context to notes. We prompt engineered GPT-4 to perform these augmentation tasks on real clinical notes donated by breast cancer survivors and synthetic notes generated by a clinician, a total of 12 notes with 3868 words. In June 2023, 200 female-identifying US-based participants were randomly assigned three clinical notes with varying levels of augmentations using our tool. Participants answered questions about each note, evaluating their understanding of follow-up actions and self-reported confidence. We found that augmentations were associated with a significant increase in action understanding score (0.63 $\pm$ 0.04 for select augmentations, compared to 0.54 $\pm$ 0.02 for the control) with p=0.002. In-depth interviews of self-identifying breast cancer patients (N=7) were also conducted via video conferencing. Augmentations, especially definitions, elicited positive responses among the seven participants, with some concerns about relying on LLMs. Augmentations were evaluated for errors by clinicians, and we found misleading errors occur, with errors more common in real donated notes than synthetic notes, illustrating the importance of carefully written clinical notes. Augmentations improve some but not all readability metrics. This work demonstrates the potential of LLMs to improve patients' experience with clinical notes at a lower burden to clinicians. However, having a human in the loop is important to correct potential model errors.
Authors seeking to communicate with broader audiences often compose their ideas about the same underlying knowledge in different documents and formats -- for example, as slide decks, newsletters, reports, brochures, etc. Prior work in document generation has generally considered the creation of each separate format to be different a task, developing independent methods for generation and evaluation. This approach is suboptimal for the advancement of AI-supported content authoring from both research and application perspectives because it leads to fragmented learning processes, redundancy in models and methods, and disjointed evaluation. Thus, in our work, we consider each of these documents to be templatic views of the same underlying knowledge, and we aim to unify the generation and evaluation of these templatic views of documents. We begin by introducing an LLM-powered method to extract the most important information from an input document and represent this information in a structured format. We show that this unified representation can be used to generate multiple templatic views with no supervision and with very little guidance, improving over strong baselines. We additionally introduce a unified evaluation method that is template agnostic, and can be adapted to building document generators for heterogeneous downstream applications. Finally, we conduct a human evaluation, which shows that humans prefer 82% of the downstream documents generated with our method. Furthermore, the newly proposed evaluation metric correlates more highly with human judgement than prior metrics, while providing a unified evaluation method.
We study the implications of the modeling choice to use a graph, instead of a hypergraph, to represent real-world interconnected systems whose constituent relationships are of higher order by nature. Such a modeling choice typically involves an underlying projection process that maps the original hypergraph onto a graph, and is common in graph-based analysis. While hypergraph projection can potentially lead to loss of higher-order relations, there exists very limited studies on the consequences of doing so, as well as its remediation. This work fills this gap by doing two things: (1) we develop analysis based on graph and set theory, showing two ubiquitous patterns of hyperedges that are root to structural information loss in all hypergraph projections; we also quantify the combinatorial impossibility of recovering the lost higher-order structures if no extra help is provided; (2) we still seek to recover the lost higher-order structures in hypergraph projection, and in light of (1)'s findings we propose to relax the problem into a learning-based setting. Under this setting, we develop a learning-based hypergraph reconstruction method based on an important statistic of hyperedge distributions that we find. Our reconstruction method is evaluated on 8 real-world datasets under different settings, and exhibits consistently good performance. We also demonstrate benefits of the reconstructed hypergraphs via use cases of protein rankings and link predictions.