Dynamic Planning of Bicycle Stations in Dockless Public Bicycle-sharing System Using Gated Graph Neural Network

Jianguo Chen, Kenli Li, Keqin Li, Philip S. Yu, Zeng Zeng

Benefiting from convenient cycling and flexible parking locations, the Dockless Public Bicycle-sharing (DL-PBS) network becomes increasingly popular in many countries. However, redundant and low-utility stations waste public urban space and maintenance costs of DL-PBS vendors. In this article, we propose a Bicycle Station Dynamic Planning (BSDP) system to dynamically provide the optimal bicycle station layout for the DL-PBS network. The BSDP system contains four modules: bicycle drop-off location clustering, bicycle-station graph modeling, bicycle-station location prediction, and bicycle-station layout recommendation. In the bicycle drop-off location clustering module, candidate bicycle stations are clustered from each spatio-temporal subset of the large-scale cycling trajectory records.

Causal Mechanism Transfer Network for Time Series Domain Adaptation in Mechanical Systems

Zijian Li, Ruichu Cai, Hong Wei Ng, Marianne Winslett, Tom Z. J. Fu, Boyan Xu, Xiaoyan Yang, Zhenjie Zhang

Data-driven models are becoming essential parts in modern mechanical systems, commonly used to capture the behavior of various equipment and varying environmental characteristics. Despite the advantages of these data-driven models on excellent adaptivity to high dynamics and aging equipment, they are usually hungry for massive labels, mostly contributed by human engineers at a high cost. Fortunately, domain adaptation enhances the model generalization by utilizing the labeled source data and the unlabeled target data. However, the mainstream domain adaptation methods cannot achieve ideal performance on time series data, since they assume that the conditional distributions are equal. This assumption works well in the static data but is inapplicable for the time series data.

Flatter Is Better: Percentile Transformations for Recommender Systems

Masoud Mansoury, Robin Burke, Bamshad Mobasher

It is well known that explicit user ratings in recommender systems are biased toward high ratings and that users differ significantly in their usage of the rating scale. Implementers usually compensate for these issues through rating normalization or the inclusion of a user bias term in factorization models. However, these methods adjust only for the central tendency of users’ distributions. In this work, we demonstrate that a lack of flatness in rating distributions is negatively correlated with recommendation performance. We propose a rating transformation model that compensates for skew in the rating distribution as well as its central tendency by converting ratings into percentile values as a pre-processing step before recommendation generation.

Conditional Text Generation for Harmonious Human-Machine Interaction

Bin Guo, Hao Wang, Yasan Ding, Wei Wu, Shaoyang Hao, Yueqi Sun, Zhiwen Yu

In recent years, with the development of deep learning, text-generation technology has undergone great changes and provided many kinds of services for human beings, such as restaurant reservation and daily communication. The automatically generated text is becoming more and more fluent so researchers begin to consider more anthropomorphic text-generation technology, that is, the conditional text generation, including emotional text generation, personalized text generation, and so on. Conditional Text Generation (CTG) has thus become a research hotspot. As a promising research field, we find that much attention has been paid to exploring it. Therefore, we aim to give a comprehensive review of the new research trends of CTG.

Attentive Excitation and Aggregation for Bilingual Referring Image Segmentation

Qianli Zhou, Tianrui Hui, Rong Wang, Haimiao Hu, Si Liu

The goal of referring image segmentation is to identify the object matched with an input natural language expression. Previous methods only support English descriptions, whereas Chinese is also broadly used around the world, which limits the potential application of this task. Therefore, we propose to extend existing datasets with Chinese descriptions and preprocessing tools for training and evaluating bilingual referring segmentation models. In addition, previous methods also lack the ability to collaboratively learn channel-wise and spatial-wise cross-modal attention to well align visual and linguistic modalities. To tackle these limitations, we propose a Linguistic Excitation module to excite image channels guided by language information and a Linguistic Aggregation module to aggregate multimodal information based on image-language relationships.

Disentangled Item Representation for Recommender Systems

Zeyu Cui, Feng Yu, Shu Wu, Qiang Liu, Liang Wang

Item representations in recommendation systems are expected to reveal the properties of items. Collaborative recommender methods usually represent an item as one single latent vector. Nowadays the e-commercial platforms provide various kinds of attribute information for items (e.g., category, price, and style of clothing). Utilizing this attribute information for better item representations is popular in recent years. Some studies use the given attribute information as side information, which is concatenated with the item latent vector to augment representations. However, the mixed item representations fail to fully exploit the rich attribute information or provide explanation in recommender systems. To this end, we propose a fine-grained Disentangled Item Representation (DIR) for recommender systems in this article, where the items are represented as several separated attribute vectors instead of a single latent vector.

Indirectly Supervised Anomaly Detection of Clinically Meaningful Health Events from Smart Home Data

Jessamyn Dahmen, Diane J. Cook

Anomaly detection techniques can extract a wealth of information about unusual events. Unfortunately, these methods yield an abundance of findings that are not of interest, obscuring relevant anomalies. In this work, we improve upon traditional anomaly detection methods by introducing Isudra, an Indirectly Supervised Detector of Relevant Anomalies from time series data. Isudra employs Bayesian optimization to select time scales, features, base detector algorithms, and algorithm hyperparameters that increase true positive and decrease false positive detection. This optimization is driven by a small amount of example anomalies, driving an indirectly supervised approach to anomaly detection. Additionally, we enhance the approach by introducing a warm-start method that reduces optimization time between similar problems.

Active Learning for Effectively Fine-Tuning Transfer Learning to Downstream Task

Md Abul Bashar, Richi Nayak

Language model (LM) has become a common method of transfer learning in Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks when working with small labeled datasets. An LM is pretrained using an easily available large unlabelled text corpus and is fine-tuned with the labelled data to apply to the target (i.e., downstream) task. As an LM is designed to capture the linguistic aspects of semantics, it can be biased to linguistic features. We argue that exposing an LM model during fine-tuning to instances that capture diverse semantic aspects (e.g., topical, linguistic, semantic relations) present in the dataset will improve its performance on the underlying task.

Predicting Attributes of Nodes Using Network Structure

Sarwan Ali, Muhammad Haroon Shakeel, Imdadullah Khan, Safiullah Faizullah, Muhammad Asad Khan

In many graphs such as social networks, nodes have associated attributes representing their behavior. Predicting node attributes in such graphs is an important task with applications in many domains like recommendation systems, privacy preservation, and targeted advertisement. Attribute values can be predicted by treating each node as a data point described by attributes and employing classification/regression algorithms. However, in social networks, there is complex interdependence between node attributes and pairwise interaction. For instance, attributes of nodes are influenced by their neighbors (social influence), and neighborhoods (friendships) between nodes are established based on pairwise (dis)similarity between their attributes (social selection). In this article, we establish that information in network topology is extremely useful in determining node attributes.

Aspect-Aware Response Generation for Multimodal Dialogue System

Mauajama Firdaus, Nidhi Thakur, Asif Ekbal

Multimodality in dialogue systems has opened up new frontiers for the creation of robust conversational agents. Any multimodal system aims at bridging the gap between language and vision by leveraging diverse and often complementary information from image, audio, and video, as well as text. For every task-oriented dialog system, different aspects of the product or service are crucial for satisfying the user’s demands. Based upon the aspect, the user decides upon selecting the product or service. The ability to generate responses with the specified aspects in a goal-oriented dialogue setup facilitates user satisfaction by fulfilling the user’s goals. Therefore, in our current work, we propose the task of aspect controlled response generation in a multimodal task-oriented dialog system.