In the specialized domain of brain tumor segmentation, supervised segmentation approaches are hindered by the limited availability of high-quality labeled data, a condition arising from data privacy concerns, significant costs, and ethical issues. In response to this challenge, this paper presents a training framework that adeptly integrates a plug-and-play component, MOD, into current supervised learning models, boosting their efficacy in scenarios with limited data. The MOD consists of an Online Tokenizer and a Dense Predictor, which employs self-distillation and self-modeling on masked patches, promoting swift convergence and efficient representation learning. During the inference phase, the plug-and-play MOD component is excluded, preserving the computational efficiency of the original model without incurring extra processing costs. We substantiated the value of our approach through experiments on leading 3D brain tumor segmentation baselines. Remarkably, models augmented with the MOD consistently showcased superior results, achieving elevated Dice coefficients and HD95 scores on two datasets: BraTS 2021 and MSD 2019 Task-01 Brain Tumor.

Community detection is a fundamental yet important task for characterizing and understanding the structure of attributed graphs. Existing methods mainly focus on the structural tightness and attribute similarity among nodes in a community. However, grouping numerous semantically homogeneous nodes will result in information cocoons and thus reduce the robustness of community structure and the efficiency of node collaboration in real-world applications, such as recommendation systems and collaboration networks. Since nodes with closer connections tend to be more similar, finding communities with dense structures and diverse attributes poses great challenges to mining latent relationships between the graph structure and attribute distribution. To our best knowledge, very little research has been conducted to address this challenge. In this article, we propose a novel three-view graph attention neural networks (TvGANN) model to formally address the attribute diversity aware community detection problem. TvGANN reveals correlations between the graph structure and attributes distribution from the perspective of node organization, attribute co-occurrence, and the node-attribute interaction. It effectively captures structural features and attributes distribution by feeding a structural network and an attribute co-occurrence network into graph attention modules through the encoder–decoder framework. It also learns heterogeneous information by feeding a network into a meta-node attention module. Then, it fuzes the three modules and clusters the embedding representations through a Student's t -distribution approach, which iteratively refines the clustering results. The experiments show that our method not only improves the quality in dense community detection but also performs efficiently for attributed graphs.

Irregularly, asynchronously and sparsely sampled multivariate time series (IASS-MTS) are characterized by sparse and uneven time intervals and nonsynchronous sampling rates, posing significant challenges for machine learning models to learn complex relationships within and beyond IASS-MTS to support various inference tasks. The existing methods typically either focus solely on single-task forecasting or simply concatenate them through a separate preprocessing imputation procedure for the subsequent classification application. However, these methods often ignore valuable annotated labels or fail to discover meaningful patterns from unlabeled data. Moreover, the approach of separate prefilling may introduce errors due to the noise in raw records, and thus degrade the downstream prediction performance. To overcome these challenges, we propose the time-aware dual attention and memory-augmented network (DAMA) with stochastic generative imputation (SGI). Our model constructs a joint task learning architecture that unifies imputation and classification tasks collaboratively. First, we design a new time-aware DAMA that accounts for irregular sampling rates, inherent data nonalignment, and sparse values in IASS-MTS data. The proposed network integrates both attention and memory to effectively analyze complex interactions within and across IASS-MTS for the classification task. Second, we develop the stochastic generative imputation (SGI) network that uses auxiliary information from sequence data for inferring the time series missing observations. By balancing joint tasks, our model facilitates interaction between them, leading to improved performance on both classification and imputation tasks. Third, we evaluate our model on real-world datasets and demonstrate its superior performance in terms of imputation accuracy and classification results, outperforming the baselines.

Visible-infrared person re-identification (VI-ReID) aims to retrieve the person images of the same identity from the RGB to infrared image space, which is very important for real-world surveillance system. In practice, VI-ReID is more challenging due to the heterogeneous modality discrepancy, which further aggravates the challenges of traditional single-modality person ReID problem, i.e., inter-class confusion and intra-class variations. In this paper, we propose an aggregated memory-based cross-modality deep metric learning framework, which benefits from the increasing number of learned modality-aware and modality-agnostic centroid proxies for cluster contrast and mutual information learning. Furthermore, to suppress the modality discrepancy, the proposed cross-modality alignment objective simultaneously utilizes both historical and up-to-date learned cluster proxies for enhanced cross-modality association. Such training mechanism helps to obtain hard positive references through increased diversity of learned cluster proxies, and finally achieves stronger ``pulling close'' effect between cross-modality image features. Extensive experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, surpassing state-of-the-art works significantly by a large margin on the commonly used VI-ReID datasets.

Growing leakage and misuse of visual information raise security and privacy concerns, which promotes the development of information protection. Existing adversarial perturbations-based methods mainly focus on the de-identification against deep learning models. However, the inherent visual information of the data has not been well protected. In this work, inspired by the Type-I adversarial attack, we propose an Adversarial Visual Information Hiding (AVIH) method to protect the visual privacy of data. Specifically, the method generates obfuscating adversarial perturbations to obscure the visual information of the data. Meanwhile, it maintains the hidden objectives to be correctly predicted by models. In addition, our method does not modify the parameters of the applied model, which makes it flexible for different scenarios. Experimental results on the recognition and classification tasks demonstrate that the proposed method can effectively hide visual information and hardly affect the performances of models. The code is available at https://github.com/suzhigangssz/AVIH.

Unsupervised visible-infrared person re-identification (USL-VI-ReID) aims to match pedestrian images of the same identity from different modalities without annotations. Existing works mainly focus on alleviating the modality gap by aligning instance-level features of the unlabeled samples. However, the relationships between cross-modality clusters are not well explored. To this end, we propose a novel bilateral cluster matching-based learning framework to reduce the modality gap by matching cross-modality clusters. Specifically, we design a Many-to-many Bilateral Cross-Modality Cluster Matching (MBCCM) algorithm through optimizing the maximum matching problem in a bipartite graph. Then, the matched pairwise clusters utilize shared visible and infrared pseudo-labels during the model training. Under such a supervisory signal, a Modality-Specific and Modality-Agnostic (MSMA) contrastive learning framework is proposed to align features jointly at a cluster-level. Meanwhile, the cross-modality Consistency Constraint (CC) is proposed to explicitly reduce the large modality discrepancy. Extensive experiments on the public SYSU-MM01 and RegDB datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, surpassing state-of-the-art approaches by a large margin of 8.76% mAP on average.

Labeling sufficient data for supervised learning remains an open challenge in social network analysis. An alternative is to collect self-labeled data, i.e. the data labeled by their owners. Emmery et al show that standard models can be trained and perform well on self-labeled data, suggesting the effectiveness of this approach. In this paper, we argue self-labeled data may not be representative of the population. Taking Twitter demographic prediction as an example, we show the popular FastText model standardly trained on self-labeled data does not generalize well on random testing samples. We then present a new learner DeFastText that aims to correct data bias using the kernel means matching technique. In experiment, we show it achieves lower generalization errors than FastText. This research raises an attention of the data bias problem when learning from self-labeled data in social network analysis.

The advancement of science and technology provides the possibility of personalized intelligent education. Representation learning of students’ behavior data is challenging because whether time sequences and interactive behaviors or the correlation between knowledge points and students carrying important information. Some researchers propose knowledge tracing to provide ideas for solving this dilemma. However, existing knowledge tracing methods are divided into machine learning and deep learning. Machine learning-based methods require manual feature extraction and a large amount of prior knowledge. Although deep learning-based methods can automatically extract features, most methods either only use the time series information of the data, or use the association between knowledge points. All the methods ignore the association between knowledge points and students. To fill this gap, we propose a Gated Heterogeneous Graph Convolutional Network (GHGCN) model. We utilize the encoder-decoder framework to predict student performance using the representations of nodes, which is learned from heterogeneous convolutional networks and gate recurrent unit. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed GHGCN model, we conduct the experiments on three public datasets: Simulated Data, Assistments 2009, and Assistments 2015. The results indicate that our method can achieve better performance compared with state-of-the-art algorithms.

Graph neural networks (GNNs) can be effectively applied to solve many real-world problems across widely diverse fields. Their success is inseparable from the message-passing mechanisms evolving over the years. However, current mechanisms treat all node features equally at the macro-level (node-level), and the optimal aggregation method has not yet been explored. In this paper, we propose a new GNN called Graph Decipher (GD), which transparentizes the message flows of node features from micro-level (feature-level) to global-level and boosts the performance on node classification tasks. Besides, to reduce the computational burden caused by investigating message-passing, only the relevant representative node attributes are extracted by graph feature filters, allowing calculations to be performed in a category-oriented manner. Experiments on 10 node classification data sets show that GD achieves state-of-the-art performance while imposing a substantially lower computational cost. Additionally, since GD has the ability to explore the representative node attributes by category, it can also be applied to imbalanced node classification on multiclass graph data sets.

Dynamic graph neural networks (DGNNs) have been widely used in modeling and representation learning of graph structure data. Current dynamic representation learning focuses on either discrete learning which results in temporal information loss, or continuous learning which involves heavy computation. In this study, we proposed a novel DGNN, sparse dynamic (Sparse-Dyn). It adaptively encodes temporal information into a sequence of patches with an equal amount of temporal-topological structure. Therefore, while avoiding using snapshots which cause information loss, it also achieves a finer time granularity, which is close to what continuous networks could provide. In addition, we also designed a lightweight module, Sparse Temporal Transformer, to compute node representations through structural neighborhoods and temporal dynamics. Since the fully connected attention conjunction is simplified, the computation cost is far lower than the current state-of-the-art. Link prediction experiments are conducted on both continuous and discrete graph data sets. By comparing several state-of-the-art graph embedding baselines, the experimental results demonstrate that Sparse-Dyn has a faster inference speed while having competitive performance.

Impression regulation plays an important role in various online ranking systems, e.g. , e-commerce ranking systems always need to achieve local commercial demands on some pre-labeled target items like fresh item cultivation and fraudulent item counteracting while maximizing its global revenue. However, local impression regulation may cause “butterfly effects” on the global scale, e.g. , in e-commerce, the price preference fluctuation in initial conditions (overpriced or underpriced items) may create a significantly different outcome, thus affecting shopping experience and bringing economic losses to platforms. To prevent “butterfly effects”, some researchers define their regulation objectives with global constraints, by using contextual bandit at the page-level that requires all items on one page sharing the same regulation action, which fails to conduct impression regulation on individual items. To address this problem, in this article, we propose a personalized impression regulation method that can directly makes regulation decisions for each user-item pair. Specifically, we model the regulation problem as a C onstrained D ual-level B andit (CDB) problem, where the local regulation action and reward signals are at the item-level while the global effect constraint on the platform impression can be calculated at the page-level only. To handle the asynchronous signals, we first expand the page-level constraint to the item-level and then derive the policy updating as a second-order cone optimization problem. Our CDB approaches the optimal policy by iteratively solving the optimization problem. Experiments are performed on both offline and online datasets, and the results, theoretically and empirically, demonstrate CDB outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms.

Irregularly, asynchronously and sparsely sampled multivariate time series (IASS-MTS) are characterized by sparse non-uniform time intervals between successive observations and different sampling rates amongst series. Those properties pose substantial challenges to mainstream machine learning models for learning complicated relations within and across IASS-MTS. This is because that most of the models assume that the time series in question are even, complete (fixed-dimensional features) and synchronous. To address these challenges, we present a novel time-aware Dual-Attention and Memory-Augmented Network (DAMA-Net). The proposed model can leverage both time irregularity, multi-sampling rates and global temporal patterns information inherent in IASS-MTS so as to learn more effective representations for improving prediction performance. Comprehensive experiments on real datasets show that the DAMA-Net outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in multivariate time series classification task.

Traditional anomaly detectors examine a single view of instances and cannot discover multi-view anomalies, i.e., instances that exhibit inconsistent behaviors across different views. To tackle the problem, several multi-view anomaly detectors have been developed recently, but they are all transductive and unsupervised thus may suffer some challenges. In this paper, we propose a novel inductive semi-supervised Bayesian multi-view anomaly detector. Specifically, we first present a generative model for normal data. Then, we build a hierarchical Bayesian model, by first assigning priors to all parameters and latent variables, and then assigning priors over the priors. Finally, we employ variational inference to approximate the posterior of the model and evaluate anomalous scores of multi-view instances. In the experiment, we show the proposed Bayesian detector consistently outperforms state-of-the-art counterparts across several public data sets and three well-known types of multi-view anomalies. In theory, we prove the inferred Bayesian estimator is consistent and derive a proximate sample complexity for the proposed anomaly detector.

Fair machine learning has become a significant research topic with broad societal impact. However, most fair learning methods require direct access to personal demographic data, which is increasingly restricted to use for protecting user privacy (e.g. by the EU General Data Protection Regulation). In this paper, we propose a distributed fair learning framework for protecting the privacy of demographic data. We assume this data is privately held by a third party, which can communicate with the data center (responsible for model development) without revealing the demographic information. We propose a principled approach to design fair learning methods under this framework, exemplify four methods and show they consistently outperform their existing counterparts in both fairness and accuracy across two real-world data sets. We theoretically analyze the framework, and prove it can learn models with high fairness or high accuracy, with their trade-offs balanced by a threshold variable.

In music classification tasks, Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network (CRNN) has achieved state-of-the-art performance on several data sets. However, the current CRNN technique only uses RNN to extract spatial dependency of music signal in its time dimension but not its frequency dimension. We hypothesize the latter can be additionally exploited to improve classification performance. In this paper, we propose an improved technique called CRNN in Time and Frequency dimensions (CRNN-TF), which captures spatial dependencies of music signal in both time and frequency dimensions in multiple directions. Experimental studies on three real-world music data sets show that CRNN-TF consistently outperforms CRNN and several other state-of-the-art deep learning-based music classifiers. Our results also suggest CRNN-TF is transferable on small music data sets via the fine-tuning technique.